Ask Me Anything with John Kempf - February 13

Thank you for being here. Thank you for, for asking all of the good questions that you always do. We also had some questions sent in in advance and I'm probably going to intersperse or mix some of those in here as well. But I see there's already a bunch of good questions coming through here. So first question is, here is from Matt Stevens. Hi Matt, regarding pulling SAP sampling on apple trees, what's the earliest you would recommend getting SAP samples? Would you wait until you have enough leaves to do both old and new, or do you see value in getting samples as soon as the first couple of leaves have reached full size even though you won't have the new old difference? Yes, Matt, this is an outstanding question. We've even experimented particularly with more so with cherry production actually, I think with apples as well. We've experimented just collecting buds and sending buds in for samples for SAP analysis. And, and I think the way that I would answer that question is that over time, once you have a couple years of experience with SAP analysis, you should be able to get your year over year agronomy management to a point where you perhaps don't need those very early samples because you kind of know what to expect, you know what the trend line and the trend trajectory looks like and you've already addressed some issues that showed up historically, but particularly for the first couple years, or maybe a better way of saying it would be to say that until you see the, the issues being resolved in those first couple of samples from the way you manage the prior year, those, those early samples can be very valuable. And the reason they're so valuable is because the, the nutritional status of those early leaves also reflects what is happening in the fruit during the cell division period. So that period is obviously extremely important for cherries and for apples and for all of our perennial trees really that are blooming early and then leafing out. So yes, I would highly suggest even if to start as soon as you have spur leaves that have opened up large enough that you have enough for a single leaf sample, I would begin pulling samples because the information is very valuable from a, from a fruit quality nutrition management perspective. There's a question here, a couple of questions here from Jordan Carlson. Hi Jordan, do you know of a good resource to learn from about anion for anion exchange capacity? Trying to remember, it's been years ago that I learned a lot about anion exchange capacity. I think the original reference that I spent some time digging into, if I remember correctly, was William Jackson's book titled Organic Soil Conditioning Humic Fulvic and Microbial Balance. It's. You have to go digging online to find it there. There has been William Jackson's. I'm not sure who manages the website from the company that he started. It might be his family at this point. He passed away a couple of years ago. I don't think the book is readily available on Amazon or if it is, it's very overpriced. You can get it for. You used to be able to get it for under $100 from his direct website. And so the book again is Organic Soil Conditioning Humic, Fulvic and Microbial Balance. And it's a doorstopper of a scientific reference book. And I think there are other resources as well, but I can't think of which ones they would be right now. Might also just look online on Google Scholar and see what you can find there. All right, there's a question here about foliar applications of urea. Can you use magnesium sulfate instead of ammonium thiosulfate in the mixture to add sulfur? Yes, you can. Particularly in fact if you're doing this as a foliar. So our common recommendation is for the use of thiosulfate as a side dress application. If you're using it as a foliar, I would prefer the use of a sulfate form rather than a thiosulfate form. And some thiosulfates like calcium and potassium thiosulfate can also be very valuable as a foliar, but they can also easily become very hot. They have a very high electrical conductivity and you can easily cross the threshold and cause some plant burn. And so magnesium sulfate and other sulfates tend to be a lot kinder to the plant foliage and are not quite as hot. So that would be my preference. All right, so I'm going to switch to some of the other questions that have come through here. There's a question here from Brandon. I'm curious what John recommends to improve selenium in food products and in my land. I may be missing something obvious, but I didn't see AEA products with selenium listed. Should I be looking at soil or foliar applications as another approach? I also rotationally graze various livestock, so I'm curious in the value of supplementing the livestock to slowly improve selenium in the land. I hear of selenium being discussed frequently with sheep, so my assumption is that they have a higher selenium requirement and may be used as a tool to improve the land of grazed with selenium supplementation. All right. So this is a big question and one that I'm actually going to talk about selenium for just a little bit, because there, I think there are some ways in agriculture that we are really, really missing the boat by a mile. And selenium is one of them. The context, quickly, is we know that we have this epidemic of cancer in our human population. Half the people living today are expected to get cancer in their lifetime. And why would we expect that to be normal? And I haven't done this homework myself, I should go digging. But good friends of mine have told me that if you do a thorough literature review, There are over 400 peer reviewed published papers in the literature describing selenium as an effective prevention and as an effective treatment for all types of different cancers. So if that's true, then why would we not prioritize biofortifying our foods and making sure that we have generous selenium levels across our entire food chain? How beneficial, how valuable would that be from a human health perspective? And just from an overall value of life perspective? This, this seems like such an obvious piece that we should be prioritizing. And we, we well know and well understand we have an abundance of data to describe that many of our soils, majority of our soils, there are exceptions in low rainfall, low arid area areas. Like you have, the, the soil maps exist of what the selenium status is of our soils. You can easily find that information. We have large. The areas where the majority of our food is grown is grown. Most of our food is grown in selenium deficient soils, Particularly here in the eastern half of the United States in a high rainfall environment. We have lost the selenium in our soils over decades and centuries of weathering and erosion. And so addressing selenium, we know that our human population and our livestock are chronically deficient in selenium. And so in the case of livestock management, to the question that Brandon asked, there has been this historical dogma, this historical approach within the livestock grazing space, that one of the foundational pathways to be profitable in beef production in particular is not to spend money on inputs, on inputs for the land specifically. And I think, and then at the same time, we turn around and we free choice, feed expensive kelp to livestock to supply them with enough selenium and iodine. Or we feed, in the case of dairy cattle, we feed selenium, yeast or selenomethionine. Those livestock supplementation sources of providing selenium in the diet are much more expensive than it would be to address selenium in our soils. So from a human health perspective, this is something I've thought about this for a long time, but there have always been other priorities and this never made it to the top of the priority list of the top 10 things that I wanted to work on. And that has recently shifted. So this is something that is very important. It is something that we are going to be working on here at AEA is providing a selenium product that can be applied that is affordable to serve as a soil remediation or as a crop remediation. And the so it is my perspective is it's much less expensive to address selenium in soils and plants than it is to feed it to livestock or to constantly supplement. Like I take selenium supplements of selenium with ionine every day, at least 200, 200, 200 to 400 micrograms and occasionally much more than that if I sense a viral or bacterial infection coming up to 1 milligram per day. And so the so I suppose the concluding point to Brandon's first question is that as of this moment, there is not an AEA rebound selenium product. I expect that to change at some point in the future. And it will be interesting to navigate the situation of having a product that is very effective and is affordable and is also organically compliant. Because the last and that's one of the reasons why selenium product doesn't exist right now is because when I last looked at it a number of years ago, the soil amendment sources that are most effective, the most effective one is sodium selenate, which is not readily available in the marketplace, or at least wasn't at the time. That is a different oxidation state. That's NaSeO4. The most commonly readily available ingredient back at that point was sodium selenite, which is NaSeO3. And selenite also works, but not as effectively as selenate. And the challenge is that back in the day, when I looked at it, if I remember correctly, neither of those materials were organically certifiable, were organically susceptible, which was a much larger proportion of our customer base back at one point than it is at the moment. So we will be working on developing an organically compliant rebound selenium. And I think it's, I mean I'm readily giving away information here, but the reason I'm doing so is because all of you can also if you do a little bit of digging, you can easily figure out everything on your own that I've already talked about. But the I think there's a lot of Value in having a rebound selenium only because the quantity that is needed per acre is so comparatively small, measured in grams or ounces per acre, that this is not something you broadcast as a dry ingredient, not even with a drone. This is something that in order to just simply, in order to get good distribution and get good soil coverage, we need to turn it into a liquid and spray it on, spray it onto the plants as a foliar application, spray it onto the soil. So that's the only type of application that really makes sense logistically in order to get good and uniform distribution. So, all right, it's a very good question, Brandon. You can expect to see a selenium product for agriculture on the marketplace that we'll be putting on the marketplace at some point. I'm sure other people have some that are out there right now as well, but many of them that I see are not. I don't see anything that is chelated or that is particularly designed to be exceptionally effective. They're just raw material ingredients. Question here from Kurt. In organic winter wheat, will an amino acid nitrogen foliar at Flag leaf be the best way to increase our protein an extra point or two? What have semi arid wheat growers working with AEA been able to do for raising high quality wheat? We have a lot of experience in dry land wheat production, Kurt, and so there are different things that we've been doing. But the, the short version is that yes, an amino acid nitrogen source can be beneficial. But the question is, the question that I would ask is, is a nitrogen deficiency? The, is that the actual source of low, low protein? Is that, that, is that the actual reason why you have low protein and lower yields? So we all know that the correlation between nitrogen content and protein content is imperfect and imprecise. In fact, mostly when we measure wheat, we're actually not measuring protein content, we're just measuring nitrogen content. But the amount of nitrogen that can be held inside the kernel and can be converted to protein is not a reflection of the amount of nitrogen that's provided to the plant so much as it is a reflection of the sulfur and magnesium and molybdenum levels. Those are the elements that are needed to form complete proteins. So if you want to elevate protein levels, a foliar application at that stage should not just contain amino acids. You also have to address those other elements. And in fact, if I were to say it differently, I would say unless your crop is nitrogen deficient, which few wheat crops are, but if, if, if your wheat crop has reasonable levels of nitrogen. You can actually increase the protein content of the grain quite significantly with foliar applications of magnesium and sulfur molybdenum that don't include nitrogen. You don't have to include nitrogen the foliar spray because that isn't the limiting factor. Most of the time it can be the limiting factor, but in many cases it's not. So that's that's the way I would answer that question. Two questions here from Chris hi Chris, you're musing on what a plant would look like if it could express its full genetic potential has spurred me to experiment. I believe there is potential by following single plant cultivation techniques introduced by Fukuoku in the One Straw revolution, formalizing the system of rice intensification, expanded to other cereal crops by Cornell in the system of crop intensification. By moving up the plant nutrition pyramid, I believe wheat growers can disregard the Hessian fly threat and plant two to three months earlier. I can confirm that that is absolutely true and absolutely the case, particularly when you start addressing boron and plant two to three months earlier to encourage maximum tiller development prior to winter dormancy. The hypothesis is equal or greater yield of nutrient dense grain from 1/10 of plant population. I would very much value your comments Chris. The short answer is yes. I'm generally conceptually in alignment. I think this is an area that is under explored and underdeveloped largely because of weed control and managing weeds in a commercial setting and just the way our crop rotation systems are commonly set up. There are a couple of folks who are doing some innovative stuff in this space, both here in North America and internationally. One in particular that I'd point out is Frederick Larson, who is a farmer and agronomist from Denmark. I interviewed him recently on the podcast and he I primarily see his posts on on social media, on X or Twitter. I don't know if he is also active on other social media platforms or not, but he is definitely worth following and paying attention to the work that he is doing because he is going in the direction of figuring out the crop rotations, the intercropping with earlier planting on small grains based on based on these ideas and is figuring out how to implement them and execute them successfully on a commercial scale. To your second question, Dr. Albrecht wrote that calcium is the premier element. Please explain the difficulties a wheat plant has through its vegetative and fruiting cycles to move calcium from the soil colloid complex to the maturing kernel. How do the two AEA calcium products help eliminate calcium deficiency and improve plant Health. All right, so Chris, this is a good question, one that I could talk about for 20 minutes. But the one way that I would say it is that calcium is the fulcrum. It's the leverage point against which you leverage everything else. So if you have adequate levels of calcium, all of a sudden this is a common phenomena, one that I've observed, I don't know, hundreds of times at this point. A grower might be using a foliar application of a trace mineral product, let's say zinc and manganese, and he puts on a SAP, puts on a foliar application, runs a SAP analysis before and after. And yeah, if, if it is a good product, like our rebound zinc and manganese products, the needle moves, but it doesn't move as much as you would expect it to move, given that he applied four quarts of product or a very high product application rate. And that phenomena occurs over and over again in low calcium settings. And then all of a sudden you address calcium, calcium levels come up, all of a sudden you put on a foliar application of a pint of product and of a zinc or manganese and you get more movement on the needle. The SAP analysis levels move more rapidly with a pint of product than they previously did with four quarts. It's a very common phenomena. You get much greater crop responses to anything that you apply when you have a foundation of generous calcium levels to leverage against. So that's the way that I think about, that's how foundational and how important adequate levels of bioavailable calcium are. So ultimately, from a long term sustainability perspective, the objective is to build levels of available calcium in the soil and to have good biological activity in the soil through the rise of ag cycle, and to have generous boron levels in the soil. And when we have those three things that should address calcium so that we're not dependent on foliar applications of calcium. So our, our holocal product and our macro pack product are very effective in irrigation systems and in planter applications and in foliar applications at moving the needle and getting calcium up into the plants, into the crops very quickly. But I think of them as a band aid. They're there to fix the problem. If we didn't succeed in having good enough biological activity to deliver calcium from the soil in the first place, that's the ultimate long term solution. So holocal and macro pack are there to fix temporary problems in the current growing season if our foundation isn't yet in place. And they work very effectively either as foliar applications or almost any type of application system solve. All right, let me switch back to see what other questions have come in here. What are some of the best modes of action herbicides that are least detrimental to soils and can control weeds to a relatively high level? I do not know the answer to that question. And of all the things that I could study in the world.