Ask Us Anything with AEA Founder John Kempf & Director of Education David Miller | Regenerative Ag

Well, hi friends, welcome to our conversation. This afternoon you've got David Miller and myself and we're just simply going to have a fun time answering questions that you might have. So the title of this is Ask Me Anything. But you know, in popular culture there's no boundaries around ask me anything. But we're just giving you a heads up. There probably are boundaries around ask me anything. There's probably questions you can ask us that we're not going to answer. So you're free to ask them and we're free to choose not to answer. Just giving you a heads up. No, just purely joking. Having a good time. We do really enjoy the interactions and the back and forth with any thoughts or comment or critique that you have. You know, we live in a very interesting time in agriculture where aside, I mean, there's obviously very interesting time from an economics perspective, macroeconomics perspective and so forth, but it's also a really interesting time in that there is an emerging science of an alternative form of agronomy, alternative way of thinking about plant nutrition and plant health management that hasn't been mainstream for the last seven decades. And it's really exciting to see all of the information coalesce around the science and the information about how to make this work very, very well in practice. So we're excited to be here today. Feel free to type any questions that you have into the Q and A on the lower right of your screen. I see the questions already coming in here pretty quickly and David and I are going to just have a conversation back and forth and answer any questions that come up. So. First question that I'll pick here is from Timothy. Hi Tim. Advise on maintaining high biological activity and nutrient availability during winter growing in mild southeastern winter climates. High rainfall, high sand content, low CEC soils for mixed vegetables. So when you think about, yeah, that's a tough one, high biological activity during winter. So I'm assuming you're going to have cooler soil temperatures and high rainfall. Of course, high rainfall adds another dimension in there. So the primary driver, the primary tool that you have to work with in those situations is supplying high levels of biologically active carbon. So think of it this way. If you were to use an engine analogy, you can have high RPM or low torque, or you can have high torque and low rpm. And this is obviously an oversimplified explanation because there's more to the story than that from an engines perspective. But when you look at it from a biology perspective, during the winter months the RPM is going to slow down. You're going to have a biological activity is never going to stop completely, but it is going to slow down. And to compensate for the slowdown you need more volume. In other words, you need more torque. And the way to deliver more torque is to have higher levels of biologically active carbon, of amino sugars and carbon sources that the biology can tap into so that you can sustain a net larger population. So when you have a larger population in total, having that population, overall population slow down a little bit is not going to cause, is not going to have as negative an effect. David, is there anything you'd add into that?

No, I think that's the key is getting the carbon. And I would just maybe add that if you can find carbon sources that are longer lasting, more complex carbons that break out, break down over time would be a strategy to help where you're not always just applying humic or folvic or carbohydrate type carbons, but looking at high quality compost, wood chips, those types of things, to amend the soil and then obviously limiting any activities that would cause excessive oxidation of that carbon, such as tillage, which is a very common practice in vegetables production.

Yeah, you raise a very good point, David, in that when we think about amplifying these really challenged systems and really sandy soils, then these are the places where we need to add physical quantities in sometimes particularly to kickstart it, larger physical quantities of carbon like compost and so forth, where just adding material through an irrigation system or with foliar sprays is not enough to really get where we need to go. There's a question here from Dave. I'm a market gardener having trouble finding a good way of dealing with bicarbonates in irrigation water. And Dave goes on to explain that many of the commercial available solutions like sulfur burners and so forth, are designed for larger scale. So Dave, to your question about humic substances versus sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is an appropriate solution for smaller scale and one that I would highly recommend. Humic acids like fulvic acid and humic acid, or even the humicarb they are, they're helpful, but they're usually not enough to deal with water that has high levels of bicarbonates. And I would be an advocate of using sulfuric acid in that type of a situation. Another follow up question from Dave. In other webinars you've talked about using a geological mining soil assay to find the total quantities, not just exchangeable and soluble elements like an MLA3, is there a resource that discusses what minimum levels of each element are needed for healthy plant growth based off a test such as this. David, you want to respond to that one?

I'm not aware that there is any resource that gives specific quantities that are required. We've kind of used the rule of thumb that we like to be at least double of what the desired values are in the Malik 3 as a good buffer for biological activity to mineralize that soil. Unless you're in a sandy desert soil or in beach sand like Florida, which are the only places where we've done samples that actually came back at, say, and one example I remember is potassium, where the Melek 3 was 87 and the total mineral assay was 80. And so what that tells you is there really is no potassium out there. And in that scenario, obviously you need at least the minimum amount. And I think it's a rule of thumb we've been using until we come up with a resource or develop those numbers, is aiming to be about double of what the desired values would be on our mellic 3 test.

Yeah. And just to build on what you described, David, I doubt that we will come up with what desired values are for that type of assay anytime soon, Perhaps never. And the reason for that is because while this test, it's usually referred to laboratories refer to this test as a total digestion test. And while it does give us an indicator of the total nutrient content in the profile, what it does not tell us is what mineral form it is in. Is it in a smectite or a biotite? Or what are the associations with potassium, for example, and iron and aluminum and calcium and magnesium and what crystalline form, what rock form, what mineral form is it taking? That's very relevant because some potassiums and some rock powders are going to be more available and others less so. But at the end of the day, as David indicated, we're using it simply as an indicator to tell us about what the total soil reserves are. And can biology tap into the total reserves? In other words, are there any reserves to tap into? And if the answer is no, then it's important for us to know that. Another question here about crop rotation. This is a fun one. I got asked this question the first time, probably 15 years ago. Do you think crop rotation is still necessary or at least a beneficial practice in a regenerative agriculture system? How would you answer that, David?

A couple of thoughts come to mind when I think about regenerative agriculture. Crop rotation as. Crop rotation, as we think of it, I don't believe is going to be necessary. Planting alfalfa and then planting Corn and then planting, I think we'll see. So on one hand we'll have a lot more of crops per annuals growing together and our food being produced in a system where all of the plants complement each other at the same time. So it's not a rotation, but there's benefits of multi crop species arranged in a way that allows us to, to produce masses of food at high quality. The other aspect of that is when we have enough carbon, when we have carbon cycle, when we have good water cycle. And I think I remember you saying this John, so I'm kind of stealing the wind out of your way or sails. There is that. Let's take tomatoes for example. When we create a microbiome that is exceptionally suited or is acclimated for whatever the specific crop might be, tomatoes in this example, and then we plant tomatoes into that again and again and again, the memory and the microbiome is going to be tilted to actually benefit the tomatoes. So I think the problem comes when there's not enough carbon, when there's excessive nitrates, when there's poor irrigation water or management and that environment gets, gets tilted towards, towards disease enhancing soil and environment. So those are my thoughts, John. I'd be.

There are sometimes very good reasons for crop rotation, but the primary reason that is most widely discussed and most commonly is rotating for the purposes of reducing disease. Well, when you develop what is truly a disease suppressive soil, that argument goes out the window. And as David just described, you can develop a soil to have an optimal microbiome for a specific crop so that that crop will perform optimally in that soil and you are better off not having a rotation. And we've, we've actually observed now, now this I'm going to also share a couple of other examples. There's one example with Fazarium on watermelons and then also there's a few other examples as well. But I'll just maybe focus on the one where a farmer had been growing watermelon for the prior 10 years on about 10% of his farmland and rotating it every year. And he had growing problems with Fazarium becoming worse and worse year by year until he decided to discontinue his crop rotation and focus on growing the watermelon on the same soil year after year after year. Now, with that being said, he was doing lots of other things. He was using cover crops and incorporating compost and soil amendments and microbial inoculants and using fertigation and foliar applications of nutrients. So he was doing many other Things well. But the moment he stopped his rotation and he grew watermelon on the same soil, year after year, his fazarium levels dropped until by the third year he had no fusarium left. So that to me is an example of what can be achieved if we're willing to make the commitment to rebuilding and regenerating our soils and developing disease suppressive soil. There's a question here from Eugene. Can we get rid of Canadian thistle with a fertilizer program? Eugene, the way we should think about this is we can get rid of Canadian thistle with a management program. We have to look at the overall system and it's not just nutrition, it's also biology and it's also cultural management practices. What other crops are growing there? When are they harvested and cut? When is the Canadian thistle get cut? What is the tillage like? So we have any number of experiences, dozens actually, maybe hundreds at this point, where farmers have successfully gotten rid of Canadian thistles with. And it's. We like to point, farmers like to point to one thing and say, hey, I sprayed rejuvenate and their fall soil primer and my Canadian thistles disappeared. And of course that makes us feel really good. But the question is, what else was being done? What was the rest of the system like? Because often there's a combination of changes that happen. So the short answer is that it is absolutely possible to change your soil management to get rid of Canadian thistle. And I would in fact say from what we've observed, that's one of the easier weeds to have that effect on. But it is the overall system, not just nutrition.

I would just add to that, John, that thistles like all other wheats or accumulators.

Yep.

So if we have a lack of bioavailable calcium, that's usually why thistles are there. The first time I experienced it was simply with an application of a pint of micropack and two quarts of Holocau on a hay field made a week or two before cutting. And the next cutting there were no thistles there. The cutting before it was just like solid thistles along a couple of waterways. And this he thought there was some herbicide or something in our spray and was like, no. And the key is that that happened to be the specific limiting factor and it sent the signal to that plant. So that was exactly what is needed. And you'll need to look at what is the thistle communicating that's needed in your specific scenario that it may be a compaction issue actually more than a nutrient issue.

I see the questions are rolling in or the questions are rolling in here really fast. We have 34 open questions right at this moment. So I enjoy the explanations and providing thoughtful answers. And we want to continue doing that, but we're going to try to move along pretty quickly here. Question here from Irwin on radishes for seed production, observing high ammonium levels in plant SAP and how can we reduce the high ammonium levels? Well, I would say that the only reason plants have high ammonium levels in the plant SAP is because they're not properly converting it into complete proteins. So you are likely missing or have inadequate levels of one of the four or five following nutrients, magnesium, sulfur, molybdenum, boron or nickel. So test those, see what is missing and add whatever is missing or not an adequate supply, and that should help fix your ammonium problem. Another fun question. Can fulvic and humic acids still be consumed by microbes? Elaine Ingham says yes. You present them as the end result of microbial decomposition. Yeah, we love controversy. It's lots of fun. This is a question that I've circled around over and over, studying the literature and the research and doing some of my own homework as well. And I had a really interesting conversation. I should reference the individual, but I've met too many people at conferences the last couple of months. I don't even remember who I had the conversation with. But what I learned from that conversation was that in the laboratory they developed very clear evidence that the fulvic acid fraction of total humic substances can be consumed by biology and used as a carbon source. And that is the only fraction in their research they were identifying that the only fraction that can be consumed, actually be consumed and used as an energy source by biology represents about 4% of raw lignite ore. So it's a very small number. Question from Nicole, what advice would you give for someone just starting the process of converting a conventionally farmed no till farm growing corn, wheat and barley to a region farm in Virginia? David, would you like to respond to that? It's really easy. Call aea.

Yeah, just, just call aea. There's, there's lots of, there's lots of things, lots of questions to consider in where to start and how to start. One of those questions is how fast do you want to get where you're going? And what is the shape of the soil? What is the condition that your soil is in now? So if it's a. It's a conventional corn and soybean farm and been glyphosated for the last 10, 15 years and lots of fungicides, insecticides, then a pretty aggressive approach would probably be advisable. But if you're just continuing to grow organic corn and beans, then maybe the budget would you'd want to just started slowly doing cover crops. If I were to just list it out and I would do that just in a couple simple steps. But then call your AEA consultant because there's so many more details that are important. But plant a cover crop and use biocoat gold on your cover crop seeds, get mycorrhizal fungi, get bacteria out there in the soil, incorporate that cover crop and apply rejuvenating spectrum to it to re inoculate and continue inoculating. Depending on how much chemical use has been out there, you might consider adding OP8 which is a substantial investment. But if you're growing any kind of high value crop, it's worth the investment to put that out as you're starting and then think about your rotation your look at your soil. Do you need any soil amendments? If your potassium is only 100 parts per million in the total nutrient digestion, then you probably want to add compost or manure or a potassium source. The minerals that are deficient balance your soil. And then think about carbon cycling, carbon having gas exchange. There's a lot of things that go into it, but step number one is getting biology and creating an environment for biology.

Thanks David. There's a question here from John Anderson, current literature and videos about transitioning from traditional to organic farming and regenerative agriculture. Well, first of all John, if you refer to what is today's mainstream agriculture as traditional, I would point out that it hasn't earned the right to be called traditional. It's only been the mainstream for about the last 70 years and doesn't have exactly an awesome track record at this point. These recommendations are confusing with respect to how to determine the amount of organic amendments to apply, specifically manure, compost, etc. Are there comparability measurements that can be used? So first of all, I respect and appreciate your question of can this be measured and can this be tested? Because the best approach is, as you know, as you hear us talking about, is don't guess when you can test, actually measure what's going on. Obviously there are soil analysis that you can conduct to determine what your soil's nutrient requirements are. And you can also measure compost analysis and manure analysis to see what the nutrient contributions are. Now both nutrient, both compost and manure have not just nutrients but also carbon microbially active carbon. And I would say that in general, our general rule of thumb is that you can never have too much carbon. You can always add more. There isn't really a downside to adding more unless you add carbon that cannot be decomposed quickly. So the downside, the limiting factor, the limitation is going to be nutrient content, sodium, chlorides, potassium, and so forth. So that's really where you need to pay attention. Would you expect there to be difference in nutritional content in spinach leaves from a plant that has been cut repeatedly just above the growing tip, versus from a plant where just the biggest outer leaves are harvested regularly, leaving about 50% of the leaves at every harvest? That's a really good question. I don't know the answer. I don't know that anyone has ever measured it. The only relevant experience that I would have is a kale farmer who had constant challenges with flea beetles and was constantly harvesting the leaves to try to remove all the flea beetle damage. So the leaves plants only had a few small leaves and new shoots at the top. He finally gave up on the flea beetles and just walked away from the field, let the leaves grow out. And the moment the leaves grew out to be larger, the plant developed higher brix readings and the flea beetle problem disappeared all on its own. It was a pretty interesting experience. So plants do need leaves for photosynthesis, and based on that, there's a possibility or possible hypothesis that leaves plants, which maintain some leaves, might have a higher sugar content. But I don't know that. I don't know that anyone's actually measured that. Any thoughts, David?

Yeah, I think in the scenario where you have leaves, you would have a constant brix or a constant photosynthesis going on, whereas if you cut it, then you have a regrowth. But I don't know that that would necessarily equate to a higher nutrient density. I could see it possibly because you have a more constant feeding of sugars to the roots. But then on the flip side, if you cut it, all of those roots will, you know, will slough off and you'll have a flush of regrowth and all the energy. So be an interesting experiment.

Yep. So question here from Jared. What foliar nutrient spray do I need to cause an immune response in squash to protect against vine borers and squash bugs? Well, Jared, I'll give you a quick answer, and that is you can put on foliar sprays that contain immune elicitors such as chitin or chitosan, and seaweed is known to have immune elicitor compounds, you can include the nutrients like magnesium and sulfur and molybdenum and boron that are going to also change the plant's nutritional profile and carbohydrate profile. I can't on a webinar, give a recommendation to say you can use this product or that product or that product to nutritional products to control insects because that is making a pesticidal claim. And that could really get me in trouble with lots of people who are both my friends and who might not be so friendly. So the what you really need to think about, though, is how do you create an immune reaction from the soil up? Because the reality is when you get to level four of the plant health pyramid, that immune response that plants produce is coming from soil biology in the root system serving as immune elicitors. So all these organisms that we call PGPRs, plant growth promoting rhizobacteria, have this effect of triggering an immune reaction. And that should happen in the root system from the moment the seed germinates. And that is really the foundation of, along with mineral nutrition, of course, and mineral support of how you develop resistance so that you don't need foliar nutrient sprays. Anything to add to that, David? Darren has a fun one here. Hi, Darren, you got a bit of pushback on your retweet last week about carbon dioxide being more important than water. Would you please expand on the carbon cycle versus water cycle? Walter Yanny says that if you fix one, you fix the other. Thank you. So, Darren, I actually don't think I got any pushback on my CO2 versus water conversation that we had. There were folks who immediately wanted to vilify just the very conversation, pointing out all of the negative environmental effects of carbon dioxide. But there was in fact no intelligent discourse, which is common on Twitter, about carbon dioxide as a fertilizer. So no informed conversation from my perspective. And so, you know, I've made the comment about qualified opinions. You're only qualified to have an opinion if you can articulate the opposing perspective better than the opposition. And I didn't perceive any of that. So I still stand by my position, which is very well studied, that carbon dioxide is frequently a greater limiting factor than water. And that is because our soils don't breathe. It's because we don't have large reservoirs of soil biology exhaling carbon dioxide. You know, when you have gas moving out of the soil profile as the earth exhales, that's usually it can. It varies, of course, but it can be as high as 20 to 30,000 parts per billion carbon dioxide, or 2 to 3%. That's where the majority of crop absorbed CO2 should come from, is from soil respiration, not from the bulk atmosphere. So there's a fundamental misunderstanding or lack of being informed that commonly occurs is that the assumption that the majority of crop absorbed carbon dioxide comes from the bulk atmospheric CO2, that is not the case. Well, let me say it this way. If that is the case, we have really screwed up soil. The healthiest, the highest yielding soils are the soils which cycle the largest volume of carbon, where carbon is moved into the soil through photosynthesis and then back up again through microbial respiration and picked up again by the crop. And in that total cycle, plants are picking up an additional, Perhaps an additional 10% or so, or maybe 20% from the bulk atmosphere, but not the majority. The majority of the carbon dioxide is not coming from the bulk atmosphere. So anyway, that could be a whole conversation in and of itself for the next hour to expand on that, but we don't have enough time for that. David, are there any other important points you'd like to discuss?

No, but I'd like to ask you, what do you see? How do you see the carbon and the water cycle or your thoughts on the water cycle? Maybe in addition to what you just described about the carbon cycle?

It is important to sequester carbon. It's important to build solar organic matter so that we can restore our hydrological cycles so that we can restore our water cycle. So carbon storage or carbon sequestration is important from that perspective, but it is more important from the, in my opinion and the opinion of Walter Yenny and other climatologists as well. Restoring soil organic matter so that we restore our soil water holding capacity and water cycling is more important than just carbon sequestration for the sake of carbon sequestration. Question here from Jared Lake. What nutrients and minerals are needed to protect Brassicas against slugs at transplant? We have had reasonably good success with foliar applications of iron. And if you want to dig into the best and most comprehensive explanation of why slugs are present on a crop that I have ever heard is from Harriet Mello in her carbon microcycling course that she put together on Kind Harvest. Highly recommend. If you have any challenges with slugs, you want to dig into that conversation because it's going to be very worthwhile. Question from Michael. Are insects like potato leafhoppers, flea beetles and cucumber beetles deterred only once you reach level four of the plant health pyramid and really have Your system going? Well, I would answer the question this way. We created the. Developed the Plant Health Pyramid with clear delineations and clear boundaries in order to be able to describe what is happening and what we observe happening in these biological systems. However, nature doesn't have neatly defined boundaries like that. And so in our experience, I would suggest there's definitely a transition that happens and there is definitely overlap and that you can achieve resistance to some of these insects sometimes faster than when you get all the way up to level four. But of course there's, there's so much overlap. Lots of these things happen at the same time and they're difficult to measure. So it's. I don't have a good question for that other than a good answer for that, other than to say that it can happen very quickly and it can happen in a single growing season with the right management.

I would just add to that, John, that we think about the Plant Health Pyramid and being up here. You know, crop is up here, but it's more about the pulse and how consistently the plant can stay there. Because you might have the ideal weather, soil moisture, nutrient availability, and for two days it's at level four, but then it drops down to level one because of being too dry or being too wet or the sun not shining. So I think it's important to not see the Plant Health Pyramid levels as a static position that once you've reached it, you stay there.

Yep. Thanks, David. Question from Stevie. I have huge problems with blossom end rot and bell peppers. Yeah, they're one of the crops that's notorious for that. I grow on heavy clay soil. What can I do immediately to help reduce this problem? Immediately you can begin supplementing with chelated calcium in irrigation systems and foliars and also address boron and manganese. Make sure you apply generous levels of manganese and boron to down regulate the excessive potassium that that crop is absorbing from your likely to be absorbing from your heavy clay soil.

And don't apply potassium in any form.

Whatsoever at any time ever. Yeah. The reason bell peppers have blossom end rot is not because they have a calcium deficiency, but because they have a potassium excess. Question from Jeremy. Lots of legumes and woody debris to break down in a very dry, hot environment in New Mexico. And the debris is on the soil surface. Are there any products that we could recommend to aid in and speed up the breakdown? David, you want to take this question?

Yes. We have found that just inoculating with the regular spectrum will help break down crop residue quickly. But there's also A product called biodigester that has additional lignin digesting bacteria and fungi. So if there's any, you know, whenever we have very challenging environments, we used to recommend the biodigester instead of the, instead of just the spectrum. And then obviously you need again, all the, all the factors of the environment to make sure that that biology is able to do its job.

Yeah, and Jack just shared the link in the chat to that, so. Thank you, Jack. Thank you, David. Question from Patrick. We raised malt barley under irrigation in southern Idaho and have been no tilling for about six years. This year we no till planted our barley with Biocoat gold at 3 ounces per acre. Chicken manure pellets in row at 150 pounds approximately 5 to 10 days post plant. We applied 30 units of liquid urea stabilized with sulfur carbon and moly. We applied 32 ounces of Roundup with that fertilizer. Ouch. So, Patrick, thanks for your comment. Thanks for sharing that update. I hope that things are going well with you. You know, when I interviewed Michael McNeil on the podcast and I asked him about combining foliar nutrient applications with fungicides and insecticides, he said, why would you mix poisons with your food? And I think that's the challenge that we run into. And I understand that from an economics perspective, and sometimes we need to do that from the perspective of making field passes and so forth. But I loved everything you said until you said that. I think that's something we need to be cautious about. Calcium deficiency is common in summer. Can we use calcium nitrate in abundance and reduce nitrate using the photosynthesis pathway? The short answer is no. Calcium nitrate is an excellent fungicide sales tool and insecticide sales tool because of the way that it increases insect and fungal susceptibility. We try to avoid the use of calcium nitrate on farms that we work with, if at all possible, as much as possible. Question from Michael. When utilizing an AEA drench program needing to apply in areas with a hose instead of drip irrigation, is it still effective to apply even if you can't really soak the soil and the soil is fairly dry? If the nutrients and biology are applied to the soil surface, is there still some benefit? Short answer, in my opinion, is yes, there's significant benefit. David, you want to chime in on that and describe some of the extreme experiences that we've observed?

Yes, definitely. If it's sprayed on the soil surface and there's no rain in sight, you're probably going to lose quite a bit. But if you have a drench where you're actually drenching it into the soil, you're going to have significant benefit. And I've seen applications made in less than ideal scenarios and been astounded at how well they performed. Like day before Christmas and the following day, on Christmas day, there was 12 inches of snow. And just. And I was like, wow, it was really cold. It's like, that's not a very good environment. Snowed the next day, so maybe that insulation helped. And also in dry soils, there's only been one situation in all my consulting that I recommended the grower to not spray, rejuvenate and spectrum. And that's where they had like 3 inches of dry dust and they were going to plant into that. And that scenario would just add a spectrum to the biocoat gold and put it right on the seed. And that way it just lay dormant in that dry powder until they did get moisture. But in most scenarios you will definitely get benefit, especially if you have rainfall within a couple days to a week.

Thank you, David. Yeah, I would say that David answered it adequately, but I strongly agree that we can put into really challenged and what we perceive to be very challenged environments and still produce some very nice crop and slow responses. Question from Nicholas. Do we know how fast and how far mycorrhizae and fungi can recolonize a tilled soil and plant? Thinking of the strip till method, for example? Nicholas? I don't. I'm sure the research has probably been done. I don't know the answer off the top of my head other than to answer it this way. Mycorrhizal fungi recolonize soil in the presence of a living root system. So the question is, the plants that you are planting, what is the volume and quantity and reach of of the root system and the root biomass that they're developing? Because it is the association with that root system and the rude exudates that is really going to propagate development very rapidly in the first year. So that would be my hypothetical answer of how I would be thinking about it. Question from Jordan. Does blending the fungal and bacterial products at specific ratios help to optimize the bacterial to fungal ratio that is preferred for a given crop? The answer is no. It's not the presence of the organisms in the product that you apply, it's how you feed them once they're actually out there. Question from Alan. In a dry land, broad acre situation, how do you juggle keeping living roots in the ground as long as possible while also having enough soil Moisture to get a good germination on your next crop. Alan, the answer to your question is maybe we need to change the system completely. Maybe we can make a lot more money grazing beef and growing perennials than we can growing annuals. And if we can be a lot more profitable doing that, should we consider changing our system to that? Anyway, this is obviously a bigger conversation. So in general, I think there are these environments in which we should consider growing perennials rather than annuals. David, do you want to add any thoughts to this?

It goes back to the conversation we had earlier about water holding capacity. And when we do get that rain, all that moisture, where's it going and how long are we able to hold onto that moisture? I've seen way too many soils that were being farmed 4 inches. In fact, I was on a farm right after a flood event. There was water running over the road. The ditches were full. We walked out into a wheat field, it was muddy. We dug down, and four inches down was. There was dry soil, I mean, bone dry soil. But water is running down the ditches. So I think that's. That's key. Getting organic matter, getting water infiltration, holding that water for when your crop needs.

There is a word that has been lost in the agricultural community, and that word is percolation. We've become obsessed with the idea of water infiltration and that we should measure our soil's infiltration capacity. And that's all well and good, but infiltration is just the first half of the story. It's just a measurement of how fast your water is moving into the ground. The next part of the question or conversation is percolation, which is how your measurement of your soil's capacity to move your water down deep into the soil horizon and, and then also bring it back up to the surface. And we should focus closely not just on developing our infiltration capacity, but also on our soil's percolation capacity, which almost all agricultural soils had really excellent capacity for before the structure was damaged. With our agricultural management practices. Question from Patrick. We're seeing two things going on. First, our crop appears to be developing a large root structure. But above ground, vegetative growth is lagging behind our conventional neighbors and behind what I would expect to see. Is this normal? Awesome. Patrick, I love this question. The answer is yes. Not only is it normal, let me. Well, first of all, it depends on how you define normal. But this is what is really healthy. A healthy plant will have a larger root biomass and smaller vegetative growth. So, yes, this is unfamiliar. For many growers, and it's what you are comparing and contrasting with is mainstream agronomic practices, which are loaded up with nitrogen and are going to cause all kinds of diseases and insect susceptibility problems, but also have a smaller root system. And so, yes, the healthiest plants, what you will discover is the highest yielding plants are going to be plants that have cytokinin dominance, that have a dominant root system and smaller vegetative growth. Once if we're talking, assuming we're talking about a reproductive crop, like grains or fruits or vegetables and not a crop, if you're harvesting alfalfa or kaleb is a slightly different story. But if you're harvesting a reproductive crop, crops with a dominant root system and smaller vegetative growth will always produce a higher yielding crop measured in bins and bushels and pounds per acre. Your second question. We've done some SAP analysis and our ammonium and nitrate levels have been very high. Is this a result of the chicken pellets or the 30 units of urea we applied? It would be coming from the chicken pellets, not from the urea. Most likely it's. Well, actually, on second thought, you make a note that you have had very cool wet conditions. So when you have saturated soil, when you have wet soil, the nitrogen that is in the soil profile is going to be in the ammonium form, because ammonium is the reduced form of nitrogen. And when you have saturated soils, of course you have a reduced environment. So that's probably where your ammonium is coming from. It's a good comment.

I would also just add to that that your high nitrates and ammonia may be because you have a deficiency of something else and it's just not being metabolized.

Yeah. Which leads to our next question from Nicholas. Is it possible to have a balanced SAP analysis and still have high nitrates and ammonium? Well, by very definition, if you have high nitrates and ammonium, it's not balanced. So what we've observed is that very reliably, very consistently, when we address magnesium and sulfur and molybdenum, nitrate levels go down to non detect levels like clockwork. It's very reliable and very consistent. That doesn't necessarily happen for ammonium in high temperature environments where plants switch to photorespiration dominance instead of photosynthesis dominance. And even in that environment, the ammonium accumulated should be converted back to proteins during cooler parts of the day. But to do that requires adequate levels of nickel, something which 70% of soils have enough of and another 30 or 40% don't. And so that for in those types of environments, nickel is obviously something that's not commonly tested and not commonly applied and is considered a hit toxic element. So it needs to be managed very cautiously. But you're looking at only requiring a few grams per acre as an enzyme cofactor for plants to metabolize ammonium back into complete proteins.

John, you might also just add a bit on the importance of carbon and the carbon that's required for the converting the ammonia back and how in photorespiration we often have a lack of sugar carbohydrates being developed and that can actually cause that ammonia to accumulate instead of being converted back. So sometimes a simple application of rejuvenate or some sugar form can help the plant artificially elevate that and help get the ammonium levels down.

That's an important point, an important reminder. Thank you, David. The reason plants catabalize, the reason plants generate ammonium internally within plant structure in the first place, is because they no longer can get enough energy from the sugars coming from photosynthesis or from stored sugars. So they begin catabolizing their own proteins and consuming their own proteins, consuming their own enzymes, so to speak. And the end waste product of that process is ammonium. And so to convert that ammonium back into proteins is going to require carbon, carbohydrates and sugars, both to sustain the plant and also to be bonded with the ammonium and converted back into proteins. So if we have high temperature periods, high heat periods for any extended length of time, longer than a couple of days, it can be very valuable to foliar feed and just spoon feed plants relatively small amounts of sugar to help snap them out of that cycle.

And also just watch like iron, manganese, all of your photosynthetic elements, like if you have a significant deficiency of iron that could be connected to the high levels of ammonium indirectly by not having enough photosynthesis happening and carbon being produced on a, on a 24 hour photoperiod.

Yep. Question here from Jeremy. With a micronutrient test showing very low levels of boron and cobalt and molybdenum, is amending with kelp a good way to increase the availability of those nutrients? So Jeremy, you asked the right question. Is this a good way to increase the availability? The question is that I would come back to you with, is, is there the presence of those minerals in your soil mineral profile that you can increase the availability of? Certainly seaweed is not a source of a significant source of those Nutrients. The only nutrients that are in significant levels to be worthwhile considering in seaweed, as I understand it, are if you get the right species of seaweed, you can count on them as a source of iodine and selenium. And that's just about it. Otherwise, think of it more as a biostimulant. So it's possible that as a stimulant that could increase the availability of trace minerals from your soil mineral profile. But the question is, are they there in the first place to become available? Question, if a plant seedling is not able to produce soluble carbon, can we feed them amino acids and molasses? The answer is yes, you can. But the question also is, why would they not be able to produce soluble carbon? Because that is, after all, how the system was designed to work. But it certainly can be supplemented. The next question, in SAP analysis of my tomatoes, chloride levels are 2,500 to 3,000 parts per million. Ouch. And sodium is 100 to 250 parts per million. If the other elements are around the desired levels, are these levels toxic to the plant in arid regions as in Senegal or West Africa? If so, can nitrate alleviate chloride toxicity? What else can we do other than gypsum? This is the fun one, isn't it, David? So the answer to your question is yes, you can use nitrogen, you can use nitrate to balance out. I use the term balance out to kind of negate the negative effects of chloride. I would also, I would say that you do need to elevate the other elements. The other nutrients that are present as well, particularly calcium, need to develop higher levels of calcium and phosphorus. The downside of using nitrates and having plants that have high levels of nitrates and chlorides is that without question, you're going to have a lot of insect pressure and disease pressure. David, you deal with quite a few situations like this in the Southwest and in Florida. What thoughts do you have?

Why and where is all this chloride coming from? That's my question. No, it's. It's a real challenge. We. I'm dealing right now with a very similar scenario where there's high sodium chloride in the water. And with using spectrum ds, there's very little sodium coming into the plant, but the chlorides are just excessive. So chloride being an anion.

The.

We're actually running some trials on a vineyard in California where we're going to be injecting humor carp. Every time water goes out, there's going to be humid carp with it to help try, help bind up some of those chlorides. I think it goes, you know, carbon is going to be a key part of it and then really have to wonder how much of this chloride water problem or water quality issue is because of that water cycle not being buffered and not being buffered and filtered by sufficient levels of carbon. And so we end up concentrating these compounds because they're not being buffered by the organic matter and the carbon. Carbon in the soil. So I it, there's not really any silver bullet that I'm aware of, except the nitrate can help antagonize and make less up, you know, make it more difficult for the chlorides to be taken up. And then the carbon thing, we're trying that, but it's yet to be seen how, how that works.

Yep. Yeah, certainly a challenge to deal with. And I would echo David's thoughts that from a long term landscape regeneration perspective, we need to look at restoring water cycles and being less dependent on irrigation water and managing our watering differently. And that is fundamental to solving this from a long term perspective. Question from John. Is there an ideal soil composition where the organic matter will automatically regenerate carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphere at Rhodexidates, reducing the need for external amendments? John, you ask a good question, but I would say it's not the right question. It's not a question of ideal soil composition. It is a question of management system. Like you can have soils that are really challenged and really compromised, and based on the management of those soils and the crops being grown on them or the plants being grown on them, those soils will regenerate carbon and hydrogen every year without inputs, even in very challenged environments. So it's not so much a question of soil composition as it is a question of management. Whether we're speaking about grazing or whether we're talking about crop nutrition management, there's obviously lots of nuance there. But the short answer is that you can have very challenged soils in very challenged environments that gain carbon and nitrogen every year based on how they are managed. Then a follow up question. Is there an ideal or target microbiome assay that can be intentionally developed? If so, can it be supplemented directly? John, I'm not quite sure I understand your question here, but we do use microbial inoculants and work with farmers who use compost teas all the time. So microbial inoculants, fungal and bacterial inoculants are a very important part of an integrated system. Yeah. Question from Alan on the crop rotation. By continually growing the same crop, do you eventually unbalance your nutrients as that crop requires more of specific nutrients, or is it just a case of carefully feeding those plants? That's a good question, Alan. And I think when you ask that question, my thoughts go to how do crops rotate, if you will, in natural systems? So if you have, what does a natural succession of plants look like as soils improve on a prairie or in whatever ecosystem you might want to consider? And so the answer is that over time, yes, soils will shift, and what might be optimal for a given crop now might be more optimal for a different crop. But the answer is over significant periods of time, usually I would say a matter of decades or more. But again, it's really dependent on our management. We can manage that. To maintain it in that. Excuse me, To maintain for that specific crop or to go to a different crop. David, I'm going to turn the microphone over to you for a little bit. I'm going to go grab some water. I'll be right back.

Okay, good. We'll go to the next question here. What is the difference between brix and total sugars and plant SAP? How do you use the information given by total sugars in the plant SAP report? What to do if it's too high or too low? Great question. We are actually in the process of doing a comparison of the brix and the total sugars. But as I understand it, the brix is going to be measuring your total dissolved solids, While your total sugars is looking at specific, specifically the sugar compound within the plant. So when we, when we do a brix analysis, we're measuring more than just sugars. We're measuring the total dissolved solids. And then how do we use this information? Or what do we do if it's too high or too low? If it's, if it's too high? The question obviously is, are we not metabolizing it? Is the plant not metabolizing the energy from those sugars and it's just accumulating if it's too low? Obviously our first thought is that we're not producing enough to keep up with the plant demand. And this is where it's so important to have context with the plant SAP analysis. Just looking at a plant SAP analysis and saying we have sufficient levels of sugar, therefore the plant must be healthy, can be a dangerous assumption. So knowing how your plant is growing, because sometimes plants go through a major vegetative growth flush and the sugars drop in the SAP analysis based on that flush and it's a part of the cycle. So it's about looking at your data over time and seeing the overall trend of those Sugars but generally if it's too low we immediately look at and especially if there's a trend of it being too low, you want to check the photosynthetic minerals, the magnesium, the nitrogen, iron, manganese and phosphorus and just see if there's a reason why it's so low. And we have a question from Andrew. I've been working on soil surveyor machine varys and that EC PVC and then high resolution ph and organic matter. I want to use the EC map to help write variable rate scripts. For example high EC can hold and supply more K to reduce K applications and whereas EC as much. So apply more there and get a better return on investment on potassium or apply more cattle manure and lower ec. John, you want to take that. And then there's a follow up question if your voice is back, what if.

Your crops greatest limiting factor is boron and manganese.

And what if soil biology which is the most efficient form of nutrient uptake doesn't register as ec?

Yeah, so I think this and I don't want to, we don't want to just take the perspective that and be downers on ideas or technology because it can be very useful and very valuable. But one of the challenges that we have in mainstream agronomy is we've been incredibly accurate at hitting the bullseye of the wrong target. And this would be the concern that I would have is in our work with plant nutrition as we are understanding and learning about the rhizophagy cycle and about the capacity of biology to deliver nutrition to plants. The there's a few critical pieces here. One is that microbial metabolites have very low electrical conductivity but are extraordinarily efficient at providing plants with nutrients. And also they're not soluble in water or I shouldn't actually. Yeah. Speaking broadly, many of them are not soluble in water. So at any rate to your last question, can you add sugar to UAM or a carbon source with nitrogen? Yes, we recommend it all the time. It's a part of our nitrogen efficiency recommendations just to add rejuvenator sugar in with the humic substances. So these can be valuable tools but I would suggest it's worth experimenting also with let's not just look at potassium and phosphorus and nitrogen applications but let's. So let's also look at what does the readings that we're taking tell us about soil biology and how can we change them with soil. How can we change, how can soil biology change these readings as well? Because they may in fact have a much bigger impact on soil fertility than the products that you might be considering applying.

It reminds me of a conversation we had with a grower at Acres many, many, many years ago. And he was asking the question, really scratching his head because he, he carried an EC meter around and everything and he was measuring EC of everything, every soil like and comparing the crop growth. And he had this experience where he saw amazing crop growth and healthy crops in a garden scenario. But the EC was way below what was considered to be the required level to grow a healthy crop. And that's. I remember that's where I realized that EC was not going to accurately indicate how well crops are going to grow.

Yeah, there is no correlate well in biological soils. The rules of EC corresponding to vegetative crop growth, crop response go out the window because. Because soil biology delivers lots of nutrition that is low electrical conductivity. There's a question here from John Warmerdam. Hi John. Using biological products on vegetative crops is a no brainer. But I do see a higher than preferred nitrogen response on some of our stone fruit blocks. And John, I assume when you say a nitrogen response you're referring to a vegetative crop growth response with new shoots. So I would point out that first of all, that may not be just nitrogen. That could be calcium also contributing to that. I've done two years of the AEA fall primer and made some Johnson compost for applying this fall. But I have a concern I may go too far. Can one manage the nitrogen supply yet get the other biological benefits on fruiting crops? The short answer is yes. Yes, if you have concerns and it's known, documented, which I'm sure you probably have SAP analysis that indicate you have excess of nitrogen levels. That's coming from biology. By the way, did everyone just hear the sentence I just said and what John is talking about? It is possible to get excessive nitrogen levels on crops coming purely from biology without any applied nitrogen. This is something that we experience all the time on many different types of crops and different types of environments. And it boggles my mind that we have the idea that we have to buy nitrogen like this is not untested, unvalidated science or technology. This has been around for decades. Lots of folks are doing it and it works very effectively. We don't deal with nitrogen deficiencies in the farmers that we work with. Our greater concern is nitrogen excesses coming from biology. Anyway, to answer your question, John, the antidote for nitrogen excesses in crops is elevate the levels of magnesium. You get higher levels of magnesium and that will limit that growth response. And it will actually, if you get it, you have to be cautious because when you get levels of magnesium high enough, it will actually deplete the crops absorption of nitrogen, nitrogen and crop utilization of nitrogen. So use with caution. But the short answer is yes, magnesium is the answer that you're looking for.

And sulfur is going to be important for utilization of that to get good healthy growth and utilization of the nitrogen without having that excess kind of feeling.

Yeah, We have quite a few open questions yet. We're a little bit past the hour, but we value all the time that you put into this meeting and we try to make our answers concise and thoughtful. David and I are going to stick around for a while yet and go through some of these questions that have come through yet if you want to hang with us. Can you change soil management to reduce or get rid of bindweed pressure like with Canadian thistle? The short answer is yes. Not as easily. We find that it's not as responsive as Canadian thistle, but it can happen and does happen. Question from John if you apply rejuvenate on corn stalks in the fall after harvest, can you still graze cattle on it or should you apply it after the cattle have finished? The answer is yes, you can graze cattle on it. And if you put the rejuvenate on before you graze on it, it's probably going to increase the digestibility of the corn fodder perhaps. Question from South Africa we farm pecans in South Africa and irrigate through drip irrigation high ph soils. We're pulling SAP analysis every two weeks all the way through the growing season and then spray according to SAP analysis results. Would it be correct practice to spray the elements to boost photosynthesis and protein synthesis along with the elements that appear low on our SAP analysis? So the answer is it's not necessarily incorrect, but you want to be cautious about not creating excesses. So I would in terms of priority, I would start with by focusing on photosynthesis and protein synthesis elements but avoid excesses at all costs. A follow up from an earlier question. How can I prevent high ammonium appearing in plant SAP when I incorporate grass and clover and herb cover crop before planting radishes we shallow incorporate with an application of a lactoferment applied three weeks before sowing. The pathway to avoiding having that high ammonium level show up. If your ammonium levels are coming simply from the COVID crop residue decomposition is to apply a lot of carbon with that cover crop. Or maybe saying it a different way is to have that cover crop, allow that cover crop to be slightly more mature before you incorporate so that you get a slightly broader carbon to nitrogen ratio and slow down the decomposition slightly and that should take care of it. David, is there anything you'd like to add to that?

No, I think that's good. Except just like always, make sure you have sufficient levels of sulfur. You could think I'm on a sulfur range today.

David? Yeah. Question from John. Interested in your thoughts on a multi species orchard? How one may incorporate a diverse understory of their practices for disease and pest suppression and nutrient cycling? The short answer is yes. Figure out how you can do it and do it as much as you can. So I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but there's in natural ecosystems, we've been indoctrinated in agriculture to think that plants compete with each other. They're competing with each other for water and nutrients and so forth. And there's some really interesting research, I forget where and when I read it. But the conclusion, the bottom line is that when there is abundant, when there are abundant resources, when there is abundant water and nutrients, then it's true that plants do compete with each other. But in a resource constrained environment, if it's water limited or nutrient limited, plants will actually collaborate rather than compete. And that makes you wonder about what is the type of management system and ecosystem. If we want to develop these diverse ecosystems and orchards, might we be better off not irrigating to surplus, not irrigating to abundance if we want our cover crops to, and not just our cover crops, other plant species that we're planting to truly collaborate with our crop plants, should we perhaps not irrigate to the point of saturation on a regular basis? Do we need to supply slightly less water so that plants collaborate better with each other? There's some interesting questions to be explored there that I don't know the answers to. Question from John for an open minded California farmer who can see the end of the road water wise, where in the country would you suggest the best opportunity to put down roots and put my regenerative knowledge to? Good news. Boy, John, that is a really good question, one that I'd be interested in having a follow up conversation with. So I would look for areas that have adequate or generous levels of water and climactic stability. And there are a number of those across the Midwest, but particularly Arkansas and others. So there's a number of those. When you go east of the 98th person parallel but or meridian. Interesting things to think about. Question From Brian, how would you convert a long term CRP field to organic? If you want to know, till could you mow it close in late summer and put a heavy rye crop on it? Would the rye drown out the perennial grasses? And then could you roller crimp it? That's a tough one, Brian. That's a tough one. I would suggest in that type of environment I would probably go for something even more aggressive than just the rye by itself. Perhaps a combination of rye and hairy vetch, both seeded very heavily because hairy vetch is one of those that is, if anything, perhaps even better than rye at choking things out. So another possibility would be planting sorghum Sudan grass as a cover crop. Sorghum Sudan grass will choke out just about everything that if you plant it at high population densities.

Yeah.

David, any other thoughts?

Sorghum Sudan was the one that was coming to my mind. And also I don't know what the possibilities would be of doing intensive grazing. So if you, if you were able to really intensely graze it over a short period of time, maybe even overwinter cattle on it and what would feel almost like abusing the soil, but if you roll out hay and then allow the cows to really trample that in, not only are you killing the one crop, you're really fertilizing the next.

In the answer on the spinach, you said that when you cut plants, roots will be sloughed off. Is there good theory about the relationship between percentage of foliage removed and percentage of root system abandoned? My understanding is that it's very crop dependent and crop cycle crop stage dependent. So if you're young, vegetative growth stage or older stage plant, it's going to vary quite significantly. What plants are more efficient with the carbon cycle? That's a really easy answer for that. One, the plants that are the most efficient with the carbon cycle have two parameters. One is they have good nutritional integrity and two is they are supported with a healthy microbiome. Those are the plants that are the most efficient with the carbon cycle. It doesn't matter the species, it matters about how well they're supported with a healthy microbiome and healthy nutritional status.

I would just add to that, John, that the C4 pathway, photosynthetic pathway, plants are going to be more efficient, especially in high temperatures. And also when we talk about carbon cycles, it's important to understand that the carbon cycling and putting carbon back into the soils will primarily happen during the vegetative growth stage after the plant switches to reproduction. The amount of carbon that goes into the soil as root exudates starts to be much more limited, or that's not where the plant focuses on putting the carbon. So having something like a sorghum sedan or a corn crop is. If we want to look at specific plants, and I fully agree with your parameters that you gave, but that being put aside, if you want to look at specific plants, corn, sorghum, those types of plants are going to give you the most effective cycle as well as, as well as vegetative biomass that you can then incorporate as liquefied carbon.

Yep. Thank you, David. Very good point. Question from Jared, how does one improve the gas exchange in clay soils that already have 13% organic matter? If you already have 13% organic matter, then my question would be, do you have good water infiltration and percolation? Do you have good gas exchange? And if the answer is no, then why not? What are your limiting factors? Is there mechanical compaction? Is there chemical compaction? What's going on? So we would need to figure out and address why that's the case and fix it, make sure we don't recreate it.

Just a quick thought on that, John. Organic matter, if you, if you took a piece of lumber and you did a soil analysis on it, it would be very high organic matter. And so just because you have 13% organic matter does not mean that it's biologically active carbon or has significant water holding capacity or is contributing to soil structure.

That's a good point. Yep. Question from Michael. Hi Michael. What are the benefits of using a fertilizer containing chitin, such as mealworm manure, in a market garden? Well, the short answer is that it will stimulate all the bacteria in the soil that feed on those things, which in turn means that any insects that overwinter as pupae or eggs or larvae in the soil profile are unlikely to survive. And those same bacteria also serve as immune elicitors for plants. So they will trigger an immune response in the plant when plants are planted the following spring. Question from John. In Florida, citrus with very sandy soil, what is the quickest way to break down wood chips? And then there's a follow up question that how do you feel about vermicompost? We already spoke about wood chips. Earlier. David responded to a question. I would be in favor of using our soil primer rejuvenate spectrum application and perhaps adding an inoculant with lignin or cellulose digesters that is called biodigester. That's one that we have used very successfully in the past. And then how do we feel about vermicompost. Well, the question is very simple. Is it effective and does it work? And sometimes the answer is yes. Often the answer is yes, but it depends on how it's produced. David, you want to pick out one of these questions? There's a question here. Yeah, go ahead.

Greg. Judy has been a significant resource. I really appreciate it. He if, if there's a John Kemp of the grazing world who just puts out information and details. Greg, Judy has been a very, very valuable help in my small grays and.

Operation and subscribe to the Stockman Grass Farmer. It has no equal. Wow.

The end doesn't. The end isn't coming up.

We just keep answering questions and more of them keep getting at it. I think we're going to answer a few more questions here, but then we're going to wrap up in just a couple minutes here. When you speak of critical points of influence after germination, what do you mean? In corn you describe it first being at nine to 12 days, but cold or hot temperatures change the drastically. You don't mean emergence from the soil, do you? No, I'm not talking about emergence from the soil. That, that window, as I understand it, that window occurs at a certain time after germination to some degree regardless of the stage of plant growth. So if you have 4 inches or 6 inches of shoot growth or if you only have a half an inch of shoot growth, then the plant is going to reach that stage almost regardless of what the growth stage is at in terms of physical growth. So I'm not speaking about emergence. I'm speaking about the timing of natural development processes. So cold or hot temperatures are going to change the rate of plant growth and they're going to slightly influence the critical point of influence in timing, but not significantly. If you think about the critical point of influence from let's say during the cell division stage. So there's this common for many crops, cell division stage will last about 10 to 14 days. So that is very temperature and weather dependent. So weather can shorten that from 14 days down to 10 days or perhaps even down a little as seven or eight days or it can lengthen it to as much as 16 or 18 days. So weather conditions and stress conditions do have an influence on the length of those critical points of influence, but not so much on which stage of the plant's development that they occur, if that makes sense. We're going to take one last question here and then we're going to wrap up in any that we missed. We'll have to follow up with afterwards.

The question here. Oh, sorry. Damn it. This, this is an intriguing question that I think is a good question. What do you think about irrigating a little and often several times a day versus irrigating less often and a lot at a time? For example, once or twice a week.

It depends on the crop and the context. But in broadly speaking, we generally get larger crop responses and better crop responses from irrigating more frequently and less heavily. But if you're irrigating blueberries versus grapes, those plants have very different root system structures and need to be managed very differently as well. So broadly speaking, we generally get better responses from doing higher frequency rather than less. But that's not always the case. David, what are your thoughts?

Very much agree with your answer. I think you need to look at where if you have a deep rooted crop, it's going to be more important to have enough irrigation time. The water can really penetrate down. So looking at where your crop, where the roots are, in other words, if you don't irrigate enough that you're always just irrigating the top two inches and you're never really pushing moisture down, that would not be so you need enough moisture for good root development, I think that's really where you need to look. So like you said, it depends like everything else.

Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, David for joining me here for this Q and A and thank you to everyone for the really awesome questions that you contributed. We had lots of really great questions and I really enjoy the interaction. Feel free to reach out to our team directly. Our office phone number is 800-495-6603. And there's not just David and I, we have a team of a couple of dozen people who. This is all they do every day is working with growers, figuring out these answers and working through challenges. So we enjoy working with you in the field. We enjoy having these conversations. Thanks for all you do and we look forward to talking again soon. Have an awesome day and happy growing management. We can manage that. To maintain it in that. Excuse me. To maintain for that specific crop or to go to a different crop. David, I'm going to turn the microphone over to you for a little bit. I'm going to go grab some water. I'll be right back. Work.

Okay, good. We'll go to the next question here. What is the difference between Brix and total sugars and plant SAP? How do you use the information given by total sugars in the plant SAP report? What to do if it's too high or Too low? Great question. We are actually in the process of doing a comparison of the brix and the total sugars. But as I understand it, the brix is going to be measuring your total dissolved solids while your total sugars is looking at specific, specifically the sugar compound within the plant. So when we, when we do a brix analysis we're measuring more than just sugars, we're measuring the total dissolved solids. And then how do we use this information or what do we do if it's too high or too low? If it's, if it's too high, the question obviously is are we not metabolizing it? Is the plant not metabolizing the energy from, from those sugars and it's just accumulating if it's too low? Obviously our first thought is that we're not producing enough to keep up with the plant demand. And this is where it's so important to have context with the plant SAP analysis. Just looking at a plant SAP analysis and saying we have sufficient levels of sugar, therefore the plant must be healthy can be a dangerous assumption. So knowing how your plant is growing because sometimes plants go through a major vegetative growth flush and the sugars drop in the SAP analysis based on that flush and it's a part of the cycle. So it's about looking at your data over time and seeing the overall trend of those sugars. But generally if it's too low we immediately look at and especially if there's a trend of it being too low, you want to check the photosynthetic minerals, the magnesium, the nitrogen, iron, manganese and phosphorus and just see if there's a reason why it's so low. And we have a question from Andrew. I've been working on soil surveyor machine various and then high resolution ph and organic matter. I want to use the EC map to help write variable rates. For example, high EC can hold and supply more K to reduce K applications and whereas EC as much. So apply more there and get a better return on investment on potassium or apply more cattle manure and lower ec? John, you want to take that? And then there's a follow up question if your voice is back, what if.

Your crops greatest limiting factor is boron and manganese?

And what if soil biology, which is the most efficient form of nutrient uptake doesn't register as ec?

Yeah, so I think this, and I don't want to, we don't want to just take the perspective and be downers on ideas or technology because it can be very useful and very valuable. But one of the challenges that we have in mainstream agronomy is we've become incredibly accurate at hitting the bullseye of the wrong target. And this would be the concern that I would have is in our work with plant nutrition as we are understanding and learning about the rhizophagy cycle and about the capacity of biology to deliver nutrition to plants. There's a few critical pieces here. One is that microbial metabolites have very low electrical conductivity but are extraordinarily efficient at providing plants with nutrients. And also they're not soluble in water, so. Or I shouldn't actually. Yeah, speaking broadly, many of them are not soluble in water. So at any rate, to your last question, can you add sugar to UAN or a carbon source with nitrogen? Yes, we recommend it all the time. It's a part of our nitrogen efficiency recommendations is to add rejuvenator sugar in with the humic substances. So these can be valuable tools. But I would suggest it's worth experimenting also with let's not just look at potassium and phosphorus and nitrogen applications, but let's also look at what does the readings that we're taking tell us about soil biology and how can we change them with, how can we change, how can soil biology change these readings as well? Because they may in fact have a much bigger impact on soil fertility than the products that you might be considering applying.

It reminds me of a conversation we had with a grower at Acres many, many, many years ago. And he was asking the question, really scratching his head because he, he carried an EC meter around and everything. He was measuring EC of everything, every soil like and comparing the crop growth. And he had this experience where he saw amazing crop growth and healthy crops in a garden scenario. But the EC was way below what was considered to be the required level to grow a healthy crop. And that's, I remember that's where I realized that EC was not going to accurately indicate how well crops are going to grow.

Yeah, There is no correlate well in biological soils. The rules of EC corresponding to vegetative crop growth, crop response go out the window because soil biology delivers lots of nutrition that is low electrical conductivity. There's a question here from John Warmerdam. Hi John. Using biological products on vegetative crops is a no brainer. But I do see a higher than preferred nitrogen response on some of our stone fruit blocks. And John, I assume when you say a nitrogen response you're referring to a vegetative growth response with new shoots. So I would point out that first of all that may not Be just nitrogen. That could be calcium also contributing to that. I've done two years of the AEA fall primer and made some Johnson Sioux compost for applying this fall. But I have a concern I may go too far. Can one manage the nitrogen supply yet get the other biological benefits on fruiting crops? The short answer is yes, if you have concerns and it's known, documented, which I'm sure you probably have SAP analysis that indicate you have excess of nitrogen levels. That's coming from biology, by the way. Did everyone just hear the sentence I just said and what John is talking about? It is possible to get excessive nitrogen levels on crops coming purely from biology without any applied nitrogen. This is something that we experience all the time on many different types of crops and different types of environments. And it boggles my mind that we have. The idea that we have to buy nitrogen like this is not untested, unvalidated science or technology. This has been around for decades. Lots of folks are doing it and it works very effectively. We don't deal with nitrogen deficiencies in the farmers that we work with. Our greater concern is nitrogen excesses coming from biology. Anyway, to answer your question, John, the antidote for nitrogen excesses in crops is elevate the levels of magnesium. You get higher levels of magnesium and that will limit that growth response. And it will actually, if you get it, you have to be cautious because when you get levels of magnesium high enough, it will actually deplete the crops absorption of nitrogen and crop utilization of nitrogen. So use with caution. But the short answer is yes. Magnesium is the answer that you're looking.

For and sulfur is going to be important for utilization of that to get good healthy growth and utilization of the nitrogen without having that excess kind of feeling.

Yeah, we have quite a few open questions yet. We're a little bit past the hour, but we value all the time that you put into this meeting and we try to make our answers concise and thoughtful. David and I are going to stick around for a while yet and go through some of these questions that have come through yet if you want to hang with us. Question from Jeremy. Can you change soil management to reduce or get rid of bindweed pressure like with Canadian thistle? The short answer is yes. Not as easily. We find that it's not as responsive as Canadian thistle, but it can happen and does happen. Question from John. If you apply rejuvenate on corn stalks in the fall after harvest, can you still graze cattle on it or should you apply it after the cattle have finished? The answer is yes, you can graze cattle on it. And if you put the rejuvenate on before you graze on it, it's probably going to increase the digestion of the corn fodder perhaps quite significantly. Question. From South Africa. We farm pecans in South Africa and irrigate through drip irrigation, high ph soils. We're pulling SAP analysis every two weeks all the way through the growing season and then spray according to SAP analysis results. Would it be correct pract.