EP 601. Making Dollars and Sense: Profitable Wildlife Habitat in Ag Landscapes

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, work in keeping with our summer theme, we’re going to talk a little waterfowl and overall wildlife habitat. But today’s topic, how landowners can use the farm bill to make habitat profitably. And leading us down that path is Dr. Mark McConnell from Mississippi State University. Mark, how the heck are you?

Mark McConnell: I’m great, happy to be here. Thanks for letting me come on.

I think everybody listening that has some private land wants good wildlife habitat, but they may be unaware that it doesn’t have to be just completely out of pocket

Ramsey Russell: Good, I’m glad to be here. Real quick, let me make an announcement for everybody listening, mark your calendar Delta Waterfowl Expos blowing into Oklahoma City July 25^th to 27^th. And if you like duck dogs, hunting gear, guns, calling contests and meeting your fellow hunters, this is a duck hunter Disneyland. Then the very next weekend, August 1^st to 3^rd, Ducks Unlimited Expo DUX hits Memphis like a freight train full of camo calls and everything outdoors, best yet, both events are in the air conditioning. See the latest and greatest before the season gets there. Yes, I’ll be at both shaking hands, telling lies, probably talking too much. So come by, say hello, put your hands on any and all of the latest, greatest brand products you hear about here, and let’s swap a few duck blind hunting stories. Don’t just hear about it, be about it. See you all there. Mark, I’m glad to have you on board, man. I saw you back this spring up there, up there around West Point where you’ve done a whole lot of quail habitat and over some really good fried chicken, this conversation started and I think everybody listening that has some private land wants good wildlife habitat, but they may be unaware that it doesn’t have to be just completely out of pocket. There’s a lot of opportunities out there and a lot of incentive for wildlife habitat, for farming profitably, so to speak for wildlife. But before we get into that topic, I just want you to introduce yourself real quick. Tell everybody kind of who you are and where you from.

Trying to make farmers more money and get good wildlife habitat in the process is kind of been the focus of my academic career

Mark McConnell: Yeah. Appreciate it. Yeah, I’m from West Monroe, Louisiana, and I grew up in there, duck hunting all up in that Northeast Highway 15 area around Ravel and Alto and I had some family up there that had some hunting land. So, I cut my teeth duck hunting up in that part of the world. And that’s all I did growing up, duck hunting and deer hunted a little bit. And I actually quit deer hunting, much to the frustration of my father probably when I got really into duck hunting and had the opportunity to work with a dog and I got hooked. So I grew up there, typical, Southern upbringing, hunted fish, spend as much time outdoors and figured out there was a way to make money working with animals. And so I went to LSU, got my degree, then went to Mississippi State, got a couple more, and got obsessed with quail for the most part. Most of my research is on quail, but I’ve done research on ducks, I’ve done research on ruffed grouse, I’m trying to do some research on woodcock right now. So if it’s a bird you can aim a gun at and use a dog for, it interests me. And yeah, in that path, we got really invested in finding ways to help farmers and private landowners owners in general, but really focused on farmers and getting good habitat on the ground. And like you said, when it not fully out of their pocket, find ways to get the farm bill to support cost share and payments to help farmers do things they want to do they just sometimes don’t have the funds to do out of pocket. So, yeah, trying to make farmers more money and get good wildlife habitat in the process is kind of been the focus of my academic career.

Ramsey Russell: Growing up around West Monroe, what were your origins? Who indoctrinated you into hunting? Who was your mentors?

Mark McConnell: Yeah, great question. So, my dad was a duck hunter, but he was at the time he was much more of a deer hunter, but he had duck hunted a lot in his youth and my great uncle Richard Abraham, who still alive, he’s 87 to this day, and he took me and got me involved and I spent more time in the duck blind with him and his dog and his dog’s name was Rainbows, a yellow Labrador. I wrote an article in Gundog magazine about my last hunt with him several years ago. And so he was probably the biggest influence in terms of getting me into a duck blind and learning to appreciate all the aspects of it. And then my dad started going more, and then we started duck hunting a lot more together. So the two of them really had a lot to do with it. And of course, Western Monroe, we were in Duck Commander country and just this morning somebody sent me a clip of Willie talking at Robertson’s funeral and telling stories. So I grew up in West Monroe where Duck Commander was kind of the king. So I learned how to blow a duck call off his old VHS video, grew up watching his shows. And so yeah, I think the first time dad and I, we would hop around bayou diluter and we would poke around in kayaks and stuff and jump shoot wood ducks. But I didn’t get kind of into the pit blinds and big decoy spreads and big running dogs till, probably early teenage years and I was hooked, that’s all I wanted to do.

Ramsey Russell: Do you still blow a Duck Commander call?

Mark McConnell: I do not actually. I blow one that my good friend of mine, James Calico, who’s faculty at the university with me that James made several years ago. I don’t know what, if he could tell you what it is, but it’s an acrylic double read that that he made for me and that’s my favorite one. But I still have a Primos original winch, the white one, I still have that on my lanyard too, I still blow that when I need to.

Ramsey Russell: Man, I was talking to a young guy not too long ago or two ago to ask me what kind of call I blow and I blow a gaston and I blow several different single reed J frame calls, that’s how I learned. But man, I have had primos. I have had those primo double reed, I have had Duck Commander, I’m going to tell you what, those are some ducky sounding calls. And if I was going to give one to somebody that never blown a duck call, I would just soon choose a duck Commander, they’re not terribly expensive and they sound like a duck, they’re easier to blow.

Mark McConnell: Yeah, the Reacher was the only one I ever had trouble getting enough air into, but the rest of them, my dad used to blow the brown sugar when it came out.

Ramsey Russell: Brown sugar, that’s right.

Mark McConnell: We have my dad and I have killed more gadwall under a brown sugar duck call, if you could just cackle in background, it was soft, it was sweet and my dad had this theory that it just lulled them into a trans they were coming in.

Ramsey Russell: And that’s a good story. You know, it’s funny, did you end up at Mississippi State and fall into bobwhite quail. Because my time at Mississippi State University, I also fell into bobwhite quail. That was a big time interest of mine, especially later in undergraduate and into graduate school, it was Bob White quail. And I’ve always wondered if it just wasn’t, because forestry is pine heavy.

Mark McConnell: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And good pine management lends itself to bobwhite quail and upland birds and wild turkeys. And I just wondered if that’s kind of how I developed that interest in it. I love bobwhite quail, they’re hard to come by these days, good hunting population.

Mark McConnell: Remind me what years you were there?

Ramsey Russell: Way back when. You were probably still in grade school when I was at Mississippi State University. But I can tell you I did a lot of undergraduate projects as an undergraduate student for Wes Burger, that’s how long ago it was. I can remember him getting there is how long it was.

Mark McConnell: He got there in like 1993, 1994 maybe. So Wes was the reason I came to Mississippi State. I did my undergrad at LSU and I’d worked with Frank Rohr actually, he was still there at the time. I was his student worker. And he hates when I tell the story, but it’s true. I was working for him and I wanted to be a duck guy. I wanted to go to grad school and do ducks. And I asked him about it, and he told me I didn’t have enough experience and I was like, well, okay. So I switched to quail, and then about a year later, when Wes had accepted me to come, I was still working for Frank. And I told him, hey, I applied to Mississippi State in grad school, when I got in, he goes, why didn’t you come to me? I would have hired you, I was like, no, you had a chance, I asked you about a year ago, and he swears he never said it. So he and I, we had him on our podcast a few weeks ago, it’s going to air pretty soon and we told that story before we hit record.

Ramsey Russell: He’d appreciated that during record.

Mark McConnell: Oh, yeah. But to work for Wes and I felt like that was what I needed to do. And it’s kind of cool now to be in Wes’s old position.

Ramsey Russell: Did you happen to do any research work back in the day down on Hindleberry on those transection actions cut? You remember what I’m talking about?

Mark McConnell: Oh yeah, I know where it is. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Because the last undergraduate project, I made it for. I made a whopping $5.50 an hour cutting transects down the length of Hindleberry.

Mark McConnell: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it was some pretty godless work.

Mark McConnell: But back in that day when you were there, you had George Hearst and then you had Wes.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Mark McConnell: The pine market was booming. The quail population was probably doing fairly good at least compared to now, or at least the interest was up because Wes was doing all this research. Bruce Leopold used to tell me that Wes researched him to death, that was the reason for the decline because Wes researched them so much. But yeah, there’s a lot of overlap. If there’s a way to manage ponds that can be really good for quail and there’s a way to manage ag systems that can be really good for quail. Ag used to be kind of the by product, at the turn of the, not this century, but the last one, agriculture and quail went hand in hand and it was just a slippery slope before those two kind of parted ways. But there’s ways to make it work and we’re spending as much time as we can trying to figure out how to make that work for landowners.

I believe that the true boom time of bobwhite quail when they existed like you hear people existing when little boys grew up and everybody there was a bird dog onto every porch in the Deep South, I believe it was just a time, they had just done the initial cut throughout the Deep South everybody had two mules in a plough, it was a lot of just dirt, little patches and farms and little bitty dirt patch farms and little home garden that fed families

Ramsey Russell: It’s a long term commitment. My brother in law who will be on here soon has committed his life to bobwhite quail over Webster County. And it’s a long road hoe, there’s no short solutions. And he and I have talked about it, I believe that bobwhite quail have always been around some places more than others. I don’t believe it’s fire ants, I don’t believe it’s a lot of this stuff going on. I really believe that the true boom time of bobwhite quail when they existed like you hear people existing when little boys grew up and everybody there was a bird dog onto every porch in the Deep South, I believe it was just a time, they had just done the initial cut throughout the Deep South everybody had two mules in a plough, it was a lot of just dirt, little patches and farms and little bitty dirt patch farms and little home garden that fed families. And I think it was the perfect condition for bobwhite quail to flourish like they did back in those days.

Mark McConnell: You’re 100% right. The landscape has changed and it made all those other things that may be working against quail have probably a bigger impact than they would have back then. But we’re farmers or landowners where they want to have quail? Like me and my buddy John Mark Curtis, he’s our Quail Forever state coordinator. We’ve been telling people and we’ve done a number of site visits together, there’s almost nowhere in Mississippi, very few places where if a landowner has, at least a few hundred acres and puts in the effort, that they can’t get quail. Now, are they going to get them like they were in the 50s? No. Those days are gone. The landscape has changed way too much. I tell people, those farmers that are in their 70s and 80s that remember the heyday, we’re not going back to the heyday, but we can go back to where it is a regular occurrence to hear and see quail and where you can put a bird dog on the ground and move a couple coveys in a morning. And the bar is a little bit different, but it’s very doable. So, I mean, we did a site visit in Rankin county, which I don’t consider a mecca of quail in the modern era. And all it took was a little tornado and a guy did a salvage cut and his neighbor started burning, then his pine started burning, and boom, he’s got 2 or 3 coveys running around.

Ramsey Russell: It’s doable.

I get calls every single year, and they’ll say, hey, I heard you on a podcast, I had a question, I just saw a covey of quail for the first time in 30 years, what happened

Mark McConnell: It’s doable. Even I don’t know if you’ve ever been down to, like, Honeybreak Lodge down in Louisiana, it was all ag, now it’s all WRE, or what call WRP. And it’s just young grass and the trees aren’t overgrown yet, there’s quail hopping around that place, like it doesn’t take in the Mississippi Delta. I get calls every single year, and they’ll say, hey, I heard you on a podcast, I had a question, I just saw a covey of quail for the first time in 30 years, what happened? And I’ll ask them, I said, well, did you enroll anything in CRP or something like that? Or did you take something? Did you change things? No, but their neighbor does. And that usually all it takes is a little bit of habitat and quail just pop up out of the Delta, seemingly out of nowhere, and all of a sudden you’re hearing them. I’ve done so many surveys in the Mississippi Delta, quail surveys in the summer and in the fall and as soon as a landowner starts making effort, it’s like quail just smell it in the air and they show up, it’s just mind boggling. And the fact that they can hang on and people talk about the sad story of the quail and it’s depressing, but it’s kind of the half full, half empty approach. The fact that in 2025 in the Mississippi Delta, you can do a little work and you can have quail, that’s a pretty damn optimistic story that these birds have hung on and they’re that resilient to where they’re still not totally extinct from that area. Because we’ve done just about everything we can to get rid of quail and a lot of the ag world, right? Just because the nature of what production ag demanded, but the fact that they still show up and you can still get them, that’s what keeps me going, it’s what keeps me up at night, gets me excited to go to work in the morning.

Ramsey Russell: Good deal. You talked about your uncles yellow lab named Rainbow, how did you go from growing up hunting with a yellow lab named Rainbow to hunting with a poodle? How did that come about?

Mark McConnell: So the funny part is that poodle, I named her after Rainbow. Her name was Make It Rain. And she was bred out of Louder Creeks Kennel in Georgia. And so her papers say Louder Creeks make it Rain. But I wanted to call her Rain when I released her because my great uncle, when he would release Rainbow – my great uncle was a very stoic guy, still is. And he never really got excited, showed a lot of emotion. But when a duck fell and he would release that dog, the elation in his voice was almost comical. Like you just couldn’t believe that noise was coming from his man. He’d Rain and he turned him loose and I grew up hearing that. So I was like, you know what, when I get my first duck dog, I want to say Rain when I’m releasing her. And so the reason I got that poodle, my now wife, when we were dating, she was allergic to a lot of pet hair and dander and I wanted a Labrador and I wanted it to live inside, and it just wasn’t an option. So I did some digging and I bought her a little, this is even a funnier story, Ramsey, I bought her as a Christmas present, our first Christmas, I bought her a little miniature cockapoo. It was a cocker spaniel, poodle, miniature poodle mix, it’s a lap dog. I just got it as a gift to her. But I wanted to be obedience trained, so I trained it for her. And then I noticed the damn thing loved to retrieve. So with her begrudgingly permission, I trained it as a retriever and I duck hunted with that dog for 4 or 5 years. 22 pounds of retrieving fury. And look, I used to hunt catfish ponds in Belzona, Mississippi with that dog, you’d shoot a shoveler or scaup down and he’d launch off like superman, hit the water and he’d go pick him up. So that got me thinking about Poodle, since he was half poodle and then I kind of just stumbled upon it and realized historically they were a waterfowl dog in Europe, but the show ring here kind of got away from that. To the show ring people’s credit, they’re also the same group trying to get them back into the working dog group. So hats off to them for course correction there. So I started talking to breeders and found out who was and got one. And I trained Labradors with my great uncle, he was a dog trainer. So he had taught me how to train dogs, I had red water dog and game dog and Joanne Bailey’s book on how to help gun dogs train themselves. So I was somewhat of a trying to become an amateur trainer anyway. But with that poodle, oh, my goodness, it’s a whole different story. Their brains just work differently. So, yeah, we hunted together for a decade, she’s in the next room, she’s mostly deaf, mostly blind, she’ll be 15 on October 7^th.

Ramsey Russell: They really were a hunting breed, they’ve got web feet, I was surprised to learn that, and I know this because my dad, I don’t know where he got it or why he got it, he never had dogs my whole life and begrudgingly let me have one. But he had a giant poodle when he died. It is this big, massive poodle that was smart as any dog I’ve ever seen. Had web feet, of course he kept them pom pomed up, he kept it looking like a big poodle. But they are a sporting breed. Was it hard to find a poodle that still has that sporting instinct?

Mark McConnell: At the time, it was. At the time, that would have been about, I can’t remember, well, she’s 15 now, so we’re almost 15, so whenever that was 2010 or so, there were about 4 people in the country that I heard of, and had talked to who were actively trying to what they called breed back the standard, right? Bring them back to a hunting dog. And there was one group in particular, Rich and Andy Louder, they’re still doing it. Louder Creek and several breeders I talked to told me to call them. And so I just developed a relationship with them and told them what I was looking for. And they were putting them through the AKC circuit and the HRC hunt test stuff and kind of getting the titles, which I didn’t have really interest in that, I just wanted to make sure the dog would work. And she was a delight to train, very frustrating, like you said, wicked smart. And a Labrador, typically you train through repetition, right? You drill that T-drill, the baseball drill, and you just get them used to it. Poodles are very different, they don’t like repetition, once they figure it out, they want to move on. And you have to kind of just constantly stay on top of them and ahead of them because if you send them on the same blind retrieve and they’ve just done it perfectly, they’ll look at you, we call it the poodle pause, they’ll look at you like, are you serious right now? Like, you want me to do that again? Whereas a Labrador wants to do it again, a lab’s dying to do it again. A poodle’s like, why would you make me do that again? And I had to adjust how I’d been taught to train. And luckily, the breeder, Rich Louder and he’s a dog trainer as well, and he’s trained and yeah, I don’t know, probably 50 some odd poodles for duck hunting and upland hunting. So he was a great resource and he really helped me, I would call him all the time, especially when I was going through force fetch, I mean, I was calling him like almost every day. And so yeah, we got her. There were certain things she couldn’t do that I missed, she wasn’t a big dog. She was 36 pounds soaking wet in her prime and so big cold days, ice breaking, she did not have the physical stamina to endure, some of the conditions that a Chessy or a Labrador can take. But we hunted North Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, we hunted in Arkansas, we hunted a number of states with her. But you take a lashing from people when you show up with and she’s red too. So you show up with a red female poodle, you got to have tough skin.

Ramsey Russell: I was going to ask you about that because I hunted springers forever. My granddaddy Russell raised springers, field springers and we hunted with them forever. And I’d get a lot of looks when I showed up in Arkansas or showed up anywhere with a springer spaniel. That dog retrieved. I thought it was just to keep your foot warm, I mean, I heard all kinds of stuff.

Mark McConnell: You show up with a red poodle to a WMA check station in Mississippi Delta, you look odd. And I’ve been called a lot of things. And my brother in law used to be in a club in northeast Arkansas called the L’Amguille Lounge, Pat Pitt and all those guys. And he invited me up there the year he was up there to come. And I said, you want me to bring the dog? He goes, well, let’s bring her, but let’s not advertise it. Like, let’s just keep her in the car, beause you know up there it’s Chris Aiken Black Labrador Country.

Ramsey Russell: Black Dog University, yeah.

Mark McConnell: And it’s got to be a Chris Aiken dog. Mr. Pitt, who was super nice guy, we get there and my brother in law is like, hey, just leave her in the kennel, in the truck, no problem, I’ll let her out, so I let her out, let her air out. Well, it’s dark, we got there late at night, they’re all in the camp and she sneaks in the door between my brother in law’s legs and she’s just parading around in a circle in their den. So I hear all this commotion, I hear mister, Mr. Pitt go, what in the hell is that? And so I’m like, oh God. So I run in there and I’m apologizing to my brother in law, like, man, I’m so sorry, cat’s out of the bag now. And I get her and I was like, sorry, Mr. Pitt, that’s my dog. He goes, what is it? And I said, it’s a standard poodle. And man, the eruption from the crowd was hilarious. And so they put us with, I can’t remember the guy we hunted with, we didn’t hunt Mr. Pitt the next morning, but me and my brother in law hunted with somebody else. And I think we shot maybe 5, 7 ducks, I can’t remember, she picked them all up without any issue. And when we got back, the other guy we were with, he told him, hey man, that dog, there’s nothing wrong with that dog. So, I didn’t want him, I was really hoping to because I’ve already embarrassed my brother in law, now if she doesn’t perform. Because if a dog wants to embarrass you –

Ramsey Russell: Just like a kid, yeah.

Mark McConnell: Don’t wait till the pressure’s on to do it and you’ve got an audience. So yeah, we’ve been laughed at a lot of places, we’ve been a lot of jokes about. But I wouldn’t have traded that dog for anything in the world.

Ramsey Russell: You going to get another one?

Mark McConnell: Yeah. Right now I’m hunting with a poodle pointer, which is a German wire hair breed. And because they’re versatile and I kind of needed a versatile for what I was doing. I’ll probably always have one of those, but yeah, next I’ll probably get one more dog that points and then I’ll get a poodle after that when she passes just for duck hunting. And I would upland hunt with too, but as a flushing dog, it’s a different scenario. But they’re great in the house, they don’t shed, their temperament’s great, they’re great with kids. I got a bunch of kids, so it’s a great breed.

Ramsey Russell: Let’s talk about the Farm Bill as a tool for creating habitat. And let’s lead off like this for anybody listening that may not know what is the Farm Bill and who administers it and how do we access any potential funding?

Mark McConnell: When I have to give this lecture with students, I always joke with them like you’re going to fall asleep. Because I can only make this so exciting because at the end of the day it’s congressional legislation which is only so exciting. So the Farm Bill is just a really big collection, it’s a huge bill, $500 billion ish. It’s a 5 year typical piece of legislation, but it’s got everything from food stamps to conservation to research to crop insurance, it’s essentially what makes the farming world in America work and it provides the framework to do that. It’s a very expensive piece of legislation. We’re currently in an extension right now because Congress is having trouble agreeing on a farm bill. But if a farmer wants price support mechanisms things that help them if they have a bad crop that’s in there, if they want to do conservation, that’s in there. It’s just a bunch of stuff. And of course the biggest part of it, 80% of it is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamps part, that’s 80% of that Farm Bill. The conservation title, there’s about 14 titles, they’re just sections. The conservation title is about 6%, 7% depending on each given Farm Bill. So what we try to do within that is things like the Conservation Reserve Program, some of your listeners may have heard of CRP to the waterfowl world, the Wetland Reserve Program, now called the Wetland Reserve Easements, WRE, things like EQIP, Environmental Quality Incentives Program, all these different cost share and set aside or working lands programs to help farmers do conservation friendly activity and to get some cost share out of it and get some price support. So for example, you’ve probably hunted over some WRE or WRP all over the country, those are permanent easements, right? That’s a one time payment, it’s out of production for typically forever, very popular. CRP takes it out for 10 or 15 years and you can plant the trees or grass or different things. So they’re just ways to help farmers put conservation on the ground and take off some of the financial burden of that decision.

Ramsey Russell: Good deal. A lot of your work shows how landowners use the Farm Bill to create duck habitat profitably. Walk us through how you got a farmer or landowner to pinpoint where that habitat should go and how the profit plays into it.

Mark McConnell: Yeah, great question. So what was happening for – So in 1985, that’s when the Farm Bill first kind of got CRP, there’s been other farm bills, but that’s what we consider kind of the initial true Farm Bill. And you could take land out, say Mississippi, let’s say in, I don’t know, Sunflower county, there’s a soil rental rate that the taxpayer supports that the government will write you a check for taking that land out of production, because you’re taking it out of farming, you’ll get that every year. Well, it may be $75, $120, depending on how productive your soil is. But if you were already making $180 in profit off farming it, that’s a loss. So we were implementing CRP and all these practices, but there wasn’t an economic side to it saying, hey, here’s what that’s going to look like and when I came to grad school working for Wes, that’s what we were focused on. Wes had already put together kind of a workflow to figure this out. So the way we make sure it’s profitable is we rely on a suite of tools that you’ll hear called Precision Agricultural Technology, precision ag. So precision ag is everything from drones doing spot spraying of herbicide to GPS guided tractors, to a GPS and a yield monitor on the combine and that’s the technology we focused on. So essentially, as you’re cutting through a field, it’ll tell you exactly how many bushels per acre you’re cutting in each spot. Now, farmers know where they got good ground and bad ground. What they didn’t typically didn’t know was how much money they might be losing on a certain piece of ground. Like, they knew it was bad, they didn’t maybe know the magnitude of it, a lot of them did, but some of them didn’t. So we essentially just said, hey, if you’ve got a yield monitor, you’ve got that data, can we look at the data and let’s figure out where you’re losing money the most on that field. By no fault of the farmers, not all soils are created equal. Some of them have more slope than others, some of them just don’t have the organic matter, some of them just don’t have it. Some of them get wet too much, and we’ll get back to that on the duck side. So we figured out if we could figure out where the lowest yielding land was and match that to where certain conservation practices, whether they’re for ducks or for quail, where they fit, where that overlap was, we should be able to increase revenue on that field while getting habitat. So it’s a win, win for everybody. So it just relied on the technology, we built some software to calculate it. In a duck example, I’ll give you, there was a farm in, I want to say it was Quitman county. And one edge of their field, like a lot of delta fields, was next to a remaining bottomland forest, it was a swamp, it was low. And on dry years, that bottom corner was the best ground there was. He couldn’t irrigate, it wasn’t level enough. So on a dry year, that’s where he made his bumper crop. But on a wet year, he was ruined. The soil was too saturated, you just couldn’t get soybeans to get very high up there, you get sun scorch, root rot, all these different challenges. So what we did was we said hey, let us take a look at your yield data, let’s see how bad it is. And then we ran some scenarios that showed, hey, on a great year you’re doing fine, but on a wet year, which we’re getting a lot of, in a wet spot, you’re not doing so good. What if we took this out and rolled it in a wetland practice? Which Conservation Practice 23 is a wetland practice in CRP. You’ll get a payment rate, we know what the payment is, we know how that compares to what he was making on average over say a 5 or 10 year period. And we just did the math and said, hey, on a 10 year average, you’re going to make about $80 more an acre on this field than you would farming it. Now that’s just by enrolling it. Now he wanted to put a blind in it and lease it out, that’s extra revenue outside of the farm bill that I can’t do the math on that because that’s up to them. But just by not farming it and getting paid to put it in a different vegetation type, the farmer was already making money on the field because we only recommend he take out that land that was the worst, keep the good stuff. We say farm the best, conserve the rest. We’re not trying to infringe on good cropland, good cropland needs to stay good cropland, all right, we all like good, cheap, sustainable food. But every field just about or every farm has some area where it’s just a marginal piece of ground that a conservation practice might increase revenue. So we just took that approach, Ramsey. We just said, hey, let’s find where the farm bill can make you money, and if it can, here’s the scenario. Then it’s up to the farmer if they want to take that step. They go see NRCS, go see FSA, get a contract, it all starts from there.

Ramsey Russell: When you talk about using Farm Bill incentives to cash in, so to speak, on the least productive part of that farm, how do recreational values, whether it’s in the form of leases or personal use, how does that play into the economics?

Mark McConnell: The recreational, is that what you said?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, recreational value.

Mark McConnell: We’ve had a number of farms that we’ve worked with where they’ve used the Farm Bill to make the farm more attractive to say, various wildlife, whether it’s ducks or whatever. And deer hunters do it a lot too. Like, I mean you can go through the delta and you can see a bunch of properties that the agronomic value is lower, right? But the recreational lease value potential is higher because now you’ve just got more habitat. And the way the recreational lease system works, all you’ve got to be able to do is convince people it’s better, right? There’s no checks and balances there. If you plant a bunch of hardwoods and you’re growing big deer and you convince people that that’s worth 10, 20 more dollars an acre, more power to you, that’s the way it works. So yeah, the recreational value can go up dramatically while the farm revenue. So like for example, here’s where it gets complicated, let’s say you’re leasing out your farm ground, you’re the owner, but you’re leasing it out. And if you’re leasing it for $150 an acre, that rental farmer is paying you $150 an acre across the whole thing, regardless. So if you take out a really marginal area and it may, let’s say it doesn’t pay $150 an acre, let’s say it pays $120, so you’re looking at a $30 an acre loss, right? So your rental farmer, the ones we work with, a lot of crop consultants, they’re generally pretty happy if we’re just taking out the poor ground because it draws down their averages anyway, right? Taking out the bad ground. So if you’re just taking out the bad ground, the farmer who’s leasing it, he’s not that unhappy, and he’s paying for less acreage, which he’s happy with. But you took a $30 hit because you were getting $150 now you’re $120. Well, recreational lease for the hunting rights is where you make that up and actually increase your overall net income from that farm. But it’s tough to do if it’s just row crop from ear to ear, right? Or fence row to fence row. But if it’s row crop with a little trees here, a little grass here, a little herbaceous stuff here, food plot here, now you’ve got a well-managed system that the Farm Bill helps you get that can give you a lot more economic diversity, essentially. So we tell farmers, think of your field or your farm like any other investment portfolio, right? You don’t want to put all your money in Coca Cola all the time, right? Because then if Coca Cola takes a hit, you’re screwed. But some of your soils are more productive than others, some of them are more risky than others. So we can use the farm bill programs to mitigate risk, take marginal ground out that’s risky to farm, diversify our revenue stream and insulate yourself from any one big shift in the market. Because now you’ve got a diverse revenue stream across the field, you’ve increased the portfolio’s resilience to market shifts, you’ve created more habitat, you just get a lot more options when you diversify in that manner.

I know in the context of a lot of what we’re talking about, we’re looking at producers, farmers, what about private land owners that want to utilize the farm bill to enhance or improve or build wildlife habitat on their property

Ramsey Russell: I know in the context of a lot of what we’re talking about, we’re looking at producers, farmers, what about private land owners that want to utilize the farm bill to enhance or improve or build wildlife habitat on their property? What opportunities are there for them?

Mark McConnell: Great question. So there’s a lot of what we call working lands programs now. So things that just provide cost share to help mitigate the cost of enhancing the wildlife benefits. So one of the most popular ones, at least in the South, but I think everywhere is EQIP, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. EQIP is, got a, I don’t know how many in Mississippi, but a list, a two scroller on a screen, list of practices that you can get cost share assistance. So if it costs $80 an acre and they pay 50% cost share, you paid up front, they reimburse you for half and the cost share varies by practice. But yeah, those are different programs that if you just want to create, you want to put prescribed fire on the ground. Well, there’s EQIP cost share for prescribed fire. You want to put in some vegetative grass buffers to do that. You want to thin some pine trees, you want to do some bulldozer work, you can get cost share assistance just to put in fire lanes. So there’s a lot of practices that EQIP and other type programs will provide cost share for to help. You don’t have to be a production farmer on that. You can own pineland, bottomland. You can get EQIP money to do a hack and squirt on your hardwood stand to just reduce the basil, the density of your trees to get more sunlight on the ground and grow deer food, there’s a ton of options there. And what we’ve noticed over the years of my career is that one of the challenges is a lot of people just don’t know how many options there are, and when they do, go to the websites to find out, it’s not easy to navigate.

Ramsey Russell: It’s overwhelming. What would you say to a landowner that may be unaware of all the options? What is his best recourse for – without spending the next 72 hours on a computer getting bogged down and all this government website stuff, what’s his best option for finding out what all opportunities were available?

Mark McConnell: Yeah, man, great question. My opinion, and I’m a little biased because I work with these people every day, but the best solution is contact your local – if your state wildlife agency, every state wildlife agency now has a private lands program where they have biologists who are there to help private landowners manage for wildlife. Those are some of the most knowledgeable people you will ever meet, right? The ones our team in Mississippi, I would put up against anyone, they are tremendously talented, they are a resource for me. I call them and text them all the time when I need a question answer because they are just up to date on it. So your state private lands program with your state wildlife agency, if you’re interested, I’m a little biased towards quail, right? So every state just has quail forever biologists, some of them are what they call farm bill biologists, they’re there to help you navigate the farm bill and get signed up for cost share assistance with the farm bill. Any of your NGOs, Ducks Unlimited, Turkey Federation, anybody that’s working in that sphere, those biologists on the ground are the most knowledgeable people on planet Earth, NRCS too. You can get a lot more if you just call your NRCS agent in your county, your district conservationist, or your soilcon, if they don’t know, which they’ll probably know, if they don’t know, they’re going to put you in contact with whoever does. And that’ll save you a ton of time of wading through the nonsense on the Internet. We’re actually working with FSA, the Farm Service Agency, me and some colleagues, to build a different and interactive website for CRP so you don’t have to navigate through – if you go look something up for CRP, you just go to USDA’s website right now within 10 minutes, you’ll have 5 to 8 tabs open because you just keep getting redirected.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right. Been there, done that. It’s daunting at best. It’s like they don’t want me to find it. Do you know whether or not, I just had this thought pop up, you mentioned NRCS and state biologists and Fish and Wildlife and some of the NGOs, do you know whether or not the partners program is still active? Because at least back in the day there was funding for qualified applicants, they could apply to the partner’s program and get pipe and technical assistance. Yeah, I mean, if nothing else, I mean, I’ve got a swag out here, I need a piece of pipe. Man, I’m going to tell you what, I’m a whole lot closer to putting in a duck hole if I got a pipe available to me. Is that program still active?

Mark McConnell: It is still active and we still have one in Mississippi now. Our partner’s biologist took the deferred retirement option.

Ramsey Russell: Jeffrey Lee.

Mark McConnell: Yeah. Jeffrey retired. So we’ll hopefully get another one, hard to say at this point. But yes, they’re still out there. I was told, and I can’t confirm this, but I was told some of their focus had shifted a little bit more towards endangered species or at risk species, I never confirmed that, that’s just what I was told. So I don’t know if that’s true. But yes, I’ve heard that it has been more difficult to get pipe, a control structure, for example, for a wetland, for a duck project, if in recent history than maybe it was 15 years ago.

Ramsey Russell: But you know for the average guy, even if I couldn’t get that pipe because of funding or whatever have you like it just to have some form of technical assistance to come out there and shoot an invert and shoot a few angles and let me know cost effectively exactly what I need in the form of a levee.

Mark McConnell: Yeah, absolutely. When I was at UGA, I was professor there for a few years and on one of the research farms they had an old wetland, had an old duck blind still in it, but they had kind of let it go and they had pulled all the water off for various agronomic reasons. And I asked him as, hey, is there any chance we can get that restored? And they were like, yeah, we just don’t know what to do. So I called DU and I had DU send out an engineer and their regional biologist and we were working on, they drew us up a map and we were working on getting that restored and the dirt work we have to do to restore the levee and then getting a control structure and we were going to try to use it as like an educational thing. Hey, when people come to this farm, here’s how we did it. I ended up leaving before they ever got the ground on that and came back here to Mississippi State. But yes, the DU, their engineers are fantastic, they’ll come out and look at it. Your NRCS folks are really talented as well. And the great thing about that community, the wildlife profession is really tight knit and it’s really small. So what’s great about it is the first person you call, hopefully that’s the last person you need. But more of the times than not, it’s going to take one or two more calls. But when all those organizations and agencies are kind of synergized and they know – the closer knit they are, the more effective they are in that state. So like if I call John Gucci, our private land guy, and he doesn’t know the answer, he knows who to tell me who to call to get the answer and we get it that way. And typically, when we do a site visit, there’s more than one organization or agency there, which is good, right? It’s good to get the perspectives. We’ll do property visits and forestry commission might come out, which is great, we want to hear their perspective. It might be a little bit different than the wildlife perspective, but the landowner needs information and then they need a full set of information so they can make an informed decision. So yeah, call your private lands biologist, call your NRCS agent, call your quail forever, pheasants forever, wherever state you’re in. Or sometimes your county extension agent is pretty well informed. And they’re kind of, oftentimes they’re a mediator between a lot of these groups to kind of connect people. Because a lot of farmers deal with their county extension agents more regularly than they do anybody else. So sometimes your county extension person can put you in the right direction as well.

Ramsey Russell: It’s more important outside the delta than inside the delta normally. But countless of the times I’ve seen duck holes put in and they just assume because it was a swag at whole water. But I mean, kind of one of the first steps is do a soil cord, get somebody intelligent to tell you if that soil profile will even hold water.

Mark McConnell: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen many a pond and duck hole built that ain’t going to hold no water.

Mark McConnell: Yeah, I’ve seen that as well. Or you see people that don’t really understand. And we did this when I was working on the farm and we redneck this stuff all the time, trying to do it ourselves. Well, we’re kind of eyeballing. All right, I think that flow gap needs to go there, I think we can put a pipe here. And you end up putting the control structure a little too high and you can’t control the water depth you want. So yeah, those people that understand that business, they are worth their weight in gold and definitely worth. I mean, I’m all for fake it till you make it and try stuff on your own. But every now and then it really helps to have a professional just help guide you.

Ramsey Russell: You ain’t lying. One of the best little duck holes I ever saw, Rick kaminski had put in south of Starville there. And I’m going to say the levee was, it couldn’t have been more than a foot and a half, two foot and a little pond, a little wetland probably about 4 or 5 acres. But he had put in a 6 or 8 inch piece of PVC pipe that would bend like an elbow. And when he wanted to hold water, he lifted the elbow up and it was above the invert and the water held and it was time to drain the water, he just bend it over and start letting it drain off nice and slow and good for moist soil. And if he’s having too much beaver activity, he’d come back out there in the evening and turn it back up, so water wasn’t moving when the beavers came out.

Mark McConnell: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it was simple and it was cost effective but utterly productive.

Mark McConnell: Yeah. So Rick and I used to bet every year on the LSU Mississippi State football game. And as an LSU fan and I would bet for LSU and I know I won 2 years in a row and there was that one game where State was like almost 6 inches away from winning and they didn’t. But the bet was, I can’t remember what I was going to give him but is that he would take me duck hunting. And so he had a place in Phoebe.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right, yeah.

Mark McConnell: Oh man. I have been blessed with amazing duck hunts, that is still in my top 5.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mark McConnell: And it was a farm bill Conservation Practice 23 Wetland and didn’t look like much. And that landscape, Phoebe, doesn’t look like a big duck mecca.

Ramsey Russell: No.

Mark McConnell: And it’s a bunch of pine trees everywhere. And we got out there at like 2 o’ clock and he had his son’s dog, I think that dog’s name was Bo and he was having trouble marking. So he said, I’ll sit behind you for a while with Bo and you shoot and I’ll send him, I want him to get a good look. And we’re like 02:30 we’re in there in the blind. And he goes, it’ll be about 4 o’, clock, they’ll be here. And about 03:57 it was like somebody flipped on a switch and every mallard in the area goes, oh, this is where we’re headed. And the next 40 something minutes was absolute mallard hunting gold, and it was just something else. But again, a farm bill practice being used to achieve a wildlife objective and executed beautifully.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, I’ve heard you say, Mark, I’ve heard you talk about, it’s not so much about more habitat, but smaller habitat. What does economically targeted conservation really mean for duck hunters and landowners?

Mark McConnell: Yeah. So with economically targeted conservation, what we were aiming for was, if you’re going to use the farm bill to do this, only do it in a way where if that conservation practice does not increase revenue on that field, don’t do it. It needs to be an economic decision first. Now, I got a lot of pushback from colleagues over the years that maybe that wasn’t the right way to go. But having worked on a farm and spending as much time around farmers as I can, and the literature bears this out too. Generally speaking, about the number one thing that comes down to making a decision to a farmer is the economics of it. Now that’s not to say farmers aren’t conservation driven, a lot of them really are. They like the environment, they want to do what’s right. But a lot of times they’re just hamstrung by the cost of something. They want to do things, but it’s not feasible, it’s not responsible economically sometimes to do that

Ramsey Russell: It’s got to make dollars and sense.

Mark McConnell: Got to make dollars and sense. So we just said, hey, economically targeted conservation is where the economics are the first priority. If the economics work, let’s do it. And by doing that, you may end up with a smaller amount of habitat in terms of acreage. So in the paper you’re referencing, we did this simulation with some of our software and we looked at, hey, what if we just maximize conservation acres? What if we do just keep farming and then what if we do it economically in a targeted way? And what we showed was if you max out conservation, put a conservation practice, every acre it’s eligible, you’re going to decrease revenue because there’s a lot of good ground on that farm that you’re taking out that conservation payments cannot compete with. If you’re cutting 175 bushels an acre and corn is at $650 an acre and it’s only $600 an acre to farm corn, that conservation payment is going to be hard to mess with it, it’s going to be tough, but on really low ground, low yielding ground, it’ll work. So we did all this math and what we found was by putting the economics at the front of the line and do it in an economically logical way, it was the most profitable, more profitable than maximizing conservation. And overall, we had 52 fields in the study, we were able to increase revenue on 37 of those 52 fields and overall, for the whole farm, we increased profitability by 26%. Now that’s not just a jaw dropping number, but you’re farming less acreage, you’re farming almost none of your challenging marginal ground. You’re only farming good stuff, you’re getting a payment for the other stuff and you’re increasing overall. You’ve diversified your revenue and you’re increasing overall profitability. Now it ranged, we’ve done a bunch of this stuff different papers we published, it ranges. But so we tell people is if it’ll increase the profitability of your field 10%, every farmer’s got their own threshold, that’s up to you. But if it increases at 80%, that’s a no brainer. So show the farmers what it’ll do and then give them the information to make a good decision on where their threshold is. Maybe their threshold is 20 bucks an acre, maybe it’s 100 bucks an acre, I don’t know. But that’s for them to decide. But I couldn’t tell them what that break off was prior to us doing this research, we wanted to be able to give farmers information they didn’t have.

Ramsey Russell: Modern day farming seems to be such a marginalized profit anyway. It seems to me that any percent increase return would probably matter as long as it didn’t interfere with efficiency.

Mark McConnell: That’s right. And we’re in a tough farm economy right now, it’s been a tough farm economy for the last couple years. Inputs are up, prices are not great. So that profit margin just keeps shrinking and of course that’s before tariffs and whatnot. So it’s a tough time to be a farmer. A lot of the public think farmers just live high on the hog all the time and they’re overly subsidized and spoiled.

Ramsey Russell: And my hat is so off to those men that are doing that. I’m telling you, because I know some of them, they live and die on that tractor, man. I mean they live and die at the bank and on that tractor.

Mark McConnell: I grew up with farmers, worked for farmers, my brother in law farms, my father in law is a crop consultant. Look, there is nothing easy about that job. And yes, there are years where it’s a bumper crop, the weather’s good, all the stars are line, it’s a good commodity market where trade’s great and there are years where farmers do tremendously well. There’s years where they can’t miss. But that is not –

Ramsey Russell: Most years, you aren’t. I mean, right here I’m hearing that, underwhelmingly small amount of cotton has been put in this year because it’s been raining so much. I mean, it’s just one of those years.

Mark McConnell: And it wasn’t that many years ago in the delta especially where a lot of farmers lost their rear end on cotton. Farming is not easy, and do farmers get support from the government? Absolutely, I support it. And conservation is just one example of those. So if we can find ways to keep – look there’s some challenges in the agricultural community in terms of impacts on the environment. But I’ll take a cornfield over a subdivision any day. And if I can take that cornfield and help the farmer make it a little more environmentally friendly, a little more profitable, and whether I get to hunt on it or they get to hunt on it doesn’t matter. If we can piece together little patches of habitat here and there, hopefully we can make the whole landscape better. But to your point about too small or little. Would I rather a whole field when it, when it’s economically feasible, a whole field to come out and be a whole field of quail habitat or duck habitat, a huge wetland? Sure, those are great and we get those sometimes, but that’s not the norm. We’ve got to figure out how to think of the landscape as a puzzle piece and the conservation pieces are smaller than the ag pieces. The ag pieces can get fit in anywhere. The conservation pieces of that puzzle are sometimes smaller, but if we can stick them in enough places, we can probably get some overall benefit. We just got to figure out how to do that and scale it up and do it in a way, farmers are making money.

Ramsey Russell: Well along that line, what types of habitat farm bill supported habitat, are we talking wetland edges? Are we talking buffers? Which delivered the biggest return on investment through those farm bill programs?

We focus on what the landowner wants, we want them to meet their objectives. Because when they’re happy, that land stays enrolled, it stays, the good stuff stays farmed, the less good stuff stays in conservation, the landowner’s happy, it doesn’t get turned into a solar farm or subdivision

Mark McConnell: Oh, great question. So it depends on how you look at it. And so I’m sure you’ve had other biologists on, and the most favorite phrase of wildlife biologist is it depends. And it almost irks me when I have to say it, but we say it so often. So it’s going to vary by – well, so for a lot of the wetland practices are creating a functional wetland, those are typically more, a lot of WRE goes into that, those are your permits. So they have a big payoff up front, but of course, it’s just one payoff, you don’t get money there. But if you scale that out over time, you’re doing pretty good. What determines how profitable or how much the payment’s going to be, right now under the current farm bill is how productive the soil is. So if it’s really good soil, you get a higher rental rate payment, if it’s really bad soil, you get a low Rental rate payment. For example, there are farms in, like the prairie of Mississippi where the rental rate to take that land out of production is $29 an acre, okay? Very few farmers are going to make that choice because they can rent it out for well beyond that. But if the rental rate is $120 an acre, like you’ll see in Bolivar and Sunflower county, sometimes really productive delta soils, the cash rent is higher than that. But if the farmer’s farming it and on that marginal ground, he’s only making $60 an acre, that’s a no brainer, right? So what determines the profitability or how much payment is really the location of the practice. And there are some extra incentives for water quality practices and wetlands are one of those, so you get a little bit of a bump, but it all comes down to what land you’re taking out mostly is going to make it. So if we’ve got landowners who want duck habitat, look, and I’m a quail biologist, that’s what I’m focused on. But I go with what the landowner wants, it’s their property, it’s their objectives I’m trying to help them achieve. If they want duck habitat and they want to put a wetland in, I’m going to do everything in my power to figure out how to make that work. If they want pine goats and they want to shoot deer, we’ll deal with that. If they want quail, we’ll deal with that. We focus on what the landowner wants, we want them to meet their objectives. Because when they’re happy, that land stays enrolled, it stays, the good stuff stays farmed, the less good stuff stays in conservation, the landowner’s happy, it doesn’t get turned into a solar farm or subdivision. And we keep that culture on the ground.

Ramsey Russell: Using your software to pinpoint exactly where conservation out earns crops. How often do duck habitats top the list?

Mark McConnell: How often does duck habitat, what?

Ramsey Russell: How often do duck habitats top the list?

Mark McConnell: That’s a good question. For me, probably 40% of the time. But then again, when I’m called, I guess, I’m more known as a quail guy, so I get called for that. But I had a research associate that was going all around the state and helping farmers and I’d say almost half the time if they’re in the delta for sure. Now, if they’re in the prairie, very few, just because that’s not as duck central. But again, we’ve been implementing it with my software, like us doing it, mostly, in Mississippi. So, I mean, I wish it’d be more, because I think I’d like to see more water in the delta in the wintertime. It seems like, and I was discussing this the other day, it seems like in my lifetime, Mississippi, I’ve seen a reduction in water on the landscape. I don’t have the math to prove it, but just driving around when I showed up in 2008 versus driving through now, I definitely remember seeing more duck blinds and more water back then.

Ramsey Russell: Well, what’s the farmer’s reaction usually like when you show them, hey, believe it or not, you can take some of this out and put it in a conservation practice and make a little more money?

Mark McConnell: They’re a little skeptical at first, which they should be, right? They’ve been told their entire lives you make more money in agriculture by the amount of acres you farm, right? The more you farm, the more you make, right? The bigger loan you get, the more you can do, that’s what they’ve been taught. And to a degree, there’s some truth to that. So they’re skeptical at first and they should be right. You should never just take anything I say at face value, and then when we use their data, it’s their yield data that we’re using. And when we see their data and we walk them through it, we sit down at the kitchen table with it and we show it to them. And then more times than not, they’re pretty convinced. Not everybody is, because it’s a huge shift in culture to farm less acreage, and we know that. So, I mean, it’s interesting, the older the farmer, I’d say they’re a little more skeptical because they’ve been doing it longer. Younger farmers that are just now taking it over, they’re a little more into the technology and using it, they tend to be a little more receptive, but it’s not a big difference. I mean, it’s a hard thing to convince people of because it’s counterintuitive.

Ramsey Russell: But a lot of what you’re saying, you’re advocating farming for profit, not yield.

Mark McConnell: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: Which flips everything farmer’s been taught right on its head. How does that mindset unlock opportunities for habitat creation?

Mark McConnell: Great question. So the assumption that more yield is more profit, and you’ll see it’s all over social media every. They’ll be coming out pretty soon, at the end of the summer when harvest starts, 93 bushels an acre and soybeans, I’m like, I’m sure that happened on that test plot. I don’t disagree with that at all, I believe it. But you probably spent upwards of $750 to get that acre to that potential. So there’s a degree to where yield and profit are perfectly correlated. But then they start to separate and when you bring in all the other factors that are affecting that. So you can cut 250 bushel corn easily, but if corn is $3.50 a bushel, you are still having a pretty small profit margin considering the cost per acre of corn. So if you’ve got a marginal area that’s not cutting as good, you can do stuff to it to try to increase yield, but that’s increasing your cost. Or what a lot of farmers do, like on center pivot corners, there’s not a lot of this in the delta, but on big, Nebraska, big center pivot corners, on those corners they’ll reduce the seed population because they can’t irrigate it. So they’ve got less invested in that acre. So if they cut less, it tends to not affect them as much, but they’re going to have less yield. So if you can get them away from yield is always perfectly correlated with profit, you’re right, it opens up a number of doors because you can get marginal ground to bump up a little bit in terms of yield, but you’re not doing that for free. Every time you boost yield, you’re adding something to that soil or to that plant to get it there, so your profit margin shrinks. A lot of that depends on the commodity market and that’s what we can’t control. When I started this research, Ramsey, it was when soybeans hit, we had our results from my first round of stuff back in 2008, 2009, 2010. I guess soybeans hit $16 a bushel, almost. I mean, it has to be some of the worst ground on the planet for $16 a bushel soybeans to not out compete conservation, I mean, you can cut 20 bushels an acre and make a profit on that. And we got a paper in review right now looking at this, but when you look at that same ground and soybeans are back to $8 or $9 dollars, different story. So it’s a tough concept to push. I think we’re making headway groups like Pheasants Forever, Quail Forever, they’ve kind of taken our approach and just run with it and had it tremendously successful, even going way beyond what we ever did, tremendously successful at implementing this kind of what we call precision conservation. And they’ve had great success and I think that’s becoming more commonplace. But we’re still not the norm and I knew we wouldn’t be. I mean, it’s a fundamental paradigm shift in farming.

Ramsey Russell: The paradigm shifts that you’re talking about is, it’s not just practices, it’s almost attitudes towards conservation. I mean, we’re so geared towards scaling that farm and making every single bit of it go towards yield. But now we’re starting to see through your research we can and we make and implement something. When I think of field ages, for example, I’m just thinking of a soybean field, a rice field, an ag field out in the Mississippi Delta that is going to slope in one direction or the other and down towards the low end of the slope, man, a little bit of levee and a buffer, we got grasslands boom, all of a sudden in the duck season, I’ve got a duck hole.

Mark McConnell: That’s right. Think about some of those areas, like the bottom of bean field, for example, where let’s say it was too wet to spray and we’ve all seen it. One year, every now and then it gets real weedy and when that big rain comes in, it looks phenomenal out there. You’ve got some seed producing grasses that have popped up, you’ve got a little bit of soybeans and you’ve got the perfect water depth. And if you can hide and throw 6 decoys out, you’re about to have a great morning if there’s ducks down. And that used to be some of my favorite spots to hunt growing up. Hunt with my uncle because we had these pit blinds and then, they get blind shy, of course, by the end of the season. But then you’d have a big rain event and this new area would just kind of hold water that we didn’t have water in and ducks would just flock to it. And man, I’d belly crawl and do everything in my power. I used to have a little chicken wire blind, I would hide in, have it brushed up because those kind of new food opportunities that just popped up in that rain, man, if the ducks were here, they were on top of it and they were coming. So those were some of the greatest hunts I ever had with 6 decoys and no MOJOs, nothing, just being in a new spot that they wanted to be and the water be gone in 2 days.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Now, that ephemeral water can be killer. Well, I tell you what, me and our mutual buddy Mr. Ian sure slog through some fields with pulling our little poke boats to lay out on those areas and make hay while the sun was shining.

Mark McConnell: That Munn you talking about?

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah, Mr. Ian.

Mark McConnell: Man, bless his heart. I got to hunt with him down in his place during teal season, and it was something else to share a blind with him, he was a character.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, he was a character. I got 30 years worth of stories on Mr. Ian. And let’s talk about diversifying duck habitat on the landscape. Say a landowner wants to build habitat diversity. What’s the playbook? Buffers, wetlands, uplands? What mix would you recommend?

Mark McConnell: Well, so speaking of Kaminski, one of the many tremendously, hallmark things Kaminski did to the waterfowl, wintering waterfowl world, they had a number of studies that have shown this and it always seems to be about this when they’ve done telemetry and looked at all and did survey data and all this, different ways they’ve looked at it. You need a little flooded ag, preferably rice or corn, soybeans just aren’t as good. But they’ll obviously use it for inverts and stuff. You need a little bit of moist soil and you need some flooded woods. You need that wetland complex, a little bit of everything. Joe Lancaster’s work, which was one of Rick’s last students before he moved to Clemson, they showed that even better with really good data. And he’s got GPS units going in on mallards in the delta and we’re about to get a finer scale look at this, him and Davis and those boys, they’re about to have a whole bunch of stuff going. But yeah, a little bit of everything, right? And habitat diversity, it’s not limited to ducks. It’s everything, right? Nothing really likes just one thing. Quail, deer, turkeys, that complex where the ducks have options, because keep in mind, when ducks are down here, when you’re a duck, when you make it to Mississippi, you’ve only got a few things on your mind. You want to survive until the end of the season and you want to pair up, right? And you want to get fat. That’s your 3 biggest important things you’ve got to do. So you’ve got to avoid getting shot and getting eaten, then you’ve got to find a mate paired up and you’ve got a court a little bit and you’ve got to put on a massive amount of energy so you can make the flight back. Well, you can’t do all that with just moist soil. You can’t do all that with just flooded rice and you can’t do all that with just flooded timber, you need all 3 of those things to be more effective. They’re going to go court in those woods in the middle of the day and play Freddy grab ass and flirt with each other and that’s how they’re making that parabola, they need a little privacy to do that. So we joke about ducks going to the woods for bird nookie and that kind of thing, they got a little privacy and they’ve got to get those high energy calories from flooded ag. And they’ve got to get those rich invertebrate communities from the timber and the moist soil and the seeds. So it’s all necessary. And there’s a lot of ways to get that stuff on the ground. But well, it’s kind of hard to get flooded bottomlands unless you’ve already got them or at least do that quickly. But all that together, you need all of it. You need all of it in an area and if you think about the places like in the delta that do kind of consistently have the most birds, if you look at the landscape and look at the aerial photograph, they’ve got a pretty good recipe, that recipe kind of scattered in different patches around that landscape.

Ramsey Russell: Any advice for maintaining those areas so that they’re both useful for ducks and remain attractive to the landowner?

Mark McConnell: Yeah, work with a professional, whether it’s through the agencies or a consultant, a private consultant. I do a lot of pro bono work for the university and then I consult also on the side, but work with somebody who has a proven record of results. So if you’re looking for somebody to help you consult on duck holes, make sure that person – like anything else. You don’t hire a carpenter without getting a – hopefully, you don’t hire one without getting a reference, somebody that’s worked with them. Do the same thing with a water body, get a professional to help you. And even if they’re just helping you kind of do a little bit of it, or if you want them to do it for you, just work with somebody who’s dedicated their professional career to – wildlife biologists are no different than lawyers or anything else. We went to school, some of us various times, but we’re dedicated to doing this right and we want to do it right. Because at the end of the day, there’s very few, almost every biologist I’ve ever met, especially if they’re a hunter, they want to see a landowner satisfied. And nothing’s going to keep a landowner smiling more than stacking up animals that they’re interested in, or at least seeing them. So, yeah, work with a professional, follow the science. There’s always good science coming out of universities and other places, trying to figure out the best way to manage moist soil, the best way to manage timber, how to use prescribed fire. I mean, there’s no shortage of it. And now I was just telling our Dean this, Dr. Berger, when I told him I was going on your podcast yesterday, we were talking about some quail stuff, and I was like, doc, the podcast world has become where a lot of people are getting their information.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, you better believe it.

Mark McConnell: And that snuck up on me, I was not prepared for it. My department was, hey, why don’t you all do a podcast? I don’t want to do a podcast. And then when Calicut got hired, he’s like, hey, let’s do a podcast, like, this is how you get information out. And I’ve been blown away at just how effective the podcast circuit has been at getting information out on habitat management. So hats off to you.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, heck, yeah, man. I mean, right now, the folks driving to work or driving to school or there’s somebody, I guarantee there’s person to person sitting on a green John Deere tractor right now listening to this episode. I mean, they can’t be reading a book.

Mark McConnell: Yeah. See, I didn’t know, I was like, the last one. I can remember my brother saying, do you listen to Joe Rogan’s podcast? And I said, Joe Rogan has a podcast? The guy from Fear Factor? I just had no idea. And I won’t tell you how short of an amount of time that was ago, but it wasn’t that long. And then I realized that I had just missed the boat on the podcast thing. So I started trying to get caught up. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be on a number of them. And I never imagined, if you’d have told me 15 years ago, that one day podcasts would be almost the default way to spread good information, I would have been shocked. So it has happened, and I’m happy to partake in it and whatever gets the information out. At this point, like I said, our job is to make this stuff work. No one cares if I publish a paper, I don’t even care that much, right? What makes me happy is when a landowner does something I recommended and they’re successful, they’ve achieved their objective, they win, I feel good about it. The resource wins. There’s more ducks, there’s more quail, there’s more whatever the animal is. I mean, that’s why most biologists wake up every morning.

Ramsey Russell: That’s good stuff, really good stuff. Your mapping work is already helping conservation groups scale this approach to conservation. What’s next for turning a profit first conservation into a flyway wide reality. Is that coming?

Mark McConnell: Yeah, I hope so. Ramsey, Wes and I have been working on this and pushing it and trying to promote it since 2009. And at first people were like, what are you talking about? Like, people looked at us like we had turnips coming out of our ears because the technology was there. But in the Deep South, like the first yield monitors, people were using them, but they were a lot of bigger properties and it was upper Midwest, Midwest farming, it hadn’t really trickled down to the south yet. So we were out talking about it and we weren’t making any traction. So then I kind of went on a road show and started, South Dakota, Minnesota, just going all over the country and trying to promote this. And when Quail Forever, Pheasants Forever picked it up, that was really our first big shift. All of a sudden this was becoming commonplace, it was in the vernacular, people were talking about it. And like I used to go to conferences and present and no one else there was talking about this, now when I go to a conference and present, hell, I’m damn near the old guy on this topic. A lot of other people have picked it up and I couldn’t be happier about it. Bring it on. The more the merrier. So I think we just need more exposure, more adoption, more proof in the pudding showing farmers that, look, there’s a way to make this work. It’s again, the agricultural community is with now with the regenerative ag movement being so popular, it seems to be catching on a little bit more. I make it a point to always go to as many regenerative ag type meetings as I can because the ag industry people are there, the fertilizer companies, the chemical companies, the seed companies, they’re all there and I need to hear from them because somebody, my friend Ryan Henninger told me years ago, he said, until industry adopts what you’re talking about, you’re not going to scale up. My goal in the last 5 to 7 years has been trying to promote this at the industry level. Letting John Deere see it, letting Mosaic, letting Indigo Ag, Syngenta, the groups that are providing products directly to the farmer.

Ramsey Russell: What has been their reception to that?

Mark McConnell: Mostly positive. But they ask the same question they want to mechanically, how do we scale this up? Right now, for the first time in my career, the ag industry is using the word conservation regularly.

Ramsey Russell: Good.

Mark McConnell: They’re using the word sustainability regularly. Now, those terms get abused like crazy and they get flown around a lot. Regenerative ag is the new buzzword, it’ll be the buzzword for a few more years, then we’ll switch to something else because we can’t seem to stick to one word. But I spoke at a cotton sustainability summit in California last year and I was there with the guy, the head of Carhartt, where they buy their cotton from, and all these textile companies, they wanted to know, they want to be able to show their consumer we’re doing something for conservation because the consumer is starting to demand it. When you’re at a store and people want to see a little leaf or a little something that says, hey, you’re trying to do something here, conservation friendly. Now, we could debate to we’re blue in the face, how many of those efforts are tangibly doing something that’s fair. But for now, I’ll take it as a win because when I first started, the cotton industry was not calling me to talk about conservation and cotton production. Syngenta was not calling me, asking about being on a panel to talk about conservation, that has been a new thing in the last not quite a decade. So I think as industry keeps moving, if we can keep moving industry along and helping them navigate this, I think its potential is good. But again, at the end of the day, they’re there to sell products and grow farms. We’ve got to make sure we’re not looking like we’re here to wreck that, which is why I take the economic approach. I want your farmers to have more economic diversity and economic sustainability. And the conservation benefits are honestly secondary. And that’s a tough thing for a lot of people to swallow. I used to go up to John Deere meetings, 150 people in a room, and I’d be the only person on the agenda. Obviously there was a wild biologist and I’d be after everybody else and I’d say, all right, don’t get up out of your seat, I’m not here to sell you conservation. I’m here to make you more money. Give me 15 minutes, let me show you how I can make you more money. And I had several farmers over the years in different states come up to me and say, I like the way you started that. You weren’t trying to push your thing, you were trying to push us making money. And probably, yeah, do I wish they’d all make more quail habitat or duck habitat? Of course, but that’s not the reality.

Ramsey Russell: But the reality is it has to make dollars and common sense.

Mark McConnell: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: That’s the reality of the world we live in, especially in agriculture.

Mark McConnell: And the wildlife community, it took us a while to get there. I think we’re moving there, it’s not just me, there’s way many other people besides me talking about this in this way. But it took us a while to start making that argument. And I think now that we’re making it, or we’re making it more often, as I like to say, cautiously optimistic.

Ramsey Russell: We’re talking about the farm bill, a lot about the farm bill around here and boy, I tell you what, with this political climate, DOGE and all that stuff going on, who knows what changes are coming? But are there any cuts that have slowed down this conversion and this process. Or are there any features or technical improvements that would help accelerate this philosophy?

Mark McConnell: Yeah, great question. I’ll start with the back end of that first.

Ramsey Russell: Is it as simple as just, hey, we need to have higher rental rates? Now, I’ve asked 3 questions, but go ahead.

Mark McConnell: That would help tremendously. So in the 2018 farm bill, so there’s a cap, an acreage cap for CRP, a national acreage cap that you can’t go over and there’s a lot of reasons for that. When I first got to grad school, the cap was really high. Since 2007 was the highest, we had more CRP acres nationally than we ever had before and it’s pretty much been on a steady decline ever since for a couple of reasons. One, there was the ethanol boom and the subsidies with the renewable fuel standards that massively expanded corn production. And then for soy, for biodiesel from soybeans production. So you had record crop prices, at the same time, lots of CRP contracts were set to expire and a lot of farmers made an economic decision. They said, man, I put this in grass 10 years ago, soybeans are $16 a bushel, I’m going to make a killing if I plough this back under and farm, I’m not faulting the farmer for it was an economically wise decision. So ever since then, the subsequent farm bills, the cap has either been lowered or increased. We got an increase in the previous farm bill, but they reduced the payments. So we got up to $27 million as the cap in the last farm bill. But they did a 10% or 15% reduction in CRP payments, depending on which type of CRP you did. So it made it less economically viable.

Ramsey Russell: 3X2 and 2X3 is still 6.

Mark McConnell: So actually we’re about to submit a paper, we actually compared the same farms, the same acreage, everything, but under the 2014 farm bill and the 2018 farm bill to see kind of how much money you’re costing farmers to enroll the exact same acreage, we’re going to try to get that published soon. But yeah, so that was part of it. We got an increase in the cap, but it came with a decrease in the payments, not ideal. But no one really got anything they wanted out of that farm bill, so we kind of just took it on the chin, said we live to fight another day. Right now, we’re not quite sure what’s going to happen with CRP. WRE seems to be it’s going to maintain fairly popular in Congress. CRP, we don’t really know, we’re not getting a lot of information. So yes, increasing the soil rental rates, increasing the acreage cap would work. But when it’s in a farm economy where the soil rental rates are low and tough to farm, if it’s not economically viable for a farmer to do it, they’re not going to enroll and you don’t reach your cap and then you go to Congress and say, hey, we want 5 million more acres for CRP. And they say, why? You didn’t even reach the last cap we gave you. Well, that was a function of the payment reduction, at least in some part. I’m not going to blame it all that. So there’s a lot of challenges there. So yes, more acreage, more funding would help. But on the other side, the technology that I need farmers to use is this yield monitor, this precision ag technology. It comes standard on combines now. But there’s a difference in adoption and use. You can check a box and I adopted this practice because I have a yield monitor. But if you didn’t use it to change your farming operation, I would argue it’s not in use to the degree that maybe it could be. So currently, there’s a bill, I think it made it out of the house committee, I lost it in the Senate called the Precise Act, where it’s essentially incentivizing, providing cost share incentives for adoption of this technology, not just this technology. Variable rate seeding, variable rate spraying, I mean the things they can do with computers. I don’t know if you’ve been in a tractor lately. I grew up farming where I got yelled at because I had a really hard time keeping rows straight, I was 17 years old, I get easily distracted and got in trouble a lot. Well, now the GPS does all that for most new equipment. And then when you get to the end turn row, you got to turn it around, try and line it up on GPS guided tractors, you can turn it 15 degrees, then the tractor takes over, make sure you’re lined up parallel. So the technology is phenomenally advanced. But we need incentives for farmers to be able to use it in a conservation sense. So, more incentives would help, more awareness would help. And yeah, I’m with you, it’s always easier to sell conservation when the payment’s higher. But then you’ve got to be able to give something to the taxpayer to say what is their return on investment for that? And that’s a tough thing to quantify.

Ramsey Russell: Mark, for landowners that are ready to dive in to some of these topics we’re talking about to make the conversion to increase their profitability, but maybe planting fewer acres and commit more to conservation. What are the first 3 steps you’d recommend to them?

Mark McConnell: First step was call a precision ag person with PF or QF or call me, call somebody – right now, just there’s other people doing this, but there’s not a whole lot of in academia working on this in the US, there’s a couple people in Canada doing pretty good work with it. But call me or call your local quail forever pheasants forever people. And most states have a precision ag team in the state or somebody there. They call them PACS, Precision Ag Conservation Specialists. Some of them are some of my former students, they’re fantastically trained folks. They’re passionate about this topic and they’re going to make it work. Call them and then when you meet with them, just be as open minded and as truthful as you can be about what you’re willing to do. And after that it really just comes down to where on your farm it fits. And spend a little time, if they have time before that meeting, familiarizing their self with maybe CRP and some of these other practices. The USDA websites as we mentioned can be tough to navigate. We have a new one out, if you Google, what’s called the CRP menu, we don’t have it for every state yet, we got it for about 9 states. But if you Google CRP Menu, Mississippi State, it’ll pop right up. It’s a much quicker way to get information about CRP. But that was just a shameless plug.

Ramsey Russell: Which program should they be asking about, Mark? I mean CRP, EQIP, WRE.

Mark McConnell: If they’re farmers, if they’re row crop farmers, I would say start with CRP but don’t overlook EQIP. There’s a lot of things where EQIP can fit in, you can have them all, you can mix them and match them. Your farms not have to be one or the other. I know landowners – well, I think you had Jimmy on your podcast. Jimmy’s got CRP, he’s got EQIP, we’re trying to get an ASAP easement on certain part like, Jimmy has worked, he’s a great example of working with, we’ve done a lot of work with him, but he has really used NRCS and Quail Forever, their teams in that state, to help him put things where he needs it when it works. Like, we’ve got a number of pollinator plannings on that field that our state Quail Forever coordinator implemented. And there’s some of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. I mean, there’s butterflies everywhere and quail singing in them and it’s phenomenal to see. But yeah, just call somebody that in your state or in your region that’s working in that and invite them to your farm, show them what you’ve got, ask them where they can fit in and I can’t say enough about the relationships. Yeah, it seems cliché because we say this all the time, but at the end of the day, the farmers I’ve had the best success with are the ones I’ve had more than just a drive around with, I’ve had a cup of coffee, I’ve shared a cigar or I’ve spent a little more time than I had to getting to know them. And I teach my students. If you’re going to go work with farmers, you don’t come out of the gate like a drug rep, you need this. You ask that farmer what they want, what do they want that property to look like in 5 years, 10 years, and then you find a way to fit into what they want, it’s not the other way around. It’s their land, it’s their objectives, you’re there to help accomplish that and hopefully do it in a responsible way. But get to know the farmer before you start spouting off acronyms and Alphabet soup to them.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, you better believe it. You’ve hunted, published, model, mentored, what is your 10 year vision for farmland conservation and duck habitat?

Mark McConnell: In Mississippi?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. What do you think? Where are you going to be in 10 years?

Mark McConnell: I don’t know. I’d hope my only goal is to be spending more time behind any of my dogs. That’s kind of just my ultimate goal in life is to spend more time behind my dogs. I told a version of this answer to Lake Pickle on his podcast a while back, and he said, what did you want to see Mississippi upland landscape look like in 10 years? And I think, I said something about, I just want to see more dog kennels in the backs of trucks. On the quail side of people have a reason to get a bird dog, they’ll get a bird dog, nothing would tickle me more than to see bird dogs out there. For duck hunting, I want to not have to act. When I ask undergraduates how many of you all duck hunt in the class of 25 to raise their hand, I want to see that number at 10 or 15, because that’s what it was when I was a student, right? I want to see, when I go visit a farmer in the delta and I ask them if they hunt, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, we used to, but we gave up on it, the flyway shifted or whatever, all the different stories you’ll hear. I just want to see more people doing it. But to get more people doing it, they’ve got to have a reason and a place to do it where they’re successful. So if we can get all the NGOs and the agencies coordinating better, getting more duck habitat on the ground, using the university to help push the research and the extension service to help talk about what works and what doesn’t, get people more informed and make it to where getting out with your dog is cool again, let’s make duck hunting cool again. I want to see people, when I grew up, the people I hunted with, all you talked about in October, November was getting ready for duck season, right? What the weather was going to be like? I just don’t hear those same conversations the way I used to. So I want to make the culture come back. But to do that, people need a place to go to be successful. And to do that, we need duck habitat on the ground, well managed and is often and as spatially diverse as we can get it.

Ramsey Russell: One last question. I always say, Mark, when you come to a fork in road, take it. From poodles to precision tools, putting this cost effective conservation on the farm, what’s the most surprising lesson you’ve learned at the crossroads of science, land and recreation?

Mark McConnell: Man, that’s a good question. The most surprising thing I would have to say is. And it almost seems cliché to say it because I feel like you’re reading a damn hallmark card. But between those three things, there is way more we have in common across those areas of disciplines than people realize.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Mark McConnell: We often make it seem like conservation is in contrast with producers, with ag industry versus conservation. Give me a fricking break, I’m tired of hearing it. And if that gets perpetuated, it’s our fault because we let it happen. There has never been more enthusiasm for conservation right now than there has been in my career since I started. My buddy Ryan Henry, you say, talking about that same kind of question, but he’s like, what brings us together? And he also say, gravel roads unite us, right?

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that’s a good answer.

Mark McConnell: I stole it from him. And I hope I said his name there so he can’t say I copyrighted. But the gravel roads bring us together, unite us. The ag industry, the conservation people, the working lands people, the hunters, we’re all traveling down the same path, when we’re out doing what we do in that landscape. If we’re all in the same spot, we’re all enjoying the same resource and enjoying a different part of it, it seems almost incomprehensible that we’re not working more together to achieve optimal outcomes for everybody, or at least some more give and take than we’ve got. There are a lot of farmers are just like anybody else. You can have bad apples, you can have bad doctors, you can have bad professors, you can have bad lawyers, they all exist. Most of the farmers, the overwhelming majority of farmers I have ever worked with since I was farming in high school to now have been pretty good, conscientious people who care about the environment are willing to take a step, willing to take a risk. They just need a little help, either financially or in terms of how to do it. Farmers are, you ever read the book or saw the movie Lonesome Dove? If you read the book, but they only mentioned it once, the movie, they’re trying to navigate the cattle all the way to Montana. And in the book, Call calls, you let Old Dog go through there and the other cattle will follow along. Well, in the book, they talk way more about Old Dog. He’s the big bull, that they have the front of the herd. And the idea is that if they can get old dog to navigate through this, then the rest of the cows will follow. Agricultural producers are very similar. There’s a lot of big community leaders in the ag community. Jimmy Bride’s a good example in the Black Prairie in the West Point area, right? There’s ones in the delta, they’re everywhere. Bo Prestridge, there’s a ton of them. When they do this kind of stuff, it becomes normal. And then farmers go, hey, so and so did it, maybe I’ll do it. Bo Pressards is a good friend of my father in law’s and he bought up a big tractor of old retired catfish ponds, put it in an easement. I had a great, one of the best duck hunts of my life on that property. Bo’s a big farmer, right? When people see Bo do stuff, they go, hey, Bo’s doing it, maybe I’ll try it. So we just need a little more connectivity, a little more enthusiasm and the academics, the NGOs, the agencies, the ag groups, the farmers realizing that, let’s focus on what we’ve got in common. We all want this landscape here, we want it here in perpetuity, we don’t want to lose the culture. But we’ve all got a small role to play in maintaining that culture. In a waterfowl culture, there is no waterfowl culture in the wintering grounds without agricultural producers, it’s just not there.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Mark McConnell: So we got to engage for what we can do together.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, that’s a great note to end on. The reason this topic was so important to me is, some of the research coming out of Cohen’s lab up in Tennessee has demonstrated that over 70% of waterfowl habitat as expressed in kilo calories is on private land. And talking to Heath Hagee, the same could be said about the whole entire continental United States. And I think, boy, I mean if you ask me, I love wild marsh wilderness type habitat. But that’s not the world we live in, that’s not going to feed us. It’s not going to make it to where I can go to grocery store and get groceries. And I know a lot of these farmers are hard working and dedicated people, they have got a long tough road to hoe. But a lot of your research is showing that it can make dollars and common sense, you know what I’m saying? To think outside the box and use a slightly different approach.

Mark McConnell: You make a really good point there, and I’ll twist that analogy just a little bit. But the hunters, I would love to hunt quail under virgin longleaf pine. that’s not going to happen. I’ve resolved to, I’ll hunt it in old fields and patchy stuff that doesn’t look like it probably should, but it holds birds because it’s there, the birds are there. Duck hunters, we’d all probably love to hunt bottomland timber and coastal marsh or go up in the prairies and hunting a cattail, I’ve done it, I’m sure you’ve done it, I know you’ve done it, too. Hunting those cattails and watch 150 mallards come down, great. But at the end of the day, that’s not the standard, it’s not the norm, I’d love it to be the norm. But if we can flood up a little ag here and there, flood up a little moist soil, we need a lot more moist soil on the landscape. If we can do these little things and little patches, and the idea being that those little patches aren’t great, but if we can scatter enough of those little patches and dot them across the landscape, then we can get back to the days where, going out and shooting a handful of ducks in January maybe didn’t require 4 or 5 hunts till you reached. And of course, a lot of that’s weather driven, as we both know. But a lot of it is people just don’t have a place to go. Public lands, overcrowded, private lands, expensive. So if we can just put more habitat on the ground to where it is easier to access this stuff. And landowners have at it, charge a fee, it’s your land, absolutely. But charge a fee for some fantastic duck habitat if you’ve got the potential to make it.

Ramsey Russell: Well, man, they’ve got kids, too. They’ve got kids and nieces and nephews and grandkids need a place to hunt, too. Real quickly, how can listeners connect with you?

Mark McConnell: The easiest way is you shoot me an email. If you Google my name and type in Mississippi State or you can post an email address. I made the mistake on a podcast several years ago giving my cell phone number out.

Ramsey Russell: I’ll post that below.

Mark McConnell: It’s easier if they just email me and that’s perfectly fine. And again, at Mississippi State, my research is my research, but we’ve got some great folks there. Our waterfowl program is about to be, we’ve got just more capacity now. We’ve got Brian, who’s been there, and now we’ve got James Calicut on the extension side. So that program is about to blow up, the quail programs growing, we’re building the turkey program back that George Hearst started. So, if you have needs in the state or anywhere, we are happy to engage and provide whatever help we can.

Ramsey Russell: I appreciate you, Mark, I really do. I have so enjoyed this conversation and I appreciate you taking the time to come on.

Mark McConnell: I appreciate it. And what I’ve noticed is I really need to make my office look more like yours.

Ramsey Russell: Folks, you all been listening to my buddy, Dr. Mark McConnell. That’s Dr. Mark McConnell at Mississippi State University. You all can Google him, contact him. He’s like, step number one is call an expert and he is one if you’ve heard today. I appreciate you all listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where, in the world of – it doesn’t have to be agriculture versus conservation, it can make dollars and sense, and even you old dogs can have your cake and eat it, too. See you next time.

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