A Regenerative Agriculture Future for Cotton Growers - Part 1

Those of you that's the first time to join an AEA webinar, glad to have you. Welcome. Welcome to the AEA community and those that have been on a webinar before, welcome back and good to have you back. We are of course as always going to pack this time with amazing information, such powerful information that it is a crime that we are not charging people for it. But there you go, that's AEA in a nutshell. We love to do this stuff for free as much as we can to put really powerful, important, practical information into growers hands. So you all came here to hear other people, so I'm going to introduce them and get out the way. But just to give you a little practical outline of today, we're going to be hearing from in a moment, James Johnson, founding partner of W.R. johnson & Sons and current board chairman of the Con Incorporated and as well as of our own illustrious founder and chief vision officer John Kempf. And we're also going to have time at the end for some questions, answering the questions you have as well as we'll at the end make sure that we have some time to give you an idea of what's going on in part two of this webinar. So this is part one, Part two involving our exciting partnership with citizens of humanity and Kiss the Ground and the very future of regenerative cotton in this partnership. Hence the title of today's webinar, the Future of Regenerative Cotton. So with that I'm going to hand over to our very good friend James Johnson. Pleasure to have you back, James. Thanks for joining us today. Every time we get around you and get to hear what's going on, we get pretty excited to hear everything that's coming from you and your farm. So with that, thank you James. I'll hand it over to.

You. Hey Kish, thanks for that intro. I will make a little bit of a correction. I am the managing partner. I'm not the founding partner because there was three, there were three people ahead of me. So my, my great grandfather started this.

Operation. Good point, good.

Point. 105 years ago. So you know, we're talking about sustainable, you know, I, people ask me about my sustainability plan and I said, well, the fact that my family's been in this, in this area and been ranching and farming for over 100 years is I think the first key to being or to showing somebody that.

Sustainable.

Yeah. So cotton is kind of interesting. It's an interesting crop for me. My family started growing cotton back in the 50s. We built a cotton gin in the, in the 1970s with a couple of business partners operated that cotton gin up until the early 90s. And at that point we pretty well switched our operation out of, out of growing cotton and grains to growing mostly vegetables. So we became very vegetable.

Centric.

And there was a variety of cotton that came out in the early 2000s that was quite capable of making £2,000 of lint per acre and also was roundup ready. And that got us back into the cotton business. And more than anything, I got back into cotton because it fit. What was being asked at that time by most of the vegetable consumers was, you know, what are you doing to be sustainable? And so cotton fit really well because it was a very deep rooted crop. And so when we, when we would plant a vegetable crop, especially onions that might have an 18 inch root system and we could follow that with something that probably has a 36 inch tap root, we could go down and we could get any type of leftover fertilizer, fertility that had had leached below the capabilities of, of the onion roots. And then I became really passionate about growing cotton again and I started kind of, it was part of, I mean, it was just my history, it was just always part of my life when I was young. And you know, there's just something about growing cotton and I think most cotton growers can agree with that, that cotton is one crop that is, it is fun to grow, it's, it's fun to harvest and it's fun to sell when it has a price that we're, you know, capable of getting that's higher than today. We're back kind of where we were in the early 90s as far as an industry in that we're very close to break even, if not slightly losing money on just a contemporary conventional cotton crop, yields. You know, it's kind of one of those things that when we talk to other cotton farmers, we talk about, you know, where, where is our break even, where is our, you know, how do we maintain profitability in times of, of potentially less consumption like we're dealing with today. We've got worldwide problems, you know, wars in Ukraine, potential conflict in China and Taiwan. We've got all of these things. We've got an entire industry that's having to realign because of the Uyghur Forced labor act that's going on and all of this that's coming out of China. So we're really, this is an industry that's very much struggling and this is an industry that has a great story already. I think this is probably a very sustainable crop. It's been attacked in the past. And the more that I learn about how we've been historically growing cotton and how we could grow cotton, the more I start to understand that we can improve on this story. And it doesn't take a whole lot. It's not like we have to make leaps and bounds. I was asked, I did a Cotton Grower magazine webinar on Tuesday with David Miller at aea. David gave kind of a presentation or start off of that that was all slide deck thing. This today is not very much slide deck. In fact, I don't have any slides. I'm just going to talk. But David started off with a slide that was what is regenerative agriculture? And then I kind of threw in there and I'm actually going through and I'm trying to figure out right now because I've got customers that are asking me to get some kind of a third party audit done to show that I'm being sustainable. So I go out into the marketplace and try to figure out how do I deal with this. And so I know John has actually had a conversation with some of the same people that I have and there's some of their parts that I agree with, but there's some of their parts that I believe that they're completely missing. So if you look at, at what you're doing to be regenerative as only. Well, here is the six principles of soil health. Well, the six principles of soil health absolutely says nothing about the increasing there, the potential for increase in photosynthetic capacity of a plant from 15%, which we're probably closer to aligned to now with, with conventional cotton growing, how do we, if we raise that to 40%, how much does that improve the soil? But when we start looking at these metrics that some of these companies are trying to measure us by, it has absolutely nothing to do with anything like that. And so I get a bit frustrated because I know what I'm doing and I, you know, I, I get it. Yeah, there has to be or there's, there's a want in the, in the industry for some type of measurable accountability in that to show that we're doing what's right. But how do we bring things like that into the, into the fold? You know, when I started working with, it's, it's kind of funny and I, I gave this, this story in, in on my Tuesday webinar and I think it's, it's very important to say again, but in, in And I said it then. So I was a 19 or I'm, I'm going to coin that phrase. So in the, the 49ers in California was all about the gold rush. So I'm saying that the 19ers were all about the hemp rush. Hemp rush in 19. And so all of us that rushed to grow this crop, you know, I ended up partnering with some, some investors and ultimately some cannabis growers out of, out of Oregon. And the first thing that we talked about was, was soil fertility. But then there was a conversation with them as well that was based around potential soil contamination by pesticides. And we actually sent soil samples off and had it tested for soil contamination and everything came back, we were fine. We had no heavy metal contamination, we had no pesticide contamination. So everything of plant in this crop was a go. So we grew this crop. And as most people in the, the hemp growing world of 2019 were, we were very disappointed in, in the plant growth, we were very disappointed in, in the response to the crop. But we, we ended up having a fair crop. It wasn't great, but when we got to harvestable flower, we sent the flower off and had it tested and it tested clean of all pesticide residues, which was good. And so we end up harvesting the whole crop. And, and it's kind of a, another funny thing about that was that was my first adventure into any type of organic farming. So I wasn't certified organic, but it was the first time that I had used all products that were organic labeled. But at the end of the season, we still ended up having a little bit of, I would almost say they were cotton bollworms. I guess they're just figured, you know, it's, it's a worm. It's the same worm. It can be a corn. I think a corn ear worm or a cotton bollworm is the same. Same worm or same species. But we ended up with some worms in our flower. And our flower was very hard to come by. And when we finally harvested that and put it in to dry, and we were excited to be smelling or selling smokable flour that was supposed to be worth something really big. And we ended up with a fungus in the smokable flower that made it unsellable for smokable flour. So two things that was partly because of the, of the worm damage. And second was, you know, we really didn't have our fertility exactly where we need to be, knowing what we know now. So we ended up taking all of that crop and shucking it off of the plant and sending it for extraction. And the absolute devastating thing was when we got our oil content back, we expected that it was going to be high in thc, which it was because when you take that much product and you, you, you know, reduce it down, THC levels get up. So we knew that we were going to have to go for remediation to remove thc, but everybody in the industry was. But we ended up being pesticide hot. And what it but it basically ended up was when we homogenized, had we known what we know now, we would not have homogenized all 150 acres. But because we homogenized all of that, and because hemp is such a amazing bioremediator and extractor of all things in the soil, we had picked up this pesticide, it ended up being in our oil. And so we start going through the history of applications and this was a insecticide that was seed applied. So it was a seed treatment nine years in the past. And so it blew my mind that a, you know, I call the manufacturer and I'm like, how can this be? And there's like, there's no way it can be. This stuff has a half life of six months. And so I got really, really, really distraught that even when faced with the reality that this was still in my soil, the manufacturer was still denying the possibility that it was there. And I'm like, this, this is not even a pesticide that we use anymore. There's no way that it was in any way, you know, applied by the neighbors. It just wasn't something that was there. So this starts me down a path of how can we trust anything if, if we're told that it's a six month thing, how can we trust that? Because here we are nine years later. There's absolutely. So I was very distrustful of that. Another thing was, you know, I, I can remember the very first conversation that I had with David Miller here on my farm. And it just happened to work out that he was able to do a site visit. So 2019, Tom, it seems like yesterday, but it was, you know, three full crop seasons ago or four crop seasons ago now. So he ended up showing up here in the fall of 2019. And we spent a lot of time looking at my processes, looking at my applications, looking at my rates, looking at what we were doing. We were growing cover crops, we were applying compost. We were. But what he was really, really up alarmed about was, you know, we had a real bad crust on all of our soils. So we weren't getting good gas exchange. And this is the first time that I heard a lot of these terms that were used was the importance of gas exchange from the soil. So how can you get good gas exchange whenever everything is crusted as bad as it is? We went out, we looked at the compost. We actually had some samples that had been sent off to a lab looking at the. The compost and what it was, what we were doing. He looked at how we were terminating cover crops. And it was kind of interesting because it was the very first time that anybody looked at me dead in the eye and said, you know, you're doing a lot of things right, but you're doing them at the wrong time and you're doing them in the wrong quantity. And so a lot of, a lot of strange things like, well, you're growing, you're growing these cover crops, but you're letting these cover crops go all the way to like a lignified state. And so when you do that, they become hard to break down. And so we started changing our processes to, we're still growing a lot of COVID crops, but rather than taking them to a full on lignified state, maybe we take part of that cover crop and we strip till it over the top of the bed so that we can feed bacteria and then we try and leave things in the middle of the furrow as long as we can and let that lignified product become fungal food later in the year. Same thing. So this was, this was a different conversation that we had that was based around our, our compost application. We figured out at that point that we were just applying way too much potassium. And that again was the first time that it was kind of explained to me that a lot of the weeds and a lot of the issues that we were seeing was, was probably based more on what we were over applying than what we were failing to apply. And then, you know, February of 2020, you know, few weeks pre complete meltdown of, of the globe over, over Covid. And it took me to go into Lubbock and the first time that I ever got to sit down and listen to John Camp and John start telling, you know, I've got, I've got eight or nine pages of notes from that day. And I actually wrote a Big Year on the front of that notebook because I go back to it often and reread those notes and reread some of them, but that was the first time that I realized that a lot of what we were doing in conventional cotton growing, we were being our own Worst enemy. And you know, John, I think, had worked with Chad Wall for about a year at that time. So Chad had kind of gotten into this game before I had. So they had a, at least a year's worth of data and a year's worth of understanding. And apparently there had been some wonderful conversations about how, you know, historically cotton has grown with huge applications of nitrogen. And maybe it's not huge compared to other crops, but 100 units of nitrogen kind of tends to be the, the industry standard. And the other one, when you start looking at pix applications or growth regulator, it's not uncommon to find people that apply up to a gallon of picks. And I can remember John talking about how this is a bit like driving down the road in the car with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. And then I got really alarmed whenever John brought up the fact that each time that you apply growth regulator, you potentially stop. So you do a hard stop for. And I don't remember exact, the exact amount of time that John said, but you affect that plant for at least 10 days. Remember that? That was what he said was there was at least 10 days for that plant to fully recover from that. And so we sat, we listened to so many different things. I remember John talking a lot about the scales of nitrogen and how I still, and I give this presentation often about how you've got nitrate and ammonium and urea and then amino protein or amino or protein type nitrogens and how each of those has to convert and climb that ladder. So a nitrate has to convert to an ammonium and so on and so forth. And I had never been explained that. I had never been explained as a grower how detrimental something as simple as nitrate fertilizer could be. And it was kind of interesting to me to see a lot of the research that was being done in the cotton industry was talking about measuring nitrates and controlling your nitrogen for fertility based on how much nitrates there are in the plants. And then I have John that's sitting there telling me nitrates are bad. And I'm like, okay, this guy totally makes sense. And then I, you know, I talk a lot about John's story about him growing up on his, on his father's farm and how his, his father.

Was.

The pesticide or fertilizer kind of farm input dealer in, in their community. And so anything that came out knew was basically tried on their farm first. Well, it was kind of interesting, the correlation, because very similarly, I was always kind of the guinea pig in my area. So at the time I had a agronomist that was well respected within the agronomist community. He was the, he was the former chairman of the Independent Agronomists Association. He had talked in front of EPA and lobbied for several things to happen. He had a lot of, a lot of respect amongst the chemistry manufacturers and the chemistry distributors. And so there was a lot of them that I think lobbied him very hard to try A lot of the new chemistries. Well, a lot of that came to my farm first. And so we tried a lot of those things first. And so John's story follows on with. They were growing heavily cucurbits and watermelons, cantaloupes, things like that. Well, it's interesting because around about the same time we were really growing quite a few acres of Cucurbits as well. 250 to 300 acres of watermelons and up to 300 acres of pumpkins every year. And John starts telling the story about powdery mildew and how it didn't matter how much they applied, they continued to lose their vines every year. And it pretty much snapped me into the reality that I was in the same boat back in, in 2011, 2012, we had applied, we went on a seven day rotation of fungicide applications. I figure at that time we had, we had applied about fifteen hundred dollars per acre of fungicides and still lost the vines. And then John goes on with his story and talks about how the neighboring farm, I guess it decided to retire. It was a, if I remember right. John, forgive me if I tell your story wrong and maybe I'm running all over your story, but how this, this I understand it was a grazing type dairy and decided to retire. So they rented the farm and reoriented the rows and how they had planted a. Curb it and I believe it was cantaloupe. But how the plants, it was a razor line in between it and healthy on the new side and dead and or dying from the, the powdery mildew on their side that they had farmed historically. And I, this, this story just spoke to me on such a deep level because it was, it was always interesting to me how or it has been for the last three or four years since John and I have known each other. How an Amish farmer from northern Ohio in this snow belt and this, you know, southwest New Mexico high desert farmer could have a very similar story. And he continued on with that led him down the path of trying to figure out what was going on and how, you know, the plants have an Immune system. And so literally we sat there captivated. And I think that that was probably an eight hour day. And literally I wrote, you know, eight or nine different pages of notes and I came away with that so profoundly changed. And I, I kind of wrote that down in my, in my notebook a couple weeks ago of how important that was because we had just passed the, the anniversary of it and it struck me. But I had a, I had the same story and it didn't matter what I was growing. So I was, you know, I was yielding high on onions. My family had made money every year farming. And when things started turning and things started going downhill and it kind of looked at me because that was the part where I had taken over on the farm and I wasn't able to maintain this profitability and it was very frustrating. And then whenever I sat with John and realized that, you know, a lot of this wasn't my fault, it was maybe my fault because I had made some decisions, but it was a lot of decisions that were made at the time based on what, what information we had been given. And then we started, you know, going back to where we were in this, in this transition over. I left that Lubbock meeting and decided I was going to go whole hog. And that's, I wouldn't really encourage everybody to do this, but I had been spoken to on such a deep level that I didn't feel like I could continue farming the way that I was. That I needed to make a change and I needed to make it quick. We came home and we decided to convert everything over. And you look at input costs for 20, 22 and I haven't checked in 23 because I haven't been concerned about 23 yet. And it's not that I haven't been concerned, but I haven't had the need to check input costs. And when I say input costs, I mean urea and phosphorus. Because the 2019 crop was the last year that I grew the old conventional way. And we always started everything with a 200 pound application of 1152 and a 200 pound application of urea. We spread that pre plant dry and incorporated it in. Usually we would, we would spread that on the ground and we would bed up over the top of it and we would pre irrigate. And John again going back to Lubbock talked about how pre plant nitrogen application and I believe that his, the way that he worded it was, is the stupidest thing that you can ever do. So that was one boom hit me like a very lightning bolt. Second one was John started asking about 11, you know, he asked about phosphorus applications. And I think a lot of people in the room would agree, or maybe I just kind of commanded and took over part of it. But I, I brought up that 200 pounds of 1152. And I think John went back to, okay, let's do it for easy math. So you use 100 pounds of 1152. How many pounds of phosphorus are you applying? And I threw out there and said, you know, well, obviously it's 52 pounds of, of phosphorus. And so, you know, John goes through and talks about how well, you know, you think that and you've been told that, but let me explain the reality of it to you and how most of that is oxide. And so he goes, and I remember there was a whitebo, and he starts writing on the whiteboard, but in a, in a rapid fashion he tells us that our, our huge investment that we've, you know, spent a hundred dollars an acre on, potentially we're probably only getting available phosphorus. And I think it worked down to about 3 pounds of available phosphorus for 100 pounds of 1152. And that like, hit me like a brick, like, wow, okay. So you look at input costs going towards last year, 1152 was in my area that was running about 1100 dollars a ton. And so you think that we were applying, if we were putting 10% of that out, it was $110 an acre. And John's sitting there telling me that my hundred and ten dollars per acre, I'm only getting six pounds of actual phosphorus. Then I think he made another comment about, you know, kind of asking how long you've done it or maybe I just dreamt this up, but I got to do an extrapolating a little bit in my mind. And I'm thinking, you know, if my family's been applying for 40 years, say a couple hundred pounds a year of phosphorus or 1152 type map or DAP material. We've applied thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds of phosphorus, most of this being plant unavailable, but it's still a phosphorus type material and it's still in the soil. And so John starts talking about fossil phosphorus soluble eyes and bacteria and how we can get that out. And, and then I think he, he said something about starting the engine again and starting to get things functioning again and how you needed to sometimes spray a little bit of ether in the motor to get things exercised and get them running again. And then this might be his story, it might be my story. I've told it so many times I don't even remember the origin or the origin of it. But I talk a lot about phosphorus as, as kind of like an economy. And so the, the economy of the soil and soil biology and really soil fertility period. You know, we look at what's going on in economics today, especially in the United States and you know, Covid, there was, there was some thought that injecting money into the economy was going to help. And in the short term it probably did. But in the long term it gave us inflation and in the long term it gave us an increase in unemployment. And in the long term it gave us a lot of issues. And when we start looking at soluble fertility that's applied, whether it be the over application of nitrogen or the over application of phosphorus, we have to look at it like a lot of free money that's being pumped into the soil's economy. And so when we put too much soluble nutrition into the ground, there's a lot of that that stops working. So your biology start, stops. Well, let me back up. Your plant stops asking biology because it doesn't need to. So if it's not rewarding the biology for working and bringing it the nutrients that it needs, you break the cycle rapidly. And a lot of that. I think that when we start looking at soil biology, we have to look at it as an economy and we have to start weaning it. And I, I've appreciated the whole team at AEA because I had worked with a few people in the past that were very adamant about quitting inputs. So you got to stop this, you've got to do this, you've got to do that. But John and David and the rest of the consulting group at AEA were very adamant about paying my dues. I don't know how many times that I had heard, you can't do that, you've got to pay your dues, you've got to wean yourself off. A lot of these have, a lot of these economies have to be rebuilt on their own. You have to allow them or maybe put a little bit of soil primer out and act as a ether into the motor to get the engine running. But the very first one that, that we did that I was told absolutely hard stop on was stop applying phosphorus. And I remember that was even with some people that I was working with in 2019. That was one of the things that was raised even back then. But I was convinced because at that time we were using some acid blend fertilizers and I thought it was more about the Acid that I was applying at that time, and not about just the phosphorus breaking the cycle, but soon. One of the, One of the beauties about working with AEA is I. I've been taught, I haven't been told. So I've been stimulated. I haven't been in, you know, I've been instructed, I have not been commanded. So there's so many things about this that have. Have been. Allow me to understand and to teach me to understand and to allow me to come to the answer myself. And that's been really cool. But we went into that first year in 2020 and you know, I, I said this at the Lubbock event. We were just damn near broke like it was. We had very little operating cash. It was, it was kind of a difficult year. We were struggling after the 2019 hemp being hamster in 2019 and it not turning out. We weren't lush with cash like we were told we were going to. So we were on a pretty strict and tight budget. Cutting back on inputs was. It sounded really, really good to me at the time we set up. We decided, like I said in the. In the spring of 2020, we decided that we were going to SAP test each of our onion varieties separately and we were going to SAP test our cotton based on management zones. Myself being subsurface drip irrigated, most of my management zones were based on how many. How many different blocks that we could irrigate at a time or how many of them fit together. Similar varieties, similar soil, similar water. So we started managing on that and a lot of our management zones with the SAP testing were 100 acres at a time. That first year, we increased our yields significantly while decreasing our inputs. So it was astounding to me. June of 2020 was the last time that I ever applied an insecticide on my entire farm. And that was applied on my onion crop. And it was more about. I just had done it so often that I couldn't believe that I could wean myself off. And finally by the end of June, we decided, you know, I don't think we need to spray these anymore. Let's see how the rest of this crop finishes out. And that was no more. So I'll back up everything that I had planted that year, had the soil primer applied to it. So I do believe that we had some nutrition that was being delivered from the soil and we had some biological activity that was starting to function in the soil. I don't believe that we were where we wanted to be. I don't believe that we were capable of going up the, the plant health pyramid to a high level. But I do believe that we had increased on the plant health pyramid to a point that the plant was starting to function. So our brix levels were high enough that we were no longer getting the sucking and chewing animals on it. Our yields increased, our inputs went down, and for the first time we were able to manage a total, the whole crop from start to finish without having to apply a single application of plant growth regulators. And I was the guy that you know, and I know John knows this because we've talked about it, but we started at pinhead square with 8, 8 ounces and we generally sprayed 8 ounces every 10 days whether the crop needed it or not. And it just became a prophylactic and it became a cycle that we were constantly on there. And there were so many, looking back, there were so many of our inputs that were just based on. I can't even tell you why we did it other than it's what we always did. Going back to the pre plant urea, you know, it just, it slapped me in the face that we were using this pre plant urea. And John talked about how, what a devastating thing that had on our soil, carbon. He was the first guy that ever explained to me about the nitrogen to carbon ratio and how when you apply that nitrogen to the soil it starts burning off your carbon and it affects the carbon cycle or the CO2 cycle if you don't have a growing plant there that can catch that. So when I go back to the gas exchange and the lack of gas exchange that we had in our soils, these soils that we were applying this urea on were had gas it was capable of exchanging. So all we were doing by applying that early nitrogen was burning off all of our carbon that we had in our soil. So again, I kind of go back to the six principles and how regenerative agriculture is kind of classed right now. Nobody talks about nitrogen, nobody talks about the the right time to apply nitrogen. And this was one of the questions that I posed to these folks of, you know, if you apply nitrogen at the wrong time, nitrogen is one of those very, very, very finicky things. And an over application of a pound of nitrogen at the wrong time, when it doesn't have anything that can catch it, can lose a hundred pounds of soil carbon. And that's important as we go forward because I don't really like the conversation that's based around soil carbon sequestration. I don't think that that's. Again, I don't think that that's an, I don't discount that it is important, but I don't think it's all important. But I do think that if we can keep enough soil and we can, or keep enough carbon in our soil and we can restart the carbon cycle and have a healthy carbon cycle where maybe we do trickle off a little bit and we store it in the, in the soil. The more important thing for us, it's going to restart our water cycle in our soils. And I think that's going to be just as important. But all of these things had never been poised in front of me before. This, this, this has been an exciting time, but it's also been a time of, of great change. And the biggest change had to occur. To my mind it really. Changing the practices on the farm have been fairly simple, but changing my mind has been a little bit more of a difficult task. But you know, I've, I'm fully off now. I, I realize now that the ways that we were doing it before and the ways that, the way that 90% of the cotton in the United States as well in the world in fact has grown is, was based on data that was, that was wrong. And, and now we have the chance to, to make that right and change our ways. And I've been successful at this for the last three years. We've improved our, I, I think that to some extent we've got healthier plants that are emerging out of the soil right away because we're, we're putting that, that nursery of biology with the seed. We've, we've stopped applying nitrogen. We, we don't have that early season nitrogen and that real large flush that gets large long internodes early in the season like we used to do. And why we had to apply that, that early plant growth regulator, I'm saving, you know, immediately $100 an acre on phosphorus and usually up to 80, $80 an acre on nitrogen just by not applying that, that application before planting. Untold amounts that we've saved on insecticides by not fighting that. And then the other one is how much crop have we not lost in that fight? So applications being timely of insecticide applications, in my opinion, it's just better to not ever have that problem. So, you know, we don't have the bull worms, we don't have the plant bugs, we don't have the stink bugs. We, you know, it, it, it's, it's just kind of brought it about to be in fun again. Another kind of funny story about making this transition and Something that I hadn't thought about, but I, I got contacted by my state department of agriculture that wanted to come out and do a worker protection standards audit on my farm. Well, that's, that's cool. Yeah, absolutely. Come on out. Because the only thing that I've applied on my farm has been herbicides and the majority of the herbicides that I'm still using are just glyphosate. When you look at that, the worker protection standard is, you know, full boots or, or closed shoes and long sleeve shirts. Well, it's pretty nice to not have to worry about having to do a worker protection standard audit. I was a little frustrated. I had to go to a state day, if you will, to get my CEUs to maintain my applicator's license and my ability to buy restricted use pesticides. So I do maintain that license. But sitting and listening to the data and the, the misinformation I think is what I could classify that as. Now to get that was, was grueling. So it was kind of interesting to see what a difference that I was from, you know, coming from the guy that tried all the new chemistries not so long ago to the guy that doesn't use any of those chemistries and is able to, to basically control all of these things just with balanced nutrition and, and soil applied biology. So that's kind of my story. I've, I've took a good 40 minutes to tell it, but I, you know, I think, John, I'll, I'll kick a little over to you and let you talk about the, the whys and the hows of, of what's worked on my.

Farm. Thanks, James. James, I'll jump in just to say this real quick. I think one of the things that's really accessible for one of a better term about your story is not only have you made essentially or described to us today some pretty radical changes in the way that you're growing cotton, but you also didn't, didn't start with some sort of utopian soil ideal. Right. You, you, you inherited or worked on land that like a lot of other growers out there, has its own challenges. And what you've been able to accomplish is not because you essentially had the, the deck stacked in your, stacked in your.

Favor. Yeah, and that's, I, you know, the ability to, to judge this by context I think is important. And that actually came up in the webinar on Tuesday of, well, everything that you talk about, they're going to be the same. And it's interesting because when we Start talking about pesticide issues or pest issues, plant tarnished bugs, stink bugs, you can pretty well talk about that from from Virginia to Georgia to Florida to Texas to California. And everybody's dealing with the same thing. So a lot of those things are. But yeah, when you talk about. I was not in a utopia. In fact, I've. I've helped a lot of people along this journey that I've been excited about. One of them is a good friend of mine in Missouri. And I said, you know, you've got a leg up. Because one of the things that I fight the hardest is sodium and chloride in my soils. And the fact that the sodium and chloride chloride blocks a lot of things. You don't have that. But then, you know, in my mind I had built his soils up to this high level. But then I realized, well, he's got another problem. So some of my soils have 11000 parts per million calcium and he's having to apply calcium. And so I think that that's part of this is, is understanding the context and realizing that we're all dealing with all. Each of us have a different hill to push up. You know, we're pushing the cart up the hill and it they all. I think everybody has an uphill battle, but everybody's context is a little bit.

Different.

Yeah.

Awesome. James, from this point forward, I think I'm just going to go away and not listen while you're telling my story because it sounds a bit embarrassing or something. I'm not sure what exactly. Yeah, thanks for sharing your thoughts. You know, there are so many different directions and so many different places that we could go with this conversation. We originally wanted to have this discussion as a follow up and as further clarification from the snow day event that we had in Lubbock here a couple of weeks ago that many people were unable to attend. And I'm sure there's some overlap from people who were there who are also here today. One of the things I want to really drill in on and try to describe is the practical application. What do the AEA products look like that we use in a cotton nutritional schedule and why are they there, why are we using them and what's the intent and the rationale behind them. And when we look at that from the whole macro systems context that James was referring to, there is so much context dependent recommendations and input that we can take this conversation in many different directions. We can talk about nitrogen management and why nitrogen applications at planting are really bad idea. James, maybe I've softened over the years. I generally try to tell people that they do stupid stuff less often, but I still think fall applications of nitrogen and early spring applications of nitrogen are a really dumb idea. So with that, I'm going to just jump in. I don't have an extensive slide deck, but I have a couple of slides that I've put together to describe some of the concepts of nutrition management and how we think about nutrition management. And then from that I'm going to pull up an example program and we're just going to talk through that and walk through what our nutritional schedules look like and why the stuff is in there. And then it's really. I'm leaving it to you as the audience to really guide the conversation further. I'm going to be actively monitoring the Q and A. If you have any questions for myself or for James, just put them in there, type them in there at any time, and we're going to have a very unstructured kind of freeform conversation to discuss any questions that you might have. I'll walk through some of these pieces that I was hoping to talk about and we'll see where the conversation goes. The thoughts that I wanted to share here in the next couple minutes. I titled this discussion Fun with Cotton. In our consulting work at aea, we have a lot of fun working with cotton because it's one of those crops that has the. For which the historical management, and I'll say the historical management over the last three or four decades has become so screwed up and so messed up that it's really easy to make a big difference. And what I mean by that, I'm going to give you a non cotton example because it's sometimes easier for us to see other people than it is to see ourselves and to see things that other people are screwing up. And I think in reality this is one of the pathways or one of the reasons why we have the success that we do at aea. One of the privileges that we have is we've, we've been fortunate enough to develop a very different perspective and look at plant growth and crop development from kind of a fundamental principles or first principles point of view. And when you look at that and you look at what, how a crop is being managed in a field, all of a sudden you develop a very different perspective from the folks who are there and have been doing the same thing or a different version of the same thing over and over for a long time. You kind of get into a groove and you get into a rut and you lack the clarity of a fresh Perspective, which is something we're able to bring. So I want to give you an example of this. I'm going to use the example of apple production in Washington. We started working on apples, I don't know, half a dozen or so years ago. And one of the first problems we were asked to work on was fruit drop. They were having this problem. There was variation from year to year and variety to variety, but it was not uncommon on some varieties to have as much as 40 to 50% of the fruit on the tree drop to the ground in the last two to three weeks before harvest. And of course, any fruit that touches the ground, even though you and I looking at it, picking it up, it appears to be a perfect fruit and a perfectly fine edible fruit. But once it touches the ground, it's no longer qualified for fresh market from a food safety perspective. So fruit drop is a really big deal for them from a yield and a profitability point of view. And so they asked us to figure out what was why their trees were dropping fruit. So we started asking questions to try to understand. We looked at irrigation management and nutrition management. And pretty soon we discovered this situation where it becomes really obvious why their trees are dropping fruit. They are, in fact, creating the exact situation for the trees to drop fruit. But they didn't realize it. They didn't recognize it. You know, we have a similar situation very often, and there's a good parallel here in human medicine. When someone isn't feeling great, they have some stuff going on, they'll go to the doctor, and nine times out of 10, they'll get a drug prescription of some type to cover up the symptoms of whatever it is they're experiencing, or maybe even a couple of drugs. And a few weeks or a few months go by and they start experiencing some minor side effects, and they go back, they end up with another drug description to cover up the side effects of the first drug, and then a while later, they get another drug to cover up the side effects of the second drug. And so there's this snowball effect where if we're not mindful, if we don't pay attention, people are ending up taking a handful, five to 10 different drugs, when in reality, there's a pretty good case to be made that they might be better off without any of them or with only a couple. And the key point is that throughout this entire process, the doctor never intended harm. He may have been under informed, but the doctor always intended to try to benefit the patient. After all, that's why many doctors get into the medical Field in the first place is because of an authentic desire to help people. And so we arrive in this situation where the treatment is causing all kinds of harm and damage unintentionally, and in many cases, perhaps unknowingly or unwittingly. And we have the same situation happening in apples. So there is a plant hormone that really amplifies and triggers fruit senescence and fruit dropping off the tree. And that hormone is called abscisic acid, sometimes just referred to as aba. And there's a few things that are known to really amplify plants synthesis of abscisic acid. One of them is when they're in drought stress. So you have drought stressed plant, it causes the plant to produce a lot of this hormone. And some of the fruit can drop off the plant. Whether we're talking about soybeans or cotton or apples. It's kind of the same fundamental mechanism. And this hormone doesn't just trigger fruit drop, but it also triggers fruit maturity. So it really helps with coloring the fruit. So as a result of other nutritional imbalances, we'll leave those for the moment. But as a result of other nutritional imbalances, the apple growers were having challenges with some cultivars and getting them to color up. They weren't turning a nice deep red. So one of their solutions that they developed a decade and a half ago, it's probably been a common application for the last 15 or 20 years, was approximately six weeks before the expected harvest date, six to eight weeks before the harvest date, they would put on a foliar application of abscisic acid. And the abscisic acid would help color the fruit. And they would get this nice dark red fruit that they were looking for. Well, a few years go by and they encounter another problem, which is fruit quality storage. They have bitter pit and they. The short version is they don't have enough calcium in the fruit. And the fruit has large watery cells, has very soft cells in it, so it doesn't store in cold storage very well. So their solution was to eliminate the watery cells with the weak cell membranes. Was the last four weeks or so before harvest, they would shut off the irrigation so that there would be less water growing into the fruit, and each individual cell would be smaller and wouldn't have as much water. Would therefore be firmer and would store better. So now you think about those two things in combination. Six weeks before harvest, we're putting on a foliar spray of abscisic acid to turn the fruit red, to turn the apples red. And then a couple Weeks after that, we're going to shut off all the irrigation water. These trees are all dwarf rootstock, very small root systems. They don't have large root systems. The moment we shut off the irrigation water, they're going to be in a drought condition. And so these trees are all drought stressed the last four weeks before the target harvest date. So you have a combination of abscisic acid that was directly applied, plus the tree itself developing a lot of abscisic acid from the drought stress. And then we can't figure out why we're dropping half the fruit off a tree. It's like, come on, it's Captain Obvious. It's right in your face. We are deliberately and directly creating the exact situation that we're concerned about. It was a result of agronomic mismanagement from just doing the next thing. It was a combination of different practices. Each of those practices by themselves might not have been a problem. But the key point is that neither one of them addressed the root cause of the problem. The reason the fruit were not turning red was because the trees didn't have enough manganese and zinc and copper and cobalt. That was the foundational reason, not because they didn't have enough abscisic acid. And the reason the fruit were not storing well is because they didn't have enough calcium and silicon, not because they didn't have enough water or that they had too much water. So it's a failure to address root causes and to just try to cover up the symptoms with a drug. What ends up creating these unhealthy side effects? And it was in thinking about this analogy. And we have the same situation in Cotton. James described it when he was talking about. I've described the use of excessive levels of nitrogen and PGRs as a combination of one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake. But the reality is we do lots. It's not so simple as to just say it's just nitrogen and PGRs. There's a bit more nuance to this conversation. And as I was thinking about this discussion, I tried to. I decided to develop an illustration to try to describe what we see happening in the field. So I want to get into that in just a minute here and talk about how some of our agronomy management practices cause a yield drag. And this sounds really odd and really bizarre when we think about it, but the reality is that some of the management tools that are the most cherished and the most widely applied actually create a yield drag effect. So that's going to be a fun conversation. But before we dive into that, I want to talk about why cotton is fun from a yield perspective. So when we look at the cropped objectives, what are the things that we really care about? What are the things that really make us money? When we look at what we really care about, fundamentally, we're looking at increasing marketable yield. And there's a key adjective. It's not just increasing total yield, but it's increasing marketable yield. So that includes all the quality components of looking at fiber quality and looking at the overall lint strength and length, as well as the agronomic factors of what's going on with the plant. So what we really should be thinking about is we should be thinking about bolls per acre. How do we optimize the boll count per acre? It's not about plant population per acre, it's about the boll population per acre. So that's a manifestation, obviously, of plant population branching, node spacing and the number of bolls per node. And of course, it's also a function of boll size and maturity. And this is a really cool photo. I'm not sure if I'll come back to this, so I'll mention it. Expand on it just a bit here. We saw something this last year that we've not seen before. To the best of our knowledge. We don't know that anybody has seen it before, and we don't know if we'll ever see it again or not. We had a grower that had a crop pretty severely stressed from hail damage, if I have the story correct, and came back immediately after the hail damage with a foliar application of six quarts of accelerate per acre, which really drives reproductive energy. We'll talk about reproductive energy in just a bit here. But they actually ended up with boll clusters rather than individual bowls. These plants responded and came back with boll clusters of five to six bolls per cluster. Well, I get pretty excited about that because that tells us the plant is genetically capable of doing that, or at least some plants are, some varieties are. So now the question becomes what has to happen to replicate that on a consistent basis? Or is that a stress response as a result of the hail damage? So there's more homework to be done in this space, but I'm pretty excited by the possibilities that it describes. So I put together this diagram. We're going to get into this. A little bit of what contributes to net energy all the way. On the right side of this chart, I have this, what I just called net energy for yield. So if we think about feeding livestock, you know, 15 years ago, 12 years ago, I actually, I work with Midwestern Bio Ag and Gary Zimmer for a little while and I learned how to do dairy rations and how to do livestock rations and which is not my core area of expertise at all. But we paid a lot of attention to the net energy, net energy for lactation and looking at the energy that's going into a diet as contrasted to the energy requirements of a dairy cow, as contrasted to the energy requirements produced by environmental stress, lots of heat or lots of cold and so forth. So when we look at plants, I just rapidly sketched out this illustration this morning and there is a lot, I'm sure I'm going to be revising this and I'm going to be talking about it a lot in the coming years. You have two types of or two different, very different forms of energy, positive energy going in. So imagine this, this yellow line from left to right is the crops yield potential. It's the capacity for the crop to produce a lot of yield. So you have these two elements here on the left driving that yield bar up. And I'm just broadly going to call them vegetative energy, reproductive energy. And we're going to dive into what these are and we need both vegetative energy and reproductive energy in a healthy balance. And then the next arrow to the right depressing this curve is what I'm just calling yield drag. So yield drag effect as you imagine it can be caused by lots of things. It just. If we're in a drought, we don't have enough, the crop doesn't have enough water. That's a very obvious one that we're all thinking about constantly. Inadequate carbon dioxide supply is another major factor that's pretty common. But for the sake of our conversation here, I want to focus on agronomic management practices that cause yield drag, fertilization practices and pesticide application practices and so forth that cause a yield drag. Because here is this is the fundamental reason why, or one fundamental reason why crop is such a. Cotton is such a fun crop to work with because of accumulated historical agronomic mismanagement. There is so much yield drag in the system that when we take some of that yield drag out, all of a sudden the crop begins performing a whole lot better and we look like geniuses and we haven't even done all that much. Just like with the apple scenario, we discontinue going back to the apple example. The solution in the case of the apples was you address the trace minerals, the zinc and manganese and copper and cobalt that are required to have the tree or have the apples color a dark red a lot more rapidly, a lot more easily. And all of a sudden you no longer need the abscisic acid foliar. You address the calcium so that you have strong cell membranes, and all of a sudden you no longer need to do water deprivation. You do those two things. It's just a result of changing nutrition management, addressing the root causes of why they have those problems in the first place. And all those fruits stay on the tree and you get a 40% or a 50% yield bump and you look like a genius. And you haven't really done all that much except you've reduced the yield drag. And we have the same situation here in cotton. So the end result all the way on the right is the net energy that you have that the plant has available for it to actually turn into effective yield, a marketable yield. So what does it mean? What are some examples in cotton of yield drag? Well, let's look at each of these separately. So there are four nutrients which drive very strong vegetative growth. They will give you a lot of plant biomass quickly. I spoke about this when I was in Lubbock a couple of weeks ago and I've spoken about this on webinars. So I'm not going to go into too much detail here, other than to say that calcium is a bit of an outlier because calcium gives us, has a symbiotic relationship or a synergistic relationship with cytokinins and drives both vegetative growth and reproduction at the same time, which makes it unique on this list. But I've added a bar here. So basically, for those of you, if you haven't heard this conversation before, I should maybe expand just a bit. Calcium, potassium, chloride and nitrate will give you very rapid vegetative growth. If you want to grow alfalfa, hay, kale or spinach, or any vegetative crop where you're harvesting the leaves, you can use those four nutrients to drive a lot of growth fast. But you'll end up unless you use calcium. If you use a combination of nitrate and chloride and potassium, you're going to end up with poor quality vegetative growth, weak watery cells in the case of alfalfa, wide leaf to stem ratio and all kinds of hollow stem and all kinds of forage quality problems. So in case it's not clear, I've left the bar here on the left. This is the arrow pointing up. On the left is your vegetative Energy and your vegetative growth energy is contributed by those four nutrients primarily. So it's those four nutrients that are commonly put on at planting or shortly after planting, or maybe even pre plant in the case of nitrogen to strongly drive growth. However. This is where the however comes in. The but is that potassium and chloride and nitrate can and do exhibit a yield drag effect. Now, this sounds nuts on the surface. Have you ever heard of fertilizer causing yield dragon? Have you ever heard of nitrogen causing a yield drag effect? This is not something that is talked about at all in mainstream agronomy, but it's very, very real. We're used to thinking about, we'll put on a nitrogen application and we get this very rapid plant growth response and we get a yield response. But in fact, for any of these three elements, when they are applied in excess, they exhibit significant yield drag. So let's talk about. We can talk about each of these very quickly. I'm going to focus mostly on nitrate. Potassium. When plants have excess of potassium, it creates a yield drag. And I'll refine this specifically. Say it creates a marketable yield drag because high levels of potassium in a plant will reduce the plant's absorption of calcium, which gives us poor quality lint. It will reduce both fiber length and fiber strength. So excess of potassium causes a marketable yield drag because it significantly reduces quality. Chloride also produces a yield drag because chloride, well, chloride does lots of things. It directly increases the plant's water requirement. So it makes, whenever the plant is on the edge of not having enough water, higher levels of chloride will make a rapid difference and make the plant more susceptible or less susceptible to water deprivation stress, to drought stress. But nitrates are really the big one. Because nitrates cost plants a lot of photosynthetic energy. They also cost the plants a lot of water. I've gone into this in other presentations and I want to be cognizant of time here, but there's essentially two things that happen. One is when a cotton plant absorbs nitrogen in the form of nitrate, that nitrate absorption sucks up a lot of the carbohydrate energy produced during the photosynthesis process simply to convert that nitrate to other nitrogen compounds, to amine nitrogen, and then to amino acids and to finally to complete proteins. When the. As, as I've described many times the photosynthesis of a plant can vary significantly based on nutritional integrity and water availability, sunlight and so forth. But let's just say that we have a cotton plant that's photosynthesizing somewhere in the neighborhood of about 15 or 20% of its inherent photosynthetic efficiency, which is a very common range. Let's say it's 15%. When a cotton plant absorbs the majority of its nitrogen in the form of nitrate, right around 80% or so, it can take as much as 20 to 30% of that plant's total sugar production that is forming in every one of those 24 hour photoperiods. So I'm talking about 30% of the 15%. So 1/3, as much as 1/3 of that plant's total sugar production every day consumed just to convert nitrates to proteins. So that's a 30% energy drain. That 30% energy drain from photosynthesis, from photosynthetic energy means that that energy drain is not going to increase growth, it's not going to increase the number of bolls per plant and the number of bolls per acre. So you have a 30% energy suck simply because the plant is getting nitrate nitrogen. And that is a really big deal. That's one of the ways you can get a tremendous yield response is really simply to make sure that plants are not getting nitrate nitrogen and that they're not getting too much nitrogen.

Period.

So nitrate nitrogen has this large energy suck for two reasons. One is because or this yield drag effect for two reasons. One is because of the energy drain from photosynthesis and the second is because of the water requirement. If you look in any hand or any plant physiology text on the process of photosynthesis, or excuse me, the process of protein synthesis, how nitrate nitrogen is converted to complete proteins inside the plant, the math is right there, the equations are right there. In any standard textbook, every molecule of nitrate that the plant absorbs requires three molecules of water. So if you want to increase a plant's water requirement by 30 to 40%, it's really simple. Just add nitrate, you add nitrate nitrogen, you increase the water requirement and you increase the energy drain on the plant. So as nuts as this sounds, nitrogen fertilizer that converts to nitrate and has the plants absorbing large amounts of nitrates exhibits a pronounced yield drag effect. This is why putting on nitrogen applications in the fall or putting on nitrogen applications in the spring before planting, this is one of the reasons why those applications are a really dumb idea. And they cost a crop yield. They cost a crop significant yield because they have this, this energy drain and this yield produce this yield drag effect. All right, so now let's switch gears and let's talk about the second arrow, the second energy push. And this is reproductive energy. And these the nutrients which drive this are going to be manganese and phosphorus and ammonium cytokinins and all the other plant nutrients that aren't on this list and that aren't on the previous list. So this is the way in our nutrition management approach at aea, we are constantly trying to balance the exchange, to say, okay, we want abundant levels of energy coming from these four nutrients, calcium, potassium, chloride and nitrate, balanced out with energy from these nutrients, manganese, phosphorus, ammonium cytokinins and everything else that's on the list. And when those two are in balance, you get very rapid vegetative growth and you get tight node spacing. A lot of bolls at the same time. But this is not the approach that's been taken by mainstream agronomy over the last couple of decades. Instead, in the case of cotton production, we use growth regulators to supply reproductive energy. And the growth regulators have a problem. They also cause a yield drag effect. James used the number of 10 days. What is actually happening with an application of pics? Chad Wahl talks about this and was the first one to point me in the direction of the research that has been done on this. But when a PICS application is made, it practically shuts down all of photosynthesis for three days after that application. And there are continued lingering effects for up to 10 days after that application. When you think about what that means, if there are continued lingering effects for 10 days and it completely. Well, let's just focus on the three day window. So if you shut off all photosynthesis, shut down all photosynthesis for three days after a Pix application and you make seven applications per year, that's 21 days of no photosynthesis. On a hundred day crop, you take 21 days out of it, you've just reduced the photosynthesis potential that crop by 20% by a fifth, that's going to produce a yield drag effect. So this growth regulator. So now we have the.

Combination.

Of nitrate nitrogen producing a yield drag plus growth regulator producing a yield drag. And this is the exact opposite of what we're taught to think about. We're taught to think about a growth regulator like a PICS application, actually increasing the number of bolls, it increases the number of harvestable bulls per acre. And it's true that it does increase the number of harvestable bulls per acre on a crop that has excess of nitrate. But what if the crop doesn't have excess of nitrate in this case? What we see happening here is with a PIX application is we're getting a Suppression of overall plant energy and overall crop energy that's causing a yield drag. So now again, in our work at aea, we get the privilege of looking like geniuses because we just say, okay, let's remove all of these yield drag effects. Let's remove the growth applicator if we can, and let's remove the excess of nitrate and the excess of chloride and the excess of potassium, and all of a sudden this yellow bar that drops all the way down from this yield drag effect, we've removed yield drag and all of a sudden this yellow bar stays flat and we get a much higher net energy, net plant energy being directed towards marketable yield. And this is why, if you've listened to some of the stuff, the presentations that James has done on other webinars in the past, you're familiar with his story of some of the remarkable yield responses that he has that his crop has been able to produce. And the reality is, it's really simple. What we have done with our nutrition management is not to increase the plant's capacity for yield on the left side of the chart that already existed. We've simply changed out the balance and changed out the ratios of how this reproductive energy and this vegetative energy is being managed so that we're using crop management tools that don't exhibit a yield drag effect. When you do that, yields go up all on their own. It's really not that sophisticated. So in our approach, our nutrition management approach, we focus simply on making developing plant nutritional profiles that are very reproductive dominant. So we want to set as many bowls as possible at every node. And we want plants that are reproductive dominant and are also vegetative strong, that have strong vegetative growth, but without the yield drag effects being produced by the growth regulators and being produced by the nitrate, nitrogen, the chloride, the potassium, and everything else that is present that can be present in excess supply. So we can we look at this visually, we observe the plants visually. We want very rapid shoot growth. In other words, we want a tall plant frame, but we want the nodes very tightly spaced on that plant frame. And that gives us lots of reproductive nodes, lots of bolls, and higher levels of marketable yield. So of course, managing nutrition with this balance. Here's the interesting part. I haven't even framed this conversation in terms of plant health and immune systems, but when you no longer nitrate nitrogen. We could also say this differently. We could say that nitrate nitrogen doesn't just cause a yield drag, and chloride and potassium don't just cause a yield drag, they also cause A health drag. This is a separate conversation, but they cause both a yield drag and a health drag, as does the growth regulator. So if you remove those from the equation, you end up with plants that are a lot healthier. And it's really simple. When you increase plant health, you can't stop yields from increasing. It's just like with people, when you increase people's health, you can't stop their performance from going up. It's an obvious next step. Better health equals better performance. So I'm going to switch gears and give you an example of what a nutrition management schedule looks like and what is in it and why it's there. But before I dive to that, are there any questions that have come up so far? Anything that I've talked about? No questions in the Q and A. So either I've spoke, I've so thoroughly confused people that they don't know where they're going next, or they think I'm so nuts that it's not worth asking any questions further, or I've talked so fast that you haven't had a chance to come up with any ideas or any questions yet or some other possibility that I haven't thought of. James, I see you nodding your head. You have anything you'd like to chime in here.

With? No, but I can remember the first time that I heard most of these theories and I just, I, you know, I was just dumbfounded. So I, I bet you'll have some questions towards the end, promise.

That. All right, so as an example, this is not from James Farm, this is from a cotton farm in California. But it's very similar protocol to the ones that I think you have used, James. And James, I'd welcome your input here because you can share from your experience what you've observed. I'm just going to walk through this, this schedule and going to describe what is on it and why it's there. And if I can remember, I'm also going to try to describe what is not there and why it's not there. And it's. There's a pretty important, quite an important caveat to describe or to mention here, and that is this nutritional schedule is. What is written on this piece of paper is almost exclusively for in furrow applications and foliar spray applications, siders applications. It does not include the recommendations that we would make for how to manage soil amendments and how to manage calcium supply. So in the, in James, in the case of James Farm, we very seldom make see the need to apply calcium because he's got 11,000 parts per million calcium in his soil. But on other farms we do make those types of recommendations. So those recommendations for soil amendment type applications don't show up here on this particular recommendation. This is specifically to AEA products for the most part and specifically framed around how this crop develops and how we want to optimize the plant physiology in all types of different agronomic contexts. And then if there are adjustments to be made because of irrigation water quality or because of soil nutritional imbalances, those adjustments would often appear in addition to what's on this overall outline. So we begin first with the soil primer application. And given these recommendations were for a farm in California, you can see the notes here that was recommended this be fertigated on around the middle of January. So what is the soil primer and why is it here? Well, the soil primer is a combination of these four Rejuvenate Humicarb, seashield and Spectrum ds. And the reason for the regenerative soil primer, this is probably our single most expensive and most valuable application, is because we want to supply the crops nitrogen requirements without the plant absorbing nitrate. And this is how you do that. So you, I'm sure many of you have heard the chatter and seen the ads from Pivot Bio and from other organizations that are talking about microbial inoculants that have the capacity to fix nitrogen without legumes. And they'll contain species like Azodobacter and Azospirillum and Pseudomonas fluorescens and others. Spectrum DS contains all of those organisms plus many more. And in some ways we've done a really poor job of marketing. What? Well, I guess I shouldn't really say that because the reality is when you look at the effectiveness of biological products like the competitive nitrogen fixing bacteria we know as farmers, that and any soil biologist, microbiologist understands that having single species and inoculating single species into an ecosystem is a challenge. It's not impossible, it's very possible and it can work very effectively. But some soil ecosystems are much more conducive to to that product application having a positive outcome than others. If you're looking at those types of single microbial species inoculants, you can't really look at comparison data from other farms and from other soil types because the response is so variable based on the microbial populations in a given soil. But you can buffer some of that out and you can increase the consistency of performance when you have a diversity of species in the same container, which is one of the things that Spectrum DS does really well. And so when we look at this combination of rejuvenate humicarb and seashield and Spectrum ds, what we're really looking for here is we are looking for, amongst other things, we are looking for biological nutrition supply. We want the plant to be absorbing amino sugars, amino acids and peptides and enzymes directly from the soil. And we want the plant to be absorbing soil bacteria rather than nitrate. In order for that to happen on most soils, we have to greatly increase the bacterial populations. That's why we have the regenerative soil primer is to stimulate biology well before the crop grows into the ground so that we have a lot of biology there to work from. And this is, this is the foundation really of having a biological type nutrition management system working. James, I'm trying to remember what have the nitrogen application rates been like on your farm the last couple of.

Years? So 20, 20 we were down, I think we applied about 60, 60 units of total in 21 we were down probably 40 units of N22 we were, we applied 20 and I don't think that we needed the first 10. I appeased an agronomy, my, my on farm agronomist by applying the first 10. And I think after getting the SAP spec, we should not have put those out. So the, the reality is that we believe that 23, we're at zero. That's one of the reasons that I said I haven't worried about inputs because I don't believe I'm going to be buying urea this year like I.

Have. Yeah. And so when you listen to James experience an example, that's fundamentally because of what we call the regenerative soil primer. It's not because of the foliar sprays. I mean obviously we're doing other things with plant health so that the plants contribute more to building soil biology. But this is kind of the fundamental kickstarter for the engine to get things going. James, anything you'd add to that description from your.

Experience? No, I think you're doing pretty good job of kind of talking about even what we've seen here. You know, now we're really seeing after three years of constant application how this is really starting to fire, you know, and, and we didn't see a, a drag. I think that's important to say because there's a lot of people that start talking about converting over to a biological type system and how generally there's this J drag, it's an economic term, but we haven't seen that J drag in fact, it's, it's been nothing but uphill. And I think a lot of that is because you removed the yield drag. So we started building soil biology at the same time that you removed the yield.

Drags. And then we'll go to the next common recommendation is for a seed treatment, a Biokot Gold. And this is probably the single greatest ROI and single most impactful thing that a grower can do starting out. And part of the reason it has such a huge ROI is because it costs $2.48 an acre to apply according to this protocol that one of our consultants put together recently. So it's very inexpensive to apply. So Biokote Gold, in my other many of my webinars I talk about how to combine products or to layer products together for foliar applications. And I describe this concept of synergistic stacks where 1 plus 1 doesn't equal 2. And Biokote Gold is designed this way. There are any number of products on the marketplace today available today who might be they're a mycorrhizal fungi inoculant, or they are a bacterial inoculant with a couple of disease suppressive organisms in them, or they are a seaweed type biostimulant that's designed to be treated on the seed, or they are a mineral nutrient combination that's supposed to be on the seed to supply calcium and cobalt and zinc and manganese to the seed and so forth. Well, Biokote Gold, all four of those and more. And that is one of the simple reasons why it gets used on as many acres as it does. It gets. This is probably one of our single most popular products and most widely used products in terms of the number of acres that it gets applied on because of its effectiveness. And that is other. That is again another contributing factor to nitrogen supply as well as calcium and other mineral supply during the season. So one of the reasons we're able to reduce nitrogen and reduce calcium applications in some contexts is because the BioKoat gold inoculates that root system right from germination and we have really good biological nutrition available for the entire plants life cycle. One of the things that we also see with BioKoat Gold, one of the reasons it's commonly used is because we get much faster germination and stronger root system and early root system establishment. It's common for us to see. I remember, I think that some of the data that I've seen over the last couple of years in stress situations in cooler soils starting out, we're seeing Cotton emerge in five days after application as compared to seven days for the control. So some improvements in product germination and seedling speed and vigor as a result of that. Then we go to the next application, which is the planter application plus primer. And there's this depends. Each one of these recommendations that we make is customized for every farm and soil type based on what is going on with soil biology, what's the history with disease, what's the history with COVID crops and historical fertilizer applications, irrigation water quality. So there's almost a certainty that whatever recommendation you make is going to vary slightly from this. But I would also say that it's probably only going to vary slightly because this is framed the way this example is outlined is not. It's not an outline for. This is actually one of the key ways that we look at agronomy differently and manage agronomy differently from many others in the space is many growers will make or many agronomists will make recommendations for how nutrition should be managed based on the soil context to say, okay, you need to apply nitrogen at this stage, we need to apply calcium at this stage, because calcium and nitrogen isn't showing up on a soil test. And we do it a little bit differently. Instead we say, okay, we need to apply calcium and nitrogen at this stage because this is the stage of plant development that is going to influence the number of bolls, that's going to influence node spacing. So we're looking at it more in the crop context within the shadow of the soil context, rather than vice versa. It's very common for agronomists to look at the soil context first and the crop context second. And we switch the priority. We prioritize the crop frame first and then the the soil frame second. So this planter application plus primer, this is going into the furrow at planting a quart of accel. This is a California product. You would be familiar with it under the name Accelerate, just carries a different product name in California. And then the Rejuvenate, SeaShield, MicroPack, Spectrum DS and Fotomag. And I'm not going to talk about each of these in a lot of detail, but I'll give you a couple of highlights really quickly. The Rejuvenate is a part of the soil primer. There's now regulatory framework around biostimulants. Like I can't call Rejuvenate a microbial biostimulant. But what I can say is when you add rejuvenate your bacterial and fungal populations are going to come alive in a pretty spectacular way. And seashield is really interesting because seashield will have slightly similar effect to the rejuvenate in that it really stimulates fungal populations. Then we have micropak which is combination trace mineral pack and the, the micropack and the trace minerals are actually really important because remember we want to have a plant that is reproductive dominant but also has strong vegetative growth. So that's why Accelerate contains a lot of manganese and is specifically designed for reproductive growth. And the micropack also has manganese and their trace minerals in it. So those are both in there at planting. So that right from the get go we structure this plant to and give this plant the indicator that it is in an environment where it needs to drive strong reproduction. So it needs to build a large root system and a large stem diameter to support the future crop load that it is capable of producing in this type of environment. So you end up with much larger stalk diameter, stem diameter and a much more robust root system. When you start with a inferrow application that looks like this than an inferrow application that has phosphorus and nitrogen as a part of it. Because the phosphorus, the nitrogen, particularly the nitrogen going to drive vegetative growth which gives you a thin stem diameter and a challenged root system. So folks are trying to combat or overcome that compromised root system from nitrogen with the phosphorus application. And then they proceed to shoot themselves the other foot with that application. So the worst thing you can do is to put on let's say 10 units of nitrogen or 20 units of nitrogen or more at in the furrow at planting. It's one of the worst things you can do because that is going to shut down the Spectrum DS and the Bioko Gold from establishing a viable population on the, on the root surface. And so it's really simple. If you want to create a nitrogen addict for the rest of the plant's life, apply nitrogen when it's germinating and boom, you've created an addict just like that. If you want to avoid the addiction, just simply don't apply any up planting or only apply a very small amount to supply what that crops nutritional requirements are in that next couple weeks of growing. The reality is you think about it. How much nitrogen does a four week old cotton plant need on a per acre basis? £5, £10. It's a tiny amount. It's not very much. Moving on. I see there's a few questions coming in here. So before I go the next pieces we're going to be talking about are the foliar applications that we use. But I see there's quite a few questions that are coming in. So before I finish up on that I will check into the questions here and we'll have a bit of a conversation. You're welcome to also direct any questions that you have at James as well. Comment here from DWight. I apply 100 units of K annually on a cotton crop. Dwight, the simple question is do you know that you need it? Do you have soil analysis and plant SAP analysis data that demonstrates you need it? There are a few soils, very light soils, sandy soils or soils that have low potassium levels where that may be valuable and useful but on most soils potassium is over applied and is causing a yield drag effect. So if you need it, awesome. If you don't, that's having a yield drag effect for you is without question costing you. Yield. Question from Jeff Dill can you stop cold turkey with growth regulators and nitrogen applications and expect to maintain or increase yield first year? Boy Jeff, that's a good question. I don't know that we've tried that actually I think we probably have with some of the growers that we've worked with. I would suggest rather than stopping cold turkey is think of it this way. The typical approach is to put on nitrogen ahead of when you think you're going to need it and more than you think you're going to need. So you're being proactive. You're going to put on more than you think the crop needs ahead of when it needs it. Just change that frame of reference, get SAP analysis data and only apply what the crop needs. Once you have the data that proves it needs it. You do that and all of a sudden you'll see your nitrogen levels application start dropping down and you do the same thing with your growth regulators. Say okay, I'm not going to put it on ahead. I'm only going to put on what the crop tells me it needs when I see it needs it. You do that, your applications are going to drop dramatically. James, what was your experience? How would you respond to this question? It's a really good.

Question. I would kind of frame it a little differently in that, you know, by year two I was able to grow some organics and so I did stop. So I had some ground that hadn't been farmed. It had laid fallow for multiple years. So it was immediately, it was immediately certifiable as organic. But you know, we were able to go without nitrogen. So we, we found nitrogen in the form of Applying a heavier swell primer and kind of milking that primer throughout. And I say that because we continue to apply it throughout the season. And that's kind of where we're at going into 23 of saying, okay, we're not going to buy any nitrogen for the cotton crop. We're going to try and, and, and fix all of it from the atmosphere. So I don't know that it's, it would be the most cost effective way, unconventional to frame it that way, I don't think. You know, and you're one of the ones that said you got to pay your dues and get this thing generated. But I do know it's capable of being done. It just may not be the smartest.

Answer. Yeah, generally my answer would be the. Fundamentally, the reason we've been as successful agronomically as we have as a company is because we don't take unnecessary risks and we try to transition off of nitrogen and PGRs and other types of tools that are being misapplied as we have the data to support those decisions. So we make recommendations for reducing nitrogen based on SAP analysis data and so forth. And we're just about to get into that. There's a question here from Gary. What if you have not applied the soil primer by January 15, is it too late for 2020? The short answer is, no, it's not. You can apply it in the spring. In fact, you can even apply it right ahead of planting or just before planting or even at planting. Our experience has, historical experience has been that we still get very strong responses from that, but not as strong as if it was applied in the fall. So instead of getting a nitrogen reduced by 40 or 50% the first year, you might only get a 30 or 40% reduction the first year. James, what was your experience? I see you nodding your.

Head. Yeah, we ended up 2020 after, you know, we came along and rescued some onions that we hadn't even applied the soil primer on. You know, when we decided to make the change completely, it was, it was about reducing all of it as quick as we could and we applied it later. You know, it's, it's really interesting how the, the primers can work and how, you know, we talked about this a little bit in Lubbock, John, that, you know, there's a lot of growers that are hesitant to apply these things too early because they don't know that they're going to have the moisture to plant with. So there's a lot of ways to get it out and it can still be timely and it can still can still help. So we can put it in a planner and do a lot with.

It. Yeah, we see the same. There's a couple of overlapping questions here on using Biokote Gold as a seed treatment. Considering all of the fun stuff that is applied on seed fungicides, insecticides, etc. So can Biokote Gold be put on those seeds? The short answer is yes, it can. We do it all the time. We continue, we see very nice crop responses from that and I think fundamentally the reason for that is because it's not just a fungal seed treatment. Like if we had just fungal species in there, like say mycorrhizal fungi and we put that on top of a fungicide treated seed, I don't know how effective that would be. But because it's a combination material, it also has nutrition in it, it has the microbial stimulants in it and it has bacterial inoculants in it, we still get quite a nice crop response. Now I do think that in the future, as we have more of an impact on the industry, while it's already starting to happen, more and more growers are going to elect to not use treated seed and we're going to get better responses. What do you say.

James? I just came back from a meeting with a large. I won't name them, but they're a big supplier of cottonseed in the world. And one of the questions that I asked to upper management. So first off, upper management had no idea that they didn't even offer seeds without fungicide insecticide treatments. And I wasn't the only industry that was there represented in the room that was asking for that. And one of their arguments was, well, we don't know how to warranty the see seed if it doesn't have this treatment on it. And my reply to them was, well, what did you do 15 years ago whenever seed treatment was a downstream applied product? You didn't used to do this and you still stood behind your seed. So maybe you need to go back in your archives and figure it out. I do think, though that did bring some, some discussion up that, you know, I think they're going to look a little more closely into it and I hope that they, they'll allow.

That. Glad to, glad you're there in that lobbying.