Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA Dubois County farm will use a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expand its own environmentally friendly initiatives and help other farmers in southern Indiana and northern Kentucky adopt regenerative farming practices.
The grant focuses on what are called climate-smart commodities, which are produced using agricultural practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or sequester carbon.
St. Anthony-based Fischer Farms will use the grant money over five years to enhance its regenerative agriculture practices in the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program. Regenerative practices are those that improve farmland and build topsoil by reducing erosion, employing no-till planting methods, rotating crops and livestock, limiting chemical use and other methods.
The USDA is investing more than $3.1 billion in more than 140 such projects nationwide. Dave Fischer, owner of Fischer Farms, told Inside INdiana Business he recently attended a conference with 70 participants in Denver.
The USDA refers “to all these projects as pilots to really understand and gather data,” Fischer said. “Hopefully, in a few years from now, they’ll have a better understanding of what it takes to put carbon in the ground and how that works in a market economy.”
Fischer Farms learned last fall that it was a grant recipient; the grant period then began in April. The farm will use its grant to create more jobs in the area and increase carbon capture and storage, in part by keeping soil covered and maintaining living roots in soil year-round. However, Fischer said the economic and environmental benefits will reach far beyond the business and region.
“The benefits are at a global level,” he said. “It benefits society in general for folks that are interested in trying to reduce climate change.”
Fischer Farms has been in Fischer’s family since his great-grandfather bought the land previously owned by a Civil War veteran. After the family purchased two neighboring farms, the homestead grew to 750 acres that are now used for raising cattle and producing beef. The farm partners with Sander Processing in nearby Celestine to process its products.
Fischer began rethinking agricultural practices in 2002. The farm—which is nestled among the rolling hills of southern Indiana—isn’t ideal for row crops, so he started investigating how to raise cattle in an environmentally friendly way. Today, Fischer Farms’ farming and grazing practices focus on carbon capture, reducing emissions, cleaning and conserving water, and developing healthy ecosystems.
The farm’s style of eco-friendly land management has led to business partnerships throughout the state. Fischer Farms has been one of Indiana University’s featured suppliers for several years. In 2023, the farm began working with the Indianapolis Zoo, the Indiana Pacers and the Indianapolis Colts.
Steve Campbell, vice president of communications for the Colts, told Inside INdiana Business the organization was looking to upgrade protein quality and serve locally sourced beef for player and staff meals at the team’s training facility, the Indiana Farm Bureau Football Center. Extensive research led the NFL team to Fischer Farms.
“It’s good for our fellow Indiana businesses, but it’s also good for us because we’re getting a better, fresher product. This is high-quality food for our players. And we love partnering with local businesses when we can on different projects,” Campbell said. “The fact that they are taking a lot of steps to be more environmentally sustainable, that’s a third win.”
Regenerative agriculture
One day after the USDA started accepting climate-smart commodity project applications early last year, Fischer sent his son a screenshot of the announcement. Joseph Fischer, who works in business development at Fischer Farms, said his father added a note: “Hey, this is us.”
“It couldn’t have been written more in our wheelhouse just because of some of the things we’re already doing on the farm related to regenerative agriculture and how that makes our beef climate-smart,” Joseph Fischer said.
Before the announcement, regenerative agriculture was not a term the Fischers used. However, once they learned more about the USDA program, they realized their approach mirrored the application requirements.
“It’s raising the commodity, the beef, in a climate-smart way and then finding markets for that beef as well. That direct-to-market channel that we had already established helped us kind of have a leg up in understanding how this could actually feasibly play out in the market,” Joseph Fischer said.
In their proposal, the Fischers were asked to provide plans to:
◗ Implement climate-smart agriculture practices on a large scale;
◗ Quantify, monitor, report and verify climate results; and
◗ Develop markets and promote climate-smart commodities.
“We basically outlined that and presented our proposal saying, ‘Here’s how we believe beef can be raised in a climate-smart fashion.’ And they accepted our proposal,” Joseph Fischer said.
The project will bring new jobs to Fischer Farms over the next five years, including positions for an agronomist and a herdsman as well as additional salespeople and office staff. There will also be additional processing jobs.
However, the highlight of the plan is teaching regenerative agriculture practices and offering financial support to about 20 regional farms.
“What I’m most excited about is helping local farmers who are raising cattle to get a premium for those cattle, get a consistent premium for those cattle, and basically just make it profitable to raise cattle again in southern Indiana,” Dave Fischer said.
The grant money will help research and analyze the beef production cycle—from farm to table—through a climate-smart lens. For example, what is the impact of installing solar panels at the processing facility to save electricity and using backhauls with distributors to reduce empty-truck mileage?
The Fischers already work with a quick and efficient supply chain by operating on a made-to-order basis. “We’re not producing meat, putting it into a big freezer someplace, waiting for a customer order, shipping it to a distributor and then the distributor puts it in their inventory,” Dave Fischer said.
Discovering methods to keep carbon in the ground is one of the most notable benefits of the project. The USDA wants to investigate how to raise beef in a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative manner. Hans Schmitz, climate-smart agriculture and soil health coordinator at Purdue University Extension, said significant attention will be placed on the soil.
“The most obvious [benefit of regenerative agriculture] is to hold the soil in place and improve its quality and health, resulting in greater crop yields, more nutrient availability, improved water retention and all of the things that come with the ability to put carbon into the soil to hold onto and/or improve the organic matter content of a soil,” Schmitz said.
Partners
The Fischers are working with several partners on the climate-smart commodities project, including the National Resource Conservation Service, Indiana University, the University of Kentucky, Purdue University and Geospherics LLC.
Craig Rasmussen, professor of environmental science at the University of Arizona and a Geospherics consultant, visited the farm in June.
“Fischer Farms provides an excellent opportunity to measure changes in soil health and soil-organic carbon because it includes fields that have been under these management systems for over a decade to those that are just starting the system this year, providing a time sequence of change,” Rasmussen said.
Joseph Fischer said Purdue, with its extensions across the state, is an excellent resource for getting other local farmers on board with the project and assisting with field days.
“Anything we can do in an advisory capacity to help create robust research or assist in data analysis and interpretation, we are certainly capable and more than willing to help,” Schmitz added.
While the researchers collect valuable data, the southern Indiana and northern Kentucky farmers are the ones who might benefit the most from working with the Fischers.
“We’re going to work with a lot of other community farmers to really be the ones doing the production side,” said Dave Fischer. “They have to do it based on our feed program and genetics to make sure that we get really good, consistent quality and also to use our sustainability practices to where all the cattle that are going through this are climate-smart cattle.”
These business owners will be able to use the Fischers’ existing methods and the project’s new findings to implement practices that improve soil characteristics and create more resilient beef farms.
“If the research can return some conclusive results as far as the types of practices on [the Fischers’] soils and the collaborating farmer soils that do exhibit a fairly fast return of carbon to those soils and increase organic matter, the resultant adoption of those on a wider acreage and increasing the resilience then of Midwestern farmland is possible,” Schmitz said.•
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.