BioEnergetics in Agriculture with Steve Diver

Hi friends, I'm John Kemp, Hosting this podcast. I am passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce fruit of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've discovered that there are many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems and how to develop regenerative agriculture systems. However, much of this knowledge and this information is scattered. It's found all over the place, some of it has been published in peer reviewed publications, but there are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that has not been published and that hasn't been shared with many people. I started advancing EcoAgriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agricultural systems become adopted globally and become the mainstream, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared. To help achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone while we have developed products at AEA that embody the principles of regenerative agriculture systems and make them easier for growers to apply this knowledge and these principles can be applied anywhere and when they are applied properly, they will always increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or ideas topics that you would like for me to discuss, Please connect on LinkedIn or on Twitter where my username is visionbuilder7 or you can also email me at john kempf.com I would very much like to hear from you and to hear your feedback. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and thank you very much for listening. Enjoy the show.

Greetings friends and welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. On this podcast we explore the science and practical application of regenerative agriculture ecosystems and talk about how to regenerate soil and crop health quality and how to increase farm profitability. In this episode, I am very excited to welcome Steve Diver to our show. Steve has had a fascinating journey working with many different aspects and facets of ecological agriculture in a number of different endeavors, both in the field consulting and also with some work at the usda. Steve, we're very excited to have you. Thank you for joining us.

Hey Good evening Don. Thanks for the invitation. I look forward to visiting with you and I've been watching your work and I look forward to continuing Our conversation.

Thanks. So, Steve, you've done some fascinating work over the years in a number of different areas. What have been some of the memorable moments that led you to where you are today and the projects that you're working on?

Yeah, one of the memorable times was I was working as extension horticulture agent in Muscogee County, Oklahoma, and got permission to go travel to the anchors USA conference, which was in 1985. And that really set me on a journey of this discovery of what this large topic called eco agriculture. Met a lot of interesting people there that, you know, led to many, many longtime friendships and attending seminars and so forth. But another thing around that same time was another trip I took also to Missouri to attend a bio organic orcharding workshop that was led by Michael Malthus. And basically he was a master farmer, a really great gardener farmer from South Africa who started a small farm there and was doing biodynamic farming. So I really got a great introduction to really solid type of organic farming and biodynamic farming. And there was a dairy nearby called Morningland Dairy that he made their compost and, you know, did all the biodynamic preparations for them and so forth. So. But as a young extension agent, that really impressed me and really gave me the confidence, based on this experience of a really good farmer who could explain things and show us, you know, how superb his soil had improved and how spongy and humus it was and so forth, just all that good stuff.

When you attended this workshop and when you attended the Acres conference, what were the pieces that stood out to you as being different from the work that you had been doing up to that point?

Well, that's the whole introduction. And my college education in horticulture and soil started in the late 1970s. And then I started, you know, doing work in the early 1980s and you know, started off even when I started in college, I was interested in organic agriculture and would go to the library and pull out the books that were interesting. But the whole Acres USA experience has stuck with me and have ended up giving lectures at the conference several times. So just as an example, the way I frame some of my teaching and workshops that I share with farmers is something that I taught at the anchors USA conference in the year 2000. And they, they wanted a presentation on, on eco agriculture. And so after many years of in the conference and seminars and putting two and two together, the way that I frame eco agriculture is the three pillars and minerals, biology and bioenergetics. And so that minerals, including soil testing, either remineralization or some mineral balancing scheme that typically would be associated with Dr. William Albrecht or Harry Reams. The biology side, including humus management, organic matter management, soil biology, soil biota, soil food web, and then the third leg of the stool would be this bioenergetic physics, uh, that would include things along the line of photosynthesis and redox and cellular metabolism, but also include this whole genre of alternative terms like subtle energy, scalar energy, bioresonance, coherence, structured water, so on and so forth. So yeah, that, that early experience has kind of stuck with me and gelled into a lifelong learning process.

Very often in the agriculture space, when I hear agronomists and teachers speak about the three pillars, what I expect to hear about is the three pillars of soil health being the mineral component, the biological component, and the physical component of soil aggregation and so forth. So you have a slightly different twist on that. And the bioenergetic piece seems like an intriguing perspective. What led you to add that piece to minerals and biology in looking at what was happening in soil ecosystems?

So for example, on this large umbrella that Acres USA conferences include, have many different, what I call pioneers who really blank the new trail. And then you have many teachers who are the authors and consultants and, and putting on seminars and running labs, working with farmers based on a soil test and putting together a protocol or a program of fertility regime, trying that out in the field, seeing what works, making some tweaks, trying again over many, many years. They're getting these really great results in the comparison like before and after, or the comparison between the biological eco farming approach versus the conventional approach. So anyways, this, this three legs of the stool kind of emerged out of that. So you have many of these teachers emphasizing soil testing, mineralization, increasing crop vitality, increasing pest resistance. You have another set of teachers who are emphasizing the soil food web, compost, compost, teas, humus management and. And then you have this other set of teachers which included people like Phil Callahan, who I would meet in the hallways, have discussions, go to dinner with them in a mini lecture to buy him, who is talking about paramagnetism, a weak magnetic field, the influence of these subtle energies on cellular coherence and crop metalism. The better you can get the paramagnetism in the soil, the better the crop health is. And then other things, people talking about bricks, people talking about redox. So that's where I came up with that third leg. And that's why I put that out there to do my workshops and have shared that with farmers all over the country.

I'd love to unwrap the bioenergetic piece a little bit. You've mentioned a number of different areas and I'm sure each one of these could be a topic for discussion in one of these episodes, all in and of themselves. But let's just focus for the moment on a couple of the pieces that you mentioned. One of the pieces that you spoke of was redox. And I find that many growers, when you talk about soil ph, water ph, almost any farmer will have some degree of understanding of ph and the importance of ph. And yet there's almost no conversation for the most part around eh or redox, which from my observation, if anything, seems to have an even bigger impact on nutrient availability and possible pathogens in the soil profile than ph does. So I'd love to hear your perspective on redox. Why is redox important and why does it matter?

John, you would have to go into my notes and pull all that out there. But so one thing to start off with is we do have a meter, the ORP meter, oxidation reduction potential. That's when we talk about redox. That's a lot of times what we use to measure that. So for example, you can get an EC meter or electrical conductivity, you can get a PH meter. But this third one is a little less known, but it is used popular amongst eco agriculture consultants. And different people have different ways of using it and comparing the results, getting, understanding and based on that, making some adjustments. So as one example, one of the microbes I brewed is a probiotic. It has Lactobacillus and yeast and phototrophic bacteria. And we would ferment that with some herbs and some rock dust, some paramagnetism. And we would then measure the redox, the orp. And we wanted that to have a higher negative reading and get a better quality, that kind of thing. You'll see people also with these various kinds of alkalizing water devices, they, they're talking about the same thing. They're taking, they're doing an ORP reading, getting a redox and they're, they're looking for that higher level. So one of the, one of the humus management systems that I've worked with is humified composting. It's also known as lubke composting. So a group of us have traveled over to Europe, to Austria to study with Siegfried and Utah Lubki and studied how they make compost. Add clay to it, add mic to it, add rock dust to it, turn it with a really nice turner. Cover the pile with a compost fleece blanket and really aim for a high grade premium compost that has got humified, has clay humus in it, but on the tail end they'll do a whole spectrum of compost quality assessments and they do various things. Included in that is a redox reading. So I think I'll just leave it at that. People would have to dig into a little bit more technical detail on, on, you know, some of those measurements and how you evaluate them.

Okay, great. In, in the consulting work, in the agronomy work that you have done over the years, what has been something that has surprised you? What was unexpected?

Good question. I. Well, here's one. This kind of, this may not be what you, what you're expecting, but this was, this was a surprising thing that came out of my work in Texas that really led to some really great insights. That was working with a ranch and doing soil food web testing and finding out that prairies are, have a very fungal nature to them. We did some tests on a tall grass prairie southwest of Fort Worth, that area, and found that the fungal to bacterial ratio was 7 to 1. It was actually 7.5 to 1. So then based on some other work I was doing, we found other prairies, the same thing. Be like it'd be four to one, you know, three and a half, four to one, five to one. That, that led to a really amazing amount of work that we did with using compost teas and extracts and what we refer to as liquid biological amendments. So an LBA or liquid biological amendment could be a tank mix with a liquid compost extract plus a home brewed microbial inoculant, plus molasses, plus humic acid, seaweed, little rock dust, maybe a homeopathic energy pattern that was added to the water and then used to manage pastures, orchards, landscapes, roadside vegetation, vineyards, pecan orchards. And based on that concept of the soul food succession of the bacterial to fungal ratio. So that little, that little, that was a little surprise, it was a little unexpected find that the, we followed that, we did a lot more testing in different places and we put two and two together and that really became a significant roadmap.

What was the crop response that you observed from those applications?

Well, again, say if you're managing enough pasture, you've got, you have a really good example of succession in action. You can. And also, you know, you're, when I refer to managing these pastures, we're usually referring to some kind of a holistic grazing system as well. So it's the dual combination of using this tool of a liquid biological amendment and a management practice with some kind of rotational grazing or some kind of mob grazing, but the two of them together, you can really see really impressive changes in species composition. And so you're improving the species, the forage mix, and you're increasing the diversity of the forage mix and the biomass production versus, you know, plain, plain extensive grazing. So in orchard systems like a pecan orchard, you are totally working with a perennial tree that is native to a bottomland hardwood forest. That kind of environment is a totally naturally fungal rich dominated type of a system. And so you're managing for that kind of a perennial orchard or vineyard crop. You know that that would be more fungal. So what you can do is you can select from for example two or three different compost substrates and you can do like a 5050 blend or 75, 25 blend of a compost and a vermicompost, aiming for a more fungal nature of your compost extract. So you're adding this biology and then you're also stimulating biology with these microbial food sources like humic acid and seaweed. Y so once you got this roadmap, once you understand this succession, the above ground plant succession is mirrored by a below ground soil food web succession. That's the roadmap. And then your tool and your management system can work with that and then you can kind of see these change in species composition, you can see improvement in health of the crop and so forth.

I want to make sure that I'm understanding you correctly. Are you suggesting that you can. Earlier you were describing the use of these liquid biological amendments. Are you suggesting that you can change not only the health, but also not only the health of the crops that you're growing, but also the types of plants that would become dominant, let's say in a pasture ecosystem, for example, based on the application of biological inoculants to the soil profile?

Yes, I am. We had a farm down there we called the postage stamp farm. It was a property that they. It was a large rectangle of a Bermuda grass based forage system that was surrounded by a larger property of, let's see, KR Bluestem. KR Bluestem is a lower successional grass, lower quality forage. And so using these liquid biological amendments in this rectangle versus the outer perimeter, we could establish a healthy base of this Bermuda grass forage, forage and hay fields, etc. And almost to the exact line where we spray these liquid biological amendments. The KR Bluestem would not encroach on that.

Wow.

So that was, that was, that's a good one. That's why we call that the poster stamp farm, because that's what it looked like from an aerial view.

So one of the questions that often gets asked is when we consider applying biological inoculants to a soil profile, how do we ensure that that inoculant that we're applying actually survives? How do we know that a compost tea, for example, isn't here today and gone tomorrow? What tools can we use to make sure it has a bigger impact for the longer term?

We always work with microscopes and lab testing and just kind of a constant follow up with qualitative assessments. But that is a good question. And they talk about, you know, the soldiers landing on Normandy beach, just, you know, hundreds of thousands of these bacteria that are wiped out in the first wave of the solar, you know, ultraviolet light coming down and the harsh environment of, you know, of the, you know, the soil and the plant, etc. But some of those will survive, colonize, get established, start creating a biofilm to protect themselves, etc. So it's, it's a combination of doing microscopic analysis, qualitative assessment, some lab testing, etc.

Got it. Steve, what has been something that has puzzled you for a long time.

One of the things that puzzles me is, is the slow nature of, of agriculture as a whole. The industry, the government, the educational system to adapt to new technologies and concepts more quickly. A very risk averse, very conservative field. So just for example, just referring to this topic on bioenergetics, look at the progress of bioenergetics in complementary and alternative medicine or holistic health practitioners, how far they have adopted, how far this technology has evolved. And it's a parallel to another life science known as agriculture. But because farmers are very risk averse, they have crops that they're depending on, they have loans that they have to make, they have incredibly expensive operations that they're managing, they've got bankers who are working with them. The culture is just more conservative. But you, you know, so that's part of it. I recognize that that's the playing field. I think it's just going to take longer for some of these concepts and technologies to be more broadly adopted. But yeah, that puzzled me when obviously.

You believe that growers would benefit from adopting this technology, which is why it's puzzling that they haven't. One of the questions that I have for you is what does the opportunity look like to you? How much opportunity are growers leaving on the table by not taking advantage of some of these emerging technologies and adapting them more quickly.

Well, I think your podcast and your outreach is a good example, John. So what we're offering by adapting eco agriculture, increasing crop vitality, zeroing in on minerals, the role they play all the way from cellular metabolism to pest resistance, improving crop health, crop yield improving, integrating biology and compost and organic matter, improving the living soil environment, getting better nutrient cycling. You know, the effect of mycorrhizae and rhizobacteria, how they work in concert with plants and how they have co evolved over hundreds of millions of years. So it's really a natural thing. And then this whole third leg of the stool, this bioenergetic or bioresonance, all that leads to crops that are, that are, they're able to perform well, yield well, better pest resistance, better nutritional profile, nutrient density and without relying on so many, you know, chemical inputs. So that's got to be a plus. So if you think, you know, that's something farmers would really gravitate to. I think there is a really an amazing new awareness now on the soil health front, which is great. You know, NRCS has done a great job picking that, that message up, working with soil biology and multi species cover crops. That stuff is super exciting. But some of the, at the same time, when you follow what's going on in the soil health field there, it's like everything that was, has been gained understanding. William Albrecht and Kerry Reams on soil testing and mineral balancing is like it's kind of taking a back seat. People don't even talk about it anymore. Keep all these different things in play and understand that it's the integration of all these together. It's not just one. If you focus on one area by itself. You know, some pioneers, that's what they do, they're really good at it. But when it comes down to it, you know, you got to have a little bit of this, a little bit of that to make it all work.

One of the pieces I've personally been very intrigued by just in our own consulting work at Advancing Eco Agriculture and also observing other very successful consultants and agronomists who are in this field, is the substantial yield responses and quality responses that these integrated systems are able to produce. When we talk about improving disease and insect resistance, improving quality, it's exciting and it's fun to get to produce higher test weight corn or larger strawberries or larger fruit or higher protein content wheat. And there is also an economic benefit there as well to producing higher quality and greater disease and Insect resistance. But I think the piece that has really intrigued me is that in many cases, in fact, I would go so far as to say in most cases, when these regenerative ecosystems are principles are applied on a farm, almost invariably there is a strong yield response, depending on the conditions in the local situation. That may take some time for it to express itself. But often we find it happens in the first year, definitely by the second or third year. Many of the growers that we work with observe very substantial yield responses, usually in double digits and sometimes well into double digits. And I'm surprised that that piece hasn't been communicated more. And so this is one of the questions that I'd have for you is when you look at, you've been describing adding this bioenergetic piece in addition to the mineral and biological component, when you bring all of those pieces together and you implement them on a farm and they're implemented well, what does the. Well, let me ask the question this way. Based on your experience, how much opportunity do many commercial growers have left on the table that they have not tapped into? What do the possibilities really look like?

Well, if you're talking about chemical growers, so let's call that conventional agriculture. Yeah, let me just go over another angle that I share in my workshops first and then I'll talk about that. I'll address that part is. So I think it's important we have in modern portrayal of agriculture as a dichotomy of organic versus conventional. So you'll hear that a lot, you know, popular in the media. Things are framed that way. But let's remember that you have organic, you have sustainable. We've been talking about eco agriculture. There's another system, various other alternative farming systems called for example, permaculture, biodynamic farming, Korean natural farming, zero budget natural farming, and in traditional, just integrated crop livestock and holistic grazing. So what I mean is that there's a variation on a theme. These other ones I've been referring to, the new term is regenerative agriculture. I think that's a really good term because it means that you can regenerate and improve the ecology of the farm and then everything else is just lumped as conventional. But what you see, these conventional farmers also vary. Some of them are doing a little bit of no till, they're doing cover crops. They're adapting various types of sustainable. So we definitely want to leave farmers some room to breathe and, you know, think about how they're doing things or portray how they're doing things. But I think for the what? The so called conventional farmer who's still relying mostly on chemical inputs. There is a whole wealth of information out there and also field days, workshops, conferences they can plug into, learn about these things. Go see what other people are doing. Yeah, something as basic as adding cover crops to a farm has been a huge thing. When the USDA program got started in the early 1990s and all the way to now, one of the premier things that it has emphasized this whole time is cover crops. And now you have people that are doing multi species cover crops and some people are doing 10 way or 20 way. One of the comments from several people is that if you can get six different species in your cover crop mix because of the different root morphologies and because of the different kinds of root exudates that come out of these different species. For example, you'll have some kind of a cereal in there like barley or rye, legume in there like Dante or clover, a broadleaf in there like radish or rapeseed or something like that, or buckwheat or cowpeat. These different species will exude different things down in soil. They'll stimulate the soil food web, the soil food web and the roots will tie together the soil, improve soil aggregation, porosity, infiltration, deposition of organic matter, nutrient cycling. It's really impressive. So those are things farmers can adopt. And then there's just a whole toolbox of things that chemical farmers can plug into adding compost extracts. You can make these in large, large quantities and put them out in thousand gallon nurse tanks, pull them behind a tractor, put some saddle mounted tanks on a tractor. You can inject things into the drill row when you're planting, improve the soil biology and the humus going on in the soil, the minerals in the soil, etc. So yeah, this bioenergetic one, that's the last one, it's kind of like the icing on the cake. What I tell people is that you really need to have the fundamentals down first. It's important to provide proper organic matter management, proper nutrition, soil fertility. That's the foundation, that is the foundation of health for the crop and for the livestock. Adding in a bioenergetic modality, some kind of bioresonance, it could be some kind of structured water or some kind of a scalar energy or agro homeopathy, some kind of biodynamic preparation. These things have various kinds of subtle energy qualities that they can impart that can tie things together. And it's kind of like the icing on the cake. And again, it's all about improving the soil health, crop health, livestock health and vitality and nutrition.

Steve, you've had the perspective of working with many different crops in many different types of environments and many different growers. What is something that you believe to be true about modern agriculture that is perhaps not a mainstream view?

Well, many, there's many, there's many, many parts of parts of modern agriculture that is just waiting to discover what's going on in alternative agriculture. So I've kind of gone over those alternative farming systems. But let's just take an example. One of those alternative farming systems by mentioning is Korean natural farming. Now that's exciting. That's coming out of Korea, Asia, it's spreading around. It's really big in Hawaii now. And then kind of a cousin to that is zero budget natural farming that in India. These guys are taking raw biomass on the farm, like leaves off of native plants or maybe herbs that they've grown, and then putting them in a bucket, adding sugar and fermenting them to create a fermented plant juice. They're doing the same thing with fruit. So they're creating a fermented plant juice, fruit juice and various other concoctions that they can make. Lactobacillus, they can make on the farm, various other kind of recipes. But let's think about what they're doing. They're taking a raw natural biomass source on the farm and by putting together a recipe, adding some sugar to it and fermenting it, they're creating both extract that has soluble nutrients, it has beneficial microbiology in it, and it has beneficial bio substances in it, things like enzymes and organic acids and hormones. And so all that can be created around the farm and that can be used for fertility and for pest control and cost very little, very healthy, very beneficial. And so that's just a few examples. The opportunity really has never been this good, I think to thanks for farmers who are listening, who are in your audience, John, who are picking up on some of this and curious. Yeah, just I think the thing to do is just read some more books, tap into some of these topics, learn about them and try a little bit out at a time, add it slowly to the farm system, do some test strips, do some comparison results and see how they work. And usually they find that they'll get something beneficial out of it. Just adding cover crops, just increasing the species of COVID crops can really make a big difference.

You mentioned that farmers shouldn't try to learn more about these various ideas and systems. What are some resources or books that you often recommend to growers.

Well, that's a big topic. But yeah, I think one thing to do is just look at the Acres USA bookstore and go through there and kind of plug in around what I think is really helpful. These three pillars of eco agriculture or the three legs of the stool. Look at some of these books by some of the authors on biological farming, mineral balancing in the Albrecht tradition, people like Gary Zimmer and Neil Kinsey, some of their books, then some of the other books by. On Gary Rings, by Dan Scow, those kind of guys, and read some different books on soil biology, compost and humus management. And then they have other books in there. They have got some books on biomagnetism and biodynamic agriculture. Take through there, find something that's appealing, read a little bit at a time and put two and two together. And it's a lifelong learning process.

Absolutely, it's a lifelong learning process. And I think in a conversation earlier, one of the pieces that really stood out for me was that you are the expert on your farm. Study books and try to learn what you can, but then pay attention, pay attention to what's happening on your farm. Observe and ask questions and try to understand why certain things are happening. I think when we begin questioning what's happening and what's going on, that really speeds up the learning process very quickly.

You know, there's one thing, one thing I've. One thing I've learned about farmers is they are incredibly innovative, a wealth of knowledge. Take the average farmer. You know, it doesn't matter if they're conventional, sustainable, organic. Look at all the different things that they do to manage their farm. They, they do mechanical work, electrical work, bookkeeping, soil fertility, pest control, you know, raising crops and livestock, taking care of them, marketing them, you know, keeping the business going. But another thing is this brain power. And I. I was. I've had the opportunity to travel to India and work on small peasant spots in India and see how they do things in different parts of the world have been to. And one of the things I see is that this real common theme is the brain power that farmers have. So just think about a typical day that they're out there working and maybe they're driving the tractor down some long rows, doing some cultivation or some mowing or some harvesting. Think about the time they have to think. That time that they have to think and observe is a real rich pool of ideas so they can figure things out. So just here's a couple examples. You're growing some Plants, you plant them at the same time. And you know, one plant over here in this container or in this row is doing way better than this other plant right next to it. So that's a great question. What's going on there? Is there some fertility issue? You know, again, is there some kind of bioenergetic thing that you could do to increase the vitality of that plant? Another one is that I like is observing weeds growing. This kind of goes back to successionist. Why are the weeds growing? What's the history of that field? Is there something that you could do to change the management history or the cultural practice to suppress those weeds longer? So those kinds of questions are very interesting. They can really lead to some new discoveries and trying new things out.

Steve, what is the question you wish I would have asked in this conversation?

We could have a really long conversation and maybe we need to follow up on that sometime. John is a little more in depth on some of these bioenergetic modalities. Let me just throw out some terms, may have mentioned a couple of those, but some key terms like bioresonance, coherence, electromagnetic frequencies, vitality, what do they mean and what can you find out about them? And so my suggestion is to look on Google or search engine, look under holistic health, look at what's going on in holistic agriculture. You can really learn a lot right there on that one. But some of the modalities that I would point farmers to that are probably, let's say more practical, more proven. I like scalar energy. You can actually keep a scanner pendant. You can use that to energize and charge water and fertilizers. There's another field known as agro homeopathy. It's gaining a lot of, let's say proven track at various university research. Now structured water is another one that farmers are really tapping into. Paired magnetism, various other ones certainly think.

That can be a topic for an entire in depth conversation in and of itself. Steve and we will need to follow up with that conversation at some point because it is an emerging field and there are, and I can speak from experience that there are some of these technologies that can produce some very profound effects when they are managed well and applied properly.

I've got this concept that we're going through, we go through different eras and you know, coming out of World War II, we've kind of gone through the chemical era and right now we're tapping into the biological and ecological era. I think that down the road, as time goes by and as these Terms and concepts and technologies become more proven that they'll become more acceptable. They're probably considered on the fringe right now by some people, both medical and agriculture, depending on their framework. But I just like when I started out in the 1980s, organic was like a black sheep. But now there's a USDA program for organic. The food industry has widely accepted it. You know, soccer moms go to the store and buy organic produce now. So I think the same thing is happening in holistic health. Now. People can go to local health practitioners, they can get various kinds of holistic chiropractic, they can do acupuncture, Reiki, homeopathy. Pretty common now for people to have that kind of access to holistic health. The same kind of things happening in agriculture. Structured water is really simple, can make some real improvements to, like, livestock health, crop health, just by. Just by energizing restructuring of water, various other things. So I think over time this will be more commonly accepted. And yeah, I just. I'd say just give it a couple more decades.

Well, there are many other pieces that we could wrap into and dive into, and I'm looking forward to having those conversations with you. Steve, thank you very much for joining us here on the podcast. It's been an honor and a pleasure to have you here and to be able to have this conversation, and I look forward to having more discussions. So thank you for joining us.

Hey, John, thank you. It's my pleasure. Again, I look forward to carrying on a conversation with you and your network.

This podcast was brought to you by a great company that I work for, AEA Advancing Eco Agriculture, the leader in regenerative agriculture since 2006. At AEA, we believe in challenging the status quo to find more profitable and regenerative ways to grow crops. We also believe that healthy plants are resistant to pests and disease, and that to grow healthy plants, we must first think differently about agriculture, about empowering life instead of suppressing life, about regeneration instead of degeneration. To achieve this, we formulate and sell products that help growers produce higher quality yield with less risk of crop failure. In short, we help growers make more money with less risk. Thank you for listening.