S1:E3 - Mitchell Hora: A New Scoreboard for Agriculture

Mitchell is a 7th-generation Iowa farmer and the Founder/CEO of Continuum Ag, a soil health data intelligence company. He’s one of the leading evangelists for scoring crops according to their Carbon Intensity as a measure of climate impact that’s strongly aligned with how producers operate.

Mitchell shares his journey into regenerative agriculture, starting from his seventh-generation family farm in Iowa and discussing how early mistakes with cover cropping fueled his drive to ensure that farmers have the data and technical support necessary for success. He emphasizes that soil health practices can deliver significant long-term benefits, including reduced input costs, increased resilience, and lower environmental impact, but stresses the importance of farmer-to-farmer technical assistance over government-led programs.

Mitchell also highlights Continuum Ag’s role in helping farmers understand their carbon intensity scores, which are becoming critical as markets and policies like the Inflation Reduction Act incentivize low-carbon farming practices. He explains how these scores can drive new economic opportunities for farmers, particularly in the biofuels sector. Mitchell is optimistic about the potential for agriculture to shift from being part of the problem to being a key part of the climate solution, as more farmers adopt regenerative practices that are backed by data and verified for legitimacy.

 

Notable Quotes 

 

(00:05:33) The corn just looked like crap too. I've got some pictures of it and stuff, just nasty. But a lot of farmers run into those issues where we're planting corn, that's a grass, into a cover crop, namely cereal rye, which is used more than 90 % of the time across the Midwest. But cereal rye, also a grass, said they are in competition to each other. And we got what's known as the carbon penalty, where we had too much carbon biomass out there, tried planting corn into it, and just screwed things up...It was our fault. We didn't know what the heck we were doing. Our soil health was not ready for it, meaning our biological activity was not great. We had been no tilling, but we were conventionally farming, right? With plenty of pesticides and plenty of synthetic fertilizer. And just no till alone doesn't get you where you need to go. 

(00:08:51) We've changed our system to revolve around this cover crop. And the cover crop is part of the program that now we're able to have huge success with it. We’ve decreased our need for fertilizer and pesticides significantly. We've reduced fertilizer by about 50 percent. We've reduced our pesticides by about 75 percent. We've reduced our need for federal crop insurance for any farm subsidies for any replant. We haven't had a replant in years. We haven't had any crop insurance claims in years. We're just so much more resilient.

You don't have to lose money in year one. Now, it might take some off-farm money to offset the cost and to maintain and to break even in those first couple of years, but you can absolutely be money ahead very, very soon into this journey as long as you don't screw it up like we did, and that's why the technical support is just so critical

I really worry about how fast this is going. And I know that regulation is the wrong way to do it, because the technical support is not readily available at scale. The logistics, the logistical support not ready at scale, namely cover crop seed, the ability to apply all these cover crops, the labor to get it all done. Those infrastructure components don't exist today. They've progressed a long way, but like, It takes time to let that stuff really get going and let supply and demand just fuel it.

(00:11:39) The real technical assistance needs to happen farmer to farmer. That's how farmers learn best anyway. And that's becoming more readily available. I think social media has helped with that. There's a gazillion different field days and events and social