This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Agriculture’s wicked problems with Kim Stackhouse-Lawson.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: AgNext is really unique because we bring together diverse teams to solve wicked challenges.
Jocelyn Hittle: Hello and welcome to CSU Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University’s Spur campus in Denver, Colorado.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Thinking about, what we like to call, unintended consequences and those unintended consequences really drive the solutions to wicked problems.
Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health, and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, Associate Vice Chancellor of the CSU Spur Campus, and I’m joined today by Dr. Kim Stackhouse-Lawson. Dr. Stackhouse-Lawson is a Professor of Animal Science, and Director of AgNext at CSU. CSU AgNext was launched to find solutions to feed 12.3 billion people by 2100 by focusing on innovation and sustainable solutions in agriculture. Prior to her time at CSU, Kim was the Director of Sustainability for JBS USA, where she was responsible for coordinating the North American Sustainability Program. And prior to that, she was the Executive Director of Global Sustainability at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Kim received her PhD in Animal Science from the University of California, Davis, and was a postdoc fellow at Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine Beef Cattle Institute. Welcome, Dr. Stackhouse-Lawson.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Thanks for having me.
Jocelyn Hittle: So your bio describes a little bit of your path, and I’m excited to dive in on how you got where you are. But let’s start with AgNext, and as I mentioned, it’s focused on sustainability, particularly sustainability in animal agriculture. But can you break that down a little bit? What does that mean? What is AgNext?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Sure. So AgNext is a relatively new initiative at CSU and it uniquely sits between the College of Agricultural Sciences and the College of VetMed and Biomedical Sciences. And so it sort of brings food and health together in a really unique way to solve some of the industry, so the animal agricultural industry’s, wicked problems, and that’s really why we were created. There was a huge need for increased partnership between academia and industry to solve questions that industry couldn’t solve by themselves. And so what we are focused on today predominantly is greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture. But our team is uniquely positioned to also answer questions about more health-related things like antibiotic resistance, for example.
And so I joke that we are always the team that addresses the issues that are sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes politically polarizing, and oftentimes don’t have a right answer because something that we might study may impact something else. So for example, if you’re trying to reduce antibiotic use in animal agriculture, you could in fact increase animal health issues or animal welfare concerns. And so our research really looks at multiple angles of the entire system to try to not find the right answer, because there likely isn’t one, but actually a better answer.
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. So can we take a step back and you’ve mentioned animal agriculture. Can you say a little bit more about what that encompasses?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s a great question. So I think the best way to describe what animal agriculture is, is to think about all of the ways that animals touch our lives and then animal agriculture is actually the production of that. So if you think about it’s 10:45 in the morning, I don’t know when the podcast will air, but let’s, everybody just start from 10:45 in the morning and think backwards about what you’ve done this morning. So the first thing I do in the morning is I have to get a cup of coffee. I like milk in my coffee, the milk, of course, is coming from animal agriculture. And then the next thing I did was make my kids breakfast and I made them biscuits and gravy this morning and it was sausage gravy. And so the sausage comes from a pig, of course, and then the milk that goes into the gravy comes from a cow, and then the butter that goes into the biscuits comes from a cow as well.
And then I was getting, we have research going on at the moment right now, so I then came to work and we weighed and gave vaccinations to our research cattle. So to do that, I put on my boots, which are made from leather, and I walked out the door to, of course, actually do what I do, which is research animal agriculture. But if we all think about the ways in which animals touch our lives, it’s in almost every aspect. I also put on makeup, there’s animal products in makeup as well. And so animal agriculture is the productions of those things for people. And animal agriculture, Jocelyn, it’s so fun because you get to work with the animals and they’re incredible, but also it’s a field where technology is really exploding.
And so the opportunity for jobs in the animal agriculture space right now is just incredible. I mean, we’re now able to put collars on cows and move them from our phones. And so, I mean, from computer analytics to actually stepping on a horse every day, the diversity of profession is just incredibly vast in animal agriculture, and they do a lot of really important things for us.
Jocelyn Hittle: So I’d love to come back to some of the career opportunities within the animal agriculture space, but say more about putting collars on cows and moving them from your phone.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Oh, yeah. So that’s really new innovation, not that new. I mean, we’ve been working on this in the animal agriculture field, not me personally, I don’t have a ton of experience, but the animal agriculture field has been working on this for four or five years now. So it’s the same sort of theory as an electric fence for your dog. The dog wears the collar and you now, of course, can put polygons through phone with GPS for the Halo dog collars and those kinds of things and move their fence as you go on a walk or something like that. It’s the same exact concept for cattle. And so it’s basically we, it’s called virtual fence or virtual herding, and it allows us to make movements of animals across the landscape without actually building fence. And it’s incredible and it’s controlled from your phone. And it is one of the, it’s being adopted very quickly right now by producers, actually, who are really interested in doing a better job of managing the landscape with that technology.
And so we can do things like fence out riparian areas. We can do things like move cattle to higher quality forages at different times of the year. We can manage an operation for bird habitat in a different way. So instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars fencing out particular habitat where a bird may be nesting only two months of the year, now you can just drop a polygon and if you have the technology on your cow, they’ll stay out of that bird habitat. And so it’s really an incredible way to optimize our landscapes for ecosystem services. And so those are things like fresh water and wildlife habitat and soil carbon sequestration, and all the wonderful things that our landscapes provide us. And then to also do a better job managing the food system that’s on that particular landscape. You can also, if you’re like maybe you want to graze, you have a area of your ranch or a producer has an area of his or her ranch that is overgrown with brush, and maybe it’s a fire hazard for example, they can actually work on concentrating the cattle in those particular locations.
And we know cattle can, and sheep too, there’s also technology for sheep, can reduce some of that fire load either by consumption or even by trampling, actually confining them in an area enough that they can trample some of those brush type species down and get them more under control, and then we can manage that differently for fire. So that technology is, it’s really exciting and I think it’s really exciting to think about opportunities in that space. Like we need collars that will last, their batteries to last up to a year, they need to be light enough for an animal to wear, they need to be able to expand as the animal grows. There are big questions around how to do these sorts of things. And it takes really diverse perspective to do that, not just from how and where you grew up, but engineers are involved, computer programmers are involved, GIS specialists are involved, animal scientists are involved, range scientists are involved, ecologists are involved, wildlife specialists are involved. And that’s just one example, but where lots of different interests can come together to create something that’s really exciting.
Jocelyn Hittle: So that’s a great example. And I want to come back to a term you used, wicked problems, but let’s talk a little bit about what does that term mean? People may have heard it or not, and specifically how does it apply in the research work you’re doing?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Yeah, absolutely. So I think when we think about a wicked problem, the first thing I start with is that there’s likely not a right answer. There’s not a silver bullet approach. And oftentimes it may be silver buckshot. It may be that, especially in cattle production, if we think about all of the different locations in which those animals are raised, the region of the world, the culture, people raise animals. So there’s huge cultural implications. There’s incredible social implications to those animals. There’s different breeds of cattle. An animal that is in Florida has very different grass to eat than an animal that is in Montana. They have very different challenges that they face, both the people that manage them and the animals that are there. And so oftentimes, first thing, wicked problems do not have a right answer. Wicked problems also may have multiple answers to get to a similar outcome.
And it may be that one menu option, I like to call them menu options, will work for one individual, but it wouldn’t work for another. And so let’s go back to the cattle that are raised in Florida and Montana. So something that we may discover to solve a wicked problem may work for the rancher in Florida, and in Montana, that same solution may cause bigger problems. And then the other thing that’s unique about wicked challenges is that oftentimes if you pull the lever, let’s say we’ve come up with a solution and we’re going to pull the lever, that oftentimes that lever doesn’t just impact the thing we’re trying to solve, but it impacts other things. And so when we think about those wicked challenges or wicked problems, the first thing we want to do is put diverse teams together. And that’s diversity in perspective. It’s diversity in expertise.
It’s diversity in where you’re from, what you look like, who you are, because more diverse teams are more innovative. And part of that innovation is actually thinking about, what we like to call, unintended consequences. And those unintended consequences really drive the solutions to wicked problems. And so teams that love wicked problems are very comfortable with never having a right answer, just having a better one. And I think that that’s something that we see in a lot of young people that they’re actually really interested in those hard questions. And teams that work on those have to have incredible respect for each other and your lived experience, and they have to have incredible respect and appreciation for this system. So the rancher in Montana and the rancher in Florida, we have to appreciate them and really value their perspective and their lived experience. But they’re really fun problems to work on, and being a part of a team that works on them is really rewarding.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great. So let’s zoom out a little bit on what some of the wicked problems are within animal agriculture. You mentioned greenhouse gases as being something that you’re really focused on, so I definitely want to hit on that, but I could imagine some impacts on the ecosystem where the cattle are grazing are a piece of that. So it’s impacts on other wildlife, impacts on streams, rivers, water bodies, those sorts of things. What are some of the other wicked problems or pieces of sustainability in animal ag that might be a bit surprising for people?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: So actually, we really worry, and I would say this is probably the most challenging problem that animal agriculture faces, but the average age of a producer who produces food from animals is 65 to 70. And we are seeing a tremendous out-migration of people from rural communities. And those rural, it’s happening for a variety of reasons, and those rural communities are quite under-resourced from a social perspective. And so oftentimes they may not have access to broadband internet. There’s a wonderful ranching family in Southern Colorado, and they were fortunate enough that their daughter, who’s my age, came back and wanted to continue her family’s sixth generation legacy, actually, raising cattle. And she drives her three children to school an hour one way.
Jocelyn Hittle: Wow.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: And those kids go to school with just 30 other kids. And they are a very important contributor to the animal agriculture industry. They have a lot of cows. They do a phenomenal job. Not only are they environmental stewardship winners, they’re Leopold environmental stewardship winners for the work that they’ve done with big horn sheep, actually, on their ranch. And that’s a huge challenge, is how do we really support the continuation of farming and ranching because our food systems depend upon it. And those rural communities are really important. And so our ability to connect with them and to things like Spark, for example, how can we help them connect virtually or how could we help them connect to students in Denver and how could we connect students with Denver to them? I mean, those things are really important. And I’m not sure actually that there’s a concerted effort that is being placed on that. And our group does not yet, we have not yet gone down that avenue to try to help that major wicked problem, but it’s a really important one in the animal agriculture space.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, and not only to animal ag, but ag in general.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Absolutely.
Jocelyn Hittle: Food systems in general. So that is part of what Spur’s mission is, is to inspire the next generation to reengage in the food system in whatever way makes the most sense to them from whatever background they’re bringing into this. And you made a really good point about the diversity of teams. And so there is lots of different opportunities for people with different interests and backgrounds and expertise to contribute to solving these really complicated problems, because we do need those diverse teams to be bringing their different creative approaches all together in order to solve these wicked problems. One of which, I think maybe the wicked problem that is most on people’s minds these days is climate and greenhouse gas emission. So maybe we can go back to that a little bit. I know it’s a particular area of interest for you and your team. So let’s talk a little bit about greenhouse gas emissions in animal ag, and what you’re seeing, where you see the most hope for progress when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And what in particular you all are researching?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Yeah, absolutely. I’d love to. So animal agriculture contributes just around 4% of greenhouse gas emissions, manmade greenhouse gas emissions to the US, the total US production of those emissions. And the three greenhouse gases that come from animal agriculture are CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide. Methane is the one that we worry the most about because if you think about total manmade methane from the US, animal agriculture or enteric fermentation, contributes about 30%. So animals produce methane through their normal biological processes. So they have one stomach, and that one stomach has four compartments, but the compartment that really generates their energy and contributes the methane is called the rumen, and that rumen contains thousands of microorganisms. So when animals eat hay or grass or grain, the microbes actually digest that in the rumen, and then the nutrients basically go across into the blood and through the other digestive processes of the animal, which are stomach’s more like ours.
During that microbial breakdown of food stuffs, methane is produced. There’s methanogens that are in the rumen. So what’s really interesting is that for the same reasons that ruminants are so powerful, they can upcycle, we talk about upcycling, so they can graze grass that nothing else uses and turn it into food for us and other goods, leather and all kinds of really good things, that same biological function that allows them to do that is exactly what produces the methane. So I always start with, we never want to get to zero methane from a cow because if we do, she’s not well, right? She can’t function without methanogens. She needs them in her natural processes, but we do think we can reduce them. And so we’re exploring a number of ways to reduce methane from animals. Feed additives are one thing that work, so we can feed animals different things and shift that microbial population so that there’s fewer methanogens.
We also see pretty interesting individual variation between animals, and so we actually think we might be able to genetically select for lower methane producing animals. And then the other thing we might be able to do is to really manage around it. So how could we, for example with the collars, get animals to higher quality forage where we know that methane is reduced, it’s reduced on higher quality forage at different times of the year. And are there management strategies that we can implement to really optimize that? So one of the things we have up in Fort Collins is the Agriculture Research, Development, and Education Center. And within ARDEC, we have built the largest facility in the country to measure greenhouse gas emissions from beef cattle. So we can measure up to 300 head at one time in confinement, so in more of a feedlot setting.
And in that setting, we do a lot of really controlled feed additive work. And then we can also measure animals on grazing. And in those systems, we tend to approach it more from a management perspective, so how might we optimize grazing to reduce methane and other greenhouse gas emissions from the system? But it’s a really exciting field. It’s a really hard field. It’s one of those wicked challenges because if we reduce methane, we can cause lots of other unintended problems for the animal and for the health and wellbeing of the animal. And then there’s also some really unique wins. So how might we be able to potentially even increase animal health and reduce methane? So it’s exciting, it’s fun. We have great participation from our industry partners, and we really enjoy the work.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s great. So obviously you and your team are passionate about solving these complicated problems where you have trade-offs, potentially. It’d be nice to have everything, have a win-win solution, but of course it’s not-
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: It really would be, yes.
Jocelyn Hittle: Wouldn’t it? In all facets, but of course that’s not always possible. So greenhouse gas emissions is one area of research. What else are you studying? What’s got you excited? What gets you out of bed?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: So my area of expertise is actually greenhouse gases. So my specific research, I actually study greenhouse gas emissions from grazing systems. And so I love doing that. Probably what gets me out of bed in the morning is the incredible team that we have here. So AgNext is really unique because we bring together diverse teams to solve wicked challenges, and those diverse teams are spread out across CSU’s campus. So we have economists, we have two economists, for example, who think about costs and market creation like carbon markets, for example, cost of implementation, for example, of greenhouse gas emissions or social implications of implementing precision technology like the collars. So one of the questions around precision tech is does it further marginalize rural communities by removing jobs? So do we actually further exasperate the problem in rural communities as technology enters? And so we have team members that look at those kind of questions.
We have team members who are stress physiologists, so they think about the impact of how we raise animals, on the animal stress or the impact of a changing climate. There’s actually a lot of work happening as the climate gets hotter and more unpredictable, what’s happening to the animal and their stress load and how is that impacting other things? Microbiome, methane emissions, animal health, their antibiotic use, are vaccines still working in the same way that they should be? Or are these immune systems essentially creating new challenges? And so we have an incredible team of people that are really looking at sustainability through multiple lenses of health, of social dynamics and social structure, of carbon markets and incentives, and why and why not producers adopt things, of course greenhouse gas emissions, ecology, ecosystem services, wildlife habitat.
And so that diverse team and their perspectives is what gets me up in the morning. The other thing that we are so lucky is that because that team provides such incredible value to our animal agriculture producer partners, our relationships are second to none. They actually call us when they have a question that they can’t figure out. And to watch my team, our team, the CSU team interact with those producers and to help them solve problems in real time in their operations and truly contribute to getting food on the table for people everywhere, it’s really special and it’s a really rewarding field of work.
Jocelyn Hittle: So as Director of AgNext, what does a day in the life look like for you then? You have this team, you have corporate partnerships, you have industry partnerships, you’re doing research. What does that look like? How does it all come together?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: So I can just talk a little bit about this week because it’s a good example. So we started on Monday hosting Rabobank’s regional directors for their rural business. And so that’s Rabo AgriFinance, so they’re a very large financial institution that lends a lot in the agricultural space. And so we had 20 people from every single country, which was kind of fun, except Antarctica, here looking at our research and talking about ways in which the finance industry can help on sustainability, and what kind of data they should be asking from their partners, and how we might actually be able to encourage adoption either through reduction of interest rates, for example, in ag loans and et cetera. From there, I traveled to Clay Center, Nebraska, to meet with USDA-ARS at the Meat Animal Research Center to ensure that our teams are collaborating and not duplicating work.
So one of the things, as you know, that happens in research in academia is that people can get quite siloed and really be thinking about the one thing that they’re good at. And so as leaders, we need to make sure that we’re not duplicating efforts, that we’re doing a really good job connecting diverse teams across multiple institutions, not just universities, but government research agencies as well. And then they don’t have any kind of engagement or outreach, but we do. So we can take a lot of their learnings and help extend it to our producer partners to make sure that they have the latest and greatest information that’s happening in the field of research. I spent two days doing that, drove back, arrived back in Fort Collins this morning. And we are starting a new research project. And so this morning we started at 6:00 AM weighing and vaccinating and warming about 200 head of steers that are coming so that we can measure greenhouse gas emissions from them.
And I’ll finished the day doing that. We’ll do that until one. We’re going to host another group out here this afternoon. We do a lot of engagement and a lot of outreach. And then I’ll finish the day with a few meetings with my team team on other research projects we have going on this summer, and hopefully get a few emails answered. And then I’ll head home and be a mom. So it’s a new thing every day, but as the director, my job is really to clear the path for my team, make sure we’re collaborating with the right diverse teams that are interested in the same things we’re interested in, and then we’re available for our stakeholders.
Jocelyn Hittle: One of the things I really appreciate about what you just described is this connection with others. So not only within CSU do you have a team that’s quite diverse and coming from different disciplines, but also you’re connecting with other institutions and other industry partners. And so there’s this real transparency, openness, connection. And I think that’s not maybe what people think of or maybe what comes to mind first when they think about research in academia. So I do think that’s the direction it’s tending to move in, but it’s great to see this particular example and how energizing it is, and how with wicked problems, you really kind of don’t have a choice in some ways to collaborate. There’s no other way to untie the knot. So let’s talk a little bit about how you got where you are. We’ll have a little bit of a walk down memory lane, I suppose, for you. So to walk us backward a little bit, when did your interest in this career path start? Were there some moments or people who were critical in leading you to where you are now?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Yeah, so I’ll start at the beginning. I wasn’t an ag kid. So I was nine years old, and my parents are both foresters, so they’re involved in natural resources. And we lived on five acres because my mom loved horses and I loved horses, but we weren’t involved in animal agriculture per se. And we went to our county fair and I fell in love with a sheep. And I told my mom I wanted to do 4-H.
Jocelyn Hittle: And where was this, Kim?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: In Northern California, in Shasta County, in Redding, California. And she let me, and that was a mistake on her part because by the time I was in fourth grade, I had 50 ewes on our five acres and we had to move.
Jocelyn Hittle: Wow.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: And so my parents-
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s quite an expansion, yes.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Yes. My parents just never, I guess, told me, no. I don’t know.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s very kind of them.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: No, sorry, the lights are going up. So we had 50 ewes and then they bought 460 acres of trees. So we actually bought after a mega forest fire, and we replanted that whole 460 acres with trees. And then we used my sheep to graze because we weren’t big enough to buy chemicals and pesticides and stuff. But my parents knew what they were doing clearly because they’re foresters. And so we sort of meshed agriculture and natural resources together because I liked the sheep. So by the time I graduated from high school, my brother, who also loves animals, and I had 300 ewes and we had 25 cows. My parents only have 15 of those ewes left. I loved animals and I loved the interaction between the environment and them. And I saw it work, right? Yeah, it was special to me. And so it’s what I wanted to do.
So I went to Davis. I had the opportunity to go to Davis. UC, Davis was a phenomenal school. And I was so lucky because I grew up with sheep, I got to live in the sheep unit at Davis, so I didn’t have to pay any rent. So it’s free for students to live at Davis, but you take care of the research flock. And so I had 400 ewes there. There were three students to live there at one time, and it was my job to feed them and lamb them out and take care of them, and then run research projects, not run the project, but feed the animals on the research projects and things for the scientists.
And so I learned I loved sheep and research. And then I lived in the cow barn for a little while at Davis too. And I learned I loved cows and cow research. And then I was a senior fourth year undergraduate at Davis when San Francisco had their first Meatless Monday, and there was an opportunity to study greenhouse gases from agriculture to answer a big wicked problem. And it felt right, so I did it. I guess the rest is history. So I guess, I’m a 4-H success story.
Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely, you absolutely are.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Yeah. It’s really special. And animal agriculture, the people, I’m not, still, right? I’m not from ag. I didn’t grow up in a family with this wonderful history. We’ve created some really cool things as a family, and my brother and I were very successful with our show sheep and other things. But this industry has, they’ve just kind of supported me and welcomed me, and welcomed a different perspective. I mean, I’m a woman from California and I study greenhouse gases and they’ve never been anti-me, they’ve always just welcomed me. And there’s not a lot of women in animal agriculture, but doors were presented to me and opened for me by a lot of men. And I’m very thankful that they could see potential even if it didn’t look like then. And now we see so many more women joining the team. We have five graduate students, they’re all women. Our team is predominantly men, but there’s a few of us that are women. And it’s exciting to see our young graduate students absolutely excel.
Jocelyn Hittle: Well, and it seems to me that the work that you all are doing as a team and what you have experienced throughout your career is maybe not what people would expect, but you have been welcomed. The ideas that you all are researching obviously have value for the private sector because they are collaborating with you. Let’s talk a little bit about, so you came up through the private sector a little bit after your graduate work. Talk a little bit about your work at JBS, which is a large meat processing pack, meat packing company, what your work around sustainability there was like and how it led you to the next thing?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Yeah. So at JBS I coordinated the sustainability program for the company outside of Brazil. So that included the chicken and pork and beef and then all the other businesses. But those are the three big ones for North America. So there’s business of course in Canada and Mexico in addition to the US. And then I coordinated it for the European business, and that’s a chicken and pork business. And then I coordinated it for Australia and New Zealand as well. I started there in 2016, I believe, and it was before they had a corporate sustainability program. Now today, they have quite a robust sustainability program, as do most companies. And so that’s what I did. I sort of took my technical background of science and I learned something very new. And so for people who are thinking about jobs too, I mean, you can be a technical person and study greenhouse gas emissions and really understand the nuances of why they’re produced in a food system.
Doesn’t matter. We study cattle, but it could be anything. Or there’s incredible opportunities actually on the manufacturing side or the processing side. And it’s not just meat companies. I mean, I went to work for a meat company, but companies like Nestle or Danone or Unilever, they all have really incredible and robust sustainability programs. And it’s a different approach. So they’ll report things very transparently in their annual sustainability reports. They’ll report things according to Global Reporting Initiative or the Carbon Disclosure Program or SASB. So there’s all these different standards. They set goals, they report goals, and they’re not just greenhouse gases, it’s dependent upon things like team member health and wellbeing or community support or whatever is impactful or important to that company. And so-
Jocelyn Hittle: Energy, water use.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Absolutely, yes.
Jocelyn Hittle: There’s a ton of different metrics. Yep.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: So fun, yeah. And so that’s what I did at JBS. I coordinated that. One of the projects there, now that you mention it around water use that I’m most proud of, is that a team of us, they’re a huge team of us, I was just one member, worked on a food safety intervention in partnership with a water savings project. And essentially we were able to maintain the same food safety standards. So water is really important in food safety, and it’s, of course, food safety is an incredibly important part of sustainability clearly. But food safety interventions use a lot of water. And so we were able to innovate a new food safety intervention that still maintained the same food safety standards. USDA was also involved in this project, which was really neat. And we saved a million gallons of water a day.
Jocelyn Hittle: Wow. That’s a striking number. Wow.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: It was incredible. And then it worked. And so we did it across the 12 JBS USA beef plants, and then we did it in the pork plants. And I don’t remember how much total, like millions of gallons we saved, but JBS blew their water savings goal of 10% in five years. We hit it in year two. I think it was incredible what we were able to do. And so those corporate sustainability programs have, so there’s so much potential for young people to think about that as an opportunity and to go into that. And it’s a real science, Jocelyn, like it is so fun to do. So I do much less of that now. I still help a couple companies, and I have a couple graduate students who actually want to be chief sustainability officers someday, so I try to bring that knowledge to them in addition to helping them, teaching them all the technical things. But the corporate sustainability space is, it’s so fun and there’s so much opportunity in food.
Jocelyn Hittle: So we are out of time. So I have just two quick questions for you. The first one is, where can people find more information about your work specifically? Are there website, social media?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: We do. We have a website. It’s agnext.colostate, or I’m sorry, that’s our email, agnext.colostate.edu. And then our website is agnext.colostate.edu.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: And our team includes PR and communications professionals who do incredible work. So every month there’s a new theme. So you can learn on just a three-minute video and then a 500-word blog, what the theme is, what we’re doing, what kind of research we have on the website. We’re also active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. And the same team does a phenomenal job connecting through those channels, and we would love to engage with everybody.
Jocelyn Hittle: Great. We’ll link to all of your resources in the show notes and encourage people to go and watch all of the different themes and subjects that are coming through. It’s a great way to learn a little bit more about your work.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Absolutely.
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Thank you.
Jocelyn Hittle: Then last but not least, our Spur of the Moment question. So you indicated that your story of how you got into animal ag is a bit, it’s a bit accidental, a bit circumstantial, a bit fortuitous. What did you want to be? What was the other career?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Oh, at first I wanted be a vet.
Jocelyn Hittle: You wanted to be a vet.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Yeah.
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. So it’s not that far.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: I wanted to be a vet, of course.
Jocelyn Hittle: It’s not that different.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Of course. Yes.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: I love animals. And then I actually, when I got accepted into Davis, I realized I could make a bigger impact being a scientist. And it’s because I got to live in the sheep barn. And it’s because I got to see these researchers ask questions in real life on real animals. And I saw animals lives get better because of research. And if we can make animals lives better because of research, maybe veterinarians have less caseloads. And then we can really start to move the needle forward for what better lives look like for animals. And that’s still, yeah, I think that’s still probably huge for me in terms of why I do what I do. But yeah, I wanted to be a vet when I was nine.
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. And I have a second Spur of the Moment question for you, because you mentioned that you made your kids biscuits and gravy this morning?
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Oh, no, let me be perfectly clear. I made my kids biscuits and gravy on the weekend.
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: And then I reheated the biscuits and gravy.
Jocelyn Hittle: All right. Well, so my question for you then is in the kitchen, obviously you have some skills in the kitchen. Biscuits and gravy. I can’t make biscuits at altitude to save my life. So we should talk offline about how you manage.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Oh, it’s quick.
Jocelyn Hittle: Oh, okay.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: It’s surprisingly good too. Yes, it’s quick.
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. All right. Right. Well, thank you so much Dr. Stackhouse-Lawson. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you. I really, like I said, we’ll make sure our listeners know where to find more information about the excellent work you’re doing to advance the state-of-the art and to improve animal and people’s, animals’ lives and people’s lives. Appreciate it very much.
Kim Stackhouse-Lawson: Thanks for having us, Jocelyn.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, take care. The CSU Spur of the Moment podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson, and our theme music is by Ketsa. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.
