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In this episode of the Ducks Unlimited podcast, host Dr. Jerad Henson and co-host Dr. Mike Brasher welcome special guest Pete Stoddart, Director of Corporate Responsibility at Cargill, along with Adam DeHaan, DU’s Senior Director of Development for Minnesota and Iowa. The discussion centers around Playa wetlands and the innovative funding opportunities and unique partnerships that are overcoming conservation challenges in Kansas and Nebraska. Pete and Adam discuss the DU and Cargill partnership and how they helped Cargill reach their sustainability goals and create and restore valuable waterfowl habitats. Tune in for insights into how collaboration paves the way for impactful environmental initiatives.
Creators & Guests
What is Ducks Unlimited Podcast?
Ducks Unlimited Podcast is a constant discussion of all things waterfowl; from in-depth hunting tips and tactics, to waterfowl biology, research, science, and habitat updates. The DU Podcast is the go-to resource for waterfowl hunters and conservationists. Ducks Unlimited is the world's leader in wetlands conservation.
Jerad Henson: Hey everybody, welcome to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm going to be your host, Dr. Jared Henson today. I'm joined in studio by co-host, Dr. Mike Brasher. How you doing, Jared? Good to be here. I'm great. Still really enjoying the new studio here.
Mike Brasher: Absolutely. We've done a few things in here by now, so it's worked out pretty well.
Jerad Henson: Yeah, it's great. We have joining us from the web world over here, Adam DeHaan. Who is a senior director of development for Minnesota and Iowa. Adam, thanks for being here.
Adam DeHaan: It's a pleasure to join the podcast. I love the studio guys.
Jerad Henson: Thanks again. And we also have our special guest today, Pete Stoddard from Cargill. Pete is the director of corporate responsibility. Pete, thanks for joining us.
Pete Stoddard: It's a pleasure to be here. Pleasure to meet you and really eager to talk about this great story today.
Jerad Henson: Well, awesome. Well, kind of the story we're talking about is one of a cool landscape, a little different funding opportunities that we've explored, and some unique partnerships that have really brought about kind of a cool new way for us to do conservation work in North America. And so I do want to back up just a little bit and The audience knows a lot about us. They've heard our story. Too much. Too many times. Adam, do you mind doing a little background on yourself, how you ended up at DU, how long you've been with DU and what led you here, et cetera?
Adam DeHaan: We're going to give this the very quick version. I was a college basketball coach for 12 years, but my biology undergrad degree just, I thought something was missing. So I started checking out online some opportunities that were available. Ended up at a Ducks Unlimited event, checked out the regional director, had coffee with him. Next thing I knew, I was moving to eastern Nebraska and Omaha to work as a regional director in our fundraising side of the business. And then ended up in Memphis for three years as the manager of volunteer services. And then moved up to the Twin Cities to work with our major sponsors and develop opportunities. living lakes here in Minnesota is very, very prominent. However, we're prairie people by heart, a lot of prairie support, and then more recently as opportunities like the Ogallala Aquifer have become available and opportunities and programs ramped up, there's a lot of energy for the Ogallala, especially through foundation and corporate entities like Cargill.
Jerad Henson: Yeah. Awesome. And you're, you're a waterfowl hunter, right? You've heard, yeah, I've heard some stories.
Adam DeHaan: There's a lot, there's a lot of stories and most of them are true. Uh, I do like I shoot waterfowl from from canada down into the into the southern playas every every fall and uh, pete's had the good fortune of Or a bad fortune of coming with me.
Mike Brasher: However, I will let him tell those stories You know the stories that are true are never as exciting as the stories that aren't true Those are the ones that i'm really interested in. Uh, unfortunately, I don't know that we're going to be able to get to those today that No, but they're always really excited. Any other time?
Jerad Henson: Yeah Yeah. And Pete, can you talk a little about what you do at Cargill and kind of how you got into the corporate sustainability world and a little bit of that?
Pete Stoddard: Yep. All the stories about me are true. So I want to put that out there right now. So I've been at Cargill for 15 years. I started here in the communications and the public relations area and I was supporting the work, doing communications work for the very cool work that the company was doing and giving back to its large non-profit partners and its local communities and had been doing PR for a good part of my career and really got a taste of this part of the company which is such an important part of the history of the company and telling the stories of it. I approached the person leading the team at the time and said, hey, would you ever want a communications person to come over and work on the giving side of things? So I've been doing this for the past five years. I lead our partnership with Ducks Unlimited, and I also work in our other areas of corporate giving, mainly in the food security space. So I lead our partnership with Feeding America, for example, and so sustainability, food security, DEI work are very much a part of the focus of what we're doing with our corporate giving and our business giving, and so I've been doing it for five years. Very, very fulfilling work, very educational, a great mental challenge, but also just a lot of emotional payback when you get to work with great partners such as DU and so many of our other partners out there.
Jerad Henson: And we're really glad to have folks like you as partners that share that passion for giving back, for protecting the resource, etc. Can you give a quick update just kind of on what Cargill does? Cargill does a lot. And just kind of a nutshell kind of example or reference on that.
Mike Brasher: Partly they feed the world as I understand it. They do.
Pete Stoddard: So where I sit in the company in the western suburbs of Minneapolis, this is the global headquarters for the company. And then we have another big beachhead in Wichita, Kansas where our protein business is headquartered. And then we have locations scattered around the world, 74 plus countries where we're doing handling of grain and other crops and turning it into food and fuel and and bioindustrials and working closely with the agriculture community. We have a very strong legacy trading business where we're trading on commodity markets around the world. I've had the great pleasure of working here in the U.S., but also traveling to see our businesses in countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Europe, work closely with my colleagues in a region of maya and the things that they're doing so there's people doing what i do in all parts of the world and so we are uh we're interconnected we all work under the same mission we don't have a ducks unlimited asia branch yet but we're definitely working on water programs and and those parts of the world equally as we're working on them here in them in north america company has a great history it's a 150 plus years uh and and counting and I was here when we celebrated our 150th anniversary which was a great celebration and um yeah it's a it's a it's a fantastic company fantastic values the values of the family that part of the company is very much lived out every day and work closely on making sure That a key part of our work in addition to what we do from a business standpoint is about our giving back and giving back to organizations like this and and and on a smaller level in our local communities, so it's uh It's a it's a real privilege to actually have a job like I have in a company like this because it is It is not just an add-on. It's very much a core of who we are and how we operate
Jerad Henson: Well, that's awesome to hear. That's always the great feedback you want to hear and the stories you want to hear about partners and those that you're working with. And that's kind of one of the reasons we brought this topic up today. We've got a wonderful relationship with Cargill and we're working in some really cool places and some places that sometimes can be a little challenging to find funding for. And one of the places that Cargill and DU are working together is in the Playa Lakes. So that's the kind of pothole-like wetlands underneath or above the Ogallala Aquifer in the Southern Plains.
Mike Brasher: Southern Great Plains. Mike can shift on that. Do we want to go there right now, or is that where we're going to go to the geography? I actually have a question for Adam. Oh, ask. So we have a number of corporate partners, such as Cargill. In different parts of the country, they've been with us for varying lengths of time, and they've come to partner with us and see the value of what we do for a variety of reasons. And so, Adam, I want your perspective as a development guy who works in this space to kind of speak about How does some of that, how does some, for an audience that we have here that may not think, when they think about Ducks Unlimited, they may not think about the people that we have working in this corporate partner space. We will talk a little bit later on about, I mean, why the work that we do with our corporate partners is just as important and of the same type of activities that we do with any state, federal, or other kind of partner, but for people that may not be aware of how we work with and how we come to work with corporate partners around our conservation work. Give us some insight to that, Adam, because this is what you do. Yeah.
Adam DeHaan: Yes. What is driving corporate engagement with Ducks Unlimited Is something every duck hunter knows every person who uses uses the outdoors and consumes mother nature's resources knows that biodiversity leads to long term integrity and our work is we've always talked about. duck calories, and duck use days, and waterfowl pairs, and brood nest success, and all of these real ducky metrics, fall flight numbers. And we know that as duck hunters, when all the factors are right, We're going to have lots of ducks. We know they need clean water. We know they need a lot of different plant communities in the wetlands, and they need uplands to nest in. And that is now becoming a value in the corporate world. They understand that biodiversity leads to long-term integrity, and that our singular focus of wetlands sufficient to fill the skies with waterfowl today and tomorrow, that vision statement, also has many other stacked benefits. First and foremost, clean water, reducing flooding, so on and so forth, nutrient reduction in our for our municipal water supplies, water quantity for underneath the Ogallala, there's towns in Kansas that are experiencing dry wells. So It's our work, and we're getting better at talking about all of the different benefits that our singular purpose of Habitat for Waterfowl has a lot of value, not only to corporations, but to communities and people as well.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, so Adam, we've talked on a number of previous episodes with folks like Dr. Steve Adair, our chief scientist. We've had some other partners. ConocoPhillips is an example. We've been working with them for over a decade, maybe two decades now, and a number of other people too. that we've had these conversations with Trust in Food, Trust in Beef, that's the one that I was thinking about here most recently, talking about these benefits that go beyond just waterfowl, and then a lot of times I find myself in conversations about, well, why are we working with these different groups? Why are we not just focusing on the traditional work? And ultimately, it comes down to, like from our perspective, it's like the threats to waterfowl habitats and all the benefits that they provide have never been greater. I mean, we have to work with as many partners in as many ways as we possibly can that will contribute to our overall mission and vision as an organization. And there are, as you talked about, very very well, those other benefits that we've been delivering through our conservation work are now of increased attention and value to whole other swaths of society, and so we are finding ourselves in more conversations with people that are recognizing what we do. And because we are trying to grow and scale our conservation… We've invested in this space as well.
Jerad Henson: I mean, my entire team, I'm on the ES and sustainability team. I'm a project manager. It's my normal job outside the podcast studio. But the team I work with, I work with Dr. Ellen Herbert. She's our senior scientist for nature-based solutions and sustainability. And it's her job and our team's job to try and figure out what those benefits look like, right? That we can market. to everybody else, right? Because our work has tons of benefits, as Adam mentioned. But we have to be good about talking about those benefits, right? Beyond just ducks.
Adam DeHaan: We build natural infrastructure that provides nature-based solutions for all of society. Let's keep talking about it. Let's keep spreading the word. Yeah.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, and Cargill is, I'll be honest, I was not aware of the depth and breadth of our partnership with Cargill. We're going to get into that here in a minute, but it's, we're going to talk about Southern Great Plains and the work in the Playa, but it stretches well beyond that.
Jerad Henson: Yeah, well, I think we can start a little bit with that history, and that's a good place to jump into. We, we kind of just re-upped a, uh, a grant agreement with Cargill and that's kind of what led to this podcast is, uh, the significant chunk of that money is going to Ogallala support specifically in the Kansas, Nebraska, a little bit of a Colorado, I believe is what Pete mentioned earlier. Um, that's the focus area for that, but I was talking to, uh, to Tawna earlier today, who's in our foundation relationships as well. She said she found records going back, working with Cargill in 1994. That's right. Cargill cares. She's in charge of that as well. So that's a long term partnership and a great partnership and it keeps going and we keep working together. And so, yeah, we've worked a lot from what I understand at local facilities. Is that correct? over the years but the past five years since I guess since Pete's come on with it we've we've really gotten much more and Adam and you two have really built us into a much more national level focus and a much larger landscape level fundraising.
Pete Stoddard: I mean I think how Adam described it is if you go back to I didn't have the 1994 date but I'll trust I'll trust you on that your records are probably really strong on that but In the early days, in the mid-90s, early 2000s, a lot of this work was happening by groups inside our facilities. We call them Cardgill CARES Councils. There's now 400 of these around the world. These are groups of a team within a plant when they're not doing their their critical work it's a day job at the plant they're working with the budget that's been allocated to them to make decisions about how to give back locally and since the mid 90s and And increasingly, up to the scale of the partnership that we have today, the core of this work started at a local level. I haven't met any of them, but I suspect they were passionate duck hunters. Maybe a few of them owned some land. They were trying to do some early conservation work. And you take it to where we are today, and this is around the world and for sure in the United States and Canada, our most significant water partnership. And it is significant because we call on Adam and so many others across the DU team to step up on not only finding good projects, which is the very first order of business, but then managing those projects, tracking the progress of the work that's happening. And they are extensions of us in the field. We are great at what we do at Cargill. but we are not great at what DU is great at, but we trust them with a very high level of confidence to go out and advance this work, talk over the fence, back a tractor to farmers. And so the dynamics of this are were just awesome at the very beginning, just very local, hyper-local work up to this, not just U.S., but U.S. and Canada. It's a North America partnership with lots of sophisticated, very cool elements of it, and it keeps us very busy in a very good way.
Jerad Henson: Yeah, no. I was reading through kind of our press release on this. And Adam, can you talk a little bit, since we've talked about it a few times, this new agreement with Cargill North America and kind of what we have going on. I know that you mentioned there were four different landscapes and this being one of them that we're going to talk about a little bit today. But Adam, can you mention a little bit on that?
Adam DeHaan: Starting in Canada, we are working two different partnerships directly with farmers on rangeland management and then also marginal lands, mixed egg producers, and using their land smart and sequestering some carbon and improving water quality. And then moving down into the upper Mississippi, Cargill is working through the IDALS program there to restore drain prairie pothole basins and the state of Iowa calls it a tile intercept program to slow water down to reduce nutrient loading and flooding. We call it duck habitat. We're creating some wonderful wetlands in Iowa with Cargill's help and then And then the bulk of the work then is, well, I forgot about the New York Finger Lakes area. That's been a longstanding Cargill Cares area of interest, and we've continued that in this agreement, working on moist soil units and marsh restorations in New York. And then lastly, the Ogallala Aquifer, whether it's time to recharge back into the Platte River through some very ducky pond building there, or whether it's working with landowners in Kansas to clean the sediment out of their aquifers so that the surface water can interact properly and recharge the aquifer across Kansas. It's profound. Cargill was very particular in and what they were looking for. And we were able to deliver four different landscapes that are important to their customers and to the company as well.
Jerad Henson: And all four of those landscapes and all of those projects, because there's a lot of different habitat work being done under that guise. But the overall arching goal is water quality and water quantity, correct?
Pete Stoddard: Correct. But yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So I mean, we have a goal, sort of a global goal. And DU is a big, obviously a big part of that where we're, it's a 2030 goal. So I remember we came up with 2030. We thought that's going to be a really, that's a really long time away, but it's coming up quick. And so we're trying to enable the restoration of 600 billion liters of water and the reduction of 5,000 metric tons of water pollutants in water stressed regions around the world. So those are some big, strong numbers and we obviously have a global footprint. Much of that footprint is here in North America. So when you We put a target and a goal like that out there And we look at places like the ogallala and in other areas that we select adam's exactly right. We we went through many many weeks of of of ideation and brainstorming and debate and maybe a couple disagreements and and and a lot of clarifications because um, you know, this is a a very nice size grant, but it's it's not all the money in the world with you know, we No one has all the money in the world to do these things. So we wanted to be really, really selective, really, really precise. And this area was an excellent place to start because we could make such positive gains in an area from what Adam and I have talked about is that There was work happening there, but not work at the scale that it's happening now. And so This was a trailblazer opportunity. It was it was really waiting for this very good fit for the types of Goals that I just outlined we could accomplish there. And so it's uh, and so far Not just so far so good so far really good at first. We're just about a year plus into the end of the work and uh And we have about 18 months of progress yet to make, but we're off to a really fast start. That's awesome.
Mike Brasher: You know, Pete, you mentioned that it was a great place for you all to start, made it make sense for you all to start. It also makes sense for us to partner with you all in this area because that Southern High Plains area is a high priority for waterfowl, for waterfowl habitat conservation. It's a really unique geography, and there's a number of partners that work there, but it's kind of been interesting to see the evolution of wetland conservation in that landscape in particular because it's so sparsely populated with people. And what we will certainly have already talked about, no doubt, is the importance of water and specifically water through that aquifer and that landscape. And so the Playa Lakes Joint Venture is one of the regional partnerships that kind of covers that area. It has been interesting to see the evolution of the way they have approached wetland restoration, wetland conservation in that landscape. They were able to deliver a little bit through traditional partners on the backs of waterfowl in the interest of other wetland birds, but then once they began to talk about the benefits of wetlands as aquifer recharge, it opened up that entirely new kind of conversation with municipalities, with corporations, and although the work that they do now is the same as the work they used to do, It is, their audience is, in terms of who they're trying to get support from, is very different, and some of their messaging is different as well. They don't gain traction in some of those landscapes, at least for additional resources for wetland conservation, by talking about ducks, kind of what you led with, Adam. So, as a duck scientist, I'm always going to think about ducks and geese and other wetland birds, but what that allows me to do is also see how the things that waterfowl habitat provides enables us to have these other conversations and accelerate our work in these important geographies such as Southern High Plains.
Jerad Henson: Right, and that's like the coolest story about this is the fact that it was a hard area to find funding for. through that traditional waterfowl message, just because most of the people that live there, I mean, it's really important for Central Flyway folks at stopover sites, for ducks all up and down that flyway. But those local residents, most of them don't hunt. Most of them didn't care about waterfowl. They cared more about farming. And some of that traditional idea of farm through a wetland and things like that kind of carried through. But now that we've been able to quantify the benefits that those plias now have, that slowed that. Now people in the community start to think about those things very differently and say, oh, that's not just a mud hole. That's helpful. That puts water in my, you know, in my fields for ag irrigation. It puts water, drinking water in the system, et cetera. And so those are really important things.
Pete Stoddard: I think I mentioned that part of that part of the country for us is is it's a vital operational area if you start. um in dodge city, which is where we have a A beef processing plant and you drive west you're going to go to fort morgan colorado. So this area Sits almost exactly between two of our our largest beef processing phillips facilities. So um it that is a non-scientific reason to sort of but but these really This area is in our operating backyard, and that's important because a lot of our employees, our carers councils, our stakeholders in our communities, they are often the ones that are either enjoying this from a recreational standpoint or care about it from a sustainability standpoint. The location has tons of reasons from a scientific standpoint, but from Cargill, this area is very much an extension of our operating communities.
Jerad Henson: Yeah, and we have a map, actually. For those of you who are listening to the audio only, if you watch us on YouTube, you can see some visual effects here. And we do have a map. We'll try and throw up.
Mike Brasher: I think I mentioned a moment ago, I think I referred to it as the southern high plains. That was only capturing the southern portion of that. I think it's like the southern and central Great Plains would be a better descriptor of this larger area that we're talking about. You can go ahead and put that back up there, Chris. You can explain what we're looking at there. Yeah.
Jerad Henson: Yeah, so we're just talking about the Playa Lakes location and the overlap of the southern parts, central to southern part of the Ogallala Aquifer. This runs from western Nebraska all the way down into the Texas Panhandle.
Mike Brasher: That gray area that you see on your map there, that is the outline of the Oglala Aquifer. The red area, red outline there is the boundary of the Playa Lakes Joint Venture and all the other little blue dots that you see in there, if I'm not mistaken, yeah, it says courtesy of the PLJV. Those are areas, those are known playa wetlands. in that Playa Lakes Joint Venture landscape. There are playas, I think, that are outside of that, but you don't see those mapped outside that red boundary there, because I think the origin of those blue dots there was from the Playa Lakes Joint Venture, if I'm looking at it correctly. I don't see any blue dots in Nebraska outside the POJV boundary, and I think that's just an artifact of who produced this.
Adam DeHaan: The Rainwater Basin Joint Venture wouldn't take care of that in Nebraska. That's right.
Jerad Henson: And that's another important landscape to talk about is the Platte River, the Rainwater Basin in here that's not included in this conversation that we're kind of getting into, but those are also very important landscapes as well.
Pete Stoddard: And Cargill has done some support in the Platte, as Adam can speak to as well, prior to this partnership. So yeah, this is a focus now, but the Platte was very much in the in focus in our previous grant cycle.
Jerad Henson: Awesome. Okay, yeah. Adam, do you have anything you want to add or talk about there? Do you recall that off the top of your head?
Adam DeHaan: Oh, for sure, because I was the regional director in Nebraska when Jason Christians was at the Cargill facility in Blair, Nebraska and began supporting began supporting the Rainwater Basins work and the Platte River work, gosh, in the early 2000s, in the mid-2000s. So it's been, the tone and tenor was set locally and from Blair to Fort Morgan in this landscape and in Wichita, for that matter, they've been a longtime supporter as well. So it's just fun to watch it grow from three little locations to to a comprehensive North American partnership.
Jerad Henson: Yeah. And this landscape is very important for waterfowl. Mike, can you hit on some of that, those benefits?
Mike Brasher: Yeah, sure. I'll talk about that a little bit. You know, it's the Playa Lakes Joint Venture region. This central southern Great Plains region is pretty remarkable. I won't go into a great deal of detail, but the sort of the dominant wetland feature of that landscape is something known as a Playa wetland. These very shallow, isolated, well, sort of geographically isolated. They're not hydrologically isolated from the aquifer or anything, but they're shallow wetland basins, depressional wetlands that are the, I think the sort of scientific community generally agrees that they are the combined, they originated through the combination of wind and rain and some subsurface carbonate dissolution. Anyway, the The origin of these things has been debated for a number of years, which is interesting in itself, but that's the dominant. Just think of a shallow seasonal wetland. A lot of them are much shallower than prairie pothole wetlands that we think about. Prairie pothole wetlands can be four, five, sometimes five feet deep, maybe even deeper in some of them, but playa wetlands are generally less than three feet deep, is my understanding. They derive their water from just these small watersheds within which they occur. There's not a lot of stream flow that goes into these playa wetlands. And there are other larger sort of saline lakes and other wetland complexes throughout that larger landscape, but generally what we're going to be talking about are the playa wetlands. As we mentioned a couple of times, they're a primary source of recharge for the Ogallala aquifer. They have been subject to a variety of filling and draining and other types of activities that have sort of reduced their value to waterfowl and other wetland critters throughout the decades. This landscape, when you look at those that are important for migration, for migrating and wintering waterfowl, there are some ducks that will breed there occasionally, but the one thing that is characteristic about this landscape is how dynamic it is. Whenever you look at Take, for example, Texas, the southern high plains, the very southern portion of this geography falls in Texas, and they conduct their annual winter, midwinter waterfowl surveys during early January, and you can look at those numbers. In some years, depending on how much rainfall has fallen in the preceding months and how many wetlands are available, You can have waterfowl abundance estimates like of 25,000 or 1.2 million. That kind of variation is not uncommon. It's because this landscape in some years can be very wet. In other years, it can be very, very dry. And so that's probably the most unique thing about this landscape is that Average doesn't mean anything to this landscape. It's a tale of two extremes. That's right. But it can support, when conditions are right, it can support over a million ducks and even more geese than that. Not a whole lot of hunters in that area relative to the number of waterfowl. that you might find, although I think in some ways the secret is starting to get out in some locations, especially for Sandhill Cranes.
Jerad Henson: I was gonna say, Sandhill Cranes and Cacklers come to mind when I see that map. Those are some waterfowl that I know people will target in that region.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, so it's really important geography for migrating and wintering waterfowl. The value differs greatly from one year to the next, but it is nevertheless a landscape that we and others invest in for supporting continental waterfowl populations.
Jerad Henson: Speaking of waterfowl, I heard somebody may have talked someone else into going on a long walk through some of these wetlands.
Mike Brasher: That's a story.
Adam DeHaan: Pete, you got to tell them about when I walked you out into the bottoms.
Pete Stoddard: So I'm just in full disclosure here. I've come to this ducky world, late career, a little bit late in life and with great gratitude to Adam for easing me into this. My first sort of real duck hunting trip was with Adam to this area and we decided to go for a hunt at dusk and it was warm. It was as hot as it gets in Kansas in September and maybe 10 degrees warmer than that and pulled off the side of the road and got everything ready and he pointed to this Area that I couldn't see but he he assured me that that's we were able to go out that far and we uh, I followed him through The mud and the grass and uh, and we got set up and uh And I was awestruck, to be honest with you, by the beauty. And I'm born and raised in Minnesota. We don't have much topography like that, but just the colors and the sky. And Adam did help me shoot a few teal that day, which was super exciting. But I went there wanting to sort of experience this great area to see and also to hunt and but it was being there I was half thinking about hunting and half thinking about you know. what this area was like and having never seen it before and just seeing the vastness of it was just truly awesome. I made it back, I made it out and I made it back safely and I'd love to go back again. We went the next couple days, we did a little bit more hunting, we did a lot more touring, went to one of our facilities and And I just, it's quite frankly something I'll never forget. Just the, I drew a lot of inspiration from seeing the progress that DU is making there. Also just seeing some of the challenges of some of this inconsistency that you were speaking about in terms of a little bit dry in some areas, really wet in other areas. And as we all know, there's no better way to see this and to work in this space without going out and and you know and getting your feet wet literally and figuratively and so that's what we that's what we did and um yeah it's a it's a from a work standpoint and for working on this project it was such an excellent introduction to to this space and then um and i just gained a you know a ton of appreciation for for those experienced duck hunters out there for what they'll go through for a little bird with a blue or green mark on their wing. But I don't know, I think I sent a picture to Adam this morning of one of those and my smile was pretty big and I don't know if it was just because I was totally out of breath. Or I was sweating so much from walking through there, but I'd go back in a heartbeat again. I just really, really fell in love with the area.
Mike Brasher: Now, did I understand from that that you've been able to get out and do some teal hunting already this year? that last year.
Pete Stoddard: We're working on that. We're working on that. And we went we went one other time, not as with as much success as we had that those few days and in Kansas. But we have some other secret trips planned this year and here and here in Minnesota locations, of course, we won't disclose, but not So I'm learning, right. I'm not, I'm not a ducky, but I'm starting to learn the game a little bit.
Adam DeHaan: Right. Your fishing background is, is paying, is paying dividends here in your new.
Pete Stoddard: Yeah, I mean the other cool part about this, and you know, we did a tour with a big group from Cargill in Iowa this spring, took about 20 people left from our headquarters, spent the day going down to Iowa, and we drove down a stretch of I-35 left from Minneapolis, and I've probably driven that, you know, 250 times in my lifetime, and I'd never really looked off the interstate much to appreciate what was there. And there were about five or six projects from basically the southern suburbs of the Twin Cities all the way down into central Iowa that some Cargill had been part of, many that Ducks Unlimited had been part of or was part of right now. And just like Kansas, my eyes were open to just see things and notice things that without you know, a good partner and a good organization doing it. It was just, you know, just another appreciation for it. We haven't stopped to hunt any of those, but sure do enjoy just the beauty and the progress and the sustainability that's happening.
Mike Brasher: That's an awesome story and I'd love to hear how you've come to appreciate what it is that we know and have grown up doing. I can't imagine, I've said this before in various places, I can't imagine my life without having a very visceral connection with the outdoors and wetlands in particular. And Pete, it's so cool to hear you experiencing that and telling those stories. even though you didn't grow up with it. And there's a really important message there. You don't have to be a 9 or 10 or 17-year-old kid, boy or girl, in order to, at that time, to get into it. Get into it in adulthood. And it is some phenomenal experiences. And we love sharing and love hearing.
Jerad Henson: Yes. And that scenario you painted right there is one that resonates with me Every time. Watching the world wake up from a wetland.
Mike Brasher: And you never know what you're gonna see. So many stories that we have of things we've seen and we've experienced is that you will not get if you're still in bed at 6.30 in the morning. Right. Or staying in town. That's right. Can I go back and kind of edit myself? You can. We knew we were gonna have to do some of this editing on the fly whenever we went to video, because we don't have as much editing capability. I just want to clarify, whenever I was talking about the the duck abundances there in that region saying in some years it can support upwards of a million or more. That was just that southern high plains portion of Texas. So when you look across this broader geography, we're talking multiple millions of birds, and so just wanted to kind of clarify that. I've edited myself twice now. That's okay.
Jerad Henson: Well, I think that's really important to note in that landscape is really important for ducks when it has water. Yeah. And a lot of times it has water when some of the other areas don't, like El Nino versus La Nina cycles, things like that. And I think that's important to note, and that's why it's important to protect those wetlands. Because there's times when those are needed, especially for pintail populations and things like that, that depend heavily on those. So I think that was it. Is there any conservation activities specifically that we use, Adam or Mike, that y'all might want to talk about to target playas?
Mike Brasher: Yeah, we do have some of those, but I wanted to hear from either Pete or Adam things that y'all wanted to talk about with regard to the type of, the way we're We're partnering with Cargill on some of the Playa conservation work, so I want to first defer to y'all and the things that y'all are particularly excited about. Who's got some input there?
Pete Stoddard: Well, if I could preempt that a little bit, because I don't want to miss the opportunity to thank, part of the joy of these two field trips that we took was meeting your teams in the field. So in Iowa, it was Mike Shannon, who toured us for the day, just an incredible, passionate guy, just did an awesome job with our group that day. And then Matt Ho and Abe Lawler in Kansas. And you know phenomenal people and when you're a corporate partner and you go into the field you know you I like to see the teams doing the work and the teams and and and because you feel closer to the work and without question these three and I know there are a lot of names behind them that are supporting them but they were such drivers of the significance of this work and they spoke in terms that our groups could understand and explain it in a way that we were, we got excited about. And so thank you, Mike. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Abe. Thanked adam enough, but but those uh, and they're the ones that are out there doing it and uh, and there's so many I know that is just three of of hundreds that are doing this work around the country, but what a what a gift it is to have them as part of our team and uh So I just I didn't want to miss the opportunity to call out those three that I that i've met we did have um Dr. Waldrop came here to Cargill last year, spoke to a group, met with some of our leaders. That was terrific. Scott Stevens, as I think we're supposed to call him, Dr. Scott Stevens. Let's not get carried away. Got to meet him last year on a work slash fun trip, incredible guy. And just as he was moving from Canada to South Dakota. So, you know, this is, this is the, to me is a story behind the story of these partnerships is that it doesn't work without names like that behind it. And we push hard. I mean we have this is we put a this is a big investment for us and we have high expectations. But when we see that and we connect with those sorts of teams and we see their their sincerity their determination it really validates. I do this work and we're doing it but with D.U.
Mike Brasher: Adam do you have anything to add there.
Adam DeHaan: One thing that Cargill always wants front and center when we're reporting and when we're visiting is how many farmers are we interacting with? Are we impacting? Are we educating? Are we giving opportunities to? And did this program in the Ogallala really really dives right into that Abe Lawler is knocking on driving down every gravel road in Kansas and knocking on every door and looking for looking for playas that could use our help and use our conservation measures and that can bring bring value to that landowner and in his farming operation and it's just such a such a perfect opportunity for cargill to uh inter interact through ducks unlimited directly with farmers and landowners that it's uh If we can replicate keep replicating that across the country, we're gonna we're going to be winning and our Economy is going to be winning to be quite honest
Mike Brasher: Yeah, that's a great point. That is a landscape that is predominantly privately owned, like many others that we work in, that are so important for waterfowl. We've mentioned this before, a lot of the areas that are so important for waterfowl are also the ones that are so important for agriculture or other types of other types of land uses that are mostly privately in private ownership.
Jerad Henson: We've got to find ways to work together, win-win solutions in those habitats. That's what I think we've done here, and it's been fantastic to be a part of that and showcase that.
Mike Brasher: Jared, what I can do, just to kind of help people with a mental image of what some of our conservation activities even look like in this landscape, I have just a few things. I reached out to Ellie Nugent, who is one of our biologists in that landscape, and she kind of gave me a few bullets to talk about. And so when you think about playa wetlands, these shallow basins, many of them through the years have been farmed. Historically, they would have been seasonally wet or dry, whatever the case would have been. They're dominated by annual grasses and sedges and other kind of herbaceous plants. But when those are farmed, there is a tendency for the sediment to slowly run off. And in some cases, it runs off, of course, into that basin. And over time, it can reduce the water holding capacity of those basins. And from a wildlife standpoint, waterfowl standpoint, you eventually lose water holding capability. If you don't have water, we know it's not going to be of great value for waterfowl. The other thing that can happen is that it reduces that aquifer recharge benefit.
Jerad Henson: Porosity of the soil, yeah, it kind of plugs it up.
Mike Brasher: So one of the actions that we and others implement is actually removing, if we're doing some playa restoration, we will remove that accumulated sediment to reestablish some of that topography, allow it to hold water and allow it to provide opportunities for it to infiltrate into the aquifer. The other thing that we do in some cases is filling ditches that have been created to drain playa wetlands in some situations, so that playa restoration can consist of just filling a drainage ditch. Another thing that's kind of interesting there in that landscape is something that referred to as I don't know. Essentially, they dig pits in the center portion of playas. They did this a number of years ago as a pretty common practice to provide a deeper water storage area in a smaller portion of that playa basin. You're therefore slowing the evaporative potential of that particular area, and they did that because they wanted to use that water for irrigation purposes. Now, things have changed. That practice of digging pits is not as common anymore because there are more efficient irrigation practices now against heavily agricultural, ag-dominated landscape, important for producing food, fiber, fuel, all those things are really important. And so now one of the restoration activities is we'll go in and we'll refill those pits, no longer needed for irrigation. And so then when you fill that pit, it allows that water, same volume of water in theory to kind of spread out over a larger portion of that basin. There are a few other things, establishing buffer strips, restoring grasslands in some cases around the playas, and then there are a number of other things. And so Pete and Adam, I don't know how many of those activities are actually sort of fall under the portfolio of our partnership with y'all, but I know some of them do. But I just wanted to provide a little color to what physically we do to restore playas and make them more productive for waterfowl, wildlife, other wetland wildlife, as well as the aquifer recharge and other benefits that come along with it.
Jerad Henson: I was about to say, those things you just talked about, and one of the important things is we've been talking about water benefits, but Adam mentioned at the very beginning, biodiversity. Ducks, waterfowl, that's biodiversity. But with those buffer strips, with those plias, you get native vegetation, you get pollinators, you get other things that can also help the ag community, that can help the wildlife in that area. So, lots of benefits. We're going to miss a few that we're not going to mention, but… That's right.
Mike Brasher: We'll ask for forgiveness from our regional staff because we know that they're the ones that are best equipped to talk about that.
Jerad Henson: Yeah. Is there anything y'all would like to add to any of that? Or Adam, is there anything that you're aware of that's… that Mike left out?
Adam DeHaan: Oh, I mean, he hit, he went right down Ellie's bullet points and, you know, some, you know, when Ellie's working in Nebraska, they're filling those borrow pits and they're restoring rainwater basins in that manner. When Abe is working, he's more focused on removing some sediment and restoring the hydrology so that Playa can interact with the aquifer, and both of them are restoring the upland buffers and creating some upland habitat around them to also help with aquifer recharge and biodiversity. And it's all of the above, and Pargill's right there lending their shoulder to the wheel with our great habitat work.
Jerad Henson: Pete mentioned it earlier, he mentioned, you know, talking about how impressive it was to see the DU staff on the ground doing their work. But we can't do the work without the funding. Without great partners like Cargill that are looking to the future and looking to waterfowl and looking to wetland habitat and those types of things.
Mike Brasher: What is one of the famous sayings? I've heard a number of people say it, including our CEO, conservation without funding is just conversation. I mean, it's true. It is absolutely true.
Jerad Henson: So, yeah, that's a big point I wanted to make after listening to Pete say that. So, I guess our next question and kind of one of the last things to talk about is, what's this look like in the future? We hope to to continue this partnership and see where it goes from here.
Pete Stoddard: So did Adam ask you to ask that question?
Jerad Henson: You know, we gotta put that jab in when we can, right?
Adam DeHaan: Now I've got to take him to North Dakota hunting or something.
Mike Brasher: That's right.
Adam DeHaan: They're doing my job for me.
Mike Brasher: You know, conservation is a long game, Pete. We're never finished. The threats are persistent.
Pete Stoddard: I've heard all the lines, trust me. I've heard all the lines. Now, I would say it's going to be, we're hoping for more of the same. And when you also look at the factor of the multiplier factor that DU brings to the table when our $1 can convert into $2, up to $3. Maybe some cases for additional dollars to the local and federal programs that you have access to and and you know we we love being the kickstarter for that and that's a obviously a great value add to working with an organization like like do you so. We agree this is a long game situation. This is not a quick fix and all of a sudden make a grant and come back a month later and everything is all fantastic. You know we've been around for 150 plus years. We know that this is complex. We know it is important. And so I would say we're going to be leaning on them even more. It might be more of the same. It'll likely be some additional things. This particular partnership we're about Uh, I would say a little bit over a third of the way through The the agreement and so we have about 18 months or so Give or take ahead to continue with this work super encouraged by the by the fast start and uh And particularly in this area, like I said earlier, where area work was not super a big magnet for funders in the past. And we feel fortunate that DU helped us find it. And so obviously there's tons of opportunity there. We haven't talked a lot about the work in Canada, but we're doing some things up there as well. We have a partnership that's a few years older than this with some prairie grass work that we're doing through a program that our Protein North America business called Beef Up Sustainability, and that's focused on grazing land and sustaining those. The dynamics of the relationship with ducks just gets to be more and more. It started as a few carers councils and now there's parts of Ducks that I'm not even working on inside of Cargill. So the diversity of the teams that you have access to and vice versa. I mean we have relationships with your great folks in Canada and all these different regions around the U.S. We have high reliance on all of them, and I think we will continue to do that going forward. How was that, Adam? Did that make Adam happy?
Jerad Henson: Well, Adam, do you have anything you'd like to close with or mention before we kind of wrap this up?
Adam DeHaan: I just want to applaud you guys for getting sustainability out onto the airwaves and onto the internet. Man, keep doing these shows and someone out there is listening and maybe one of my colleagues will get a phone call later this week and we'll start up a new partnership.
Mike Brasher: Yeah, absolutely. We're always looking for that.
Jerad Henson: Yes. Yeah. Please let me know. I'm always looking for content. Yeah. Good stories. This one's going to be a hard story to beat in that landscape. It checked all the boxes and really was a fun story to talk about. So as we kind of wrap this up, I will definitely have to thank our special guest, Pete Stoddard from Cargill, North America, Adam DeHaan, DOD. Director of Development from Minnesota and Iowa. My co-host, Mike Brasher.
Mike Brasher: Great to be here, Jared. Thanks for all you're doing to help us bring these messages to this platform.
Jerad Henson: Yeah, thank you. And we always have to mention the man behind the curtain over here, our producer, Chris Isaacs, for all the work he does wrangling us and putting these shows out there for the audience. And we definitely have to thank the audience. Thank y'all for listening in or viewing this time. Yeah. I hope to catch y'all on the next one. Thank you. Yeah.
Mike Brasher: You know what I think we need? I need Chris, Chris Isaac, see if you can hook me up with this. I need a button over here that I can like press and make that sound, you know, whenever I need to edit myself. Because I've done that twice now, right? That right there, that one. You think you can do that? No? Well, I'll continue to work on it. So, all right. Thanks, Jared. That was awesome.
Jerad Henson: Thanks, Mike. All right. Well, thank you, guys. Hopefully, All right. Went, went well. That was a great conversation. Yeah. Pete, thanks again for doing this.
Pete Stoddard: You're welcome. Glad to be here.
Adam DeHaan: You'll get, once it goes through editing, you'll get it out to Pete's Marcom's team.
Jerad Henson: Yes. We'll send it. I'll send it to you, Pete. Is that okay? And you can forward it over.
Pete Stoddard: Yeah, I'm not anticipating anything.