Yield

American Gothic: Farm Couple Nailed in Massive $9M Crop Insurance Fraud

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 14:09:35 GMT

Sex and power are primal, but greed is the father of farm crime. Welcome to a $9 million orgy of fraud steered by an unassuming husband and wife: American Gothic gone bad.

From the basement of a modest farmhouse, Robert and Viki Warren ran a crop insurance chop-shop: liquid eraser bottles, copy machines, telltale PVC pipes, and tens of thousands of forged documents. Across a six-year run, the couple’s purported crop losses were near-biblical, reaching critical mass when their stick-wielding farmhands destroyed a tomato field and tossed ice cubes and mothballs around the stalks—spurring the Warrens to brazenly claim yield loss due to a freak hailstorm.

As USDA investigators and a bulldog prosecutor closed in on the scam, the Warrens hid a significant portion of their nouveau wealth, presumably burying caches of twenty-dollar bills stuffed inside plastic tubes. After serving a six-year sentence for crop insurance theft, Robert Warren began depositing peculiar stacks of moldy, pungent cash into a bulging bank account, all while assuring tellers, “Things are finally looking up.”

In reality, the curtain was crashing on the final act of an agriculture fraud for the ages.

Dark Art

In 1996, prior to becoming either the unluckiest farmers on the planet or serial liars, Robert Warren, 49, and Viki Warren, 43, were Buncombe County-based producers at R&V Warren Farms outside Candler, in western North Carolina.

The Warrens lived in a brick, ranch-style home fronted by a pickup truck in the driveway. No Cadillacs. No swimming pool. No shine. Modesty by appearance.

Their operation earned a reputation among buyers for crop quality and strong yields. They were among the most successful producer-packer tomato businesses in the eastern U.S., operating 10 farms in two states: North Carolina and South Carolina (later 26 farms in three states). Simply, the couple was very good at growing and selling tomatoes.

(Farm Journal)

In 1997, the Warrens noted the frailties of crop insurance oversight. A mix of federal and private layers, crop insurance is difficult to parse for those outside the agriculture industry: Private companies, subsidized by federal dollars and USDA, sell insurance policies to U.S. farmers.

The Warrens understood the winding back alleys of crop insurance. However, they didn’t understand, or failed to recognize, federal investigators cold-nosing their paper trail, steered by lead prosecutor Richard Edwards.

Despite a career colored by criminals of every stripe—narcotics conspiracy, public office corruption, construction failure coverups, video poker kickbacks, and even an Army veteran pretending to be blind who took in disability payments while coaching archery—the Warren case stays fresh in Edward’s memory.

“Crop insurance fraud cases often involve farmers that are failures from the start, but not so with the Warrens,” he explains. “They had an excellent product in their fields. They just loved money.”

From 1997 to 2003, with help from several drive-by insurance adjusters, Robert and Viki raked in $9,280,000 million in fake claims (and filed for far more) and sold the hidden tomato yields out the back door. They mastered the dark art of the double-dip.

Good Times, Great Money

They cheated going in; they cheated going out. According to an indictment delivered by a grand jury in 2003, the Warrens began cooking the books after purchasing crop insurance in 1997. They lied about average yield history, inflated acreage, moved production numbers between insured farms, and grossly underreported total output.

(Farm Journal)

From the get-go, they faked yield data and manipulated planting dates. In 1997, Robert Warren planted his Spartanburg, S.C. farm on April 15, the first day allowed by his policy—or so he told the E.L. Ross insurance company. In truth, he planted on April 4-12. He subsequently claimed cold weather damage for April-May and collected $157,712 in crop insurance.

Further, the Warrens reported remarkably minimal yields on several farms. On the Spartanburg farm, they claimed a harvest of 9,862 boxes of fresh tomatoes. The actual harvest was 78,670 boxes. They pocketed nearly $150,000.

Across all 10 farms in 1997, the Warrens claimed losses on five. Their numbers were fantasy: On their North Carolina farms alone, they professed a total harvest of 293,077 boxes, while really growing roughly 500,000 boxes.

All said, the Warrens received $644,467 in crop insurance or premium credits for their scheme in 1997, not even factoring in gravy from the double-dip.

At first blush, it was easy money. They ran the same scheme in 1998, dramatically lowered overall harvest numbers, fudged figures between fields, and pocketed a smooth $1,277,216.

Good times. Great money. But why not go big?

Mother of All Crop Fraud

Cast lots with us, we will all share the loot. My son, do not go along with them, do not set foot on their paths.—Proverbs 1:14-15

“The Warren Farms investigation is literally the mother of all crop fraud investigations,” said Gretchen Shappert, U.S. attorney for the western district of North Carolina, in a 2005 NPR interview. “It was a result of a perfect storm of individuals who were involved in fraud.”

(Farm Journal)

Enter George Kiser, Demetrio Jaimes, Harold Dean Cole, and Thomas Marsh.

George Kiser owned Kiser & Kiser Agency in Lebanon, Va. He sold the Warrens crop policies from Rain & Hail and E.L. Ross, and showed them the ropes of insurance fraud, advising the couple on how to receive payments for fictitious losses.

Demetrio Jaimes was a farm manager and supervisor who signed false documents and staged weather disasters. Harold Dean Cole forged spray records for the Warrens as a farm employee in charge of chemical applications. Thomas Marsh was a crop insurance claims adjuster who worked for Rain & Hail and E.L. Ross, and certified false acreage, damage claims, and false production figures.

“They were submitting reports to insurance companies from farms that would go in and out of existence by the year,” Edwards notes. “They fudged the serial numbers and kept it all unclear.”

(Farm Journal)

By 1999, the Warrens had 20 farms. They churned out a blitz of forged documents: bills of lading, chemical receipts, sales figures, surveyor letters, acreage reports, planting dates, payroll records, invoices, manifests, and more. They claimed losses on 18 of the farms, with an abysmal overall average of 71 boxes per acre. Conversely, they reported a 3,386 box per acre average on the two successful farms. All told, they claimed 512,106 boxes in 1999, but their actual production number surpassed 1 million boxes. Their 1999 haul was $3.8 million off the backs of fellow farmers and U.S. taxpayers.

In 2000, steering a high of 26 farms, they doubled down with tomato and strawberry fraud, and conveniently suffered losses on 14 of 26 farms. Total insurance payout in 2000? $2,254,883.

Yet, the insurance lucre wasn’t enough. The Warrens wanted more. Specifically, they wanted $600,000 from a neighboring farm for alleged herbicide drift. Their greed was the beginning of the end.

A Haunting Detail

On Sept. 8, 2000, the Warrens sued Patten Seed. They accused an employee of Super Sod (an arm of Patten Seed) of spraying 2,4-D on a neighboring field with a highboy and causing drift damage on their tomatoes. Additionally, per their complaint, the Warrens alleged a sprayer hose broke on the highboy and leaked substantial amounts of 2,4-D on an adjoining backroad for three-quarters of a mile. In total, the Warrens pinpointed $600,000 in damages purportedly attributable to Patten Seed/Super Sod action.

(Farm Journal)

During the exchange of information between the opposing legal teams, Warren Farms turned over sales and production data. Notably, the yield numbers were different from what the Warrens reported to E.L. Ross in 1999 crop losses. The figures given to Patten Seed listed overall 1999 North Carolina tomato yields at 865,997 boxes, yet the E.L. Ross 1999 North Carolina tomato yields were drastically lower—316,799 boxes. The discrepancy would haunt the Warrens.

Jumping the Shark

On Independence Day of 2001, the Warrens conducted one of the most outlandish dupes in the history of U.S. agriculture.

Covering their tracks, they switched insurance companies to Fireman’s Fund and added a new farm in Cocke County, Tennessee. Par for the course, the Warrens faked production records for the western Tennessee property, pretending to have grown tomatoes on the ground back to 1991—paving a full decade of forged documents with notarized lease agreements, false testimony from a realtor, fantasy planting dates, fantasy spraying records, bogus harvest records, false diagrams detailing a fantasy irrigation system, and hundreds of fake invoices.

(Farm Journal)

Insurance acquired, the Warrens planted 252.2 acres of tomatoes on the Cocke County farm—so they reported. The real number? Roughly five planted acres.

On July 4, 2001, a devastating hailstorm materialized from a painted blue sky and released its fury exclusively within the bounds of the Warren’s tomato rows. Their farm employees used disposable cameras to record the catastrophe and submitted the hailstone photos as proof to bolster an insurance claim.

However, rather than a freakshow of nature, the hailstorm was a freakshow from the aisles of Piggly Wiggly or Walmart. Their farm employees purchased bags of ice and mothballs, flung the loads around the tomato plants, and snapped photos of the “hailstones” falling from the sky. A farmhand then walked the rows and obliterated the crop with a stick, with additional photos taken of the aftermath.

Bobby Chambers, farm manager at the Warren’s Tennessee operation, described the scene to NPR: “The way we did it, we was down taking pictures, out this row, and then we just stood behind it and throwed the ice over the top. To me, it looked like a hailstorm.”

“They had one Mexican who did all the beating, he beat every 16,000 of them,” Chambers added. “He’d just go through there and knock the leaves off of them. It made it look like where the hail had beat it up.”

Over 20 years past the event, and after a career witnessing every shade of crime, prosecutor Richard Edwards is still jolted by the Warren’s moxie: “The plants were about 1’ high and completely destroyed. In the submission photos, sure enough, there was ice on top of black plastic and pitiful plants everywhere, torn apart.”

However, during later execution of search warrants, investigators gained access to all the photos on the camera roll—including the outtake pictures not turned in as part of the Warren’s claim. “There were two different sets of photos,” Edwards details. “In one set, in closeup photos the Warrens didn’t turn in, the hailstones were curiously cylindrical in shape, with odd dimples on both ends. Also, the path of the hailstones had miraculously fallen with heavy concentrations trailing from the bed of a pickup parked on the turnrow. It was a dry, dusty day, and no doubt the bag leaked and left a trail of ice cubes from truck to tomatoes.”

“In the second set of photos, the hailstones looked amazingly like mothballs—because they were mothballs,” Edwards continues. “Then they beat down the plants to shreds and took pictures from the front angle to make it appear as if the entire farm was damaged, but they’d only planted 6 acres of tomatoes and left the rest empty. We used satellite imagery with different color filters to prove they were lying. Yet, two adjusters, Don Farrow and George Kiser, both approved the claim.”

In the replant of the 252.5 acres, the Warrens pocketed $98,490. (They also declared freeze damage on five farms in the Carolinas for a tidy cleanup of $63,761.25.) All told in 2001, over 17 farms, they received $1,097,718 from Fireman’s Fund, and claimed they were owed an additional $3,805,610. The Warrens had jumped the shark: USDA investigators were closing.

Foot of the Cross

Staying on the move, the Warrens attempted to shift insurance companies again in 2002, seeking a switch from Fireman’s Fund to IGF. They used virgin farmer names—front producers—as window dressing to obtain lower coverage rates.

But on March 12, 2002, their plans went sideways when federal agents with search warrants descended on their home and two packing houses. Investigators found a trove of evidence in the basement of the Warren’s house—a veritable document production facility where paperwork had been manufactured for the duration of the crop fraud.

(Farm Journal)

“We were able to see exactly how Robert and Viki created documents,” Edwards says. “They took bills of lading, chemical receipts, sales receipts, and much more, and did cut-and-paste jobs. Then they photocopied the new document and turned it in as proof of low yield or high yield or whatever they needed. Their basement that had been turned into a facility for cutting and pasting with old fashioned Wite-Out and Xerox machines.”

Due to the motherlode of falsified and forged paperwork, the Warren’s fraud became one of the most fact-intensive cases of Edward’s career. “We’re talking about nearly 1 million damning documents, as well as multiple farms and multiple submissions,” he says. “I was fortunate to have a group of four USDA agents and one IRS agent working on the case and they were fantastic.”

How convincing were the forgeries? “You could take the xeroxed documents the Warrens submitted and match them against the pink or yellow originals and spot the changes in figures,” Edwards notes. “You could hold the documents up to the light and see the Wite-Out or places where tape had been stuck on paper to hide changes in figures.”

Beyond the reams of paperwork, the Warren’s basement held a curious assortment of PVC pipes. Some of the pipes contained stacks of twenty-dollar bills wrapped in aluminum foil, then placed in cloth bags, and finally stuffed into the plastic tubes—impossible to locate via metal detector.

“We strongly suspected they were burying cash on their land, but there was no way to find it,” Edwards says.

Despite a mountain of evidence screaming out crop insurance fraud across a six-year shuffle, the Warrens denied all wrongdoing and professed complete innocence: They were victims.

“The Warrens were extremely defiant,” Edwards recalls. “They never came to the foot of the Cross until a gallows conversion. They finally pled guilty.”

Saddam Hussein of Crop Insurance

A year-and-a-half after the search warrants were executed, the grand jury dropped a stinging indictment in October 2003, layered with details of the con. According to DOJ, “The indictment charged the Warrens, as well as two of their employees, an insurance agent, and an insurance adjuster, with participating in an extensive scheme to defraud the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) and several private insurance companies of more than $9 million between 1997 and 2001, and attempting to obtain an additional $2.8 million in 2001 through 2003.”

Year by year, claim by claim, and lie by lie, the investigation exposed the Warren’s fraud, connecting the dots to George Kiser, Demetrio Jaimes, Harold Dean Cole, and Thomas Marsh. The evidence was overwhelming:

—Filing fraudulent applications for crop insurance and then filing false loss claims;

—Submitting falsified production records, planting dates, and harvesting dates;

—Creating thousands of false, altered, and forged documents to support fraudulent insurance claims;

—Staging false weather disasters to substantiate false crop damage claims;

—Using false records to file a fraudulent civil suit against a neighboring farm;

—Attempting to create false farming entities that would appear to be run independently of Warren Farms, as well as creating false reports and forged documents in support of these attempts.

Significantly, the government used the Warrens’ herbicide drift lawsuit against Patten Seed/Super Sod to bolster its case. In May 2002, on the heels of undergoing federal search warrants of their properties, the Warrens curiously dismissed their suit against Patten Seed. Nonetheless, the raw yield numbers were inescapable, and Edwards pointed out an impossibility: “To make their court case look good against Super Sod, they submitted huge past tomato yield numbers, but on the same farms, they had submitted dreadful shortfalls to USDA for crop insurance claims. Therefore, it was time to pick a felony because they both couldn’t be true.”

(Farm Journal)

Overwhelmed by a flood of evidence, the Warrens took a deal. Robert Warren pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Viki Warren pled guilty to conspiracy to defraud the FCIC and one count of mail fraud. The Warrens agreed to the forfeiture of $7.3 million, and $9.15 million in restitution to USDA.

Speaking to NPR, Robert Warren’s attorney, Sean Devereaux, deflected blame from his client: “It’s fine for the government to issue sentencing memoranda and make Robert Warren appear to be the Saddam Hussein of crop insurance, but he’s not. He basically was approached by people selling insurance and told, ‘This is an easy thing to do. Don’t worry, this is the government’s money, it’s not the insurance company’s money.’”

Almost the entire Warren crew confessed. Crop insurance agent George Kiser pled guilty and received a 27-month sentence and an $8.15 million penalty in restitution to USDA. Thomas Marsh, the loss adjuster, admitted guilt and was sentenced to 14 months and $767,000 in restitution. Harold Dean Cole refused to plead and went to trial. Cole was found guilty at trial of forging agricultural spray records on the Warren’s Tennessee farmland; his falsified records, ranging from 1991 to 2000, enabled the Warrens to triple guaranteed yield and increase the indemnity by $2 million. He was sentenced to 46 months and $2.18 million in restitution. Farm manager Demetrio Jaimes escaped with probation.

Viki Warren was sentenced to 66 months; Robert Warren was sentenced to 76 months. Roughly six years later, after he was released from prison on Nov. 29, 2010, Robert Warren quickstepped back to Buncombe County. Time to dig for PVC pipes?

Stale and Musty

On Feb. 22, 2011, while on probation at a halfway house in Asheville, N.C., Robert Warren opened an account at RBC Bank in Candler in the name of Beaverdam Valley Farms. Between April 13, 2011, and August 17, 2011, he deposited $208,463.40 into the Beaverdam account—in small bites never climbing above $9,000, ensuring no Currency Transaction Reports would catch the government’s eye. However, Warren was exposed by the odd physical condition of the money he deposited. Literally, the smell and feel of the bills set off alarm bells.

As reported by Eric Veater, IRS special agent: “The branch manager recalled that on two or three occasions she witnessed Robert Warren making the deposit of older twenty-dollar bills, specifically those without the security features added on the latest twenty-dollar bills, which were rubber-banded, wrapped in aluminum foil and ‘freezing cold.’ The branch manager recalled that Warren made comments such as ‘things are looking up’ and ‘things are getting better’ when he made the deposits. A teller at the RBC Bank Candler Branch said sometimes the cash that Robert Warren deposited at the bank smelled ‘stale and musty.’ The teller also said sometimes the rubber bands on the cash broke because they had lost their elasticity.”

Stale, musty, freezing cold, and aluminum-wrapped wads of money? “The currency that Robert Warren deposited fit with our speculation during the crop insurance case,” Edwards says. “We suspected that he dug that money up or retrieved it from somewhere, or both.”

Busted for bank fraud and probation violations, Robert Warren once again went back to the pen. Nine years after pleading guilty to crop insurance fraud, he was sentenced to 29 more months in prison.

What were the Warren’s plans had they not been caught? What drove their steadily rising and riskier levels of theft?

(Farm Journal)

“They were buying property every year,” Edwards says. They were buying more farms. It’s purely conjecture on my part, and they didn’t have children, so I don’t know if they intended to sell the land as property values exploded. It seems to have all been tied back to generating more and more money.”

The Warren case is as old as time, Edwards concludes. “Love of money is the root of all evil. Maybe it’s just that simple. It appears the Warrens stole to steal.”

For more from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:

While America Slept, China Stole the Farm

Priceless Pistol Found After Decades Lost in Farmhouse Attic

Cottonmouth Farmer: The Insane Tale of a Buck-Wild Scheme to Corner the Snake Venom Market

Tractorcade: How an Epic Convoy and Legendary Farmer Army Shook Washington, D.C.

Young Farmer uses YouTube and Video Games to Buy $1.8M Land

Bizarre Mystery of Mummified Coon Dog Solved After 40 Years

The 4Rs can Help Reduce the Sting of Fertilizer Supply Logistics

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 20:25:37 GMT

As U.S. farmers evaluated fertility needs, prices and prepay opportunities this past December – and wondered whether to delay purchases, hoping prices might improve before planting season – Corey Rosenbusch was doing a similar evaluation.

(Farm Journal)

“I would have never dreamed where we’d be three months later,” says Rosenbusch, president and CEO of The Fertilizer Institute. “There’s even more than we anticipated, and it just keeps layering on.”

Based on what industry members tell him, Rosenbusch says an “anecdotal” estimate is 50% of the fertilizer products farmers will need this spring are in U.S. warehouses and distribution facilities.

“We’re by no means completely at that 100% mark of having everything that’s needed,” he told Farm Journal during a conversation at the 2022 Commodity Classic.

“The question is, what’s next? What should we be preparing for?” he adds.

Grab The ‘Bull’ By Its Horns
Farmers can’t fix the situation with fertilizer availability and high input cost, but they can get a better grasp on their crop fertility requirements, even now.

Rosenbusch advises farmers to lean on retailers and other agronomic advisors to help them be as efficient with products as possible.

And, once the ground thaws, he says go pull soil samples and find out what they tell you.

“If you’re not soil sampling, if you’re not using variable rate application, if you’re not using the 4R stewardship principles to be as efficient as possible with your fertilizer, now is the time to do it,” he says. “If there’s any bright light in the current market situation it’s that it really will drive farmers to adopt and use these nutrient stewardship principles in their farm.”

On The Near Horizon

As he evaluates the current fertilizer situation, Rosenbusch says the U.S. still faces potential challenges getting products brought into the country. At play are what he calls “correlated effects” – multiple factors in the marketplace that influence each other – that combined make the upcoming planting season so concerning.

Two unique, potential factors that might yet come into play this season and impact fertilizer supplies for U.S. farmers:

1. A potential CP railway strike in Canada. The U.S. gets 80% of its potash from its northern neighbor, Rosenbusch says. A rail strike could mean zero product would come across the border and into the U.S.

In a March 7 letter to President Joe Biden, The Fertilizer Institute, the National Grain and Feed Association, and 19 other members of the Agricultural Transportation Working Group requested the administration work with the Canadian government to avert a major railway labor strike and to rescind the cross-border vaccine mandate for workers moving essential commerce.

“We’ve done everything we can to urge the White House of the serious nature of this coming into the spring season,” Rosenbusch says. “We’ve got our partners in Ottawa, urging the Canadian government to get involved, because that would be a huge supply disruption to the market if something like that happens.”

2. A domino effect created by a lack of access to natural gas. Russia supplies the lion’s share of natural gas to Europe. That matters to the U.S., because nitrogen production is based on natural gas.

“So, if we are looking at a major curtailment of European nitrogen production, that is going to have, you know, significant global nitrogen ramifications,” Rosenbusch explains.

How that could potentially play out in the U.S. is farmers might have access to nitrogen but it might not be in the form they want or are accustomed to using.

“You might not find it as UAN, and you’ll have to use urea instead,” Rosenbusch says, as a for instance. “So, we will definitely need to have some flexibility in terms of the type of product to achieve your nitrogen requirements.”

How to Balance Agronomic Decisions Against High Fertilizer Costs

Farming In The Sustainable Triangle: Human, Natural and Physical Environments

Ferrie: How to Keep ‘$6 Corn’ Happy? Use Your Starter
Make Every Pass Count

Tips for Back-to-Back Soybean Production

Furrow Efficiency: 6 Products In 1 Pass

8 Ways To Ready Your Weed-Control Practices

How USDA's $2.8 Billion Climate-Smart Investment Might Impact Your Operation

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 06:20:07 GMT

After months of talking about climate-smart agriculture and working with a handful of funding recipients, USDA is now investing up to $2.8 billion in 70 projects under the first Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funding pool. The projects, which seek funds ranging from $5 million to $100 million, include everything from flood control to building carbon markets.

After sifting through 450 proposals, USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funding recipients include:

Government entities
Farmer coops
Conservation, energy and environmental groups
Universities
Small businesses
Large corporations

Trust In Food™ , the sustainability division of Farm Journal , is among the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities project recipients for its coalition-driven Connected Ag Project.

The Impact of USDA Climate Funding

According to Tom Vilsack, USDA secretary, these efforts will “increase the competitive advantage of U.S. agriculture both domestically and internationally,” while building wealth in rural America.

“Through today’s announcement of initial selections for the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, USDA is delivering on our promise to build and expand these market opportunities for American agriculture and be global leaders in climate-smart agricultural production,” he says.

USDA’s press release says, from the funding, farmers can expect:

1. Technical and financial assistance to implement voluntary climate-smart practices.

2. Methods to quantify, monitor, report and verify greenhouse gas benefits.

3. New markets and promotion in climate-smart commodities.

With this new funding in place, USDA anticipates the projects will:

Provide hundreds of expanded markets and revenue streams for producers and commodities ranging from traditional corn to specialty crops.
Reach more than 50,000 farms, encompassing 20 to 25 million acres of working land engaged in climate-smart production practices such as cover crops, no-till and nutrient management.
Sequester upward of 50 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent over the lives of the projects. This is equivalent to removing more than 10 million gasoline-powered passenger vehicles from the road for one year.
Engage more than 50 universities to help advance projects, especially with outreach and monitoring, measurement, reporting and verification.

Proposals for the 70 projects include plans to match 50% of the federal investment with nonfederal funds.

Who Will Provide the Funds?

The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funding will be pulled from USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) funds in two pools. USDA says the projects announced today are part of the first funding pool.

The CCC has been tapped numerous times in the past year, such as a March announcement to put $250 million toward American-made fertilizer to give U.S. farmers more choices in the marketplace. Some, including Jim Wiesemeyer, Pro Farmer policy analyst, feel the CCC is more of an “ATM machine for aggies” than a tool used to stabilize, support and protect farm income and prices, as it was originally created for.

When asked about why USDA chose to pull more funds from the CCC, Vilsack said it was a matter of timing.

“We track expenditures from the CCC on a monthly basis. We are within a couple of weeks from the end of the fiscal year and there are significant resources left in the CCC account,” he says. “We won’t require any action from Congress to replenish the CCC. We will be able to adequately fund this initiative, as well as some nutrition announcements made today, and still have billions of dollars left in reserve in the account through the remainder of the fiscal year.”

The Agency says the second funding pool will be announced later this year.

How Funds Will Be Used

In the first pool of funding, numerous projects were selected with funding ceilings from $70 to $95 million. According to USDA, some of the individual projects that will span several states include:

1. Climate SMART (Scaling Mechanisms for Agriculture’s Regenerative Transformation), led by Truterra, LLC

This project, which will reach across 28 states, aims to catalyze a self-sustaining, market-based network to broaden farmer access, scale adoption of climate-smart practices, and sustainably produce grain and dairy commodities with verified and quantified climate benefits.

2. The Climate-Smart Agriculture Innovative Finance Initiative, led by Field to Market

This project, covering more than 30 states, will use innovative finance mechanisms to accelerate climate-smart practice uptake by farmers, leveraging private sector demand to strengthen markets for climate-smart commodities. Partners will provide technical assistance and additional financial incentives to an array of producers across commodities, tying climate-smart practices to commodity purchases and creating a scalable model for private sector investment.

3. Connected Ag Climate-Smart Commodities Pilot Project, led by Farm Journal, Inc.

This project will expand climate-smart markets for many agricultural commodities and provide direct payments, technical assistance and data management strategies to row crop, beef, dairy, pork and other producers to adopt climate-smart practices and strategies.

4. Scaling Methane Emissions Reductions and Soil Carbon Sequestration, led by the Dairy Farmers of America, Inc.

Through this project, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) climate-smart pilots will directly connect on-farm greenhouse gas reductions with the low-carbon dairy market. DFA will use its cooperative business model to ensure the collective financial benefits are captured at the farm, creating a compelling opportunity to establish a powerful self-sustaining circular economy model benefiting U.S. agriculture.

5. The Soil Inventory Project Partnership for Impact and Demand, led by The Meridian Institute

This project will build climate-smart markets, streamline field data collection and combine sample results with modeling to make impact quantifications accurate and locally specific but also scalable. Targeted farms produce value-added and direct-to-consumer specialty crops as well as the 19 most common row crops in the U.S.

Details on the other projects can be found here .

More on ag policy:

Biden Administration Presses Unions, Railroads to Avoid Shutdown

More than Hangry: What’s Really at Stake in Global Food Insecurity?

Are Farmers Losing Yield? The High Heat's Potential Impact on Midwest's Crops

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 14:12:04 GMT

It’s no secret this week’s heat is gripping the Midwest. Forecasts started fueling commodity prices last week as crops in portions of the Midwest were forecast to see the most challenging weather yet this year . Now that the heat is here and expected to remain through the weekend, analysts say crop conditions are expected to dip in USDA’s report on Monday.

“The heat and forecasts impacted corn, soybeans, and spring wheat prices, it was across the board,” says Dan Basse of AgResource Company. “It was that hot of Montana all the way up until Nebraska and stretching over to Illinois.”

Temperatures are forecast to top 100 degrees and rains remain spotty. Earlier this summer, condition ratings seemed to be in a free fall, but July’s rains and cooler temperatures caused conditions rebound, but the heat to close out July means crop conditions could be set to take another dip.

“We believe crop conditions will be done 2% to 3% on Monday for corn, soybeans and spring wheat, we’ll see how it all plays out,” he says. “But it’s the weather during August that will be the big determinant and especially for the soybean crop.”

USDA’s Crop Progress on Monday showed the U.S. corn crop is rated 57% good to excellent, steady from the previous week. Soybeans dropped 1 point with 54% rated good to excellent. The notable declines were to the crop in Tennessee, Minnesota and Missouri.

Forecasting Yield

With the mix of rains and continued drought, AgResource Company is has revised its yield forecast.

“As we look at it, we’re sitting today at about a 173 bu. per acre corn yield. We’re looking at soybeans around 50 and a half, we’ll see how Mother Nature treats us going forward,” says Basse. “That’s down from USDA. It’s not a disaster, but it’s truly not the kind of crop we could have had.”

Alan Brugler of Brugler Marketing says he’s been impressed with crop conditions, especially in the eastern Corn Belt. His travels took him from Ohio to Nebraska this week.

“Along the interstates, at least, the crop looks better than I anticipated would,” he says. “It was more consistent to corn. Corn is almost uniformly pollinating, although there is an area in Indiana, this is clearly behind.”

He says the soybean crop seems to be shorter in height, but still showing good canopy.

“I only saw a couple of fields when it was 95 degrees on Wednesday that were showing some stress,” says Brugler. “Now, having said that, I know there’s areas off the interstate that are worse.”

He says some producers he works with have talked about concerns with the smoke cover and the impact on sunlight to soybeans. However, others seem to think the cloud cover is cushioning the crop from the heat.

“It’s a mixed bag, but I would say, we’re in the 174 bu. pre acre to 175 bu. per acre yield range on corn based on current conditions,” says Brugler. “And the standard deviation was still allow 179 or 180 bu. per acre if we have a good finish to the corn crop.”

He says his current estimate for soybeans is a little over 50 bu. per acre, but not 52 bu. per acre that USDA currently has penciled in. He adds Brugler Marketing’s virtual crop tour, which surveys clients, will happen the first week of August.

Mineral CEO sees agtech company as tool for growers to improve productivity

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 19:38:42 GMT

The Packer’s Tom Karst recently spoke with Elliott Grant, CEO of Mineral , about the agtech company’s vision for serving the agriculture community.

California-based technology giant Alphabet unveiled Mineral in January 2023 as a company with the ambition to help scale sustainable agriculture. Mineral was spun off from X , the “moonshot factory” R&D facility of Alphabet , which is also the parent company of Google .

From this Q&A:

How the idea for Mineral developed.
Which crops can benefit from this technology.
How farmers and growers will engage with Mineral.
Companies involved in the trial stage.
Mineral’s relationship to the entire supply chain.
How ownership of data will be handled.

Related: Alphabet raises curtain on agtech firm

Tom Karst, The Packer: Elliott, thanks for taking time to talk about Mineral. As you look back on how the idea (for the company) was born, what are some things that you recall in terms of the progression of this concept?

Elliott Grant: Thanks, Tom. Let me start by going back to before I joined X. I’ve spent 17 years in the ag and food industry working to bring breakthrough technologies to scale, including working on traceability solutions for the produce supply chain. During that time, I saw the opportunity for better data and analytics to transform business operations and have a huge impact on a critical industry.

Six years ago, I joined X with the mission to help improve the sustainability of global agriculture — not just produce, but the entire food industry. I approached that problem with the insight that despite being a decision-intensive business, it’s very challenging to collect data in agriculture.

How to reconcile these two things? Every grower knows they are constantly having to make decisions under a lot of uncertainty — and sustainable farming adds even more complexity. So, we started Mineral with this idea: If we’re going to help solve for sustainability, we have to address the data challenge. And we have to provide users — farmers, agronomists, advisors, researchers — better tools to help them make decisions under uncertainty.

As the industry inexorably moves towards greater sustainability, we’re having to address things like how to be more precise, how to use fewer inputs, how to reduce waste; the complexity has also increased — and therefore the need for better data and analytics has increased. It’s a challenging time for the industry, for sure, but the good news is that AI (artificial intelligence) technology has reached the maturity that I think we can now bring [these] tools to our partners.

I would imagine maybe some of the tools involve satellites and other machines that would survey farmland. If you would, describe the set of tools that Mineral will have to help gather the data and process that data for the growers.

The farmer today can access many of types of data. Satellite data as you mention, soil data, weather data; farm equipment is increasingly generating data, and growers collect management practice data, irrigation data, picker data, yield and quality data.

Visualize hundreds of layers of data, some of which are new and coming from new sensors [on the farm], some of which already exist. The challenge has been collecting enough of the right kinds of data and making sense of it all.

One of the core capabilities we have developed is the ability to collect, organize and analyze a wide variety of different data types and do it at the scale and accuracy that farmers need.

I will use an example to illustrate. Very often, the produce industry wants to know what yield will be two weeks from now. We are bringing the power of machine learning (ML) to that question. It is very difficult to do [yield estimation] accurately with traditional tools because it’s so multidimensional, but ML is ideally suited to those kinds of problems. Unlike traditional statistics, the most advanced ML tools can now handle different types of data — and huge quantities of data — and discover subtle patterns that are not obvious to humans.

But we also learned something surprising. Not only could AI and ML improve yield forecasting, but they help human experts improve their understanding of the drivers of yield.

Human experts have intuition the algorithm doesn’t have. So, this ability for human experts and ML to work together is what we’re seeing emerge, and that’s a really exciting development for the industry.

Part of our job is to work closely with our partners to [determine] what’s the right type of information we need to collect to put into their model; it may be satellite data or historical data or management practice data. In other situations, it might be that they need to get plant image data using a rover or a drone or a phone from a field.

There is no single answer to what is required.

The big takeaway is we, as an industry, can now analyze more data, and more types of data, than ever before. The other thing I tell our partners is to think about collecting data now — even if you don’t immediately have the ability to use it. Because it’s impossible to go back in time and collect that historical data, and these AI models are very data hungry.

When you’re thinking about the crops that could use this technology or toolkit, is it a particular set of crops? It could be anything, right?

We were very intentional when we started Mineral to not focus on only one type of crop. Often agtech gravitates toward row crops — such as corn and soybeans — because that’s where the acreage is. I have a real soft spot for specialty crops because of the nutrition value proposition, the connection to consumers, the challenge of perishability, and so on. And there are other crops such as common bean and cassava which are often underserved by the tech industry and commercial industry but are an incredibly important source of food security for hundreds of millions of people.

We actually see it as a strength that we apply the same technologies in very different domains. This is one of the unexpected benefits we’ve seen with machine learning that it gets better the more diversity it learns.

How will farmers and growers engage with Mineral?

Farmers have very strong relationships with their suppliers and advisers that have developed over years or even generations. Our job is to provide those trusted partners better tools and capabilities. I think the opportunity is to help them be even more effective agents for their customers. Our mission is to work with these critical intermediary layers and give them the tools to help them do that.

Who are the customers or companies that have been working with you in the trial stages? Can you talk about those?

Since 2017, we’ve partnered with companies across the supply chain — from global leaders in crop protection and seed breeding to leading produce companies to research institutes and universities — to work hand in hand and reimagine food production.

For example, we equipped the team at Driscoll’s with perception technology and AI models that help them create new knowledge about the drivers of berry yield and quality. We’ve also partnered with leading crop protection company Syngenta to enable farmers to deploy their products with AI- and ML-powered precision.

With your previous work on traceability, you worked with retailers and growers. How do you see Mineral being relevant to the whole supply chain?

The food system is tightly interconnected. Our mission is to serve the whole supply chain, not just solve one piece of the puzzle. Historically, not just the produce industry, but the food industry in general has become very siloed, in which you end up optimizing for a narrow business problem, because it’s difficult to optimize holistically.

As we move towards a future of greater sustainability and less waste, we will need to improve the way the supply chain interacts. And this is not a new idea. To answer your question, we see this technology and our offerings bringing value to the breeders, the input providers, the farmers and their agronomists, the shippers, processors and retailers. We can become part of that connected layer that helps the industry, not optimize for a single link, but optimize for the whole chain.

How will ownership of the data be managed?

We come out of a business that has earned the right to be a brand trusted by consumers and enterprises. As a result, we understand security, we understand privacy — and the technical hard work that is needed to ensure those are delivered reliably. We take data security and ownership extremely seriously.

As a principle, grower data belongs to the grower. That grower can choose to share the data with a trusted partner, such as their agronomist or data processor. There can be a great deal of benefit in helping that grower compare their data to peers — but while maintaining their privacy. We have tools to help users get that value from a network without losing control of ownership or anonymity.

How do you see Mineral evolving in the next five years?

I’m very energized by the potential we have to help this industry achieve what it’s trying to achieve to increase productivity, to reduce inputs (such as water), to reduce waste, to improve decision-making and to connect the supply chain. I believe AI and ML will enable digital transformation of the industry and I look forward to partnering with like-minded forward-thinkers to drive real outcomes.