Biophysics of Soil Plant Systems with Arden Andersen

Hi friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. Welcome back and thank you for listening today. I'm very pleased and honored to have one of my mentors with us, Dr. Arden Anderson. For those who are familiar with the organic and biological agriculture history, Arden needs no introduction. He has a very rich history both as a medical doctor and an agriculturalist with a PhD in biophysics, which is not a typical approach you would find to the agricultural conversation. So I wanted to have a discussion with Arden about some more unusual aspects of agronomy that are very important before we jump into it. Arden, thank you for being here and would love for you to share a bit about your background and the story of the work that you're doing today and your work in agriculture and what brought you there.

Certainly my pleasure, John, thank you very much and thank you for all of your work as well. It's certainly been an interesting journey for me over the past number of decades. And I actually grew up on a dairy farm that my father and grandfather were a little bit holistically minded in that in the 50s and 60s they saw that nutrition was the foundation of animal health and didn't follow along with the conventional approach to fertilizing alfalfa, for example, just that basic thing the standard university approach to alfalfa was dump more potash on. And my father and grandfather recognized, no, we got to put lime out there if we want to grow good alfalfa and subsequently if we want healthy cows, they've got to have long stemmed, hey, not all this grain. And so that was kind of my introduction of looking at things from a more preventive perspective and also not to just believe the party line coming from the extension service and chemical companies just because they were the so called authorities on that. And my father said that he had an ag teacher who was also a Cooperative Extension Service agent in his area. This was in the late forties and early fifties. Actually it was the late forties for my father in high school. And he said, though the ag teacher told him now this is what Michigan State will tell you needs to be done. But he says if you really want success on the farm, here's the rest of the story. And so that was also then my introduction from my father relative to looking at things. And I eventually ended up going to University of Arizona and taking a degree in agriculture and agriculture education. And it was very interesting to me at that time. I took a dairy science class and they were describing various different disease and health problems of dairy herds in that modern day this was in the 70s, late 70s. And I thought to myself, wow, we don't see any of these on our dairy farm. What is, what, what's going on here? You know, we just didn't see these kinds of things. And then of course, they took us out and showed us the dairy farms. And these were large commercial dairy operations with a thousand, two thousand cows and high grain, high concentrate, feedlot type of operations. And so that kind of explained it to me because I'd already recognized that. And then after I graduated, I started looking at, well, gee, what am I going to do? Because I'm not really interested in the conventional approach. And I ended up getting a hold of a book called the Farmer Wants to Know, which was a book written by Dan Skow and Carrie Reams. And that answered some questions that I had had as to why do we really have weeds, why do we have diseases, why do we have insects? And Dr. Skau and Carrie Reams said, well, this is because it's a nutritional issue. And voila. You know, that's pretty basic from their perspective, but it was never explained to me. And the one other thing that really drove it home to me was I went to a potato short course at Michigan State University in the summertime. It was just a two day, two or three day short course put on by the Cooperative Extension Service and their potato specialists. And Michigan is a big potato state, or ida, at that time was the primary processor. And the area that I county I grew up in, Montcalm county, was a dominant potato producer for OR ida. And it was interesting to me. I'd been at Arizona and the Cooperative Extension people told us, well, you cannot grow potatoes in alkaline soils. They have to be acid soils. I thought to myself, well, that's kind of interesting. Let me see. The number one potato producing state in the country is Idaho. And that's all alkaline soils. And there's a lot of potatoes grown in Arizona and a lot of potatoes grown in California. Those are all alkaline soils. How is it that these guys can't figure out how to grow potatoes in alkaline soils? So that combination of experiences coupled with then as a result, going to a Dan Schow Kerry Reams course, or a couple of them meeting Phil Callahan, spending time with Phil Callahan, as well as a number of other specialists and pioneers in the field really is what kind of move me in the direction where I am today. And it was interesting, though. Phil Callahan was one of the people who told me, look, go to medical school, you got to put this whole thing together. And so eventually I did go to medical school, and I knew when I went to medical school that I was not going to do just standard conventional medicine, because the same principles that we see in the field, that diseases, weeds and insects are really nutritional issues, is exactly the same in the human body and mammals. The thing about it is, though, yes, it's a little more complex, but I think talking about this whole subject is very apropos to today's crisis that we see with this coronavirus around the world. We know from plant virus issues that the only reason that virus infects the plant and bothers the plant is because the nutrition is off. It's exactly the same in humans. And so I think, John, it's very appropriate that we are in this discussion today because it correlates all the way through from the soil all the way through to human health.

Arden, when you mentioned the mentors and the early people that you spoke with, Carrie Reams, Dr. Philip Callahan, who guided you in a different direction, these were pioneers who had a very different perspective on agriculture. Their approach was really an approach based on biophysics rather than looking at chemistry or other things that have become kind of the mainstream thought process of today. And I think one, one thought that comes to mind, particularly for Cary Reams, he used to describe how he believed the day would come when plants would be able to be grown from seed to harvest in a matter of hours or days. Because his comment was that plants grow from energy, not from nutrients. What is your perspective on what you learned from him?

Well, I think that's very absolutely correct. And the key thing that he talked about with that was, is that plants don't have an endocrine system like mammals do. And therefore they're not limited to the same degree that mammals are by time. They're merely limited by energy. And so I've seen that as well in various different contexts and experiments where we can accelerate plant growth quite extensively simply by getting the energy right. Really, the tuning right. It's sort of like a symphony. If you get that symphony tuned properly, you get music out of it. But if it's all out of tune, all you get is a bunch of gobbledygook and noise. And living systems operate that same way. And Reams understood that, that if we get the nutrition in there, we get it balanced. Fundamentally, even at the chemistry level, we know it's about physics and it's about production of ATP adenosine triphosphate, which is energy. And that process is not limited by time. It is only limited by the right molecules interacting in harmony to produce that energy. And actually it was Fritz Albert Popp in the 80s who was working with Phil Callahan as well, who showed in his research in cancer that biophysics precedes biochemistry. And it is actually in living systems that it's the biophotons, the little particles of information that really determine what physically then will take place at the molecular level, let alone at the higher levels, tissues and organs and so on. And so we have that precedence there as far as study in physics. And we know then as we move further, there's a number of things in agriculture that we have seen that we can change in order to help plant growth speed it up. And what we really don't know is how fast should they actually grow. We have what we know of as various different varieties of corn that may be anything from 85 day to 115 day corn. But that's all based upon the conventional mindset of climate and standard nutrition. It's not based upon really getting things balanced to the perspective that Reams was talking about or that Callahan talked about or Fritz Albert Popp talked about. And so we know that the ancients, Native Americans, even recognize the circadian rhythms of the earth made a difference. We know that they recognized the aspects of the planetary influences. And some people would like to believe that, oh, that's all just pagan stuff. No, there it was all about physics because it's very subtle energies that drive information exchange between living cells and within the cells. And that's actually what determines how fast that cell is going to grow. And if there's an insufficiency of that harmonic energy, there's going to be an insufficiency of molecular movement. So first comes the energy, the information which we can call the genetics. But that's still energy. That's information in a signature that then is driven to determine what goes on with the physical chemistry. And we know even some of the work that Paul Dettloff has done with stray currents in animals and fields that those things can interfere with. Most of the time we see those things interfering with plant growth because we see more insect or disease or weed problems. Same thing in animals. We see more animal disease with those kinds of things. Well, what's happening there is that stray current is interfering with the central energy signature of that living organism. So Ream said, yes, it's possible. I think if we're a spiritual person, you know, Christ could take something in his hand and grow it to maturity instantaneously. Some people would like to believe well, you know, that's nice parable, but that's not reality in Earth today. I disagree. I think the principle is there. Do we understand the physics behind that? Because who created the physics? It was God who created the physics as well as the chemistry.

I know that we've actually experienced this in the field where we have worked with growers who actually on our own farm, when I was growing up, we grew a variety of squash that was supposed to grow from seed to harvest in 57 days, and we harvested it 31 days after planting the seeds in the ground. Similarly with green beans that were supposed to be harvested about 40 days after seeding. We were harvesting 18 days after seeding. Correct. We observe this in the field. And I think the question becomes from a How can we apply this knowledge? How do we develop these types of systems that can speed up plant development? How can we create the coherent symphony in our fields?

Well, first of all, we have to look outside of the standard approach, which obviously you've done. And you're not going to find that within that conventional limitation, because I don't really want to believe that physics has anything to do with the living systems anyway. And that's part of the problem that we have with some of the modern devices out there. And in part of answering that question for you, I think that it's not quite cut and dried today, John, because of more and more of the research that I'm seeing coming out relative to the radio frequency problems of cell towers and cellular phones and all the electromagnetics, synthetic electromagnetics that we are getting bombarded with worldwide today, and particularly this new 5G coming out which is blanketing the entire planet, and it's interfering with living systems already, we know that. And the mechanism is not thermal. And that's where we run into problems, because conventional science, medicine, all they want to think about is the thermal effect, in other words, the heat effect of electromagnetic energy. And so what we have to understand is that the thermal effect is a secondary effect. It's not the primary effect. The primary effect is actually the information disturbance effect. And what they're finding is in every study now coming out that's being done on cell towers and so on, is that it's causing free radical generation. In other words, it's exhausting the antioxidants. It's exhausting the essential nutrients at that level. So we're talking about manganese, zinc, copper, selenium and so on. It's interfering with those kinds of nutrients and their function. And so we have to overcome that in order to be able to accelerate the plants, which means one, we have to have good foundation of nutrient out there in the soil. Those are our basic minerals. We start with two, we gotta have the biology to go with that. And then I think we don't know yet what's going to just how fast we can do things and how much these things we can overcome as far as the effect, because 5G is just coming out. We know Bruce Tanio applied various different devices into the environment in order to positively neutralize some of this synthetic electromagnetic radiation. I have a friend of mine in Canada who, similar to as you did in the field, he's done in greenhouse operations with echinacea and a few other plants, growing them literally in less than a third of the normal time that it would take in order to grow a flower or a root or a seed from various plants. Simply getting that nutrition and energetic set up appropriately. And so it's not a matter of having to get so complex with it as you know, if you're going to get that kind of change in the field, you have to start with the basics and it goes back to your basic minerals and so on.

I personally have observed and experienced plants having negative consequences from synthetic electromagnetic radiation. Cell phone towers specifically, we believe, we don't know with complete certainty. But I've observed where after the installation of cell phone towers, the calcium content, the mineral content of various minerals on crops might be reduced by as much as 40 to 60%. And when we removed the cell phone signal in immediate proximity, and I'm talking about proximity of half a mile distance, all of a sudden levels came right back up again. And so I think this points out the idea of or illustrates the idea of plants being an antenna. One of the pieces that and others spoke about is a plant's capacity to absorb nutrients from the air as a functional antenna. And you mentioned the importance of foundational minerals and biology. But what is really needed from a grounding and a soil perspective and from a plant health perspective to produce a healthy antenna function?

Very good question. And that starts out with getting that basic calcium in the system as well as then the biology in order for that calcium to become functional. And that also then of course, all our other basic minerals in the soil and Ream's talked about that a lot. If we get the calcium right in the system, our foliar sprays become much more successful and much more effective in the system. And I know you have done a fair amount of SAP testing and you find that as you fine tune further and further the quantities that you need are lower and lower because now we're getting a little bit of leverage in there. And most farmers understand if you put a cheater bar on the end of a wrench, you get a lot more torque on that wrench at the nut. And so essentially, as we get the basic minerals in the soil, starting with our calcium, getting our potassium and our magnesium and those things right in the soil, along with our bio biology, our foliar sprays become that cheater wrench pipe on the end of that wrench, as far as now really being able to crank down on that nut to tighten it up. And we find that sometimes smaller volumes give us greater results than larger volumes, because the smaller volumes don't interfere to the degree that some of the larger volumes may interfere with the electromagnetic genetics out there. As far as overpowering that antenna system, and you're absolutely right, it's an antenna. And Phil Callahan looked at that when he was studying insects. Insects have antennas. They're not there for hat racks. They're there to tune into the radio wave, microwave and ultraviolet of the environment. And that's how the insect finds its food, its mate, its location, and homes in on where that is. And everything then is also emitting that signature consistent with where it is in the biological system. The best way I think I can give that analogy is if you take a standard piano that has the strings in it, and you play that piano, you're going to get what we call analog music today, however, there's a lot of musical instruments out there that are digital. In other words, they're just a computer generated system. So you could take an electronic piano with no strings, that's only going to be digital. The difference between those, when you look at the information, though, the effect on the human brain is that the analog contains all of the information of those musical notes, where the digital only includes bits and pieces of each note. And just like a photograph is in digital is only bits and pieces. What the insect sees when they're looking at a plant is if that plant is healthy, there's a full analog complement of music coming off from that plant. If it's a sick plant, it looks more like a digital signature. In other words, there's several components that are missing. And unless your antenna is tuned to pick up those specific things, you'll think, oh, it all sounds the same. But a good musician who has a keen ear can tell you instantaneously, is this the real thing or is that just a digital recording of that? And that's one of the things that really, I think, separates the. The true biological farmer from the conventional farmer is the biological farmer gets out in his field or her field and just listens, feels, senses, looks, interacts with the life force in the field. And Bruce Tanio did that a lot. Kerry Reams did that. I do that, and I know that you do that as well. And it's something that you have to develop over time. You have to pay attention and you have to notice differences. I mean, you have to know what is bad. So you have that experience and know what potentially is good and recognize the difference between the two and pay attention to the subtle feelings that you get between the two.

Arden this is a recurring conversation that I've had with other guests here on the podcast is this importance and the value of having this intuitive sense of what's happening and what's going on in your field. I believe it's a very important conversation, and yet it's a conversation that produces some level of discomfort occasionally for some growers, I think, largely because they don't understand it and we fear what it is that we don't understand. Can you talk a little bit about the. There's obviously a spiritual component here as well, but there's also a scientific component of communication between plants and hearts and minds. Can you talk about the science of our communication capacity with living organisms?

Yes, absolutely. There's an interesting book out called the heart speaks by Dr. Mimi Ghurani. She's a cardiologist at Scripps Medical center in San Diego. The Heart Speaks is a book that she wrote explaining that the heart, the human heart, is really the central control system for us, not the brain. The heart, it has its own memory system and it has its own complete interactive system. And actually it's the heart's radio wave system that controls the entire body. And that's in the scientific literature, and that's what her book is about. It's that component. It's that aspect of us that tunes in potentially to everything around us, whether that be another human being or another living organism. It's still all electromagnetic. And yes, absolutely, there's a spiritual component, but I think really the spiritual component is simply being open to what God created, being willing to observe, being humble enough to acknowledge everything is living. God is in everything, everything. And there is a life force that's there. If there were not a life force in plants, we'd all be dead because it's truly the life force that we are gaining from the food that we eat that keeps us alive. And so it Allows us to make different decisions. And it's interesting, I'm sure, John, you have met farmers, dairy farmers, cattle farmers, pig farmers, horse farmers that can go out into the barn and tell you, that cow over there, she's sick today. Or that horse, that horse is sick today, or that dog or cat or whatever, they're not doing well today. And we know that women in particular, mothers in particular, have that intuitive knack. They know when someone in the family's not well. Even when us men don't say anything, they know. It's that intuition. We all have that ability. It's a God given gift for us. And we can tune in to whether or not, not only an animal, but whether or not a crop is healthy. It's just energy and it's there. It can be measured and it can. The interesting thing is some of the research I did with Phil Callahan. He built a, or designed and put together a special antenna. It's called a picram, which was very simple, essentially was burlap soaked in salt water and wrapped around a piece of metal alligator clip that you could plug into an oscilloscope. That antenna then would collect or receive the specific radio waves of living systems. And we did research on the megalithic tombs and around towers and proved that those towers collected and amplified the signals correlating to our immune system and electrical anesthesia. And we transmit those all the time. We transmit those same signals and we receive those same signals and can then utilize those symptoms for ourselves. It will anesthetize us, calm us down, allow us to pray. In fact, when we do pray, those signals are amplified. We prove that as well with an oscilloscope, with that special antenna. And so if we tune into those things, if we're quiet enough, that goes back to the heart. Can we quiet ourselves enough to just be aware of nature, of what's going on in nature with all living systems, of all living things? Like I said, women are that way naturally, particularly mothers are. They know when a child is ill, they know when their spouse is ill. They know when they're off a little bit, something is bothering them, even if there's no verbal communication. And frequently mothers know, even if they're not within earshot or eyesight of a family member, there's a problem. They know it. It's that intuition. We all have it. It's a matter of whether we quiet our heart enough in order to be able to tune into that in the field. And when we do, we then have a whole new world that opens up to us. That Allows us to make different decisions that we before wouldn't make.

Yeah. As you said, a completely new world with completely different perceptions of what might be happening and what's going on. When you just described your work with Philip Callahan and the Picram sensor, I recently posted a blog post describing his evaluation, Philip's evaluation of a cultivator that was developed in Australia that was inhibiting weed seed germination. And my understanding was that it was because it was transmitting in the electrical anesthesia range. And this brings a question to mind that I'll ask you now. Would it be possible to transmit that signal without using a cultivator and produce the similar results?

Yes, it would. The question of its effectiveness is going to be how close to analog are you going to be? And analog versus digital. Today we want to generate everything versus digital, where the cultivator is actually in the analog range. So the signal it was generating was a full spectrum signal. And if you generated a full spectrum signal. Yes. You could put in the same signal and get the same results. Well, I speculate that you could get the same results. There's two aspects to this. One is the signal. Two is the mechanism or the delivery system through which you're putting that signal in there. And so the other thing about it is, of course, is you know what's going on in the soil. How transmissive is your soil for that signal? There's a number of things that I think that go into that effectiveness of that tool as well, with that process of inhibiting weed growth.

Arden earlier, when we were speaking about biophysics in soil and plants as antennas and the work that Fritz Albert Popp and Kerry Reams and Bruce Taineo have done on several occasions, you mentioned the importance and the primacy of calcium. And this is a topic that is so important. Obviously we address calcium in our work with growers all the time, but I think it has to some degree. It's lost its. The importance of calcium is lost because of familiarity. People are calcium. Sure, we address that. It becomes kind of a given that people. But people don't really appreciate how important and why it is so important. Why is calcium so necessary to have a healthy soil and plant function?

Well, what we observed and Reams was the one who brought that out to me first, was that calcium is really the foundation. It's the messenger. We know in studying biochemistry and cellular function that calcium is the system that allows communication within that system, whether it's a human cell or a plant cell or an insect cell or a microbial cell. Typically, calcium is the messaging system that allows information to traverse through that cell, within the cell and between cells. And as Fritz Albert Popp proved, it's the information that precedes all chemistry. So we have neglected that process, both from an electromagnetic perspective as well as a physical chemistry perspective. And that was Steve Weston, who actually taught me that process. And it goes back to petroleum engineering and the whole process of understanding clay chemistry and clay physics and the dynamics of the process. And if you miss the basics of calcium regulating the dynamics of clay, then you're not going to be successful in being able to manipulate that mud, drilling mud in order to be able to keep your bit clean in drilling a well. And that's where that whole process of information and understanding of clay chemistry came from, was from the drilling industry. That translates then to the soil. And we see various different problems in the soil. The most part we see compaction issues. Well, compaction and erosion, those two things that we have encountered that led to the Dust bowl back in the 1920s and 30s. And today, of course, compaction, well, in the last, what, four decades really has led to the whole no till premise that, oh gee, we don't want to drive equipment out there. But none of those people ask the question, why is the soil compact able? We know that soil compacts, yes, if you drive heavy equipment across, of course it compacts, but it compacts when you put an inch of rain on that too. So Reams understood that there is a dynamic there of calcium is the foundation as far as I'm going to build all other nutrients on top of that, calcium. And in order to get all those other nutrients to work properly, I have to have calcium in place in order for me to get potassium to work properly, properly, to get magnesium to work properly, to get nitrogen to work properly, I've got to have calcium in place. And until I have calcium in place, I'm going to fight this quote, unquote, fight the system to keep those other things operational. And he recognized, looking at Albrecht's work, because Albrecht was at Missouri University of Missouri, and he came up with the Albrecht system and the cation exchange capacity approach to balancing calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium, your primary cations in the soil. And he wanted somewhere between 70 and 80% calcium by percentage of exchange in the soils. And so that became the mainstay by which Midwestern agriculture, I should say the Albrecht system in Midwestern agriculture developed. And it was the first big step really, in addressing the calcium issue. The problem is, and Reams recognized this, that, well, you're still only dealing with percentages. And Albrecht was in Missouri. And the Missouri soils are not at all like Florida soils, which is where Reams was. Florida soils are basically beach sand. And even if you have 100% base saturation of calcium in a sand, you don't have quantitatively the pounds of calcium necessary to grow high brix fruit, high brix watermelons, high brix citrus, which is what Reams was growing. I saw that as well. In Australia, in the Cotton Belt, where we have exchange capacities in the 50s, 60s and even 70, we have magnesium percentages on the Albrecht test that are higher than the calcium levels in an exchange capacity. 50, 60, 70, no way could you ever apply enough calcium to bring that percentage up. And yet, gee, percentage wise, from that perspective, we've got a lot there. So Reams looked at functionality in order to grow a crop, and most people would look at a standard test and say, hey, I've got plenty of calcium sitting out there. I've got an exchange capacity of 50 and I have a 40% calcium. Gee, I have tens of thousands of pounds of calcium and magnesium sitting out there. I don't need to add any more. And they still in the plant, you'd have a calcium deficiency, you have a magnesium deficiency. And they're constantly working to try to get potassium into the system because they didn't understand the biophysics side of it, that you have to get these things from functional at the rhizosphere level, not just at the dirt level. And so Rheims understood that if you get calcium functional, your foliar sprays now begin to work properly, your brix readings begin to come up. And as your brix readings come up, you have less insect pressure, you have less disease pressure. And so it is in basic chemistry, it's in basic biochemistry. Calcium is the second messenger. If you study any of the basic biochemistry of cellular exchange and cellular communication, calcium is the regulator of all that information exchange.

What are the differences between functional calcium and dirt level calcium as you were describing it, total calcium in the profile?

Well, dirt level calcium, essentially it's there, it's going to show up on your basic soil test, but you're not going to see that calcium in there. As far as a tissue test or a sept test, we're not going to see other things working as well. It's not just the presence of the calcium. We're going to have low brix readings, we're going to have disease and weed infestation, we're going to have problems with the integrity of the fruit, for example, we're going to have weak fruit, we're going to have weak cells as far as the core of the apple hollow heart. Those kinds of things will show up that we'll begin to see out there as well. We're going to have lower than we should have yields and potential. We're never going to see corn at the third, fourth and fifth ear fill out unless we have calcium functional at those levels that we need to have. Yes, we may have a lot of calcium sitting out there. It's just dirt, but we're not seeing it in the plant. And that's really the key thing. I think from a functional perspective it has to start showing up in the plant and not just showing up from a standard test tissue test of the plant has to show up from observations of brix readings coming up, of yields coming up. And John, you've talked about a number of times of fields in your organization where you're getting corn filling out the second, third, fourth and even the fifth year, the stalk. You only do that if you've got functional calcium to be able to get the potassium and magnesium in there necessary to do that.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun when that happens on a field scale. A few minutes ago you mentioned clay aging in passing and learning about clay aging from oil drilling perspective. What is clay aging and why is it important? From an agronomy and agriculture perspective, Clay.

Aging is a term that came out of the petroleum engineering handbooks. And essentially what it is is that you put enough potassium chloride into the clay matrix to drive out your potassium and calcium, or excuse me, your calcium and magnesium. And so the clay collapses, essentially becomes non dynamic. It hardens the clay matrix itself at the molecular level. And so it essentially becomes dead from a biochemistry perspective and certainly a biophysics perspective as well. And it's something that we see in our midwestern soils over time with the higher and higher levels of potassium chloride being applied at the exclusion of liming. And so the clays become less and less pliable and less and less dynamic.

And also I think anhydrous ammonia is a very effective clay aging material as well, correct?

Well, it is absolutely. Because it will also drive out the calcium over time and along with then because the standard approach typically is anhydrous ammonia and myriada potash potassium chloride. And so what happens is your anhydrous drives out your calcium, your potassium and chloride is in there to fill that slot within the clay matrix. And the clay gets older and older and older from a functional perspective.

And of course my Understanding of clay aging is that you reduce your exchange capacity. You reduce your capacity to hold and release nutrients, you reduce your expandability. So if you want to have 20 pound boots or 40 pound boots when you walk across a field, non expandable clays or aged clays are the effective pathway to achieving that.

That is correct. If you want pavement, it's an excellent way to get it.

Arden, you've raised many different topics that I'd love to explore a bit more deeply. But there are a few that I also want to get to. A few conversations that I believe become increasingly important as our agriculture evolves and improves, but that are not well known. One of these topics is the idea of biological transmutation of elements. The idea that one element can change into another element. And this has been interesting to observe. As we develop soils that have really vigorous and aggressive biology. At a moment in time, we get the appearance of adequate levels of selenium, for example, or molybdenum or nickel, or elements that previously did not show up on a soil analysis. And all of a sudden they're present. How can we describe that process?

Good question. I think I can explain at least some of that. I don't know that I can explain all of that. But we know based upon some of the work by Louis Kirvaran in his book Biological Transmutation, the elements can actually change. And I know that that is blasphemy from the standard chemistry industry. They don't want to hear about that at all. There's also some politics about that because there have been organizations, groups, through the use of certain Tesla technologies, if you will, that have been able to change, change elements. And that, of course, is not politically correct to do, particularly when you start dealing with gold and silver and platinum and those kinds of things. So we'll kind of stay away from that discussion right now. But from a plant perspective, Bruce Tanio probably was the guy who, I would say, in at least modern times, did the most work on biological transmutations and showed that microorganisms are really the method or mechanism via getting change of elements per the need of the system. And rather than a driven system, which is what a lot of people would like to view transportation as is, I'm going to drive biological transmutation of one element to another. And I think Bruce looked at it more from the other direction. And it is a pulled system that we set up, a truly healthy, complete system. And when I say complete system, not just talking about a plant, I'm talking about the plant and the entire microbial system, system that engulfs it, which includes then the rhizosphere and all of the soil and components that encompass that living plant. We start feeding that plant with more and more specific nutrients, and we start seeing change. And some of that change now is the ability of that system to transmute nutrients and pull it along, if you will, per the need of that plant to get to the next step of improvement in that plant. And it's one of those situations where I'm not sure we can explain all of that other than they're being transmuted, because they don't show up in any other test until we get to the point where, hey, why are we. It's showing up. And at the same time, we're seeing increasing brix readings, we're seeing increasing speed of plant growth, we're seeing increasing productivity of that plant, we're seeing increased overall health. Or if we did an analysis of the beneficial microorganisms, we're seeing a higher and higher, stronger and stronger level of those organisms in there as well. And as we also note in SAP testing, we see more responsiveness to lower and lower quantities of other nutrients and applying certain nutrients, and then, voila, these other nutrients show up. And biological transmutation, I think, is a very viable approach to explain why those things are happening. It's one of those things that we don't see, however, in a conventional fertilized or fed system because we haven't provided the matrix for those nutrients to move from one to another.

It is referred to as biological transmutation for a reason. It is really dependent on exceptionally vigorous and active biology that has an abundant energy.

Yes.

Where the symphony is really playing very nicely.

Yes.

In. In this same vein of biological transmutation, there's also a shift in even a developing shift in the mainstream of our understanding of biological systems, where it used to be considered that we'd have all these thousands or tens of thousands of different species. And now, as we consider genetic fluidity and the exchange of DNA and information from one species to another, that type of characterization becomes increasingly questionable. Which was first described a few decades ago under the idea of pleomorphism. What is your perspective on how biological populations might be characterized in the fluidity between different varieties and species?

It's very interesting that you mention that I number of years ago, I took the Wilhelm Reich biophysics class in Princeton, New Jersey. I think it was 1986, five or six. I took that class, and we observed what Wilhelm Reich called bions under the microscope. I mean, we observed Change before our very eyes, under the microscope by setting up appropriate environment for various things to occur. And I think that back to the biophysics side of it, Reich recognized and he called it the orgone. But it is the same thing that Pop talked about, the same thing Callahan talked about. Steiner. You go back to this life force and the life force really is the generation of all of these other things. And they're absolutely fluid and at any given point in time, because time is fluid as well. And as you know, John, once you really start getting into some of these things, there really is no time. And so things pass in and out of the fourth dimension where we will. At any given point in time, you can analyze, aha. We find this organism at another point in time, we find this organism at another point in time, we find this organism. It is a fluid dynamic and an exchange in and out of these other dimensions. And as any system gets healthier, its ability to interact with these other dimensions increases. And we can call that the spiritual world. It doesn't matter what term we put on it. It's still going to be insufficient to describe this creation that God has created and allowed us to get closer and closer to perfect health. And as we do, we see all kinds of things that we couldn't explain and cannot explain with standard chemistry, standard biology, microbiology, standard physics, but yet we still observe it.

I ask these questions about pleomorphism and transmutation of elements because there is this recurring question in the regenerative agriculture space. If you want to describe something as being regenerative and regenerating, soil health and plant health. There is the question that comes up of do we need to constantly apply inputs? Do we need to constantly add soil amendments and microbial inoculants? Shouldn't these systems be regenerating on their own? From my observation, I would say that yes, these systems can be completely self sustaining on their own. Once they reach a higher plateau of performance than they're at right now, they can't sustain themselves or regenerate themselves right now because they don't have the right biology or the right mineral profile. And the symphony is incoherent, it's not flowing correctly, but it is. When we get to that higher plateau of performance, we can have a completely self sustaining system. I'd love to hear your perspective. And also the question that I really have for you is what really is possible? What are the possibilities? What are the potentials that plants are really capable of?

I do agree with you, John. We got into a bind a decade ago with the belief out there that all we needed to do is apply compost tea and all of the minerals would miraculously become functional and our plants would grow magnanimously and we didn't need to apply any more fertilizer. And I observed unfortunately, a number of operations that either did or nearly went bankrupt as a result of that belief system out there. And not saying it isn't potential, it's like anything else. If we want to be able to lift £1,000, we're not going to start out lifting £1,000. The potential is there, but we don't get any of these things to happen until we get to a critical point. And in order to get to that point, we have to do some of the basics. And that means getting the basics to minerals into the system, getting some basic inoculation into the system, getting some basic processes accomplished so that the system can start building upon itself and we're helping it along, helping along, helping along. And eventually the help needed becomes less and less and less because the system becomes more and more self sustaining. When do we get where it's completely self sustaining? I don't know. I don't know if any of us have truly answered that yet. But we know we can continue to approach that self sustaining process. And those farmers that have added to the system over time, they find that the needed input to sustain that becomes less and less over time. But the beginning farmer, and I don't mean the beginning farmer just coming out of high school or something, I mean the beginning farmer going from a standard anhydrous ammonia mary to potash process to a point where they're more self sustaining is yes, we're going to have to add things to get to that point where you have many of your clients now where it's just very small additive amounts on a yearly basis, then come back and do the SAP testing very small quantities to add into that system with an appropriate cropping system. And what is the possibility? I think I would have to defer to what Don Huber says is that we're only about 10 to 15% of our genetic potential today from a crop production perspective. And so if we take any corn, any soybean, any tree crop that we have, we are only at about 10 to 15% of their genetic potentials. And gee, if you think about that, we've got corn today, we've got guys growing 250 and 300 bushel corn, and we're only at 10 to 15% of the genetic potential. That means that we're out there Close to then what? 3000 bushel per acre is what we should be able to produce. With the current genetics, we're a ways away from that. And so is that the limit? I don't know. I don't think so. I don't believe that that's the limit. But with the current genetics, we're only at 10 to 15%. So we've got a lot of work to do.

I would say we have a lot of work to do. Arden, you've been very outspoken for decades, clearly communicating your thoughts on what you have learned of the fallacies of the mainstream agricultural system. What is a topic that you often find produces discomfort for farmers? What are they uncomfortable hearing and talking about?

I think it's for all of us. None of us like change, and we like comfort. And even if the comfort's uncomfortable, we don't like to have to change things. And my wife and I have to deal with this on a daily basis in our practices. And that's diet. People don't like to have to change their diet. It doesn't matter how small of a change it is. They have to be motivated. And usually the motivation for most people is they have to be so sick that they can't do what they want to do. And so then they decide, okay, well, I guess I'll change my diet. And it's exactly the same in the soil, because it's the diet that we're providing to the soil, which. Which is called fertilizer, but it's still the diet that we're feeding the crops and the soils. People don't like to change because they've spent money on equipment and toys with the current approach to that soil's diet. We come in and suggest that, well, gee, maybe, maybe we need to change that application. Maybe we don't use anhydrous ammonia anymore. Maybe we use a little bit of tillage to go with that. Oh, my goodness, that's blasphemy. And so they. People just don't like change, period. They like to do the status quo. And the other thing, of course, today is they like farming the 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 100,000 acres. And you're not going to be able to farm 100,000 acres and get out there and walk the field. There just isn't enough time in the day to do that. So making that change to say, well, wait a minute, we're only at 10 to 15% of your genetic potential. You could farm 1,000 acres maybe and be able to do it 10 times better, or 10,000 acres and do it 10 times better. And that requires, though, getting off the tractor, getting out into the field, being quiet for a little bit, listening to what the crop is telling you, what the birds are telling you in the field, and what does it feel like being engaged in? Growing a living system is really the key thing that is important. It's important that we understand that regardless of where we are. I find, and I think you have found the same thing, John, because your own personal health, and that is that as farmers improve their own personal health, they're able to. To take that next step to further improve what they're doing in the field. It goes hand in hand. I don't think you can be sick in one aspect of your life and expect to be well in another aspect of your life.

I completely agree with you. And I can attest to that from personal experience because of historical exposure to pesticide applications that I experienced personally had a very significant health impact and absolutely impacted my capacity to interact with plants and being out in the field. And I think this is a very important and appropriate point because unfortunately, today many growers don't have. They don't grow their own food, and they tend to not have access to really good food or choose not to buy good food. I find it really interesting when I work in the Midwest, within our company and our team, we refer to the Midwest as being a good food desert because there simply isn't access to very good food that sustains people. And then we wonder why farmers have. True farmers have this epidemic of health concerns, disproportionately high rates of cancer and heart disease and stroke and diabetes. You can speak to this even better than I can, I'm sure, But it is a challenge. And it's. It's sad that our farmers, who should be producing food and who want to talk about needing to feed the world, are some of the unhealthiest in the population.

That's absolutely correct. And it's one of the reasons. One of the most difficult things, as you mentioned, to get them to change is really they need to start with their own health, need to start with getting back to what their grandparents did, was grow a garden, Grow a garden without pesticides, get out there and actually consume some of their own food. I'll never forget, in the late 1980s, I was at a Dan Scowl class and we had a cherry grower from Michigan stand up and say, well, you know, he says, I have to admit, he says, we have a little separate area here where we don't put pesticides on these cherries, and those are the cherries that we save for our family, the cherries that we grow commercially and we put pesticides on. We don't eat those. We just sell those down the road. That was a tremendous testament to his complete disconnect with what his profession was. And so I find that farmers really do need to get out and get a garden, even if it's small, like we have here where we live. We have just a few raised beds, but we get quite a bit of stuff off from that. A lot of greens, tomatoes, those kinds of things. It's important, I think, that farmers do that just to get back, connected with that. And unfortunately, so many farmers eat at the local McDonald's or whatever is in town instead of at home.

Arden, thank you for sharing your insights. Are there any final thoughts that you would like to share with our listeners before we wrap this up?

Well, I think with the coronavirus, I think that farmers have the opportunity really, to make a big dent in the susceptibility of society to such viruses or any virus, and that is through just producing better quality food. And that is what we see in agriculture every year. John, I'm sure you see that as well. And your people see that farmers see that, hear of a virus or they hear of a fungus or a bacteria or something of that nature. It's not a problem with the genes. It's not a deficiency of pesticide that is the problem. It's a problem with the farmer connecting to the soil and to the crops that he's growing and getting the nutrition back. And when we recognize that, people are intimidated because they believe the chemical approach, that every disease, whether it's a virus, a bacteria or a fungus, is there because of some deficiency of a drug or vaccine. And that's simply not the way nature operates.

We don't have diseases or insects because of antibiotic deficiencies for certain. Arden, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and your experiences and your insights, and I've appreciated it tremendously. I'm sure our listeners will as well. And I look forward to speaking with you more again in the future. Thank you very much.

You're welcome, John. Thank you. My pleasure.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test. We analyze and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look forward to working with you.