00:00:04 Speaker 1: Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both. Big shout out to aax Hunt for their support of this podcast. I'm your host, Lake Pickle, and Hey, Happy New Year twenty twenty six. Already, man, who could have seen this coming. With the new year comes all kinds of exciting possibilities and opportunities. It's also around the start of a new year that you always hear folks making their so called New Year's resolutions. Well, today I'm going to challenge all of us, myself included, to a wildlife conservation mind in new Year's resolution. In this episode, we're going to be focusing in on the conserving wild places mantra of this podcast as we dive into learning about how you, yes, you and me can make a real intangible difference on the ground that we hunt, fish, or recreate on by learning about things like conservation programs, the farm bill, easy ways to get involved with both, and learning from folks that have walked to this path themselves. Let's dive in. It's a picture perfect winter day in central Mississippi, bright clear, sunny skies, crisp air. It's the kind of day that when you step outside and the wind hits you, you immediately start thinking about how you can get into the woods in some form or fashion. And I'm with my longtime friend Josh Thrash. We're riding through his property and he's showing me the various amounts of wildlife habitat work that he's done on his place. I'm asking about his prescribed burning and how the Bob White quill have responded to it. It was around this time that we pulled up on something that I don't believe I've seen in my lifetime. 00:01:54 Speaker 2: Yeah, those are long leaves, and we were assisted through the EQUIP Program EQIP in planting and sight prepping and planting those, and I just kind of had an inkling that I don't know, I just always liked the story of the long leaf because all this used to be long leaf before the number companies came in and cut it for timber and turpentine. And there's still some long leaves around these perimeters, but it's been I guess a couple of generation of lib lollies in here since, and I've just always kind of thought it was neat to see the long leafs on the property lines and stuff. So I got to thinking about it, and I knew you could burn long leaves at a young age, and I thought, well, that'd be cool to have for wildlife. 00:02:44 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:02:45 Speaker 2: I got to looking into it, and this is the far northern end of the long leaf territory. 00:02:51 Speaker 1: You don't that's I'm saying. If you hear about long leafs in Mississippi these days, it's typically South Mississippi. You don't hear about them this far north. And we're not north, we're central, but it's north for long leafs. 00:03:03 Speaker 2: But we decided to pull the trigger. And you know, I won't probably won't ever see any monetary benefit from these long leaves in my lifetime. But I also thought it would be something unique for the next generation to have here that a lot of people wouldn't have. It's five hundred acres of yeah, plantation long leaf that had been well taken care of. So what you see out there right now is I would say ninety nine percent ninety eight percent long leaf. 00:03:35 Speaker 1: Yeah. Man, that's uh, that's time machine type stuff out there. It really is. The long leaf pine was once a keystone tree in the southeastern US a tree that at one time covered over ninety million acres, stretching all the way from Virginia to Texas. They're exceptionally adapted to fire, and they're part of critical habitat for all kinds of native animal and plant species like gopher, tortoises, red cockaded woodpeckers, bob white quail, and all kinds of grasses and wildflowers. When you see a long leaf pine, it's almost like seeing a relic, a lingering remnant of a time period when open prairie and savannah was much more prolific in this region of the country. They were heavily logged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were heavily reduced to roughly five percent of their original range. That's why when we came upon Josh's five hundred acres of planted long leafs, it was pretty much a showstopper for me. What was even better was hearing him talk about how positively he had seen all the wildlife respond to it, the deer, the quail, the turkeys, the incredible hunts he had been able to enjoy with his kids out there. What an awesome thing. One more thing to point out before we dive back in. You heard Josh say that he was able to get these long leafs planted through the EQUIP program e q IP. Remember that we're going to dive into that later on. 00:04:59 Speaker 2: So I've killed turkey's in this, I believe it. I killed a turkey right out there. Big turkey out there, not this past spring, but spring. 00:05:09 Speaker 1: Of twenty four, hanging out in this stuff. 00:05:12 Speaker 3: Yeah, he was. 00:05:13 Speaker 2: I got a long lane that goes down through there, and he was in that lane with a hen. But after I burned this stuff in February, it's like a big green field here and they'll get out here. 00:05:22 Speaker 3: It's you, nayk. 00:05:23 Speaker 2: I've it's ended up probably being more than I ever thought it would be, far as your the ability to use them, to manage and hunt in them, and all that. It's really been. It's really been fun. 00:05:38 Speaker 1: As I spent the rest of the time going through Josh's property, it was really quite a sight to see the amount of effort and care he and his family have in that place is very evident. And the proof, well, it's right there in front of you from the sites, the stories of the good hunts, quail flushing off the side of the road. It's good land stewardship in motion, the kind of thing I want all of us to think about as we move through this episode. We're going to put a pause on the tour of Josh's property and his conservation work, but I promise we'll come back to it. For now, I want us to start getting a better understanding of some of these conservation programs that are out there, what they are and what they do. We're going to start big and work our way down to do these topics justice. I needed to call in subject to experts, and I think we found the perfect folks. 00:06:21 Speaker 4: My name's Aaron Field. I'm the director of Private Lands Conservation for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. Live up here in western Minnesota, but we're Washington, DC based national nonprofit, and I cover the ag conservation portion of that portfolio, so everything from farm built conservation programs especially, and then looking for ways to get some private lands conservation work done in ways that benefit the adjacent public lands as well. 00:06:52 Speaker 1: The first thing I want Aaron to walk us through is the farm Bill. I would wager that most of you listening to this show have at least heard of the farm Bil but how many of us out there are actually tuned in to what impacts it can have on wildlife and wild habitats, hunting quality even I'll put myself on the chopping block here. When I was younger, I didn't know the Farm Bill had impacts much outside of commercial and row crop farming, so I didn't really pay that much attention to it. However, we're about to learn that in many ways it can shape the future for hunters and outdoors men and women. 00:07:23 Speaker 4: The Farm Bill is a huge package of the legislation that we've been passing in this country for oh ninety years or so, we could call it. And originally it was purely a farming ranch egg policy in that package, and in about nineteen eighty five Farm Bills when we really added a big chunk of conservation to the bill. And so the chunk of the farm Bill that I pay most of my attention to is called Title II. It's the conservation title, and the reason that hunters and anglers should be paying attention to it are multiple. One of the things I think people might not realize, or maybe they do but haven't thought about as much as they could have, is on private land in this country. If we see good conservation work done on private land in the United States, the reason that got done is because the private landowner decided to do it. It's almost never because a regulation forced them to. It's almost never because somebody else had influence over It's because the private landowner decided to do it. Farmer or the rancher, the forest landowner made that choice, and oftentimes that choice is pretty expensive. Takes time and money to get that work done, whether it's you establishing native vegetation, whether it's controlling invasive species, whether it's managing a forest so that is more productive in terms of both timber and wildlife. And actions like that, especially over a nationwide scale, make a big impact on things that the rest of us benefit from, So things like improving water quality, things like clean air air, things like biodiversity maintenance or improvement, and then things like producing healthy wildlife populations, which you know as a hunter and I'm sure most of the listeners here hunters and anglers really care about. 00:09:16 Speaker 3: And so the. 00:09:17 Speaker 4: System we've created in this country largely supported through the Farm Bill, but also through various state and local programs as well to encourage more landowners to do work like that is a set of voluntary and incentive based programs administered by the United States Department of Agriculture that help offset some of the cost of doing good conservation work on those lands and hopefully encourage more people to get involved. 00:09:45 Speaker 1: So there's a whole lot to go through here, but this is the main dot that I want to connect right now. Remember Josh's long Leaf pine plantation that we rode through and he said he was able to get this planet through the EQUIP program. EQUIP stands for Environmental qual Incentives Program, and in short, it's a USDA program that provides financial incentives and assistance in helping landowners implement conservation practices. Josh's long Leaf Pine plantation is a perfect example of this, and EQUIP is not the only program like this. There's also CRP, which I'm sure many of you have heard of. It stands for Conservation Reserve Program and CSP which stands for Conservation Stewardship Program. All of these directly effect conservation being put back into the ground, and all of these fall under the Farm Bill, which is why it's in our best interest as hunters and anglers and conservationists to pay attention to. 00:10:38 Speaker 4: It where I live. If somebody drives past grass that doesn't have cows on it, it's they're going to call it CRP, whether it's actually enrolled in a program or not, and that's just its testament to the influence that that program has. So the farm bill is the vehicle that one reauthorizes all the programs you listed so that they continue to be funded and continue to function. Typically we do that every five years. That we're ways off of that right now, we're in a little different process currently, but the Farm Build reauthorizes those programs so they can continue to function, and it also provides the opportunity to make policy changes within the programs. And so in the normal process, what we would do is you'd pass a farm Build and then over the next five years, we'd be working with the agencies that are administering those programs. We'd be talking to landowners, we'd be talking to ag and commodity groups about the programs as well as other groups in the hunt Fish wildlife conservation space, and we'd be looking for ways that these programs aren't working quite as well as they should be. And then we can take that to Congress and say CRP the Conservation Reserve Program. Awesome program. Here is five tweaks that you could make to CRP that would make it work even better or equips been great the Environmental Quality and Centives program, but we'd really like to see some additional wildlife habitat happen through that program. Here's some suggestions for how those programs could be improved. And that's what would happen when we pass a farm bill. We've been working since about twenty twenty two here at TRCP to try to provide those recommendations, but those changes don't happen unless a farm bill passes. 00:12:17 Speaker 1: In short, the farm bill allows these programs to exist, to stay funded, and to be tweaked and changed around here and there if needed. And if you're listening to this show and you're not fully bought in on how this could affect hunting quality or even you directly, I can assure you it does. But allow me to share one example. Remember just a few episodes back, when we were talking, Mallard Duck declines, I want to let er explain from his perspective how the farm bill and conservation incentive programs affect that directly. 00:12:46 Speaker 4: So CRP specifically again Conservation Reserve Program. What that program does is it provides an opportunity if a farmer has a crop field that is eroding, that is vulnerable, that is not very productive, typically that would essentially provide a great a lot more good ecological goods and services, things like clean water, clean air, habitat if it were planted to perennial vegetation. This is a program that it provides funding to do that, and it does that over a ten or a fifteen year contract, which is another big thing, because once we get that grass established or those trees established, we don't want it to come out again in three years. We want it to stick around for a little while. But in the Prairie Pothole region, both the Conservation Reserve Program as it as it sit, those enrollments in that part of the country would have peaked somewhere in that twenty ten to twenty fifteen range. And actually that's when I was in college out in Jamestown, North Dakota, at the peak of CRP and the peak of pheasant populations in North Dakota, and I didn't even know how good I had it. But yes, the enrollment in that program has gone down a lot in that state. I'm speaking specifically to North Dakota. That's just where I've got the number in my head a little better. But that's a bigger chunk of the Prairie Pohole region as you're aware. Yeah, for a few reasons. One, there's been some tweaks to the program in the twenty eighteen Farm Bill that made it a little bit less attractive in terms of enrollment, but also just broader, we saw corn and soybean prices go way up during that period of time as well, and so if you're making a business decision as a farmer and a renal rate through CRP has gone down and the amount of money I can make on corn and soybeans has gone up, it makes it a little harder to make the business decision to keep that in grass and that definitely makes an impact on things like waterfowl populations, upland populations. And then also for deer, if you look at the number of deer tags that those states in the PPR have been able to issue a hunter's they've gone down precipitously, and I would lay a lot of that at the feet of a loss of CRP. 00:14:48 Speaker 1: Yeah, somewhere around like four point eight million acres lost. And to quantify that, I mean the entire Mississippi Delta, which is like if you live in Mississippi and you duck hunt, I mean there's other pockets here and there where you can do it, but the Mississippi Delta is where you're going to go, you know, like that's the most historically good area to do it. It's right around four million acres. So it's like, imagine that just gone, like no longer habitat. So it's like trying to paint the picture to someone that you know, maybe doesn't in this world how important these conservation programs are, like, how how much it can affect wildlife and wildlife populations. It's crazy to me. 00:15:29 Speaker 4: Yeah, And right now we're right at the enrollment cap for the CRP. We're at about twenty seven million acres enrolled in CRP, and that program does look a little different than it did years ago. We've got more acres in something called grassland CRP than we've had in the past, which has sort of shifted where that enrollment sits in the country a little bit. But we're at the cap. Commodity prices are not what they once were, and we're starting to hear from farmers that, man, we could really use some additional acres in this program, and we could really use some improved incentives in this program. So what we've got to do is get a farm bill pass so that we can make those changes. 00:16:08 Speaker 1: Believe me, I didn't ask Aaron to share that story and information with us just so we could lament on the days of more ducks, upland birds and even deer in the prairie Pothole region. I asked him to share it so we could all begin to understand how important this stuff is. Here's the basic truth. If you want wildlife, you have to have wildlife habitat. So understanding this stuff, like the farm bill, these incentive programs like CRP, CSP and EQUIP, I think it's very important both on public and private land. I might add, we need wildlife conservation happening on both. 00:16:44 Speaker 4: You look at a state like Minnesota. We've got quite a lot of public land, but it's concentrated in the northeast part of the state. It's not where I live. So if we don't have good habitsat on the ground on private land, or access as well on private land, or missing the boat. And then when you look further west, even in a state like Nevada where you're something like ninety five percent public, that five percent that's where the water is, that's where a lot of the feed is. It's incredibly important for wildlife in the West to have those private lands in good shape and providing good habitat as well, even if you've got tons of public land that you can manage. There's a program called the Voluntary Public Access and Habitat and Centives Program. It's the only federal program that incentivizes hunting and fishing access on private land, which is a big deal to folks like me in the Midwest and especially in the East, but also touches down in the West in some really really interesting ways. There's lots of opportunities to make these things work better. 00:17:41 Speaker 1: I've made this example about my home state of Mississippi as to why conservation programs are important both on public and private land. Mississippi is roughly ninety percent private land. If we only did focused conservation work only available public lands, then we would have really really good wildlife habitat ten percent of the state, leaving the vast majority of the rest of the state finn for itself. Personally, I want wildlife habitat anywhere I can get it. There's also voluntary public access and habitat incentive programs. These programs create public access through privately owned properties. This includes some of the walk in hunting access programs. And all of us know we need all of that we can get. 00:18:26 Speaker 4: Yeah, and I mean all of us are doing. Hunters especially, but anglers too. When you're driving across the country wherever you're going, or even in your backyard, you're looking out the window and you're looking at the landscape and thinking about, man, that could be some really good turkey habitat, or that could really do a lot more for deer if it was X, Y and z, or whether you're thinking about it on your own property, the same thing. And this is a pretty powerful tool. These programs are a really powerful tool to do more of that kind of work. I think we get intimidated as just the average hunter and angler. And you know, I don't know all the details of that program. I don't know all the ins and outs, and so I'm not gonna you know, I won't speak up. I'm not going to get engaged in the process. But honestly, a simple phone call that says, Hey, I am a hunter, I'm an angler private lands conservation ad Conservation makes my hunting and fishing better. I care about this stuff. Can you please support it? Can you please make it happen? It doesn't have to be Hey, we need to tweak to page thirty seven US Code thirty three point. You know it doesn't. That's we can do that. I can handle that part. What we need is decision makers hearing from people in their state, in their district about why this stuff is important to them. 00:19:41 Speaker 1: Hey, call your representative and tell them that you care about this stuff. If we learned anything this past summer after the public land sell off attempt, it's that our voices do matter. Okay, we now have a better understanding of the farm bill, the conservation programs. I feel like we got that down. Now it's time to dig in even further and learn how we can get in on this ourselves. And for that, we're going to quickly return to the tour of the Thrash property. So like when you were going through the equip program to do the long leaf, Huh is that a pretty easy process or no? Not a easy process? 00:20:18 Speaker 2: Nope, I don't see how the NRCS and the people that do it keep it all together with all the paperwork. But it is a world of paperwork, you know. It wasn't It wasn't easy to me. If you were just gonna do it by yourself and you didn't have an extremely knowledgeable NRCS person helping you, the average person. 00:20:37 Speaker 1: Couldn't couldn't get it done. 00:20:38 Speaker 2: You probably could somebody, you know, younger with computer skills to research everything. 00:20:44 Speaker 1: You could probably get through it. 00:20:45 Speaker 2: But I mean, I feel like the average person is going to have to have some assistance. Yeah, you know, with some of these people that are out there now that are assisting landowners to get these contracts. 00:20:58 Speaker 3: And that's what we've done. 00:20:59 Speaker 2: And I've done a lot of the work myself because I started doing it before I actually had a contact and had somebody helping me. 00:21:05 Speaker 1: Gotcha, I'm gonna be real honest here. That's not what I wanted to hear at all. 00:21:12 Speaker 3: Really. 00:21:12 Speaker 1: I wanted this part of the conversation to be like, yeah, man, that was the easiest process I've ever been through. A kid could do it. Putting conservation on my property has never been easier. And you could do it too. Now let's tie five and go dear honey. But obviously you heard it. It didn't go that way. Josh said. It was incredibly difficult, a very difficult and painful process just to get enrolled in these conservation programs. And from my perspective of wanting to motivate myself and others into getting involved in some of this stuff, well that didn't sit well with me. But fear not, my friends, all hope is not lost. It's not lost at all. I have found a solution. It's time for yall to meet our next subject matter expert. 00:21:53 Speaker 5: These conservation programs are very complex, I mean, more complex than they should be. But I think I got a little bit different viewpoint in that we spent some time working for in r cs and now consult trying to help people enroll in conservation program So I've kind of seen it from both sides, and it's complex on both sides. Even if you work for in rcs, things are constantly changing, ranking process is constantly changing. But from the landowners perspective, and it would just be hard to even know where to start sometimes if you didn't have somebody helping you, and you really are at the mercy of the people that work in those offices and relying on them to make sure you get the best deal available. And I think a lot of people will just find value in having someone represent them. That's kind of our goal that Stewart Link is to take a little bit of that burden and just unknown off of their plate and help them find the right program and just kind of navigate that whole process to make sure we achieve their goals and put them in the best position to be successful and just you know, hopefully find the right program. 00:22:59 Speaker 1: The voice you just heard is a man named Nick Thomas. I met Nick through my good friend and mentor, Will Primo several years ago. Now, Will was going on about how Nick was just a wealth of knowledge about conservation programs, which eventually led to him founding Steward Link, a company that specializes in simplifying the conservation program enrollment process for landowners. 00:23:21 Speaker 5: You may have heard the story, but I go through a short version of it on how this got started. I did not have a grand vision for us to become what. 00:23:30 Speaker 3: We are now. 00:23:31 Speaker 5: You know, like you, I'm very passionate about outdoors, hunting and fishing, and I left n rcs gonna sell crop insurance, and obviously had a background of these conservation programs. I knew things were kind of underutilized. I did not appreciate how much people wanted help to get enrolled in these programs or just get the right applications in the right paperwork, or understand more about what was available. So as I was talking to people, I tell them, like, you need to be signed up for the EQUIP program or the CSP program, or you could you know, apply for this or that, whatever program it may be. And you know their initial response was, and would you help me do that? I'll pay you if you'll do that for me. And you know, light bulb went off in my head. You know this can be a side gig. I'll pay for a hunt trip. You know, my plan was to go kill a Marriam's turkey somewhere with this side business. And here we are, you know, now, almost exactly eleven years later, and you know, we got applications out there in thirty five states. You got twenty six full time employees and growing like a weeds, certainly a demand for the service. The analogy I use all the time is I compare it kind of to the irs. I mean, if you think about it, like and you may do this, but you can do your own taxes. You know, you can go online, you can file your own taxes, but most people hire a CPA, a professional that understands RS regulations policy to make sure it just don't correctly and that you're given the best deal possible. It's kind of the same thing for conservation programs again to what we were originally talking about. They're so complex. Everything has a code or an acronym, and if you don't live in that world, you don't even know what that means. So you have to kind of have all that background to really even know which programs it is that you're trying to get enrolled in to achieve your goals for your property. And that's what Stewart Link does is our kind of tagline or thing we put on our business cards. We want to make conservation work for you. That's what we want to help people do, and that starts by understanding what are the goals for your property, what are you trying to achieve, and that it's our job to go find the right program to make sure that they get signed up on time. All the eligibility paperwork and submit the highest ranking application possible. We don't want to get them into something that they don't want to do, obviously, but a lot of times they don't know everything that's available. An example may be maybe somebody's interested in planting cover crops on their farm. Well that's just one practice. You know, you could also do nutrient management, pest management, maybe there's some potential induce reduced tillage, or you know, plant some native grass or flood for waterfowl, whole whole winter water for waterfowl. Just so so many different things that are available. The more conservation you apply for a usually the higher you rank. So we try to tell them everything that's available, make suggestions, and you know, improve their odds of getting a contract as well. 00:26:37 Speaker 1: Do you have any sort of idea how many acres you've been able to put into conservation effort over the time that y'all have been doing this. 00:26:47 Speaker 5: I do. I could take a stab at it. You know, it's been in the millions. 00:26:52 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been a lot, and that I don't know. 00:26:56 Speaker 1: That just strikes a little bit harder with me now because it would in two episodes prior talking to that waterfall biologist, he was talking about how we've lost so many acres and CRP over the years, and how the farm bill is kind of hanging in the balance right now and not knowing it's just so important that. 00:27:14 Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's unfortunate, I think, and you know it's my opinion. Here we're still in the twenty eighteen farm Bill. So here we are, you know, about to roll over into twenty twenty six, and we're still operating under the twenty eighteen Farm Bill. And you know, quite frankly, what we've seen some conservation dollars take a down turn, and I hate that. I don't understand exactly why that is. I'm obviously very passionate about land and hunting and fishing as well as I know you are, Lake and a lot of people listening to this podcast are. But we got to do a better job, I think of educating people and making sure people understand the importance of conservation and just good stewardship in general. You know, Natural Resources Conservation Service is the federal agency that administers conservation programs through the Farm Bill. So what are our five natural resources? You know, soul water, air, plants, and animals, And you know, we're trying to conserve those, you know, leave those better than we found them, hopefully, And if you think about who benefits from that, well, it's not just me and you, everybody. I mean, no matter where you live in New York, in a high rise apartment somewhere or wherever, if you don't hunt and fish, if you've never bought a hunting license or anything, you depend on those five natural resources to survive. Every single person does, and we've got to protect that, and we need to do a better job I think of telling the story of that. Just the fact that the funding is trending down to incentivize people to put good conservation on the ground tells me we're not doing enough to educate the public on how important that is. I know our federal government has got a lot of things that you know, they have to consider when they figure out where tax dollars are going to be utilized, but I've got to believe protecting our natural resources needs to be a little bit higher up the list. The farming economy is not good right now. I think you could talk to farmers anywhere in the country and it wouldn't take you long to figure out that they're struggling you know, commodity markets are not good right here in the Mississippi Delta. I mean it has been tough for two or three years now, and you know it doesn't look better for twenty six and you know what a time to maybe get more conservation on the ground if there was funding. Conservation is not free. We all know that. I mean, we've got to have some way to incentivize people to put forth the effort and the time and the energy and the resources to get conservation on the ground. I mean it may take moving dirt. I mean, native grass seeds are expensive, and all these different things. To put that habitat back out there costs money. But there again, every one of us depend on that. And it doesn't matter who you are or where you live. You need those five natural resources to survive, every. 00:30:12 Speaker 3: One of us. 00:30:13 Speaker 5: And I'm going to try to call it quote here, Lake, and I hope you don't mess it up. So all the Leipold quote, it's very famous, my favorite one. It says, conservation will essentially boil down to incentivizing the private landowner to protect the public's interest. And that's really what it is. Yeah, that's conservation right there, and that's you know, once everybody understands that, you know, hopefully we will realize the importance and get some funding going back in a more positive direction than what we've seen here recently. And that's one thing I'm so proud of for Steward Link and one thing that I don't know what all good Steward Link's doing, but one thing I know we have been able to do is prove their demand for conservation. Landowners are passionate about their land. They love their land, and we've all got different goals and maybe trying to produce more corn per acre, or have more ducks on the farm, or more deer or quail or whatever it may be, but they're passionate about conservation and they want to do stuff to improve their land. I mentioned earlier that we've got applicants now in thirty five states and continue to grow, and I've been in personally in most of those states and met with farmers, and I very seldom ever meet with a landowner that he doesn't sign up. I mean, he's either enrolled in a program, and a lot of times even if he's enrolled, he still wants help. Because we may be able to find a state program or private program or something else, and he just loves our mission and what we're trying to do. And we've had a very high success rate in signing people up to help them find conservation programs and just pursue good stewardship. So that's exciting. We know the demands there, we just need to find the funding for these people. 00:32:00 Speaker 1: I heard Ryan Callahan say this once and I've never forgotten it. Conservation is not convenient. It's not. But conservation is essential. That's a fact. And that's why I find it so encouraging to hear folks like Nick talk about it so knowledgeably and passionately, and also knowing that there's such a demand for this stuff from landowners, which is a perfect segue for this new topic. What could you be doing for conservation? Do you own property? Does your family? Do you have it enrolled in any conservation programs? Maybe it's time you looked into it. My wife and I recently bought sixty acres closed to home, and I know I'll be looking into those programs real soon. Do y'all work a lot with smaller landowners or is it pretty good spread? Or do y'all work with mostly big acreage guys? Or how does that work out? 00:32:51 Speaker 5: You know, we get that question a lot, especially as we move into a different state when we may have a referral partner or somebody we're working with and they'll ask us the eye deal size of a landowner, and always that the smallest contract we've had so far was one tenth of an acre, and that's ranged all the way to our biggest guys over forty thousand acres that he farmed, so everything in between. But if I just had to guess at the average size on the road crop farming Agg's side, probably you know, twenty five hundred three thousand acres if I had to guess, and timberland would be something smaller than that. But you know, we try not to turn anybody away. We want to, you know, bring value to anybody. We've added some new services. We're doing a lot of timberland work. We've got a guy we're working on right now. We've got two guys out on his farm doing some hacking squirt treatment and he's paying for it out of his pocket. You know, he's not and didn't have any contract. We got an application in he was disapproved or was not approved this past year, and I mean, he you know, had the resources and he's that passionate about improving his land. He said, look, i'll pay you guys, he's come to do it myself. I won't happen to that out there. So it's so fun to work with guys like that and just have a service to be able to help them get things done that otherwise they wouldn't be able to do. 00:34:08 Speaker 1: So part of the reason I asked that is selfishly because I just bought sixty acres and I'm like, well, I wonder how. 00:34:14 Speaker 5: I could deal with this. Look, we'd love to help you. We'll get the Stewardlink app downloaded. We'll get you going, man, get you a forestry management plan. That's one thing that is really important on the forestry side. It really needs to all start with a good forestry management plan. I mean, you've got to establish what's out there? Okay, what's the current you know, density, what species have we got out there? Is some different ages, what are the different stands? You know, what are our goals? How we're going to treat it, to improve it, to make it better? And that just helps us make good decisions. So, and we've got technical service providers and like I said, foresters that are certified to do those things for n r CS and help get a good plan in there that that hopefully makes n rcs's job better. I mean, that's one thing that that we talk to our team about every day is trying to find ways to work better within RCS. Now, sometimes I can't tell if we're making progress or going backwards in that, but our effort from Stuart Link is to get better at it and we want to do that. We're going to continue to do that. The goal from everybody associated should be to get conservation on the ground, and however we can make that more streamlined an easier process for the applicant, the private landowner, the farmer, the individual, if you will, who's going to be putting that conservation on the ground. We should be trying to figure out how to make their experience as easy as possible and as pleasant as possible. Customer service, if you will. But la you're sixty acres, you can go to the NRCS office FSA office and sign up on your own. Anybody can. That office is their public ass access. I mean, it's a public service, so anybody can go in. But yet here we are applications in thirty five states, and I would venture to say that over ninety percent of the people we talk to sign up. So that pretty clearly says that there's a demand for somebody to use a technical service provider or a consultant if you will, to help them navigate that process. So we need to, you know, in my opinion, just get over that a little bit and let's figure out how to help people and work together on this and do it for the right reasons, and let's conserve our natural resources. 00:36:39 Speaker 3: That's what we need to be focused on. 00:36:41 Speaker 1: You know it. You know, it reminds me of and this will be I think this will draw some parallels because the folks that listen, I know they'll be able to relate with this one. There are services on extive works of them like hunting fuls. One of them like hunting tag services. Anybody like I can go and apply for a help tag in Arizona or by a preference point in Iowa. Do you know how many years it's almost embarrassing, you know how many years I would realize that, oh I missed the deadline and I didn't get to get my preference point. 00:37:14 Speaker 5: That is a perfect comparison. Yeah, Like, I love to hunt as much as anybody I know. I'm passionate about it and done it my whole life and just can't imagine it any other way. I was at the Congressional Sportsman's Foundation summit last week, and I was visiting with a friend, and one of the things the speaker said was that about four percent of the population hunts. And maybe that's true. I don't know what the percentage is, But if that's true, how fortunate am I that I'm in that four percent? Because I cannot imagine life any other way. Pretty Much everything I do in my free time or my enjoyment is you know, killing animal is such a small part of it now for me. But I mean I'll be out here in July, I working on a duck field or a duck hole, or a duck blind, or hacking squirting trees. I mean, I'll have my ten year old son out here, my daughter, my wife, I mean the whole family. We're out here hacking in square. I mean we had blue dye over everybody. You should see some of the pictures. 00:38:13 Speaker 1: Oh, I've been distracted this entire conversation because I keep catching ducks in the window here, oh, landing out there, and. 00:38:20 Speaker 5: We've been so fortunate to have a camp here, you know, and by design because I want to. I want to be able to sit here and see the ducks going in in the evenings. And it's cut back on my duck hunting because i like to sit here and watch them, and I've just got so many memories tied to that. 00:38:36 Speaker 3: Just so so fortunate to. 00:38:37 Speaker 5: Be in that four percent that hunt, because man, I just I don't know what I'd do if I hadn't grown up that way. 00:38:43 Speaker 3: I had no idea what I'd be doing right now. 00:38:46 Speaker 1: He really was distracted, you know, trying to focus on the interview, but there's steadily Mallard streaking across the range sunset sky and contently landing just right there in view. But at the same time it was kind of a perfect testament to a guy like and what he cares about those ducks are there because he takes care of his place. And that's conservation, my friends. I want to round this conversation off by going over some practical steps on how you or really anybody could put some of this conservation work in place. 00:39:18 Speaker 5: My advice to those people into everybody is understand for conservation programs, it's not likely that anything is going to happen fast. All of the federal programs, if you will. In most conservation programs, you know, go through an annual cycle. There's an application period, a ranking period, a funding period, and there's a lot of applications with a few people working on it. So it's a slow process. But kind of just engage it with the mindset that this may take a while. It may take a year, two years, it may take three years. 00:39:52 Speaker 3: I don't know. 00:39:52 Speaker 5: We just got a guy funded this year for a four hundred thousand dollars contract that this is the fifth year he's been with us. But I would advise for people to let's go in it with the mindset it may take some time, and let's formulate a plan. Let's get a forester out to the property if it's timberland, and let's go ahead and get a forestry management plan, Let's get a wildlife management plan, and let's decide from a whole farm perspective, what can we do to make it better to achieve your goals. Let's look at what it would cost to maybe do a timber thinning, or what you would get out of the timber cells, or maybe if you got into a conservation program, what it would pay to allow you to do that, whatever it may be for that specific property. Let's come up with a good plan and rely on Steward Linker. I tell people all the time, you know, if you don't feel comfortable using US, I still want you to go sign up for the program. Programs are there, they're available to the public. Everybody should be signed up participating if they're interested in conservation at least pursuing the program. And you know, go up there and talk to nrcs and try to build a relationship with them and get going down that road. And if you come back later if you need some help, we'll still be here and happy to help you. And we've had a few people do that, and a lot of times they do come back and want help, and of course we're happy to do that. But I think that's the best advice I could give is just to find some professionals, some wildlife biologists, foresters. Let's form a good plan and let's get some applications going. And there's a lot of paperwork associated with those applications, and it is timely. 00:41:27 Speaker 3: You know, you have to have some help. 00:41:29 Speaker 1: If someone wanted to go, you know, if they happen to be in one of the states that that y'all are in, Like, how would they what's the best way to get in touch with the off. 00:41:37 Speaker 5: Yeah, so a couple of ways. You can go to our website at stewardlink dot com. You know that there's a button on there to contact us and it'll send us a short email and someone from the office will reach out to you within twenty four hours of business days anyway, or you can just give us a call or our office number is six six two five three five zero two three three, And I mean we're there Monday through Friday, a lot of times on Saturday or sometimes maybe even Sunday afternoon. 00:42:04 Speaker 3: But we'll be there and be glad to help you. 00:42:06 Speaker 5: And like I said, we've got employees scattered around the country and we'll get you assigned to the person closest to you. And as we build applications and hopefully get contrasts, I mean, we look to add more employees. So you know what, we're hiring people steadily and continuing to grow. So you know, we've got two employees in Montana now and Montana Montana, come all the way over in the northeast to New York. I believe we've got an application. We're talking to a couple of people in New Hampshire, so we may get a little bit further to the northeast, and then of course all the way down into Florida, and I guess southwest we go as far as Texas, so I don't think we have anything further west of Texas, kind of on the southern southwestern part of the country, so. 00:42:49 Speaker 3: Not yet. 00:42:49 Speaker 5: I mean, we'll be in all fifty states for it's over. So that's the goal of ours, and I think one that will obtain. 00:42:55 Speaker 1: I'm going to share with you all my New Year's resolution. Like I told Joe earlier, my wife and I recently bought sixty acres and I could not be more excited about it. My resolution is to have that place enrolled in some sort of conservation program within this calendar year. I don't know if that's possible or not yet, but I promise you we're gonna make some progress, and I encourage all of you to do the same if you're able at least look into it. I want to thank all of you for listening to Backwoods University, as well as Bear Grease and this country life. I can't tell y'all how much it means to all of us over here. If you like this episode, share it with a friend, or share it with someone that you know maybe has some land that they want to put into some conservation programs, and stick around because it's a new year and we're all fully energized over here. There's a whole lot more on the way.