A lot of that debt comes from two sources, really, but primarily inputs. I mentioned our 2019 report entitled “Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis”. There's a really illustrative graph in there showing where the difference is between farm net income and farm revenues. It's primarily coming out of farm input costs. That generally tends to come out to approximately 95% of every food dollar. We're taking home about 5¢ or 6¢ out of every food dollar spent, on average, as farmers. The other big driver of prices is land. The price of farmland is growing by leaps and bounds. It has gone up massively in the last 10 years especially.
If we can find ways to incentivize farmers to reduce our input costs and maintain yields to the point where we can continue feeding our communities and driving our export of agriculture, but reducing especially our nitrogen fertilizer usage even by small percentages, it will have a big impact. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers especially produce the three main greenhouse gases—at creation and use and runoff and off-gassing—throughout the system. That's a big one.
If we can incentivize things like cover cropping and other practices that will reduce the need for those inputs, we can do better for farmers' bottom lines and we can do a lot better for the environment. We can continue to do our part to help solve this climate crisis.