Christine Bielski's ability to leverage data and science with integrity and transparency is a big part of the reason why she has been named "Trusted Adviser of the Year" by Field to Market.

And it's also a big part of the reason why the Northern High Plains Division, where she works as Nutrien Ag Solutions' research and sustainability manager, has seen 10x enrollment in certain sustainability programs over the last three years.

We chatted with Christine three years ago in episode 18 of this podcast about what we could learn from Nutrien Ag Solutions' carbon pilot.

And given the massive growth since then, and her award from Field to Market, we figured it was about time we caught up with her again.

So in this episode, Christine joins us to talk about the abundant challenges growers face in the Northern High Plains, how they're leveraging sustainable agriculture practices to improve their yields, and what she expects to see over the next couple years.

Plus, she shares some hard-earned insights about what works and what doesn't in one of North America's most challenging agricultural geographies.

Episode Transcript

Christine Bielski 

I think the numbers speak for themselves. It's caught on in our area. 

We’ve got our work cut out for us, but I feel like that's what makes the people that I work with so great, because they found ways to overcome all those obstacles and still grow some really great crops. 

Dusty Weis 

Welcome to the FARMSMART Podcast, presented by Nutrien Ag Solutions, where every month, we’re talking to sustainable agriculture experts from throughout the industry. 

As the leading source of insight for growers on evolving their sustainability practices while staying grounded in agronomic proof, FARMSMART is where sustainability meets opportunity.  

Sally Flis 

We don’t just talk change – we're out in the field, helping you identify the products, practices and technologies that bring the future to your fields, faster. 

I’m Dr. Sally Flis, Director of Program Design and Outcome Management. 

Dusty Weis 

And I'm Dusty Weis, and we're joined today by Christine Bielski, Northern High Plains Division Research and Sustainability Manager at Nutrien Ag Solutions. Christine, welcome back to the show. 

Christine Bielski 

Hey, it's good to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Dusty Weis 

And congratulations are in order, by the way. I understand you've been named the Trusted Adviser of the Year by Field to Market the Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture. That has got to be incredibly gratifying to be recognized like that. Tell me a little bit more about the honor and what it means for the work that you do in the Northern High Plains? 

Christine Bielski 

Yeah, it really has been a humbling experience, and I feel really honored to have received that award. And it highlights the cool work that we're doing and the team effort that it took to get to where we are today. From my understanding of Field to Market, who gives out the award, they're all about transparency and data and science. 

And so to receive the award, it verifies that we are taking that science-backed approach to implementing sustainable practices in our area that I get to work with awesome growers and people. You know, my name might beyond the Trusted Adviser of the Year award this year, but it really is a team effort from growers all the way up to Sally Flis.  

Sally Flis 

Yeah, I'm super excited about it. I think I sent you an email beforehand that I hope they didn't cry while I was accepting it for you. After I saw the amazing video that Field to Market put together and I didn't, I made it through accepting without crying. But just super excited to see you and the work that you guys have done there, and the partnerships and the growers that we've built.  

To follow on that, the first time we had you on the podcast was in 2022, and we were talking about looking back on our carbon pilot from 2021, which feels like forever ago. I can't believe we're rolling into our fifth year of running a carbon sustainable ag type program at the company, and we've seen huge growth and change in the growers and the data and the way that we're managing things.  

So how have you felt over that five years since that original 2021 pilot to looking at enrolling growers for a fifth cropping season in 2025? 

Christine Bielski 

It is crazy to think it's been that long. I pulled up some numbers before the podcast, just looking at straight numbers. I mean, we'll talk about one program specifically.  

In 21, we had enrolled about 11 or 12,000 acres in that program, and in 2023 we had 133,000.  

I think the numbers speak for themselves. It's caught on in our area. I think a lot of the reason it has caught on is because a lot of the improvements that have been made since that first pilot program.  

The last time I was on the podcast, we were talking about areas where we could improve on the seamlessness of collecting the data, making sure we knew what information we needed from the growers before they signed up. 

And from that to where it is, is like night and day.  

You know, we have a solid team of customer success representatives from your team, Sally, that have really made this possible too. And they've been around for the last couple of years. So we have this streamlined process between your team and my team that makes this whole thing a lot easier to bring to a grower and say, okay, this is what you can expect. 

This is the kind of information we're going to need. These are the eligibility requirements. And it's cleared up a lot more since the beginning. And then as far as the digital side of things, you know, Agrible… the developments made there have been significant since the beginning. So it just makes the whole process easier. 

Dusty Weis 

Christine, those numbers that you cited, scaling up from 11 or 12,000 to 110, 120,000, are those specific to your territory, those numbers?  

Christine Bielski 

Yeah.  

Dusty Weis 

That's just that's incredible. And again, I think a testament to the fact that Nutrien Ag Solutions was able to take that feedback from the growers at that summit that we had in New Orleans back in 2022, and really incorporate it and use it to promote that 10x development, which is, again, just incredible. 

But can you remind us a little bit about your job in your territory in the Northern High Plains Division? 

Christine Bielski 

Sure. So my official title is Manager of Research and sustainability for the Northern High Plains Division. I am a part of the division staff. I'm in charge of the research, sustainability and then precision ag platforms as well. I also have two people working for me full-time that help support all three of those platforms because as you could probably imagine, it's a lot of different things going on at once. 

So my job is to help farmers implement high quality, repeatable research trials on their farms, help our sales guys use those trials to better understand how products perform, or just how different management practices results in plant health or yield or water savings, that kind of thing. And then on the sustainability side, my job is to work with all these programs that Sally develops and her team, and then try to find ways to implement them with our growers, specifically in this region, and then the precision ag side is filtering down all the different third party companies we could be working with into the ones that we feel will bring the most value to our growers. 

Dusty Weis 

And Northern High Plains Division encompasses what territory? Put it on a map for me. 

Christine Bielski 

I mean, roughly it's over 5 million acres from the Rocky Mountains, you know, Greeley, Colorado, Alliance, Nebraska to Stockton, Hays, Kansas, and then Yuma, Colorado. So we span a pretty big area.  

Sally Flis 

In that geography, Christine, I think there's a lot of unique challenges to where you work that makes sustainability a little bit bigger of a lift for some of your growers. Can you explain a bit some of the things that you guys deal with across such a vast geography that are going to impact the practices that growers will be interested in or able to implement when we talk about how we design and deploy these programs?  

Christine Bielski 

Across the Northern High Plains Division, we are blessed with so many different kinds of environments every single year. 

Most of the time not so beneficial to growing a crop.  

You know, our organic matter is sub-2 almost all the time. We'll see sub-1 organic matter. Our CECs range from 7 to 20, pH is anywhere from five to almost nine. And then soil tilth, your calcium magnesium based saturation ratio, we run on the tighter side of things. 

We're around that 3 to 5 calcium-ag ratio. And that means that it can be pretty difficult when we do get a rain event to get that water in the soil. So we have pretty tight soils. And most of our growers do practice no till or minimum till. So that's definitely a challenge.  

We have exceptional drought in at least one area of our division every year. I think we're just breaking out of it in some areas, you know, near Hill City, Kansas.  

But I was meeting with this grower and he said this is the first time he's had two failed crop seasons back to back in his whole farming career. And he's like 50 years old. He had just never seen that before.  

We get lots of hail. So you know when we do get rain we get excited but also scared to flip a coin and it's going to be hail. A lot of our region was wiped out last year. In fact, about 40% of our research trials we just had to give up on because it was pummeled to the ground.  

High winds… 70 mile an hour wind gusts, that happens out here, and then over 100 degree temperatures quite frequently throughout the summer. You'll get that for like two weeks.  

And then you talk about water availability. We have a lot of dry land acres. And then on our irrigated acres there's, in a lot of our area, water allocations. So for example, you have a five year window where you're allowed 15 inches per year. Some areas will let you carry over inches to the next year. Some areas won't.  

We’ve got our work cut out for us, but I feel like that's what make the people that I work was so great because they found ways to overcome all those obstacles and still grow some really great crops. And we see some of those nitrogen use efficiency scores or, you know, water use efficiency scores really, really competitive compared to other regions in the U.S. 

Dusty Weis 

I was going to say, Christine, with all those challenges that you outlined there, it sounds like as a grower in the Northern High Plains, you're expending so much effort just trying to survive, just trying to get something to grow.  

You spend a lot of your time trying to get as many local research plots going as possible in order to build grower trust in and openness to these sustainability products and practices. 

Given what these growers are facing, how are those efforts—trying to get them to focus on something that's not just surviving—how have those efforts been received, and what have been your big takeaways over the last five years here? 

Christine Bielski 

You're exactly right. I feel like in the past it has often times been that survival mindset. And in the last 6 to 10 years, maybe we’re starting to shift to one that focuses on optimizing everything we have, and maybe with a more positive ring to it, because we are seeing more successes.  

So it's really exciting to be in the business right now, because all these new tools and ways of thinking about farming, taking a more systems approach versus “I'm going to do the same thing I did last year because that's what dad did. That's what grandpa did.” And not taking that quantitative approach to it.  

So now we are focusing on everything we do with the research and sustainability stuff and precision ag bringing in programs there, whether it be variable rate prescriptions, population or fertility, whether it be bringing in, you know, drone imagery.  

And we talk about sustainability programs, but really everything we do is all just about increasing efficiency. The research that we do focuses on increasing efficiency in water use, fertilizer applications, hybrids, selection. Maybe we can find a hybrid that doesn't require as much water as another hybrid.  

Maybe it's splitting your fertilizer applications instead of dumping it all up front or applying it in the fall. Just being smarter with all of our inputs. We're just taking that quantitative approach or tying all these decisions and then measuring the impact of those decisions, whether it be for SAP testing or soil biology testing, and then ultimately yield at the end of the year. 

So we're taking a more quantitative approach to farming, and it seems to be paying off. And then making sure that we're applying the right products in the right places. And that takes an understanding of the soil—chemical, physical properties of the soil, but also the biology, too. So we're starting to dive down that side of things. And, you know, maybe you cut down on commodity fertilizer, but you add a carbon based product to it, and it increases the efficiency enough, it’s a wash economically. 

But you're getting more out of the yields. So the ROI is up.  

Sally Flis  

As we've seen, that growth from 12,000 or so acres enrolled in 2021 to over 100,000 acres enrolled in 2023. How is that conversation and how is the interest from grower customers changed over that timeline as you get out in the field to interact with growers around the products and services and programs?  

Christine Bielski 

It hasn't changed a whole lot other than having a neighbor that is signed up for one of the programs has helped other people feel more comfortable signing up for a program, and then just having our team have a couple years of experience under their belt helps in those conversations, because we can tell them exactly what they're going to be signing up for. 

Dusty Weis 

And that old standard of show me, don't tell me. And I want to see what this is doing before I put it on my own field. Certainly. What about the financial incentives? Because certainly that was something very breakthrough when it was rolled out a few years back by Nutrien Ag Solutions. But what have we learned about financially incentivizing these sustainability practices? 

Christine Bielski 

Well, that was one thing that changed from ‘21 to ‘23. The dollar sign attached to the program. In my experience, I found that if you can increase the incentive, I mean, it makes sense more people are going to be more willing to sign up for the program.  

Part of that financial aspect is, you know, where the markets are. If the value of the commodity is pretty high, you might have a harder time signing up growers versus if it's lower, they might be more willing to sign up. And I think we've seen that.  

And then it also helps that some of the programs that we offer to growers are tied to specific proprietary products that we sell and have proven to increase efficiency in yield. And so that really helps. Like, all right. Well, this is a win-win. It might be the last nudge they need to start using one of those products, because they then get a couple dollars or however many dollars back to help pay for that. And then they also get that increased ROI at the end of year. 

Dusty Weis 

Right. It makes sense. And I would imagine that some of the folks who we talked to a few years back in New Orleans had come into the program because they were actually just really interested in seeing what happened. They weren't as concerned with the financial incentives. I would imagine that it has opened the door and sort of broadened the tent, brought more people in who maybe aren't as much early adopters. 

So definitely want to dig down into that a little bit more as we continue the conversation. It's certainly been great to catch up and hear what's changed over the past few years, but coming up after the break, we want to turn our focus forward a little bit and talk about what the future holds for you, for the Northern High Plains Division and for sustainability in general. 

That's coming up in a moment here on the FARMSMART Podcast. 

Dusty Weis 

This is the FARMSMART Podcast presented by Nutrien Ag Solutions.  

I'm Dusty Weis, along with Sally Flis, and we're talking today with Christine Bielski, Northern High Plains Division Research and Sustainability Manager at Nutrien Ag Solutions.  

And Christine, in the work that you do, you are out there to collect data and use those data to answer big questions. But what are the big unanswered questions that you're hoping to tackle next? 

Christine Bielski 

I would say top of the list for us is focused around water efficiency. I know when I was on the podcast a couple of years ago, we talked about our water pro trials. We're still doing those. We are still learning every single year how to better irrigate, and we find that most people are so overwatering.  

And, you know, the biggest thing that I feel like people don't often consider is, every farming input decision that you make under a pivot assumes that you have your irrigation strategy spot on. 

And we're finding it's time to recalibrate the irrigation management with tools like soil water probes and autonomous pivot units, and actual equipment that will measure the water movement throughout the soil profile and compare that to plant use, and also pick up on nutrient movement throughout the soil profile. And then with that, how each hybrid actually responds differently in different conditions. 

So we kind of open up a Pandora's box where we found different brands of hybrids, you know, corn hybrids specifically we have the most information on. They’ll respond differently to different irrigation management systems.  

So we're trying to recalibrate the irrigation management. We found a lot of opportunities to cut back on how much water we can apply. You know, we have a trial result coming back from ‘24 that we were able to cut six inches from a grower’s irrigation plan for that year. We were at like 13 inches applied and they were at 19. And this was just splitting a pivot in half. And the yields were within two bushels of each other. So you talk about increased efficiency and knowing that water is only going to get harder and harder to come by, and these restrictions and allocations are only going to become heavier. That's definitely top of the list for us.  

Other things… continuing to test out new products that are coming down the pipeline, biological products specifically, we're doing a lot of testing there.  

And then continuing just to find ways to increase growers efficiency, whether that be by doing some check strips and prescription maps where we change the rate of the fertilizer or population, and then at the end of the year, see, okay, are we spot on with where we need to be with those rates? Are there opportunities where we can get the same yield or ROI but cut back on some of our inputs? And, you know, maybe it's not a total cutback on inputs, but it's reallocating that financial input into maybe a micronutrient that you hadn't been able to address before.  

So just taking that systems approach to farming and using technology and data to back up the decisions, we're just continuing to do that. 

Sally Flis 

So, Christine, that's a long list to go after in the 2025 cropping season. But I think the biggest theme I hear there, and that you mentioned in the first half of the podcast, is good agronomy data and insights. And so as you guys work with growers out in the field, what are the pieces that we've been able to bring to them through that report they get from Field to Market, or through the way you guys are analyzing the data that we're collecting in Agrible, that the growers are seeing a lot of value in, that they maybe weren't seeing a metric about something like that in the past.  

Christine Bielski 

Sure. So I'd say one of the coolest parts of that sustainability report is that benchmarking. Growers involved with these programs can see how their nitrogen use efficiency or emissions or irrigation use, how that compares to their neighbors and others in the program. 

That's been kind of like a nice pat on the back for most of our guys. The guys in these programs are usually doing such a good job.  

There's been a couple instances where the Agrible platform allowed a grower to take their notebook recordings of their farming practices and make them digital for free, and just helping them take all that information and put it in one spot. 

So that's been cool to see. Yeah, those are the two biggest benefits of that digital piece. With the sustainability programs, I can see. 

Dusty Weis 

Well, Christine, I could imagine that the growers always appreciate a visit from you as well. Certainly you bring a lot of expertise to the table. We appreciate your taking the time to catch up with us and fill us in on all the latest from the Northern High Plains Division. 

And congratulations once again on being named Trusted Adviser of the Year by Field to Market. Really exciting stuff there.  

Christine Bielski, Northern High Plains Division Research and Sustainability Manager at Nutrien Ag Solutions, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the FARMSMART Podcast. 

Dusty Weis 

That is going to conclude this episode of The FARMSMART Podcast. New episodes arrive every month, so make sure you subscribe to The FARMSMART Podcast in your favorite app and visit nutrienagsolutions.com/FARMSMART to learn more.  

The FARMSMART Podcast is brought to you by Nutrien Ag Solutions, with editing by Emily Kaysinger. 

The FARMSMART Podcast is produced by Podcamp Media, branded podcast production for businesses. podcampmedia.com.  

I’m Dusty Weis. For Nutrien Ag Solutions, thanks for listening.