Matthew Kessler
Welcome to Feed, a food system podcast presented by TABLE. I’m Matthew Kessler
Soy ranks among the top five most produced crops in the world, which might sound surprising, because you hardly ever see it on your plate. Three quarters of it goes into animal feed, and much of the rest becomes soybean oil or biodiesel. Less than ten percent is directly consumed as food.
And yet, many people have a completely different relationship with soy. They either see it as a nutritional powerhouse, an environmental catastrophe, or simply the crop that pays the bils.
TABLE has been working on a multi-year, multi-continent project trying to understand soy from all of those angles at once. We want to start with a person actually growing it.
Ryan Britt
I cannot see far enough in the future to see any environment that does not have soybeans on our operation
Matthew
That’s fifth generation farmer Ryan Britt. Stewarding more than 5,000 acres, or 2000 hectares, on Britt Farms in North Central Missouri.
Ryan
Farm with my father. And we raise corn, soybeans, wheat. Have a cow calf to finish beef operation. And get a lot of help from my family.
Matthew
And you're a cover crop specialist. Is that a right characterization?
Ryan
That's a great question if it's specialist or maybe committed to trying to do it a little differently or what. But yeah, we've been using no-till and cover crops for a long time now. There's people that have done it a lot longer than we have, but we're going on not quite 20 years into no-till and over 10 years in the cover crops.
Matthew
With no till, you try to disturb the soil as little as possible. And while cover crops are multifunctional, an important aim is to keep the ground covered. Ryan has been learning about this since he graduated from college in 2000 and started working full time on the farm.
Ryan
Since I was six years old, I was driving a tractor. The first seven years of farming, things went really well. And I thought that that's just the way it was going to be forever, right?, And it's pretty simple. We plant a crop, we take care of the crop, we harvest a crop, you know, you get paid. It's all good. Well, in 2007 we had a weather challenge.
Matthew
There was a dry hot spell that hit at just the wrong time. And next year, there was a food price crisis and a global financial crisis. It’s been up and down ever since.
Ryan
You know, you start learning that there's so many things that are out of our control. So the few things that we do control, we very much need to invest in using every tool that we can to maximize those.
Matthew
In this conversation we get into the weeds of what Ryan can and can't control - from soil health and cover crops to global tariffs and trade policy. It's a view of the food system from the farmer.
If you want to go deeper on soy's role in the global food system, we have a webinar on April 16th on soy and deforestation in Bolivia. We’ll throw a link in the show notes.
Now here's my conversation with Ryan Britt, starting with the role cover crops play on his farm.
Ryan
Yeah, it's been a learning journey. Cover crops, I think, are a wonderful tool and can help, but they require management. Just depends on what we're trying to do with which piece of ground and what our needs are. And so we're using different mixes to accomplish those goals. And I think cover crops play a major role in being able to make no-till work for us in our part of the country anyway.
You know, the ultimate goal is for it to have a positive effect on the cash crop. And there's times that if we do it wrong, we can have a negative effect on the cash crop. So there's a lot of management to it, but I think that the overall has been really good for us and we enjoy the challenge, I guess.
Matthew
There's a lot behind that. Are there any species in particular that you want to shout out that are working well for you at the moment?
Ryan
Well, with soybeans, the easy button for cover crops, in my opinion, and especially in Missouri, is cereal rye. Very easy to get established, very easy to terminate, consistent, doesn't take a lot of moisture to get it going in the fall, winters very well, and will come on strong in the spring when we really need it.
Water hemp is probably the weed that we have the most trouble with. And anytime we can get some cereal rye established pretty well and then let it lay down into the growing soybean crop, then we're able to use a lot less chemicals trying to manage that water hemp weed.
Matthew
I'm going to pivot us a little bit. Let's just talk about what were you doing in DC? What brought you there?
Ryan
Yeah, so I get the opportunity to serve for a couple of different organizations. Last week I was in Washington DC for American Farm Bureau. They have some issue advisory committees and the one I serve on is the environmental and water regulations committee, which, you know, is a lot because we start talking about pesticides and PFAS and the fun stuff that tends to get caught up in legislation and lobbying efforts. But I also had the opportunity while we were there to visit our legislators and tell them what's going on on our operation and what they can do to help us. So that was pretty important to me.
Matthew
Ryan was in the US capital in February 2026 advocating for certain insurance programs and conservation programs to make their way into the Farm Bill. And right after DC, he went down to San Antonio, Texas.
Ryan
And this last week we've been meeting for the National Association of Conservation Districts. And I really have a heart for the Soil and Water Conservation Districts. I serve on a local board in Randolph County, Missouri. I in the past have been the state president for the Missouri Association and am currently an officer on the National Association.
If anybody doesn't know what soil and water conservation is, it generally involves practices such as terraces, field buffers, rotational grazing systems, water systems, fencing practices where we can keep livestock out of streams. We do a lot of work trying to protect the water quality. A lot of work trying to improve the soil health so that the soil can protect the water quality. And then number one, just trying to keep the soil where it is.
Matthew
We talked for a while about Soil and water conservation and the Farm Bill, which is a massive policy that is supposed to be renewed every 5 years. The Farm Bill ties together support for agriculture with food security and nutrition programs. It's a unique setup that forces lawmakers from both rural and urban districts to figure out food and farm policy together. For a farmer, there’s a lot of policy to track, and advocating for yourself outside of the farm isn’t always a natural fit.
Ryan
Well, it's, you know, most of us as farmers would rather be sitting on our tractor and enjoying our land. It's not necessarily fun or something I want to do all the time. But unfortunately, my father and I recognize that if you're not the one speaking up, somebody else may not have the same opinion. And that's OK if we have a different opinion, as long as you understand where I'm coming from. And the only way we can get that message there is to take the time to do it.
Matthew
Soy has been on Ryan's farm for three generations. It's not a crop his grandfather chose so much as one the whole region converged on. It is consistent and resilient enough to handle Missouri's weather swings, and valuable enough that the economics kept making sense. Until recently.
Ryan
Our neck of the woods, the soybean honestly is probably the most consistent producing crop for us. We're able to generally handle the hot and dry stress that at times can hit corn just exactly wrong. So when we have a perfect weather scenario, we can raise a lot of corn. But year in and year out, the soybean plant is able to handle that. There's always a 10 day period that just really can suck the life out of crops if we're in north central Missouri and soybeans tend to handle that stress better. And so there's probably the majority of the operations in our area are heavy on soybeans.
Matthew
So say I'm driving down the roads towards your farm, I'm entering from the road, let's say in the summer, what do I see?
Ryan
Our farm still has quite a bit of grass. We've got several cows. And so it's kind of a rolling hill landscape and around our shop and our houses. We'll have some alfalfa production. And then we've got mixed in, spotted around, there's row crop production that gets rotated around. And so most of those fields will be corn, soybeans, wheat, and then maybe alfalfa for several years, and then go back into that rotation.
And then as we get closer to the river, then there's a couple of major rivers in our neck of the woods. One is called the Missouri, kind of goes long ways across country. And then the other one's the Chariton River. And as we actually farm where they meet, and right as we're breaking down into that river bottom, we have a feeding operation. So we'll have several grain bins and we'll store a lot of the feed. So we'll have corn silage, we've got a corn bunker. We've got a couple of different barns that most of the cattle are fed in a confined operation, but they're under roof.
And one barn is what we call a deep pack. So that one, they get bedded regularly and the bedding builds up in compost within the barn and then we can spread it. So there's virtually zero discharge. The other barn is what's called a deep pit. So it's actually got slats and rubber floor over top of the concrete and all that manure is stored in the pit underneath the cattle. And then we can actually pull it out and apply it directly to the farm or the fields.
We're actually looking at some technologies to even do it within season, but that's a whole another path that I have to learn a lot about and invest in yet. So that's kind of a picture, a snapshot.
Matthew
Like you said, it's really management intensive, knowledge intensive, because you've got a lot of different species, plant and animal species on the farm. How representative would you say your farm is of the area?
Ryan
Yeah, I think that there are several farms that are similar, but that's not the majority. Probably the majority of the farms in our area are primarily a soybean and corn basis with heavy emphasis on soybeans. And that's probably probably three quarters of the farms in our area that way. There's some guys that still have just a few cows. They may have another job.
Matthew
I want to talk about last year, 2025. It's like the sky opened up and all of sudden people started to care or be interested or to learn about farmers in the midwest for a month or two. So what was it like to be you this last year?
Ryan
Yeah, so we had really an average growing season. It looked like it could have been really good. And then we got dry late and took the top end off of most of our yields. And so it was average and maybe even a little below average. And so that's challenging itself in just what we're able to produce in any given year is generally enough to cover the cost of production, but this time was a little tougher because the price of the soybeans had come down some and slipped to the point that we were at or near break even. So the input costs have stayed high. And especially equipment cost and labor and everything that it takes to grow that crop had stayed very expensive. And yet the actual crop price was down and then we didn't produce a huge crop. So the economics didn't turn out very good.
Matthew
The thing that I'm alluding to with the kind of soy farmers being in the news is kind of connecting to the President's tariff threat, which was a threat for a long time without any clarity, right? It was just kind of lingering.
Ryan
Yeah, I think we feel the pressure, there's no doubt. And we are definitely in an environment that the world conversation with politics and everything going on directly affects my bottom dollar. It's just the reality of what it is. I don't get a lot of say in the deals that we make with China. And so I think that I can only control the things I can control.
We try to focus on building resilience in our operation to where when the market has a good day, it's able to reward us. But when we're in these tougher financial times, we're just paring our expenses down as much as possible to make sure that we're able to survive for the next year. And that's a challenge as we're looking at return on investment.
We may not be producing as many bushels, but if we keep that cost down, we can stay close to what we need to do. And then because we've invested heavily in what's called regenerative practices, even when we have weather concerns, we've kind of evened out the highs and the lows a little bit. And honestly, I think there are times that we may not produce the absolute high yield.
But I know and I'm very confident that we have taken out some of our low yields by quite a bit. And I know that's not exactly where your question was, but it's just how we manage into that economic time is essentially we're trying to look at the long term and making sure that our expenses are low enough that generally there's still enough demand, even US demand to make sure that we're probably going to be able to come out okay. Now, I'm not going to pretend that it's easy because we've taken two or three dollars off the price of soybeans in the last few years. And so it's a direct effect.
But we haven't really changed our operation a lot because of that, because we're looking at that longer term. I still see the need to produce soybeans because I can produce it very efficiently. But we are keeping our corn acres similar to what they were, and then our wheat and everything else, even our hay production and so forth. We're keeping that rotation mostly because that rotation is not driven by the price as much as it is our ability to produce a healthy soil environment. So that one crop we may not make as much money off of as the next one, but it sets that next one up better. And, you know, 10 years from now, it should even be better than it is today.
Matthew
You’re working with what you can control, but you’re also working within a major soy producing region. Can you just tell me more about like where the markets are for soy and in light of the recent developments - has the market changed at all or shifted at all?
Ryan
In our part of the country, we're blessed to be near the rivers, both Missouri and Mississippi. Most of our soybeans get sold on the Mississippi river. Most of that would be ground into livestock feed and oil production that may go into biodiesel or could go into food, can go a lot of different ways with the oil production, but still the majority will go into domestic use, but because it has access to that river, then it can go anywhere in the world. if we go the other direction, it can even go to Pacific Northwest, it can go a long ways by rail, but we can even go south. Our part of the world, it can end up anywhere in the world.
Matthew
So I wanted to step back historically a little bit. Do you have like years on the farm that people always talk about, ah, do you remember back in like, you know, 92 when this flood came and, it was this type of drought, but that kind year that brought about some sort of regional changes.
Ryan
Well, we've had a few times that really stick out. So 2012 was a historic drought in the Midwest. Many operations essentially did not produce hardly anything. There was a lot of acres that were not harvested because they just literally burned up. That was honestly, we were still pretty early in our soil health journey. We had been no-till in a couple years, but we really hadn't used any cover crops yet. And we were already starting to see a little bit of difference between that resilience to the drought.
I'm not going to pretend that our system is bulletproof and whatever happens, we're not going to see the effects. Because we certainly had some awful crops.
But it was encouraging that maybe we were starting to see a little bit more resilience. And then we kind of swung the pendulum as it often does too far the other direction. In 2015, we went to a really wet year. It was very difficult to get stuff planted.
And we - with crop insurance, there's what's called “prevent plant”. And so if we don't plant a crop, there's a small payment. It's not anything like you would get from producing a crop, but there's a small payment to help cover the cost of the land and the equipment to get to the next year. And so we had to make that choice. Do we not plant the crop and take that ‘prevent plant payment’ or do we try to mud it in essentially and see if we can produce something.
Well, probably because I'm stubborn and bullheaded and my father is, well, I'm my father's son. So we tried to plant every acre and in a very difficult year. were very late in the year trying to get it planted. We did get that accomplished, but it was - we did things as wrong as you possibly could and still produced a little bit. But we learned a lot of lessons.
And I think one of the biggest lessons I learned out of that is that we had just started demonstrating a little bit of cover crops. And I saw very quickly that that cover crop was a major tool to help get the moisture out of the soil to, or at least to get some soil stability to where we could get a crop planted.
At the end of the year, the people that did not plant probably made more money than I did, but we learned some expensive lessons.
Matthew
Of course you're going to have like a drought and then extreme weather, both at really poor timing. That is the reality of farming that I think a lot of people don't understand super well.
Ryan
You start learning that there's so many things that are out of our control. And so the few things that we do control, we very much need to invest in using every tool that we can to maximize those.
And, you know, for us, we've spent a lot of time through the years investing in fertility and investing in ways to apply fertility more efficiently.
And then today we're learning a lot about how we've been testing for fertility and that maybe some of the tools that we've used in the past might not be the most efficient moving forward. And maybe we're not looking at all the soil health indicators that have been there the whole time that we just didn't know how to measure or what the value of them was. Water extractable organic carbon is something I had no idea about. I went to college and took soil class.
Matthew
Can you spell that out?
Ryan
WEOC, water extractable organic carbon.
Matthew
And the way that that operates on the farm is…?
Ryan
Today, that is a real baseline that we're trying to figure out how to use that as how we're making fertility decisions moving forward. It is one of the soil health indicators that we are learning a lot about. And so I am absolutely not a soil scientist, even though I make our living off of the soil. So that's a little disturbing, number one, but that is an indicator that I am learning that is basically telling me how efficient the soil can be with what is applied. And the higher that number is, I'm probably not gonna have to put as much fertilizer on the soil. The soil has more ability to produce a crop without me spoon feeding it. And that is very important as we're looking at a tough economic time and how we can still continue to produce a crop without as much input. And so as we learn about that, that we can base that as our decision moving forward.
Matthew
Yeah, just to underscore that point, I think people don't always necessarily realize it's much better for a farmer to bet on over-applying than under-applying for all the economic reasons.
Ryan
It has been with economic reasons. It's just as, as that environment has gotten tougher, you have to start making those decisions. Okay. I can not do some of the things we've done in the past cause it costs too much to do it. And so we cannot put extra pounds out there just to be safe, to make sure that that plant has got everything it needs because that's probably the difference in whether I make a profit this year or not. And in the past, there was a lot wider margin. And so you always wanted to be a good steward to make sure you had plenty of fertilizer out there for your crop. And as you said, that was a mindset that wasn't necessarily wrong for the economic times that we were in. But it also might not have been the best thing for the environment either, in that we were putting some extra fertility out there that may not be tied to the soil perfectly and may not even be available when we needed it later on.
We can absolutely produce more with less. And it's just a wonderful concept because then we are not endangering the soil that's leaving our farm inevitably the way it happens, but the water that is leaving our farm is not carrying as much of those nutrients away that ends up in places where they're not as beneficial and can be harmful.
Matthew
Which is close to your life as a farmer, and your role in soil and water conservation.
Ryan
Absolutely. And it just goes hand in hand. As you said, there's economic drivers. I don't want to waste money. And then there's just environmental and ethical drivers. And I want to do the right thing. I want to do the right thing for not only my family, but for my neighbors and for those that get whatever consequences down the stream from the actions that I take.
Matthew
So I've got one more kind of technical question around this. I understand no-till and the reasons for it. With no-till or conservation tillage, you're disturbing the soil less, keeping the soil biology more active, the physical structure of the soil intact. So there's a lot of benefits there.
At the same time, one of the best uses of tillage is for weed control. And so when you substitute this form of tillage with a light or no tillage, there's the propensity for old pesky weed seeds to come up from the ground. There's new ones to come in and you kind of lose a tool in the toolbox. And so you need to manage that in different ways.
Another tool in the toolbox is herbicides. Do you see a relationship between a decrease in tillage but an increase in herbicide as a different tool to manage that situation?
Ryan
So you said a lot of that very well. I have found that our dependence on herbicide is absolutely there with no-till, but the reality of the applications I make with herbicides versus the application somebody that does quite a bit of tillage makes are not a lot different.
And especially when I add that cover crop tool in there without the cover crops. And I think that was one thing we were struggling with early on in no-till is herbicide was the only thing we had to, you know, for residual control for any kind of long-term, keeping that weed down long enough for the growing cash crop to overcome it and, produce a canopy. so that we weren't, allowing those seeds to germinate and come up through the soil.
I have found that because of with the cover crops, our chemical plan is not a lot different than a conventional operation. But there are times that they have the tools to start with a cleaner field than I do. And so I either have to have that cover crop as our weed that we choose, I guess, out there, or I have to rely on herbicide. It's one or the other.
I think it's really important that we don't take any of those tools off the shelf, because if you do value soil health practices and regenerative practices and the ability to protect the land, then actually, chemistry may be one of the best tools that we can do to use that.
But we have to do it in a responsible way and we have to make sure that we're using science to prove that it is not harmful for the way that we're using it.
Matthew
And the potential of like heavily herbicide resistant weeds that have gotten used to different application, then you're just kind of in this back and forth trying to out compete it.
Ryan
Well, and I think for us, that's a big part of why we keep a certain rotation that we do so that we don't build up that resistance by going to a different crop and being able to use a different set of herbicides, then we're able to break up that continual pattern of allowing that weed to get used to that chemistry. It's not perfect. I spent a lot of time talking about cover crops and it's just because that is getting to be one of our main tools that we're using. And I think they work very well together, but it's not easy and it takes that management and figuring that out on when to do what. And I've done it wrong is the only reason I know what kind of works sometimes. Cause you do it wrong more than we do it right, I think.
Matthew
And your feedback loop on that is quite longer than a lab experiment or figuring out seed germination. You're talking on these yearly cycles. You only have the opportunity to try these different things at this particular time of the season under these climatic conditions every year. I'm stressing really here how difficult it is.
Ryan
Well, absolutely. The variability makes it impossible for me to say on February 20th that we're going to do this plan. And so on this date, we're going to apply this and we're going to plant that. And because of the weather, because of so many different things, we have to have the ability to change and adapt to whatever the condition is as we're doing it. And then, as you said, next year is going to be different. The lessons we learn, we use that as a base, but we're just building our knowledge base to change to whatever the next situation is that's entirely different from this one this year.
Matthew
So, back to soy. Your family's been with it now for. You’re the third generation?
Ryan
Yeah, I think I'm the third generation to grow soybeans.
Matthew
Yeah, which is decades and decades and decades of soy. And I guess maybe it's hard to separate soy specifically than like your relationship to farming. But I wonder if you find yourself more often cursing soy or being very grateful for it, that it's a part of your farming rotation.
Ryan
Well, I just think in our part of the country, soy is our bread and butter. We consistently can produce that for most of the conditions that we face. Corn is a great crop. We depend on it for feeding our livestock, but we see a lot bigger swings in highs and lows in what we can do with corn. Wheat's been a great crop in that I think there's some great soil health benefits, but the returns on wheat have not been good for a long time now. And so it's been hard to be profitable. then in, you know, and then wheat on wheat on wheat can have a lot of detrimental effects too. The University of Missouri has one of the longest continuous wheat plots in the world. And so we know a little bit about what happens there.
But soy actually has been kind of the easy button, honestly, for. You know, cereal rye is the easy button to cover crops and soybeans in north central Missouri is the easy button of farming because it's easy to no-till. It doesn't require some of the fertility and equipment and even harvesting equipment that some of the other crops do.
And so you can drop in with a cheaper piece of equipment and get it planted. With the herbicides that we do have available, it's pretty easy to bandage. And so I think that the reason it's been adopted so widely in our area is just because it just works and handles those weather patterns and doesn't require as much storage space on the back end to be able to put the crop in grain bins because you're producing a third or a quarter of what you would with corn, you know?
And so and then it's worth twice to three times what corn is generally. And so the economics have worked out very well through the years.
It's just a tougher environment right now. you know, we just don't know how long we're going to be that way. And so we have to just continue to make sure that we're we have our options open. But I cannot see far enough in the future to see any environment that does not have soybeans on our operation. I think that it's still going to stay as probably our mainline crop with the other rotations helping to make it all work better.
Matthew
I had one final, admittedly, fairly generic question for Ryan - what’s his message to policymakers?
Ryan
Well, I just would ask that you keep giving us the tools to do the things right, whether that's helping with cost share practices to make sure that we're protecting the land or helping us with revenue policies to make sure that we're able to stay in operation. Ultimately, I understand the supply and demand world and that there's always going to be, know, volatility and politics is always going to play a role in the decisions going on.
But at the end of the day, the American farmer wants to produce food and we want to do it as efficiently as we possibly can. And we want to make sure that it's safe for you because I'm - my family's living off the land and I certainly don't want to do anything to hurt them. So whatever I'm trying to produce for you is, gotta be good enough for my family before I would ever let it come to you. So just know that as the environment is difficult at times, that farmers are pretty resilient. And if you just give us a little bit of help, we're going to keep doing what we can do.
Matthew
Ryan Britt, fifth generation American farmer. Thanks so much for speaking with us.
Ryan
Appreciate your time.