During a House Agricultural Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Rep. Don Davis (D-NC) asked Director of Agronomy at Nutrien Dr. Karl Wyant about crop inputs and what they provide to farmers.
00:00I'll recognize the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Davis, for five minutes.
00:03Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, and our ranking member.
00:07Thanks to all the witnesses who are here today.
00:09The Interregional Research Project, number four, known as the R4 program,
00:14ensures specialty crop farmers have legal access to safe and effective crop protection products.
00:21The R4 program is housed at North Carolina State University, just outside North Carolina's 1st District.
00:26In eastern North Carolina, the R4 program is essential for our sweet potatoes, sweet potato farmers in particular.
00:35My question is for any of the witnesses that could address this.
00:39Could you speak on the importance of the R4 program for specialty crop farmers
00:43and how it actually interacts with pesticides specifically?
00:48We believe the IR4 project has been a very effective program within California for specialty crops
00:59in getting essentially minor registration or registration of traditional chemistry
01:05into the specialty crop side of California agriculture.
01:11Without that, you leave crops totally uncovered, unprotected,
01:17when you have viable products that are available and could be used on that crop.
01:25So it's been a good entry point to move other products into the specialty crops
01:30that are similar in growth habits or in consumption.
01:36So we support it, we support more money for that program,
01:42and really would love to see expansion.
01:47When I speak to farmers back home, they talk about the importance of access to different crop inputs
01:52as protection tools.
01:54Without them, their crops face various threats and potential financial losses.
01:59The loss of access to those inputs poses an immediate threat
02:03to our ability to feed the American people and the world.
02:07Dr. Wyatt, can you speak about what some of these crop inputs are
02:14and what they provide to farmers?
02:16Dr. Sure. Thank you, Congressman.
02:18So we have, from the nutrition side, we have fertilizers,
02:22and they're long proven tools to help improve crop growth and crop yield.
02:27We have nitrogen, phosphate, potassium, and sulfur,
02:30your main four that growers use all over the world to help improve their crop
02:37at the end of the season.
02:38So we have that major class of inputs.
02:40We also have the crop protection inputs that my colleagues on the panel could answer questions about.
02:46So those are your two major inputs.
02:48We also are fortunate to have a good input of sunshine.
02:51That's one of your key ingredients.
02:53And, of course, water either from irrigation or in the soil from rainfall.
02:57So the new innovative piece for crop inputs is certainly these biostimulants,
03:03so living and nonliving products that really can help us manage other things.
03:09So we've figured out the pest control.
03:11We've figured out nutrition.
03:13Now we can start to manage new things like the abiotic stress, you know, nighttime temperatures,
03:19compacted soils, things like that.
03:22And I think that's where the exciting new space is for growers is being able to turn to those tools
03:27and manage things that in the past have been very, very challenging.
03:33Mr. Weatherby, how important is technological innovation in the agriculture industry
03:39and what specifically do new technologies provide farmers?
03:43If you could just speak on that.
03:46I think, you know, as things have changed in terms of environment, the different pest pressures,
03:52invasive species, other things that technology allows us to attack some of these in different ways.
03:59And in particular, you know, as much as we've talked about it, it costs a lot of money in order to bring a new active ingredient through.
04:08Particularly with a lot of the crops we're talking about, too, these are ones that a broad acre application just isn't going to work for necessarily.
04:17It does for corn and soy and other things like that.
04:19But now when we get into specialty crops, there's certain things that weeds are special, pests are special.
04:26They all require different things, and it's not just going to be broad based that does it.
04:30So new innovations are going to be important to bring in order to fight some of these newer pests
04:35and some of these newer problems that are being created.
04:38Thank you again to the panel, our witnesses, and I yield back.
Be the first to comment