S1E8: SC Ag Tech & Business Forum 2025 - Natural Resources
This episode of the South Carolina Ag Tech & Business Forum focuses on Natural Resources. Moderator Ronnie Summers (CEO, Palmetto Agribusiness Council) leads a panel with Mike Mills (Director of Sustainability Solutions, Reinke Manufacturing), Danny Kassis (Manager of Strategic Partnership and Customer Solutions, Dominion Energy), Landrum Weathers (Buck Branch Farms LLC), and Richard Carr (Land Manager, SC Farm Bureau Land Trust). Together, they explore sustainable practices in water efficiency, energy solutions, land stewardship, and conservation strategies to ensure South Carolina’s agricultural resources are preserved for future generations.
Date of Event: March 26, 2025
Location: Phillips Market Center, West Columbia, SC
Production Credits:
Introduction: Hannah Mikell
Producer: Kevin Royal
Editor: Kayla Peters
Technical: Trey McAlhany
Music Composer: R.M Davis
Special Thanks:
Transcript:
Cultivate Ag, where ideas take root and innovation grows. Hi, I'm Hannah Michael, your host of Cultivate Ag podcast, brought to you by Clemson University's Cooperative Extension Service and CU CATS. Each episode, we dig into what's shaping the future of our farming in South Carolina and beyond.
Let's get into it. Today, we're zooming in on natural resources management because good stewardship isn't just a buzzword, it's our legacy. The panel is going to dive into water efficiency, energy solutions, land conservation, and how the South Carolina farmers are leading the charge in sustainability.
Whether you're farming peanuts or peaches or maybe some cotton or corn, these insights really do matter. Natural resources, and I'm pretty loud, so if y'all need me to go to that mic, I will. You just raise your hand and holler, right?
But as we did the planning, we came up with the subject matter, okay? The subject matter was water, energy, land, and especially loss of land, right? So I'm gonna let my panel introduce themselves, and you've got a brief bio in your program, okay?
And we're gonna start, just a second, guys, we're gonna start with the energy side, a component that we were concerned about. We're gonna work the water, land, and then I got my man on the right, my neighbor, actually, Landon Webber, okay? That, he's a farmer, but you know what?
He's connected to every one of the subject matters. Energy, water, land, okay? So with that, Danny, I'm gonna let you kick it off and introduce yourself.
Yeah, good morning. Danny Cassis, Dominican Energy, Strategic Partnerships and Customer Solutions. One, thanks for the opportunity to be here, and then really, Ronnie, from your perspective, kind of creating a panel where there's a lot of convergence, which I think we'll get to fairly quickly.
So I'm a utility veteran. I hate to say close to 40 years. I hope I don't look that old.
Gas operations, electric operations, and then a lot of coordination in the retail electric business, and then apparently nobody wanted to do policy in South Carolina, or at least initially, so I spent a lot of time working on enabling legislation around renewables, and have, my signature is actually on about a gigawatt of solar projects in South Carolina, just in our service territory. So deeply interested, obviously, in what's happening at the Statehouse and how that impacts, and I'm sure we'll have a lot of discussion about that. It's not only an energy issue.
It's partially a land use issue, which I think will play out as we have the discussion. So I look forward to talking today with you guys about what's happening, at least in our space, and how it intersects. Thank you.
Mike? My name is Mike Mills. I'm the Director of Sustainability Solutions for Rankey Manufacturing.
I've been in the irrigation business for 30 years, the first half in the urban space, working in residential, commercial, golf, and athletic, and then the last 15, 16 years here in the ag sector, where I found myself at the convergence of policy and understanding what's happening with water conservation policy, and working with state and federal government and oversight agencies on how water policy is set, how water policy is viewed, and how water as a natural resource can be distributed so that we can achieve all of our environmental, as well as our species sustainability goals. Richard? Hey, my name is Richard Carr.
I'm with the South Carolina Farm Bureau Land Trust. We are part of the federation side of South Carolina Farm Bureau. We're only about a two-year-old land trust.
We will be this year, so kind of new at it, but yeah, I guess my presence here to talk more, we'll talk about land loss, but also land protection and relationship to agriculture, kind of offer some insights about what we're seeing out there as we work with landowners in different parts of the state, and fortunately, I get to work with landowners in every part of the state, so I'm seeing the breadth of it. So, quick, just a little bit about me. I actually grew up in the textile industry, but we have farms on both sides of our families up near Lockhart, South Carolina, beef operation, and then my mom's family was tobacco road over in eastern North Carolina.
So, a lot of the land sort of led me into land conservation, and I have seen one industry die in this state, so I'm hoping not to watch another one. Landon? Landon?
Good morning. My name's Landon Weathers. I'm from Bowman, South Carolina, Orangeburg County.
I'm a farmer. I appreciate Kendall asking me and Mr. Ronnie to be here this morning.
One fact about me, I was in Kendall's very first class that he was supposed to teach at Clemson, that he never showed up for. I think your employment is pretty stable, so that's why I felt like I could share that fact. But we were excited when he never showed up.
But anyway, I am a full-time farmer. I also work in the crop insurance industry. I'm very familiar with the solar industry as well.
In 2019, I joined a group, a water planning group for the state, which is called the Planning Process Advisory Committee, which is headed by DNR. Out of that group, we formed a planning process for the state for eight river basin groups to get together to eventually form a state water plan. We are in that process.
I'm looking at Christy back there in the room now. That is more than two. Now a group called Water at Sea, which I am also a part of.
So yeah, we've been in the water planning arena for quite a while now, so hopefully we'll get to some kind of agreement here sometime. Excellent, excellent, excellent. All right, so Landry's comment about Kendall leads me into the next.
We decided on the subject matter, right? But who's sitting in the chairs? Kendall, Robert Edwards, Kathy Coleman, a whole group came up with a name.
I couldn't be more pleased than to put this group in front of you, okay? So I'm gonna stick with what I did last year. Some of you might have been here last year.
I'm gonna hit this panel with one question per panel, right? And after that, if we could check a wish list, it would be that the audience gets engaged and starts with questions. I don't care, I got three or four questions for every one of them.
I'd rather hear your questions. But I am gonna give them up in one round. I'm gonna start with Danny, okay?
And Danny, the question I've got is over downtown, if you will, I was gonna say over there, but downtown. Been a lot of discussion on energy, right? All sorts of energy.
Connect some of the dots for us. What should ag and forestry communities be most concerned about as the energy discussion's taking place? Speak to that for us.
Yeah, that's a great question. I could take the next hour, but I'm not gonna. So for the ag industry and for forestry, and I think what I would boil it down to today as far as what the legislature's talking about, I think there at least is a, there isn't a ton of consensus, but I think there is enough consensus around the topics of affordability and reliability.
And I think that is becoming a place where people are, there's consensus, okay? But I wanna say, so that's positive. So if you're in business and you're an energy consumer, then you want reliable service and you want affordable service, okay?
I think there's a lot of discussion about, I've worked on legislation, so I can say it, but it's the increasingly clean component, and how much of a, how valuable is that to all the stakeholders, utilities, customers, et cetera? I would say there isn't consensus in that space. Things move so fast or are moving so fast at the legislature that I have to check with my lobbyists every day to see where people are positioning themselves.
Utilities have a huge responsibility, I think, ultimately as the system operator in South Carolina for the reliability piece. Statutorily, they're obligated to file plans which create affordability. That gets emphasis.
So to me, I think right now, I wouldn't call it a crisis, but I think it's an important thing to have happen is there needs to be additional generating resources that are in service. And that's just, if you think about the organic growth that exists in South Carolina, that just means people moving here. That's kind of somewhat discounted for the fact that we're an economic hot, people, entities, commercial, industrial, wanna locate here.
So that's somewhat discounted, but even if you just take the baseline, you need a generating resource. So I think that one outcome or a positive outcome that comes out of this legislative session would be for the ability for Santa Cooper, the state-owned utility, to participate with Dominion and building at least one combined cycle turbine, gas fired, somewhere in the state, close to load, which I think will alleviate some of the pressure on the supply side. There's a lot of what I would describe as discussions around other changes to regulatory framework.
I think they're, some are nice, some are good, some are utility beneficial, stakeholder beneficial. I think that's probably the biggest piece that we should focus on, is reliability and affordability, which I think has been somewhat of a cornerstone in the end of the day of the economic fabric of this state, is we do have, we have reliable energy that's affordable. But I think there are some other things that I think we'll get into that will be fun to discuss about the layoffs around kind of the legislative agenda.
Excellent, excellent, excellent. Mike, moving from energy, your company's involved in installing and selling irrigation systems, right? What's the most significant impediment you hear from the farm community about doing that?
What's the challenges with new irrigation? What are you running into? Can you speak to that?
So the challenges to putting in new irrigation vary from region to region around the country based on climatic conditions, based on legal conditions, and water access. Here on the East Coast, regulated ripariate rights means water's pretty easy to access. If you can get to it, you can pretty well have it.
Those of you waiting for a water permit, a well permit, might argue with me, but in general, if you've got a well permit, you can generally get access to water. So here in South Carolina, I did a little research, some very rudimentary research. What was keeping growers from installing irrigation?
Why aren't, what's the biggest hurdle to a farmer putting in irrigation? And everybody asked, had the exact same answer immediately, and that was commodity prices. Well, there's nothing I can do as a water policy individual or an irrigation company about commodity prices.
Despite my size, I still can't raise the price of corn no matter how much I eat. But it got me thinking, why is this, what's the root cause of that? And what I realized was that it came down to money.
Money is the reason that growers here in South Carolina aren't putting in irrigation. And I've always joked that you have to have three things to irrigate, you have to have water, electricity, and money. If you find two, I'll get you the third.
So, here I've seen in the years that I worked here, and I still hear this, that irrigation has traditionally been an out-of-pocket purchase and considered a single-year capex on farms in South Carolina. And there seems to still be a feeling about that today. Irrigation equipment has moved into a more financed piece of equipment.
As we've seen the cost of irrigation equipment rise anywhere from 35 to 70% in the last five years, the percentage of equipment that gets financed is growing. Which means growers need to rethink where those dollars are coming from that are gonna fund that. And instead of looking at it as, I'm gonna pay for it out of my pocket, or I'm gonna use my line of credit and it's a single-year capex expense, how do I turn this into a cash flow model, just like we do with our rolling stock and our other equipment?
So, I spread this out over 60, 72, 84 months, and how does my payment schedule coincide with my cash flow? So then I've reduced my annual financial burden in order to irrigate, and at the same time, I've increased my ability for volume and quality, which should increase my cash flow as well as my dollar value if my quality's going up. So, I think changing that perspective and reconsidering irrigation as a financed asset and looking at how the financial payments work into the cash flow of your operation is the biggest challenge that's facing irrigation installation here in South Carolina.
Next, thank you, Mike. Richard, Danny actually addressed, pretty directly, actually, why we're losing ag and forestry property. We're a desirable state, right?
We're growing. Talk as you indicated earlier about what we can do to maybe keep people on the farms and owning timberland in areas of the state that, frankly, like land around our area, the land values are just going through the roof. Speak to that for us.
Sure. Well, I think as a whole, kind of the crisis for ag land right now really revolves around being in the crosshairs of development. There's some numbers out there, American Farmland Trust has put together and done a lot of studies nationally.
We're losing millions nationally. We're losing hundreds of thousands in South Carolina alone. We're projected to lose hundreds of thousands more.
And it's supply, demand, it's location. Supply is what it is. It's not growing.
Demand is increasing. Where you are in the state is gonna put pressure on you in that regard. South Carolina's got one of the best farm to market road systems.
So, you know, when you look at the key markets, there's been a really good road system that used to go out on the farm. Now the markets come to the farm. And it's all about that development potential of the property.
It's exponential what it does to the prices when you think about land prices from traditional ag up into commercial and industrial residential. I mean, we're talking three, four, five fold. So it puts pressures on families to make decisions about potential generational wealth, multi-generational wealth if they sell their place or hang on and keep farming.
And I think all of our farmers will tell you not a lot of multi-generational wealth coming out of farming the land. But, you know, so it's more in those transitional periods when it passes from one generation to the next. Those families have to make those decisions.
And that's tough. So really the only two solutions are regulate what you can do with the land from a governmental level. And I think living in South Carolina, that's not a topic that gains a lot of traction.
Most of this, by the way, is decisions at the county level, not the federal or the state. So your county council is making land use decisions on a regular basis and they're way more accessible than, you know, because they're your neighbors as well. But the last option is what we're doing, which is placing conservation easements.
It's voluntary, it's landowner initiated. We're here to serve the landowner. We're here to educate first about what it is, what it means for your family, for your property, what benefits it can offer.
And then secondly, if the family wants to move forward, we place the easement, we hold the easement. That's the trust part. Because basically the easement can't be violated as long as we're monitoring it.
And so the family can rest at ease that once they sort of hand over that monitoring to us, even as they move into the successive generations, we're the one responsible for maintaining the integrity of that property. And restrictions are put in place on the property to keep it from being developed, but not to restrict private activities, ag activities, wildlife, timber. Those things can still happen on conserved property.
So we see it as a solution. If I had about 50 people working for me, it'd be a faster solution. But I got two.
So it only happens at that kind of pace. So if we had a little more money in the hire staff, we could get it done quicker. Kind of where we are.
And Richard, you missed Gary's comments, but he actually referenced the fact that if you had resources, human resources, and they're trying to make a plan there, you could even do more. That's right. Every easement doesn't matter if you use 30 acres or 30,000 acres.
It takes the exact same amount of staff time to get it done. So that's just kind of, that's our bottleneck. Excellent, excellent, excellent.
Now I'm getting a pick on my neighbor. About eight miles down the road. You know, we could talk energy.
We could talk land. I'm gonna talk water, okay? And partly because Ward FC is fairly new.
You already indicated when you were talking about yourself in the role that you are a member of Ward FC. Talk to us, Landrum, how important is water to the farm community as a whole? Talk to us about that.
Well, yeah, I mean, it's pretty obvious, Mr. Rodney, that water is essential to everything that we do. You know, whether we're in the crop industry or livestock industry, without water we can't operate.
I mean, even us just basic humans can't do what we gotta do. So water and access to it, whether it be irrigation or what the Lord blessed us with. A little back to last summer, I mean, we did raid three times in South Carolina and we were faced with what we got faced with.
So having said that, I might mention, you know, kind of how the East Coast operates with riparian rights and all that kind of stuff. Well, you know, we're okay and we're very blessed in South Carolina to be in the situation that we are with the amount of water that we do have. We don't have a shortage.
Nobody's talking rivers dry. If you read that in the paper, that's not happening. There's no data behind that.
It's not even close to happening. Yeah, when it doesn't rain, the river gets a little lower than normal, everybody can see that. But we are blessed and I will say that agriculture is in a pretty good spot with the amount of data that we have to back up our story.
We've done a really good job, both Clemson and some private industry as well. And even federal dollars going into NRCS and setting up some different ways to audit irrigation systems and being able to prove that we are, here's where we are on the irrigation system and here's how we can improve or have actual numbers to show that we're doing a pretty good job of irrigating, taking care of the resource. And when we're in these meetings, I always like to break it up, that we can take a pivot that shows that it's 95 to 98% efficient.
And I always like to challenge our water suppliers, are y'all even 50% efficient? And they have no clue, no clue what they are. Some of them do, but a lot of them they don't.
And I'm not picking on them, I'm just saying, I'm not picking on them as an industry, I'm just saying we have done a great job of being able to show data to show how good we are and even have data to show, well, maybe that pivot is leaking, point out the fact that here's the problem and then reorder it and we fix it. So we can use data and I will say that I stand firm on the fact that of all the users, the actual users of the water, we're probably in the best position to tell that story with real data. Thank you, Ray.
I'll back that up. I was just in a meeting last week with a CE, an urban construction group that manages water for municipalities and the statistic that they threw out was that they can only account for 40 to 60% of the water that they pump. So that means that mathematically they are losing 40 to 60% of their water somewhere out of their system.
Our loss rates aren't that great. In agriculture, we tend to lose water through mismanagement more than through lack of managing infrastructure. Fantastic, thank you.
How about an audience? Y'all got any questions? I can go on and on, but I prefer y'all ask.
Any questions from the audience? Yes, sir? Just a quick one, following up on this water resources, for both Mike and Landron, do you see a role for farm ponds in looking at the water resources in the future?
You wanna start? Yeah, I will. Yeah, that conversation's come up a lot, actually, from both using it in a shortage situation and also in a flood mitigation situation and being able to use or capture water in a big storm event, I don't care if it's a hurricane or whatever, but you just get a big rain event, and being able to capture some of that water and use it when we need it.
That's come up a lot. There's gonna be some regulatory hurdles to get around, but it has come up quite a bit. And I will say, especially in the pedestal, river basin, that it probably shows, and I'm gonna use air quotes, I don't like air quotes, but shortages more often than maybe anywhere in the state, but that's all due to modeling.
But more often than not, it's farmers that are affected first because it's all tributaries and stuff like that, so that's where farm pond storage came up. And it really wouldn't be water out of the river, per se, it would be water from rain that got captured. And it's almost more of the flood mitigation side than it is on the shortage side, if that makes sense.
This is going to agree wholeheartedly with Landon's last comment, that farm ponds are runoff and flood mitigation primarily. When you just start looking at it mathematically, how many acres, how many production acres are you gonna take out in order to install a farm pond? And what is the realistic holding capacity of that pond?
So if you take an acre out, then how many acres are you gonna try to irrigate out of that? And how deep? If you're trying to put on one inch in half a week, then you need to have a foot of water for every 12 acres that you're trying to irrigate.
So just the volume of on-farm storage doesn't make it a significant viable backup. Where we see it in irrigation as part of the water supply is when you have a very low flow, but highly reliable water source that you can fill that farm pond and use it as, for lack of a better term, a slush fund. So each irrigation cycle may pull it down anywhere from two to six feet, but you're constantly refilling that as you're irrigating, and then that just refills on a 24-hour cycle.
But the concept of installing on-farm surface storage and using that for irrigation is just not practical from a sheer numbers standpoint. Other audience questions? Yes, sir, Danny.
This is for Danny on the power side. For Danny on the power side. We hear about these data centers and the big demand for AI future.
Where's that energy gonna come from? Is that a play for micro-nuclear power centers, or how do you view this? So that's a great question.
So having participated materially in the commercial contracting for data centers, and then really looking at all the inquiries that we get, and kind of understanding that space, that's probably, you know, I mentioned the load growth. Utilities, that's one of the places where that's typically absent and can be absent in the utilities forecast, because it's not a commercial engagement until somebody actually signs a contract. But speculatively, how much of it will actually happen, and should it be included, and then the fundamental question is how do you serve it?
So we think of it as we're gonna serve, again, the growth, the existing customers, and then the residential, and the commercial, and the firm customers. Those contracts become highly specialized, but it's really clear in the statutes in South Carolina that the cost causer, or the participant, bears the responsibility for their cost, and those costs don't get shifted to non-participants. In other words, the ag community doesn't pay for a data center.
So there is a direct correlation between the supply, because at some point, if you're short of supply, you're not entering into that contract, but at the time supply is available, you would expect that most of those entities would want to enter into contracts. There's a ton of space. It's heavily debated.
What do data centers do? Does their cost increase cost to the rest of the consumers, or decrease cost to the rest of the consumers? The answer to that is that it's very, very important to understand the material terms of the contract.
If it's done right, it eliminates any cost shift. They should pay their way. But I do think that in a perfect world, the growth, but also with, done in concert with utility investment, probably ends up being a positive thing for South Carolina.
At the end of the day, for all parts. But I think it really is important, the terms in that contract. So that that risk doesn't get passed on.
I will also say that data centers, although they were, when I started doing the contracting work, which was years ago, before really we had any material investment in that space, there was a, every data center, or at least the biggest data centers, all took sustainability pledges. They're still committed to those pledges. And that means that if they're going to continue to follow through on those pledges, there's a certain amount of renewable resource that then would be either in the service territory or closely adjacent to it, which they could at least subscribe to for the green attributes.
So it's like a bigger, more complex ecosystem problem. You hear a bunch of sound bites. You read in the paper, by the way, I hardly ever read the paper anymore.
But people point stuff out to me at some point and say, hey, look, this is this. And I know, the idea that a data center, for example, would get some marvelous discounted rate. Okay?
All you gotta do is go to the published tariff and point to it, that's the rate. Generally, they do. And they only get a rate that they get, an industrial rate, is because they either are a significant volumetric consumer, and they're entitled to it, just like a manufacturer.
But it isn't like there's some magical like WOM utility ways, because by the way, everything I do in that contract, it goes to the Public Service Commission and the Office of Regulatory Staff scrutinize every single period and exclamation point and word in that document. So, I'm concerned. I spend more time, obviously, in this space than any, because it's a really interesting space.
But I do think whatever we do, it doesn't matter whether data proliferates in South Carolina but we do have a supply. I'll call it an opportunity. That we're gonna need to fix.
And it's gonna likely take, you know, something dollars, capital dollars, and really a regulatory climate that allows, look, all farms, whether it be private or utilities, to invest in South Carolina, to then fulfill, I think, what are the obligations to serve. Yes. Come on.
Yes, ma'am. So, in terms of farm, when you're choosing a source of irrigation water, would you always try to find a sweet spot between the monetary factor, whether it is cheap or expensive, as also the contamination in the water? How important is water contamination in the state of South Carolina as a farm or when you're irrigating your farmland?
I think that is you all the way, baby. By default, the end of the road over there. So, I'm gonna answer that in two ways.
I'll answer it first as a farmer. Sometimes you only have one choice. If you're not close to a surface water source, then your only choice would be groundwater at that point.
Okay, so, obviously, if surface water is available, and when I say surface water, I mean a big stream and or river. So, if that's not available or it's financially unfeasible to pump it that far, then you're going to the ground. Number two, if you're growing a crop, think of a fresh fruit or a vegetable, and you are close to a surface water source, you're probably not pumping river water, stream water, ditch water, onto a edible crop.
So, that's something to keep in mind. I'm not saying the water is bad. I'm just saying you're probably not doing that.
So, you're probably, if you have both sources available when that crop, say it's a berry, a peach, whatever it is, you're probably pumping groundwater when that fruit is on the vine, the bush, the tree, whatever. I forgot what else I was going to say, I'm sorry. As a, from a water planning, I'm going to put that hat on for a second.
Really, the state is looking at conjunctive use a lot and trying to push, and Danny, you probably are aware, from our supplier side, we have an abundance of surface water in South Carolina, and really trying to use as much of that when it's available as we can and save groundwater when we can. So, conjunctive use, but as farmers, we don't always farm right next to a surface water source. So, I mean, we have to use groundwater, and a municipality or a water supplier or Dominion, they got plenty of money to bury a bunch of pipe all over the place.
We don't. So, we're going to have to dig a well, and everybody understands that. And, but yeah, conjunctive use is great if that option is available.
So, aren't there, you know, regulatory measures, or maybe even in the future to find out some ways for treating the surface water to make it more affordable for farmers? I don't, I don't know. I know on the planning side, we've talked about, and this is taking place now, about treating surface water, you know, for human use.
You know, and actually there's ASR wells in the state now being used, which is treating surface water and pumping it into the ground for later recovery to be used in thousands of forages or high demand or whatever. But I don't, I don't even know the economics behind treating water, if that's even an option. Or farmers, we're just quite frankly trying to survive right now.
I don't even know how that would pencil to treat water to bubble to a crop. So, there are some facilities around the country that are taking domestic treated wastewater and trying to reuse that in the agriculture sector from a cost standpoint, unless the water treatment facility or a federal funded is taking care of that infrastructure, it's just cost prohibitive for the local grower because oddly enough, they build water treatment plants where there's lots of people and that's not where we put farms. So we have to get that water from those high density populations out to the farms and that's very, very expensive when we start talking about that.
So, from just a treatment standpoint from that, it's a great opportunity because for a grower, you get tons of micronutrients and can save some significant fertilization costs, but the infrastructure in order to transport that water and get it back out to the farm is a challenge. Thank you. So, for young farmers or anyone who's looking to be farmers like me and everyone at my school, do you have any suggestions to how to buy land because it's really expensive and us coming right out of college or even high school probably won't be able to afford it.
You see my notes up here? Maybe. Yeah.
So, a couple of ways to think about that. One in particular is, you know, not all land is going crazy. It's very concentrated around, you know, the major metro areas where we're seeing the exorbitant costs, but, you know, you can, you know, Ben, you're in Newberry and you're starting to see the impact of Columbia growing up.
You know, we got Sumter County, you know, there's some growth going on there, Florence, and that sort of thing that is kind of pushing land prices up, but it's not everywhere. So, there are places in the state where it's still affordable, but the hard part about that is you probably grew up somewhere where you want to stay, and if that particular area is under development pressure, then those prices are going up. So, the first thing I'll say is if you're flexible, look around the state and understand that the real estate market tends to be in those metro areas and the vicinity, but also corridors like the major interstates, major highways that connect those, and that's where your highest prices are.
The farther away you get from those, the better the land prices get. The second thing I'll tell you is, is if you know your neighborhood, you want to stay in your neighborhood, there are a lot of folks out there who are not interested in seeing land sold to developers, and are very interested in seeing future farmers take it over. Every landowner that I work with is giving up significant development potential on their property to do an easement, and they're doing that knowing full well that they're walking away from a lot of money, in some cases.
Those folks would be just as willing to have a conversation with you about buying their land to bring it into your farming operation, knowing that it's going to go to the next generation, it's going to stay in Ag, versus going into another development. So I would say talk to your neighbors and see if those folks are out there, because they are out there. It may be a few and far between on that, but they're out there, because folks care about the health of the community as much as they do money in the law.
I can't help but jump in. Richard just gave you some fantastic advice. So often the farmer doesn't have a daughter or son to follow in their footsteps, but they want to accomplish exactly what he just said, and they're open to considering someone else coming on board.
Look for those opportunities. Great feedback. One last quick one is, we have an extensive land trust network in the state.
I'll give you a good example. Low Country Land Trust, they have 550 easements, easement properties, because they've been working for a long time. That's 550 landowners who have property that's got a conservation easement where it is holding that price below the development value.
So that's another resource. Perhaps you could reach out to your land trust and see if they know of anybody that's looking to sell, and it's more reasonable. How about more questions?
This is what we want to be in. Yes, sir. Thank you.
Richard, I'll challenge you a little more on this. First off, based off of that question, that's about a three, four part question, but we'll make it quick. Does Farm Bureau have any resource like that where you are trying to connect to people that have had easements put in that they may not be looking to farm but also not looking to sell, where they can connect with young farmers?
Second, funding. I know these are state funded easements. Our state gets a lot of money from the federal government.
Are you seeing any changes in how these easements are funded? Or increase, decrease? Third, who do you see most often these days putting land in easements?
Farmers, conservationists, conservation groups, NGOs? Where does that go? Remind me first if the Farm Bureau got any kind of program to help connect.
Yeah, so the first step is we gotta get this land trust rolling. So we're two years into that. But yes, long term, I can't say it's a concrete plan, but we would love to create that opportunity where we can become a resource for folks, for farmers.
There's even been some, there's some other groups that are starting to work. South Charlotte, or in Charlotte, you know, over in South Carolina, South Charlotte, that are looking at creating incubator type farms. I do see that opportunity on some of the lands that we've eased.
One in particular, South Charlotte, 1100 acres, beautiful pasture land, but he's retired. No cows on that property. But he still keeps those pastures up like they're gonna be there tomorrow.
That'd be a great incubator farm for somebody. Remind me the second. State funding for conservation.
Yeah, we are very, very, very fortunate to be in South Carolina in the conservation community. We probably got the best thing going in the nation. That may be a biased opinion, but I think if you've really got to dig it into it, it's probably true.
We probably have one of the best supported conservation communities from a funding standpoint. And that is almost exclusively, well, it's mostly coming through the South Carolina Conservation Bank, which was created by the legislature in 2000. We also have state tax incentives that gives the landowners what they can serve, created in similar legislation.
And then this fiscal year, which we're still in, the governor signed into law the South Carolina Working Ag Land Act that gives us additional funding to basically offer a comparable financial package for easements that you used to get with an NRCS ASAP easement. The reason for that is there was already frustration with the NRCS program, not to throw any shade. It was getting the money on the ground was such a challenge for NRCS as much as it was for the land trust.
Because there was just a process and low staff and everybody was stumbling through it. It took a long time. So we basically, with that working ag, were able to offer a state-funded solution.
It turned out to be, you know, come at the right time because now, you know, NRCS funding getting on the ground is gonna be even more of a challenge. I mean, less things change, but we know where it's headed. So we're a little bit insular, which is good.
We've got our own sources of funding. We've got our own conservation bank that's very well funded right now. We've got additional funding coming for working ag.
And so to answer your question, as far as we're concerned, no, no impact whatsoever. And then the third one. Who do you see putting in conservation against?
Any shifts in the last couple of years? Where does most of this go? All over the board.
We're working with folks from 65 acres to 1,900 acres, professional farmers. And, you know, in the early stages of getting land trust up and running, we did more farm and timber land that may not have been owned by a professional farmer. But now we're having to really shift our resources to the professional farmer side because they're calling and they're interested.
And we need to have the greatest impact where we can. And so we've shifted a little bit there. So some of our folks that are not full-time farming on the land anymore, but it's good land and great conservation project.
We're having to shift our focus more to these full-time farmers. We're doing everything, cattle operations to other livestock. I just closed last week on Grimshaw Farm in Lawrence County to raise some sheep for land meat.
We're doing row crop. We're doing irrigated row crop. We are prioritizing irrigated row crop land right now.
Sumter County has blown up on us. We're just starting to do some fantastic work in Sumter County. And most, if not almost all of that is irrigated crop land.
And all the way down to the coast. I just did a horse farm. We're closing on a horse farm in the next month on John's Isle.
So it's all over the board. AGR Tourism, UPEG Farms, we're doing Lieber Farms in Newberry right down the road from y'all. So it's all over the board, but we're really trying to shift our energy into those full-time farmers.
You know, that's the big time farm operations right now because we're low staff. Once we can add staff, we can service more folks. Thank you.
Any other questions? I think we're in about the eight minute range. We have to be fair, but any more questions?
Oh, Kendall. I got a question, probably, I guess Mike, for you. You know, one of the things that we see is, I guess the hot topic, buzzword, whatever you want to call it, is the United Nations Sustainability Goals, the Sustainable Growth Goals, or whatever.
Within that, you've got goals that relate to water, water quality, water quantity. But right there at the top is no hunger. And I'd like you to speak a little bit to kind of what is Rinky's view or Mike Mill's view on how do we balance that?
Because you can't, without irrigation, you can't produce as much food as we do produce. I don't know, I don't have a specific question, but how do you balance that as being one of the goals? So as I begin to answer that, I guess I can dismiss the panel and I'll just talk right through lunch.
We can spend all day on that one. You start talking about environmental oversight and water application and sustainability goals, and a lot of times, the agencies that are doing that are, as you pointed out, speaking out of both sides of their mouths. So we have, we've all heard the nine billion people by 2050 number, which means there's going to be less land available.
Those people have to live somewhere. And we're gonna have to produce more from every acre of land that we have in terms of quantity and quality. So about the only guaranteed way to do that is to be able to irrigate that.
When we look at the environmental sustainability issues and the concerns, we have to balance that. And where do we stand as a human species within that cycle, and who's gonna take a priority? Are we going to prioritize the human species over perhaps another endangered animal species that may be affected by the increased water withdrawals?
We have seen a lot of attention paid to the plant and animal kingdom in the last four years. I think, as we've seen in the newest administration, some of that policy has shifted to some more attention on the human species in terms of how they're changing their environmental investment goals. So we still have a responsibility to be judicious with the water investments.
I don't like the term using water. Water never gets used. Water gets utilized for carrying nutrients, and then it's released right back into the atmosphere.
So water never really truly goes away. It moves from one area to another. It's been many groups' philosophy that we actually have enough water, but we have to address things like mismanagement in the ag side, and unrealized over-pumping in the domestic side, so that we can be responsible.
And if we can do that, then we can meet those goals. So I think there's, like you said, that's a lot to unpack right there. But I think that we still have that environmental responsibility to be responsible with the natural resources we invest.
But we have to balance that with the volume of food and fiber that has to be produced, and figuring out where those priorities are. I don't know if that answered your question or not. I don't know if that formulated a clean question.
Yeah, you kind of chucked me right under the bus there, didn't you? Mike, pass that over to Landrum. I think he's got a comment to add.
Yeah, I just want to say a quick comment just for people in the state. I'm gonna just, right here in South Carolina, just some fun data. Surface water, farmers pump less than 1% of the total state's usage for irrigation, all right?
Somewhere around 10% of the state's usage, of the state's surface water usage goes into non-ag irrigation. So what I like to call is we're pumping about 10%, 9% to 10% of the water for the state is going on plants that something does not eat. So to your point, how does that factor in?
Now, if we got plenty of water, I don't care, let's make all the grass as green as possible, and there's a lot of people that cut grass, I get all that. But I just want everybody to know that's that. Another thing, I just kind of want to take a moment to, we've been talking about land, we've been talking about water, we've been talking about energy.
And for those of you who were here earlier, Mike, I promise we wouldn't paint a dirty picture like the first thing I did, but, you know, nobody's really talked about saving the farmer. This is, I'm the only farmer up here, so I'll take a minute to talk about it, but this is all great, we can save whatever we want, but if we don't save the farmer, what are we really doing? So I agree we have to focus on land, I mean, I agree, you know, more broadly on that, 100% got to focus on water.
But if we're not putting just as much effort on saving the families that actually touch the dirt every day and use the water every day, I think we're not really focusing in the right place. Michael's still back in the back of the room, and I think that's what he was trying to say a while ago, that you don't have the farm, there's no way for anybody to go work, right? Wasn't that what you were communicating?
Well, Dr. Outlaw, I don't want to bring him up, but he said it, not me, he said that it's the most rare in his five year projection since, I think he said 40 years of working in farm economics. I think we need to address some of that a little more aggressively, and what goes into that.
Just for me, I'm in the term a lot, and this has got to be, but I was talking to a friend of mine, and we came up with the term farming is financially irresponsible at the moment. And I don't know, we laugh when we say that, but if you truly look at it, it kind of is. And some of the stuff, like what Richard brought up earlier, we're economically irrelevant in some of these areas, which is why?
That's the question. Yeah, we 12 o'clock, but I can't leave it alone, right? I was gonna say perfect storm, but it may be an imperfect storm.
Lack of profits, and at the same time, huge land tax. How do you walk away when you offer $20,000 to make a free land? I don't know that answer, you know that answer?
I mean, anyway, okay. That's the quandary we're in, right? That's what's happening in a large part of the state.
All right, let's give this group a hand, y'all. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.