AEA Founder John Kempf Answers Your YouTube Questions | Regenerative Agriculture

Hi friends. Welcome to our webinar Today where and today we do not have a title topic that we're going to be focusing our questions on, but instead we're leaving it very open to talk about any types of questions, all types of different questions that you have asked on YouTube in response to the various videos that we have put up there. And we also have lots of time for Q and A. So I look forward to your participation that feel free to type any questions that you have in the Q and A box at any point and I'll be going through and reviewing those as well. So we've been having a lot of fun. We've now been producing these webinars and as well as the podcast and putting a lot of information for the last three years, our YouTube channel has continued to grow and as you know, we tend to not produce a whole lot of short video content. It's mostly longer, more in depth, detail oriented stuff. But we are going to be producing a lot more short videos as well. So I hope that you're all subscribed to that. The next question that has come through is what would happen if you put too much of a nutrient on a plant? Guess it depends on the nutrient. But will a plant only absorb what it needs? So the key part of this first question, the way that I'm interpreting it, is what happens if you put too much of a nutrient on a plant? And so by that question, I'm assuming the implication is using a foliar application or applying it with an irrigation system that puts it directly on the plant. And the answer is that if the nutrient is in an available form, if it's chelated and plants can absorb it easily, they will absorb it and they will absorb more than might be optimal for them. And to some degree this can be buffered by the plant's overall nutritional balance. So we know, for example, that if a plant has adequate levels of manganese, then it is slower to over accumulate potassium to a detrimental point, similar for zinc and phosphorus. We know that if plants have enough zinc, then they're slower to over absorb phosphorus. So similarly with magnesium and nitrogen, plants have enough magnesium, they don't as easily over accumulate an abundance of nitrogen. But in general, there is only one thing that you cannot overdo and that is balance every nutrient as an individual nutrient can absolutely be overdone and cause all types of imbalances, particularly when you are foliar applying it. This is less of a challenge if you're putting on soil applications, because the soil applications are not absorbed Quite as quickly by the roots. They're buffered out by the soil microbial population. The soil microbial population can actually slow down plant absorption a little bit if it's really healthy and really robust. But it's still possible for plants to absorb excessive levels and become imbalanced. So all types of imbalances cause disease and insect challenges. And the most common imbalances are the results of excesses that farmers apply. So the answer is absolutely planned. Plants will absorb whatever you apply to an excess if you apply it in excess. Question from Gary. Nicely wondering if you could do a webinar on the subject of calcium availability and uptake. This seems to be a pretty important starting point in the growth of healthy plants. Yes, Gary is absolutely correct in that this is a very important subject. In fact, I was rereading some of the science around calcium interactions within plants over the course of the last couple of weeks. And you know, calcium is so foundational. It is. You could say that calcium is the foundation on which all the rest of plant nutrition is built. And that if you don't have adequate calcium, putting on trace mineral applications and putting on any other types of foliar applications and so forth, you may get, you will likely get responses, but your responses are certain to be significantly smaller than they would be if you have adequate calcium present. So the foundation of good calcium availability. There are many soils that have generous levels of calcium present in the soil profile, but it's not plant available. The reason for that is because calcium availability is fundamentally a biological process. We need to have really vigorous biology serving as the plant's digestive system to extract calcium and make it available to the plant. And when that happens, we can start getting some pretty extraordinary crop responses. And I'm going to ask you to excuse me for just a moment because I need to get some ventilation. I apologize for that. I'm in a really tight room and I needed to open the window to get a breeze in here because the temperature has gone up 5 degrees Fahrenheit since we started this webinar. And that's not because I'm nervous. So the next question here from Steve Larsen, Coming from a small scale market garden context, would it be alright to apply Biocoat Gold to a packet of seeds that will be used over a period of a few months? And the answer is yes, as long as it is dry and kept out of direct sunlight, which I'm sure would be the case for seeds anyway. So as long as it's dry and not exposed to moisture, then putting biocoal on the seeds can be done a few months in advance without any problems. Next question. I've listened to many of your podcasts, even been to your website, but I've never even seen a picture of you. Are you Mr. Mysterious? That's a good one. Slipping that question in here, guys.