Drought Resilience: Managing Nutrition to Reduce Crop Water Requirements

Hi friends. Welcome everyone. Welcome to our webinar on managing nutrition to reduce crop water requirements. I propose that we should have this conversation. And there's we actually had a similar webinar years ago.

I don't think it's publicly available anymore.

But we had a conversation about how you can rapidly increase yields in challenged dry land conditions. And we had a really interesting experience back in the 2012 drought that really caught my attention and brought me to realize that the amount of water that is required to grow a crop varies greatly depending on what's happening on what's.

Going on with that crop.

And so before I dive into the slideshow, I've got a really good list of things that we're going to talk about today. But before I go there, I want to share the story of what happened in 2012. And I've talked about it at a number of presentations, live presentations over the years, but I don't recall if I've spoken about it in a webinar before or not. In the 2012 drought season, we were working with a grower in central Indiana who's growing blue food grade organic corn that is known to be a lower yielding variety, typically in the 110 to.

120 bushels per acre range at best.

And they had from, if I recall my dates correctly, I want to say from mid May until the beginning of.

July they had 6/10 of an inch of rain.

It was extremely dry. A great deal of the commercial corn in the region was never was either harvested for silage or was never harvested at all. And this was the very first year we were working on this farm. This was an organic farm. They had had cover crop of oats planted in early spring and then incorporated. They were able to capture moisture from earlier early rainfall where it ran off many of the surrounding fields because it came down so quickly. So they had a bit of soil reserve moisture to work with there. But the the short version is that at harvest time they also did several they did three different foliar applications during a really intense heat period in early July and the net result was at harvest time they harvested an average of 170 bushels per acre or the previous four year average for this farm was 100, I think around 110 if I remember correctly. And that raises some interesting questions. How do you get such a significant yield bump in drought conditions when most of the corn in the region was never harvested? Not only did we get these significant yield bumps, but we also got a test weight gain increase. So you have when you move from, I think we moved from 53 to 57 or 58 pound test weight average. You have those increases in test weight. That means you have really good nutrition.

During the grain fill period.

And it was this crop and thinking about and trying to understand what was happening with the interactions between this crop and the soil environment that first gave me an appreciation for two important characteristics of microbial metabolite nutrition. The first was the ability of these plants to access water when there wasn't free soil moisture. And the second was their ability to gain access to nutrients when there wasn't abundant soil moisture. Because. Because the only way you get those type of yield responses and quality responses is obviously the plants have to be getting water and attrition from somewhere. And the realization that microbial nutrition, that plants can access microbial nutrition and microbially received water in the absence of free soil moisture in what we perceive to be drought conditions. So that was one of the early experiences that really got me started down this pathway of trying to understand what is happening with plant nutrition and how does plant nutrition vary in ways that result in crops being more resistant to water stress, or maybe a better way of saying it is how can we get plants healthy enough so that they.

Require less water to thrive and survive? And that's a very realistic expectation.

There's. I'm going to talk about a number of different contributing factors and it's hard to measure and to define how much is each of these contributing factors contributing to the overall net effect of reduced water requirements and how much is it.

Possible to reduce water requirements just based.

On an accumulation of experience? I don't have any hard data to.

Support this or back it up, just lots and lots of field observation.

I would suggest that it's possible for most crops, most contexts, to reduce the water required to harvest a full crop somewhere in the neighborhood of between 30 and 50% based on how we manage nutrition. As you can imagine, that's a pretty big deal. So I'm going to dive right into the slide deck and the different topics that I wanted to touch on today. If you have any questions, type them into the Q and A. And I'm going to try to leave lots of time for questions at the end of this because this is an interesting topic and there is a lot of what we've observed that simply because it's difficult to measure, we have hypothesis around how we think things might work. But there's a lot that we don't know.

And so I want to communicate that very clearly. There's a Lot of stuff that we.

Think we know, lot of stuff we suspect, definitely lots of things we've experienced and observed. But we're still trying to figure out.

The full dynamics of what's going on here with plant water interactions.

Alright, so let's kick things off. Managing Nutrition to Reduce Crop Water requirements Three major topics I want to discuss and focus on. The first is what actually defines a crops water requirements, how significant are they.

And how can we deliver water more effectively.

The second is how does nutrition, what specific nutritional factors influence water use?

Or maybe a different way of saying.

That is what's going on with plant physiology that can alter the amount of water a crop requires. And the third is what are specific tools, products, management practices that you can.

Use to reduce a crops water requirements or to increase drought tolerance.

So the first question is how much water does your crop actually need? And I have elected to not give.

This a specific answer because obviously it's going to vary quite a bit based on the multitude of different crops that people grow and their context, soil context and all that environment, etc.

But a general rough ballpark in terms of the water the crop actually absorbs and utilizes is somewhere in the neighborhood of an inch per week for many crops. Now there are outliers both above and.

Below that, but as a general rule of thumb.

Many broad acre crops, many crops through the Midwest are somewhere in.

The neighborhood of an inch per week per acre.

So that's 27,000 gallons per acre roughly. Next question is that we should be thinking about is how much water does your soil hold? And again, this is going to vary a bit based on clay, sand, silt ratios, and the soil's composition. It's going to vary based on soil aggregation, aggregate stability, flocculation, all those good things. But when we think about it in terms of organic matter, it's my understanding that organic matter can hold roughly 25,000.

Gallons per percentage point of organic matter. So you're very close to the acre inch number.

So I think of it as just a general rule of thumb that each percentage point of organic matter can hold roughly an inch of rainfall equivalent. And so if we have. And then the last question is, how much water does your soil have in reserve? How much? How many? How much reserve water can your soil hold? If you have four inches of organic matter, does that translate to four weeks of reserve? You know, this may not have been in the podcast recordings, I can't recall for certain, but I've had many individual conversations with Michael McNeil and Jerry Hatfield and both of Them have described how across the Midwest, it used to be, I say used to be, this is going back to the beginning of their careers would be roughly 45 years or so ago. They described how the expectation used to be that they could quite easily go three weeks without rainfall. And some of the better soils across Iowa, Illinois and Indiana could reliably go four weeks without rainfall, that they would hold enough water in reserve that they could sustain a corn crop through the grain fill period, through peak water use for three to four weeks. And now if we don't have rain for a week, it's considered a drought.

In many of these same soils.

And so this is a manifestation partially of a loss of organic matter, but it's also a manifestation of loss of soil aggregation and particularly the loss of many soils, or I should say not the loss, but the reduction of many soils ability to percolate. Well, in the last decade or so, even just in the last couple of years, there's been a growing popularity of measuring our soil's infiltration rates. The infiltration rates, the capacity of a soil to absorb water quickly is understood to be an expression of soil aggregation and aggregate stability. And it's true that infiltration rates are very important and valuable. And increasing infiltration rates, there's a lot of value there. But we've lost sight of what comes after infiltration. What comes after infiltration is a soil's ability to percolate. Percolation is an expression of the soil's ability to move nutrient, or excuse me, to move water through the soil profile both downward and then again back upward. So if you have the capacity to infiltrate a lot of water quickly, let's say four inches an hour, but it can only move down into the top six inches, and then that soil becomes saturated, and that top 6 inches only has the ability to hold an inch.

And a half or maybe two inches.

At best, then that means in a heavy rainfall environment, when we're getting with the climate we have today, we're getting lots of rain quickly, that means that the infiltration rate is not our limiting factor, but it's the percolation rate that.

Is our limiting factor.

When we get these extreme rainfall events. But the percolation rate isn't just a limiting factor, then it also becomes our limiting factor. When we do not have soils that.

Have the ability to store water down.

Deep and then move it back up, this is one of the critical pieces that's missing. When we think about soil's ability four.

Decades or five decades ago to supply water to a high demand crop for three to four weeks and today it's a week to 10 days.

It's partially a result of a loss.

Of organic matter and partially a result of loss of percolation ability and partially a result of loss of infiltration ability and water just running off.

Anyway, enough of that. I think you get this all in concept. But it is interesting that when we think about drought mitigation, many of the rest of the things that I'll be talking about today are short term things that you can do this year to turn around a crop in a crisis or to prevent a crop from coming from getting into a crisis. But there's also the longer term drought proofing of our entire soil profile. So the next category that I want to speak of is how nutrition, nutrition management generally influences water use inside the plant. So I have this, this handful of different topics. I want to speak briefly about nitrogen absorption, ion absorption, electrolyte balance inside the plant, leaf membrane integrity, leaf cooling efficiency, cell membrane integrity, stomatal regulation, and soil water accessibility. All really fun topics.

Yeah, I could expand this one hour webinar into four hours, that's fine. I want to get to the bottom line and talk about.

Just very briefly, quickly what each of these things means. And then the important part is what.

Can you do about it because you.

Can influence all of these pieces, a crop that's already planted, really significantly, really.

Quickly, if need be.

Alright, let's dig into the list.

First one. Nitrogen absorption.

So I've hammered the topic pretty heavily over the last year or so that absorption of nitrate is a really bad idea. And what happens when a plant absorbs a nitrate molecule? It requires three molecules of water for that plant to convert nitrate into amino acids. So it's pretty straightforward if you want to increase a plant's water requirement by a significant chunk. I think this is probably one of the bigger factors in the entire list that we're going to talk about. If you want to increase a plant's water requirement, it's really easy. Just fertilize them with a form of nitrogen that's going to convert to nitrate.

Before they absorb it. And you will increase a plant's water requirements.

From what I can tell based on field observation, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30% higher water requirements when.

You fertilize with nitrate.

In addition to the mechanism of water molecules required for nitrate conversion, we also know that if we have abundant levels of nitrate, that weakens cell membranes and.

Increases their permeability, resulting in more water.

Loss from individual cells. And in the Horticulture space, in greenhouses.

And fruit and vegetable crops, we talk about growing weak, watery plants. Well, a weak, watery plant is an expression of a plant that has high nitrates.

And in field crops, in ag crops, we don't tend to talk about weak, watery plants because the quantities of nitrate are usually not high enough to produce such an extreme effect. But though the effect is less observable.

It'S still there, it's still present.

So it's safe to think about nitrate.

Applications as producing plants that have weak cell membranes and are very watery cells that are very prone to dehydration and water loss.

The next topic is the absorption of.

Simple ions from the soil solution.

So this is particularly true for all the ions. I'm going to speak a bit more.

About the electrolytes in just a moment.

But for all the ions that have a high salt index, potassium, chlorides, even to some degree, calcium salts, The best way for me to state this, I think, is to say that when plants absorb nutrient ions from the soil solution, which is essentially a hydroponic pathway, then it requires some level of water just to metabolize those ions. Just as the same, the same scenario that is described for nitrate, but to a lesser degree. But it's accurate to say that when the plant is absorbing ions, it requires more water for the metabolization of those nutrients. And the alternate possibility is for plants to absorb bacterial and fungal cells through the endophyte rhizophagy process and get nutrients from live bacterial and fungal cells. And that process requires no additional water.

Because the bacteria and the fungi actually contribute and supply all the water that is needed for that process. And there's very limited metabolization that is required to occur in that process.

The next piece we need to be thinking about is electrolyte balance. So we know that for our own bodies, if our electrolytes are not properly balanced, if we have imbalances in the.

Sodium to potassium ratio, for example, then.

We easily become dizzy, we become lightheaded, we don't have enough energy, and as soon as it starts warming up, we just have no go power.

We just can't go because our electrolytes are imbalanced.

Of course, we have organs, kidneys, and so forth that are responsible for managing.

The electrolyte balance within our bodies. Plants don't have kidneys.

And the electrolyte balance can easily be disrupted inside plants, partially because plants, with the exception of magnesium, these major electrolytes here are potassium, sodium and chloride. Magnesium salts can also be present. Calcium salts can also be present. But these, these are the major ones.

And.

Potassium and sodium and chloride in particular are readily absorbed from the soil. If any of those three elements are present in an abundant supply in the soil profile, plants will pick them up very, very quickly. And because of that it's easy to produce electrolyte imbalances. And when you have electrolyte imbalances.

A.

Simple way of saying it is just.

To say that that plant requires more water. And again, you end up with a weak watery plant because you have an electrolyte imbalance.

And as you can tell from looking at the list, I mean there's regions of the country where sodium is an.

Issue because of limited rainfall and so forth.

But two of those four electrolytes that.

Are really easy for plants to absorb in excess are potassium chloride.

And if you're using potassium chloride fertilization, that's going to increase the crops water.

Requirement and increase its drought susceptibility.

Alright, next topic, leaf membrane integrity. So on the leaf surface, and there are people who know much more about.

This than I do, but it's my.

Understanding that we have this layer of waxes and lipids on the leaf surface that form a.

It's not a continuous membrane, but.

This relatively impermeable. Impermeable is not the right word, I.

Can'T think of the right term.

But there is a membrane on the leaf surface that is there for the.

Express purpose of protecting the leaf from potential pathogens and contaminants, airborne particulates and so forth.

And I had an interesting experience.

Conversation.

With a wine grape grower in California last year who described how the wine grapes that were not sprayed with fungicides did not absorb smoke particulates in the.

Atmosphere, whereas all of those that were sprayed with fungicides did absorb smoke particulates from the atmosphere. And if you're not familiar, smoke particulates from the, from wildfires. This was coming from wildfires. If they're somewhere in the neighborhood of about 2 to 4 microns in size, they're pretty small.

And that led to an interesting train of thought. This is a hypothesis I don't have evidence other than this one fairly robust.

Field experience that was fairly laboratory tested, embedded.

I suspect we know that many fungicides in particular include penetrating agents in the.

Formulation to allow the fungicide to get past this leaf membrane.

Because if the fungicide remains on the.

Outside of the leaf membrane, it's less effective or to some degree completely ineffective. And.

I'm beginning to suspect we've noticed there's a Large body of experiential evidence where growers have experienced putting on a preventative fungicide application and observing that the section that got treated with the fungicide versus the section that remained untreated, the treated section actually had disease worse than the untreated section. And I'm beginning to wonder how much of that is a result of a.

Loss of membrane integrity.

Anyway, with that context, it is quite reasonable to expect that when you have a loss of membrane integrity, that's going.

To result in a loss of water and turgor pressure from inside the leaf, inside the cells.

One of the things that we've observed is that when plants get to level.

Three of the plant health pyramid and we can visually observe this glossy waxy.

Sheen on the leaf surface, that seems to be an expression of increased membrane thickness. And without question, that glossy waxy sheen.

On the leaf surface corresponds to a reduction in water use, a noticeable reduction in water use.

This might be a contributing factor, but I have two other pieces that I.

Think are contributing to this effect as well.

One of them is the improvement in leaf cooling efficiency. So waxes are fascinating materials.

They are exceptionally reflective and simultaneously really conductive, which is relatively rare for a lot of materials. Some very interesting materials science around waxes.

But when you think about their capacity to reflect, if you have a leaf.

That has a thick wax layer on.

Its surfaces, then that means they reflect.

Heat and light better, which has the effect of reducing plant temperature.

But not only do they reflect, they're.

Also very effective heat conductors.

So that means when the plant is.

Respiring and losing water into the atmosphere in an in an effort to cool.

Itself down, it cools more rapidly. So what I can say from an experiential perspective is that without question, when we have plants that have this glossy.

Waxy layer on the leaf surface, water requirements go down, particularly in high heat environments.

Whatever the mechanisms are, this is largely a hypothesis.

We're just trying to interpret and understand what might be going on here.

Whatever the mechanisms are, we know that.

In practical terms it's very effective.

Cell membrane integrity. I spoke about the challenges that are introduced by nitrate in maintaining cell membrane integrity. There's a large growing body of research in the peer reviewed literature describing how improved silicon nutrition strengthens cell membranes and.

Reduces water requirements and increases drought resilience.

Of course, it's not only silicon. Silicon is known for this effect and.

Has this effect to a pronounced degree.

But silicon, as we know, has a symbiotic relationship with calcium and boron. And so it's not Just silicon nutrition alone.

It's also calcium and boron and maintaining strong cell membranes.

And I made note, found it worthy to mention that these cell membranes are holding water inside the cell in a gel state. This is not liquid water inside the cells.

This is water in the gel form, or what Gerald Pollack calls the exclusion zone water structure. This is crystalline water.

This is a topic that I find fascinating personally. And if you want to dig deeper, I highly recommend Jerry Pollack's work on the book that's titled Cells, Gels and.

The Engines of Life.

It holds a lot of indicators and a lot of keys for how we can increase the the nutritional efficiency and.

The water use efficiency of a crop.

When we consider stomata regulation, we know that when we have balanced potassium nutrition, it allows the plants to open and close stomata very rapidly and very easily. Whereas if we don't have adequate nutrition or we have potassium imbalances, then for.

Lack of a better term, the stomata becomes stiff, constipated and they don't open and close as rapidly, which results in the loss of more water vapor and more respiration.

Soil water accessibility Going back to the conversation or the experience that we had with the non irrigated corn in 2012, mycorrhizal fungi and other organisms as well, other types of fungi and bacteria can access water that is very tightly held.

To the soil or to the clay.

Colloid that plant roots can't access. I've been told that I have read, I should say that when we have a soil that is mostly comprised of.

Clay, so this is in reference specifically to clay soils.

When we have clay soils that appear to us visually and when we feel them and they're dusty dry in our hands, those soils still hold 70% of the water that they do when they.

Are at field capacity.

And of course one of the comments.

That was missing from that or the evaluations that was missing from that paper that I read is measuring the soil aggregation and aggregate stability. Because I have to believe that number can't be true if you had good aggregation.

But in any case. So if you have flocculated soil that isn't aggregated well, dusty dry, it still holds 70% of the water when it.

Is at fuel capacity.

How is that possible? It's possible because there is this thin film of water on the clay colloid that is, if I remember correctly, 70 microns thickness. And that film of water is too thin for the plant roots and root hairs to access. But fungi can access it and bacteria.

Can live within it and.

If we have good mycorrhizal colonization and we have the rhizophages cycle functioning, this microbial population can continue to provide the plant with water and with nutrients.

When a soil appears to be dry.

This is, I think, the process that.

Was at the foundation of producing the yield and the quality responses that we observed a decade ago.

All right, the next segment, the next section is. All right, I just gave you a bunch of hypothesis and theory and possibilities combined with a bunch of field observations. But now what do we actually do about it? Here's the tools that we have available, both tools we should use proactively and some of the tools and management practices.

We should try to avoid.

Bacterial endophytes. Bacterial endophytes, as so eloquently described by.

Dr. James White and his description and his colleagues description of the rhizophagy cycle.

Has the capacity to provide nutrients to.

Plants in the absence of free soil water.

You know, there is this whole model of plant nutrition based on plants absorbing.

Simple ions from the soil solution.

And I wish some people would stop and think and ask the question, what happens when the water is gone? Or what happens when you have too much water? Of course, the answer is if you have, if you are depending, if you are basing your entire agronomic approach on water soluble nutrients, that means that when the water is gone, the nutrients are unavailable. And it means that when you have.

Excess water, the nutrients are carried away.

It seems obvious to anyone who has spent time doing agronomy that plant nutrition.

Is still absorbed even when water supply is challenged and when it is in excess. And anyway, I've spoken about this enough in other places, but.

To provide bacterial endophytes to a crop, we need to. I would recommend there's different pathways here.

I would recommend inoculating them. When seeding, you can use BioCode Gold. You can ensure that you have really high quality seed parents, if at all possible.

Because in reality the best way to.

Get these endophytes is to get them from the parent population and get them directly embedded into the seed embryo and on the seed coat. Then of course, don't treat it with fungicides.

And then barring those first two, the seedling emerging seedling can recruit these associated endophytes from the bulk soil microbial population. But that is a less efficient process and that process has a slight time delay following germination, which gives a window.

Of opportunity for disease expression.

Fungal endophytes kind of the same story as the bacterial endophytes other than that I'm not aware that there are products.

Out there that have fungal populations being.

Able, let me say, manufactured products able.

To, that have fungal endophytes that can be used on the seed treatment. Of course, this is a possible fit for a fungally dominated compost, compost teas and so forth. Although.

I don't know that the research has been done. It's my understanding that if you want to have these fungal endophyte species, it's a little bit like mycorrhizal species. If you want to have mycorrhizal species in compost, mycorrhizal species only propagate and express themselves in the presence of a living root system. And for at least some of these.

Endophyte species, that is also true.

So it's not just in compost. You actually have to have living plant.

Root systems in the compost and preferably.

Living plant root systems from the crop.

That you want to use this as an inoculant for.

So that's a whole other topic of.

Conversation that is interesting to dig into.

Mycorrhizal fungi for the obvious reasons of having access to water and nutrients that plant roots can't access.

Possible sources include inoculation on the seed.

At planting or the reality is you can also apply this after planting as.

Well and then of course, recruiting them.

From the soil microbiome electrolyte fertilizers in the soil. Here's an interesting one. I spoke about the challenges with potassium chloride once it's absorbed into the plant. But I want to talk a bit about what happens with an abundance of electrolytes in the soil. When you add fertilizers that have a high salt index.

These would be fertilizers like urea, potassium nitrate, I think calcium nitrate maybe as well. I'm not sure right now.

For certainly ammonium nitrate. Most nitrogen products I think would have this.

Maybe ammonium sulfate has. I think ammonium sulfate has a lower salt index. There's another one that I wanted to mention. Oh, potassium chloride.

I think the potassium.

The salt index for potassium chloride is like 106 or 116. I forget right now it's higher than sodium chloride, surprisingly enough. So.

What happens when you add salt to.

A cut on your finger? It oxidizes cells and it feels like it's burning. Because it is burning, it is rapidly dehydrating individual cells. And.

And the same thing happens when you.

Add high salt index fertilizers to the soil.

It has a dehydrating effect in the.

Immediate zone immediately around where it's applied.

Which has the effect of reducing the root system's ability to absorb water. So obviously there are times and places when we need to add fertilizers to soils. If we are adding if we're concerned about drought stress and we want to reduce a crops water requirement. The solution to during this transition period, the solution is to buffer any of those applications that need to be made with humicarb which has an extremely high.

Buffering capacity to tie up those salts and prevent them from having this oxidizing effect on soil biology and on the root system.

Now switching frames, the conversation is still on electrolytes, but the framework is now.

On foliar applied instead of soil applied.

So foliar electrolytes can be extremely valuable in drought conditions as long as they're balanced. Just like if we're working outside on a hot sunny day and we're losing a lot of sweat, an electrolyte drink.

Can be very valuable, necessary even.

And the same holds true of plants is that when you give them a balanced electrolyte that can improve their ability to hold water inside the plant. Increase the increase the plant's turgor pressure as long as you avoid two things. One is you avoid applying them in excess and two, you avoid creating an imbalance. Either an imbalance or an excess will actually have a negative effect instead of a positive effect.

As you would guess if you were to put on a high salt content spray, high salt index spray, then you can end up having a negative effect because it depletes the plants ability to hold water.

So this is, this is actually a practice that is very valuable and very effective.

But you do not want to guess. You need to manage this process using SAP analysis and applying what is necessary or not necessary because you can easily make the situation worse instead of better.

Nitrogen applications. In previous webinars I've spoken quite a bit about the challenges of plants absorbing nitrate nitrogen. So and I mentioned it earlier here, I'm not going to belabor the point, but the, the final the conclusion is you want to apply nitrogen as close to the moment of plant need as possible. Don't apply it well in advance because the longer it is present in the soil profile, the greater an opportunity exists for it to for that applied nitrogen to convert to the nitrate form which.

We want to avoid.

And secondly, or actually maybe even primarily use the nitrogen efficiency program, the rejuvenate humicarb sulfur molybdenum combination has the effect of speeding up the microbial conversion process into microbial Proteins which have all the.

Benefits of having low salt index and being able for the plant to absorb in the absence of free soil moisture.

Be cautious with fungicide applications to leaf foliage and whenever the crops are on the edge of being moisture stressed I am leaning in the direction of saying.

We need to, we need to avoid those.

Unless there is for certain do not apply fungicides in that context in that.

Environment only as a preventative.

Unless there is a very good known.

Reason that you feel you absolutely must.

Apply, I would really caution against it.

And suggest delaying as long as possible. If you do need to apply fungicides.

Or perhaps even if you don't, I would suggest putting on nutrition with us with an application and seastem and I'll describe why C stem in just a minute here I spoke about potassium as an electrolyte and its value in maintaining stomatal balance and stoma opening and closing very quickly. The challenge is that when we have stress conditions, approaching drought conditions, potassium becomes complex in dry soil very quickly and all of a sudden even soils that may have abundant levels of potassium in the soil profile may not have potassium availability. And so actually it may be I'm realizing as I'm talking about these specific strategies I've missed offering some really big picture perspective. These, as I'm sure is obvious to you because you're all very intelligent farmers and advisors, these various strategies are going to have differing degrees of application to different contexts and the in season strategies such as putting on a foliar spray with an electrolyte or applying potassium. The place where these fit is.

When.

We have a crop that started off strong and is doing well and now we are going through a stress period and there is a fair degree of hope or optimism that we are going to get rain in a reasonable time.

Frame, that the crop is going to.

Recover and continue to do well. So this is these are not the types of applications you put on corn.

That is rolled so severely that it looks like it looks like a spike.

But there are intermediary steps, intermediary stages where if you anticipate the crop recovering soon, putting on these types of applications at the right window can have a tremendous impact on the crops recovery and on increasing yields, but also putting them on even earlier if it's relevant and appropriate. Putting them on even earlier is going to change the crops water requirements before.

It gets into that drought stress period.

So I'm kind of giving you the whole range, the whole index of options here. Some of them, like biocoat gold, some of these applications are relevant when you plant the crop, others are relevant before.

You plant the crop.

It's kind of all of these pieces fit into different places in the crops growth cycle.

And I think it's going to be fairly obvious to you which ones fit where.

Alright, Silicon applications already mentioned silicon but if we're putting on a full year.

Application of nutrients, I think this could be a valuable addition. AEA used to have a silicon product years ago that we discontinued because we were ahead of our time and nobody wanted it and knew what we had. We presently don't have one label for the marketplace but I think that's probably likely to change fairly soon.

Here are known to contain a number of different compounds that are termed osmoregulators.

And what that means in plain English is that they.

Help the plants regulate.

Their water use more efficiently and more effectively.

Seaweed is known for this. However you can guess what happens to.

These compounds when they are. When the seaweed is extracted with an alkali extraction process using potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide.

So I highly recommend the use of.

Sea stem applications when we are approaching drought stress or in a drought stress situation.

And lastly rejuvenate. I've been really intrigued with the applications.

Of rejuvenate over the last, I don't know, five or six years.

For those of you who've been working with us for a while or familiar with our products, you know that we developed rejuvenate as a soil applied material to really enhance and speed up the.

Soil microbial processes, particularly the bacterial population processes.

It wasn't really ever designed to be applied to plants. But then we've had all these experiences. We've had growers who.

I still remember this one potato grower in central Illinois who had potato beetle Colorado potato beetles that were just decimating his crop. I mean he had.

There were no leaves left.

The only thing left was stems.

He put on a foliar application of a very high rate of rejuvenate, higher.

Than I would have recommended. I think it was in the 4 to 6 quart per acre range. And the potato beetles vanished and the crops recovered and he got a full harvest.

Then we started working with growers who were using rejuvenate or experimented with rejuvenate for hail damage, had hail damaged crop put on a foliar application of rejuvenate.

And the crop responds extraordinarily.

Then we had growers start using it.

For extreme heat stress. We've had several periods in the Pacific Northwest the last couple of years where we had extreme periods of heat Stress and crops respond really well.

And I came to realize that the, the carbohydrates and some of the ingredients that we put into the rejuvenate are extremely high energy compounds that are exactly the group of compounds that plants need to regenerate their own cells, regenerate their own metabolism. If we have a crop that has been in a high heat environment and has been photorespiration dominant for an extended period, putting on a foliar application of rejuvenate can be the kickstarter to switch it out of photorespiration mode and help metabolize some of the ammonium and some of the less healthy compounds created in that photorespiration process. And essentially I was thinking about this process of how we are seeing Rejuvenate being this incredible stress recovery product. And it occurred to me that, you know, rejuvenate is the plants what a protein drink or an energy, a combination of a protein drink and an energy.

Drink is to people.

It gives them a rapid, immediate energy high and a rapid, immediate source of very available raw materials with which to rebuild their cells. So I'm pretty, I'm quite intrigued with what we've observed from Rejuvenate. This is not, this is the type of application that I would recommend in a, you could use lower applications in a, in a low stress or approaching.

A low stress environment.

And if you're in a high stress.

Environment, up the dose. And based on my experiences so far, our collective experiences so far, I'm pretty intrigued with what we're observing. So whoops, got ahead of myself there.

So next steps if you want to dig deeper. I've given you lots of high level concepts, principles, ideas, things to work with, kind of the whole index. This, this webinar came together very rapidly. Life has been full with lots of other stuff going on. And I am certain that if I would have dug through the literature and the research, I could have added another, probably half a dozen or so contributing factors that would contribute to drought tolerance.

Improving drought tolerance and managing nutrition better.

This came purely just top of head stream of consciousness based on the results.

And the experiences that we've had out in the field. And so that's what it is. I hope you find it useful and valuable. I'm sure you will.

So, all right, I'm going to switch to the Q and A. Actually I missed making the point I was going to make, which is that I gave you lots of high level general principles. But now the fun part of course is figuring out how to adapt that.

To your specific farming Operation context dependent. What's happening with soil types and profiles and organic matter, what's happening with nutritional balance in the soils and in the plants.

So if you want help figuring that.

Out, please call our consulting team, connect with us directly. We're happy to engage in these conversations and help you figure out what's the best fit for where you are and where your crop is.

Alright, so we've got 20 questions or.

20 plus questions at this point and.

We'Ve got 10 minutes till the end of the hour. I'm going to make an attempt to.

Answer the questions concisely and keep things moving.

Question from Arlen Is there a good tool or method to ensure a given soil's ability to percolate water? Arlan I'm sure there is. I'm guessing it would be something like a water column. It would be a similar test to an infiltration test, except you go deeper.

You go 36 or 48 inches deeper. Sorry, I said a water column. I meant a soil column.

The important piece to remember about percolation is you want to measure a soil's ability not just to percolate water down, but to percolate water back up. It's percolating water back up from the.

Reserves down below that is particularly valuable in drought conditions.

So Arlen, I don't, off the top of my head, I don't immediately know what the method is for measuring percolation, but I know a lot of research has been done on it.

So obviously there must be a method of some type that's out there.

Question from Jorge how can we manage.

Sodic soils so we can have high yields? I mean, the sodium is in the water for irrigation and we do not have any other options to irrigation irrigate.

Jorge, your question is one that it's an important question. I don't want to be dismissive of it. There are things that we can do with the irrigation water to help make.

The sodium and the bicarbonate, to reduce.

The sodium and the bicarbonate. Challenges.

There are things we can do to the soil.

We've done some really interesting stuff with. There's a synergistic stack and I know I've given this presentation, but I don't know if I've given it in a webinar format. But there's a synergistic stack of three materials, Gypsum, humicarb and spectrum ds. That combination is a lot more effective.

Than any one of those three things when they're applied by themselves.

But there's also a bigger contextual conversation.

Of looking at the whole environment of the ecosystem that might be worth considering as well.

I would recommend you look at a book that is titled Back from the.

Brink by Peter Andrews, who's an Australian farmer and hydrologist with some very intriguing insights that I think you would really enjoy connecting with.

Question from Mark hi Mark, sorry if I miss it on the front end, but I'm wondering about your comment around.

The same soils now being less capable to withstand drought. Could it be that the advances in crop genetics and higher planting density thinking of corn and soybeans have led to increases in biomass which need more water? How do you separate out these effects? How do you separate out the effects of tillage versus nutrients creating weak watery cells?

Mark, very good questions. I think that to your first question.

Advances in crop genetics and higher planting density has that led to increases in biomass which need more water?

I would hesitate to guess that the.

Answer to that question is yes. I think it's probably no only because the individuals that I was Speaking of, Michael McNeil and Jerry Hatfield, in this.

Context, they were pioneers already at that.

Time and the work that they were.

Doing and the crop yields of corn and beans that they were working with at that moment in time were as.

High or higher than the averages are today. So I only have the yield numbers to go by. Obviously I don't have biomass numbers and planting density numbers to go by, but I would hesitate to guess that they were significantly different.

And separating out I mean I'm sure there's any number of.

Cumulative effects, but one of the significant effects are I would I believe in my conversations with Jerry Hatfield.

Jerry believes that the principal effect is.

Coming from soil's loss of ability to percolate well.

Question from Andrew I already purchased UAN for my corn side dress needs and liquid dry area wasn't available locally.

I'm using the nitrogen efficiency protocol of.

Humic substances sugar, sulfur and molybdenum.

Andrew, just to clarify, the best nitrogen efficiency protocol is not just humic and sugar but rejuvenate and humicarb. The I know it's more expensive and they are very different and perform very differently. So just want to clarify that I guess for next year find some liquid urea yes if possible or figure out how to liquefy it on your own. It's not that difficult.

Anything I can do with the UAN this year?

Yes, use it with nitrogen efficiency. You're doing the right thing.

We are in severe drought debating reducing.

Nitrogen rate from on corn from 160 to 125 units just to save the money. At this point, if we don't get rain, I would be in favor of that recommendation.

And I'm saying that not fully understanding and knowing the context or where, what crop stage you're at and all of that, but one of the best ways to increase a crops drought susceptibility is.

To add more nitrogen than it needs or add more nitrogen than it can utilize. That actually makes the situation a whole lot worse rather than better. So I would be in favor of.

Being cautious and applying less than you.

Think you need rather than more than you think you might need.

Question from Enrique. Hi Enrique, thank you for your valuable information.

How can I balance knowing the needs of the plant, the analysis of soil salinity, the or the physics of nutrients and water analysis?

I think the question you're asking, if.

I understand it correctly, is how do you. How do you balance. How do you determine what the optimal balance is?

And I'm guessing based on the nature.

Of your question, you're probably referring specifically to the electrolytes. So.

The answer is, as you might.

Guess, it is a combination of the presence and balance of electrolytes in the plant, the presence and balance of electrolytes in the soil, and then of course how the irrigation water contributes to that. I don't have a simple way of answering the question better than that in the time that we have, unfortunately. I hope I understood your question correctly.

Question from Mr.

Anonymous.

What was the paper that had the.

Info on 70% of water retention? I am puzzled by the reference. May it have been the place where I mentioned the inverse of 70% was 30%? That was on nitrate, the nitrate conversion piece. So I'm guessing that that is what that is in reference to.

If my guess is correct, the answer.

Is it's in any plant physiology biochemistry textbook.

If you look at the descriptions and.

I'm sure you can find it online as well.

If you look at the descriptions for the nitrate conversion process of how nitrate nitrogen is absorbed by the plant, then converted to to amine nitrogen. It's right there in the chemical equation.

The conversion process includes three molecules of water. I'm hoping I'm understanding that question correctly.

Question from Patty. Hi Patti. In high sodium soils in eastern Montana.

Should we be applying humicarb? I earlier spoke about the synergistic stack, the combination of three that really benefits sodic soils or high sodium soils being a combination of gypsum humicarbon spectrum ds. And that would be the protocol that I would try. First, someone asked if this is going to be made public and yes, it'll be on YouTube I'm sure in a week or less.

Question from Dave Are you seeing many farms practicing multi species cast cropping?

There's some good examples of four to five way crop mixes in Australia's dry climate having the benefit of a diverse root architecture and a diverse soil microbiome to partition resources.

Dave, very good question.

I haven't even talked about the benefits of diverse species of COVID crops, much less cash crops.

Not seeing, haven't personally experienced or worked with many farms who are practicing multi species cash cropping yet. Not on a wide scale. I mean there's some interesting things happening.

With flax and peas and canola.

There is some work being done, but not really on a scale of millions.

Of acres yet at this point still needs to be developed.

Question from Enrique Enrique, you've asked a number of really good questions here, a couple that I've glossed over because.

They'Re.

Very context specific and I don't have.

Answers that I can give in a couple of minutes because to answer your question well is going to require me asking more questions first.

So I don't want to discount those questions. I would say let's plan on having.

A follow up conversation sometime in the next couple of weeks to dig specifically into that. I'd be happy to address those one on one with you, but I think.

You do have a question here that.

Is of general interest, which is.

When the plant has already set its fruit, can I apply calcium, potassium and magnesium as nitrates. With caution? You're already dealing with a sodic situation.

And with very high electrical conductivity and particularly.

Well, I think all three of those.

Or yeah, all three of those are going to have a fairly high salt.

Index and so I would prefer to.

Avoid them and have low electrolytes, low salt index materials instead of a nitrate.

Question from Cassandra.

Can you talk about or give insight on how to reduce fungicide applications for fruit crops which is.

In transition from chemical farming to a.

More regenerative growing practice as in specifically cranberry plants during bloom want to reduce chemicals but is against everything else I've previously been taught.

So Cassandra, I think obviously both a very on one hand a very broad.

Question in terms of principle and concepts, on the other hand very specific for your farming operation.

So to the question of from a general principles perspective, I would refer you to the Plant Health Pyramid webinar that.

We'Ve done that is on YouTube. You can also just do a search for the Plant Health Pyramid. We have infographics and stuff available online.

And in that I describe the principles and the concepts behind how to approach this and how to think about it. But then specifically for your specific context I would suggest connecting with our team.

At AEA and we can walk through.

How we would use SAP analysis to.

Validate collect data and have the data to know is our crop susceptible to a particular disease or not.

With the technology we have available today.

That'S no longer something we need to guess about.

Question from Peter Does Biokoat have to be applied shortly before using the seed.

Or can I pre treat one or several days ahead of planting?

Peter Biokote Gold has been applied by some growers as much as a week.

To two weeks before planting, as long as the seed was then kept dry and cool. I think if the conditions that the seed is being stored in are similar to what the Biokoat Gold is being stored in, then you can safely apply it sometime in advance of planting.

Question from Matthias Cole Is potassium nitrate.

And calcium nitrate appropriate for foliar applications in drought stress? In my opinion, no. I would avoid the application of nitrate to a plant as a foliar in drought conditions at all costs. I would never recommend an application of a nitrate in those conditions, preferably amino acids or as a second best urea. And yes, urea has this high salt index, but it's going to require a lot less water for the plant to convert it to proteins than it will nitrates.

A question from Mark for products like Rejuvenate, do you leave check strips to.

Show growers the benefits? If we can convince them to do that, we'd like to see more.

Any examples you can share an improved.

Yield and or quality?

There are two things we have a.

Really difficult time getting growers to do reliably. One is leaving check strips and the second is collecting reliable data and I'm just going to leave that right there. We've certainly done our own share of research and we're constantly doing more and it seems there's never ending need or opportunity to do more research trials and learn more. But it is certainly something that we never feel like we have enough. Question from Jared can you apply too much Rejuvenate?

We had one grower that applied five.

Gallons per acre with no negative crop consequences. There might have been negative consequences to his wallet, but well, maybe not for the crop that he was producing, but I don't think you're going to have a negative impact on the plant.

Can rejuvenate be used in combination with.

Other products such as Jetm which is? Well, I know what it stands for, but I can't think of it right now. These Lactobacillus fermentation materials, should it be used by itself? Well, I would say this two things are going to happen. First of all, rejuvenate is likely to be absorbed by plants and utilized extremely quickly.

Secondly, rejuvenate.

Almost could be said to hyper accelerate the microbial population on the Lee surface. So.

I don't know what the effects.

Would be of putting that on in combination with a fermented material, but I would guess it's probably going to skew the microbial population on the leaf surface significantly in favor of some species at the expense of others. That would be my guess.

Question from Scott, thoughts on rejuvenated and.

Furrow, particularly in corn. It's a routine standard practice that we do all the time at this point. Can we use months old stored water in tanks for irrigation? Is it okay to use rainwater for foliar spray and irrigation? The answer to both questions is yes.

Question from Nigel Palmer.

Hi Nigel. Surprise, surprise. Imagine seeing you here.

In order to provide plants with a.

Foliar with balanced electrolytes not being able to afford SAP analysis, how about using a fermented plant? Nigel, you just couldn't avoid it, could you? How about using a fermented plant juice of the plant that is to be affected?

For someone like you, Nigel, that's the.

Best solution for market gardeners, market growers, certainly you're going to have. You're not going to imbalance the plant with plant juice. It's also not going to work for the guy who wants to treat a hundred acres of corn or tomatoes. Sadly.

Question from.

Elliot.

When you say that soils can hold.

1 inch of water per percentage point of organic matter, is that based on a certain assumed functional soil depth? The how does that math work? Yes, of course it would be associated with certain soil depth and that would be, I think either six or six and three quarter inches. It's essentially whatever represents two million pounds of bulk soil. And of course that's also going to vary based on soil density, but it's usually usually assumed. That's a dangerous word. But it's usually assumed that six inches of soil represents two million pounds per acre.

Question from Jacqueline.

This is extremely relevant given the lack of rain. Hi Jacqueline, glad to see you here.

You mentioned electrolyte balance.

How do you test for this? Well, there's two ways. Obviously SAP analysis is going to reveal electrolyte balance.

Actually, when I think about it, I hate to SAP analysis or a soil.

Analysis, as in a water soluble analysis like a saturated paste or perhaps to some degree, even a Haney analysis would give you information on the electrolyte balance.

When you think about electrolyte levels, you.

Can simply measure electrical conductivity, which is one of the reasons why EC is reported on a SAP analysis. You can also do electrical conductivity readings on soil and so forth.

They can be a valuable tool. And actually in my webinar where I talk about how to design foliar sprays.

I talk about using or measuring the electrical conductivity of a spray solution.

The challenge with measuring electrical conductivity in the soil is it changes when you add water.

So high electrical conductivity in very dry environments is going to be reduced proportionate to the amount of water that gets added to it. So yeah, Best answer I have for the moment.

Question from Mark Given the synergistic relationships.

With calcium, silicon and boron, would applications.

Of silicon be best with small amounts.

Of boron or calcium, similar to how Holocal contains a small amount of boron?

Mark I would say as a general.

Rule of thumb, the answer is probably yes. For specific context I would refer to SAP analysis or known levels of calcium and boron. If you already have enough, there may or may not be a lot of value in adding more.

But as a general rule of thumb, I would expect you'll get stronger crop.

Response from adding calcium and silicon and boron in a combination rather than individually. It's a very good question.

Question from Jacob Any advice for helping.

Seed sitting in dry dirt? Soybean specifically an organic field that was tilled to 3 inches depth. Some seed germinated, others did not have enough moisture to start. There's no rain in sight. Seed was treated with Biokoat gold and had an AEA program applied through last season.

Could a biological soil treatment get soil.

Locked H2O into the seed to start germination? A dry environment? Oh Jacob, you wish and I wish.

Sadly. What is needed for mycorrhizal colonization and.

Mycorrhizal transfer of water into seeds?

That can happen. It does happen, but it happens once you have an emerging root radical that.

Is colonized by mycorrhizae. In other words, after germination. It can happen very rapidly after germination, but the seed is required to to germinate. First.

Question from Benny Thompson There was a.

Podcast where a guest spoke about desertification, carbon loss, reforestation, so that increased organic matter, water retention and water cycling in the local atmosphere. The more rain that must have been Walter Yanny.

How many thousands acres would.

You need under proper management? Increasing organic matter and increasing foliage surface area to increase the local rainfall? A lot less than you think, or at least a lot less than I used to think.

I don't know the exact answer, but we have a number of examples.

I shouldn't say we have a number. We have some examples, would be nice to have more. We have some examples of farms addressing.

Or changing local rainfall patterns with as.

Few as a thousand to a couple thousand acres. I would say if you can be somewhere in the 3 to 5,000 acre range and change the hydrology patterns in that local landscape, you're going to change the local weather patterns. Of course, again, context matters and where you are on the planet when you attempt that, and the local wind patterns are going to have an impact on that as well. But I actually think the answer is it's going to take a lot smaller scale than what we might expect. And of course, the bigger the scale, the bigger and larger the area that we can impact. Question from Doug.

John, what about a year that we.

Are experiencing here in Ontario with a lot of smoke, haze filtering the sun and we're experiencing cool temperatures? Photosynthesis not working well. What can I do to help the process? I do use your products now and always use iron, magnesium sulfate, melted urea, manganese, seaweed, etc. Thank you, Doug. You're already doing a lot. If photosynthesis is not working well.

One of the questions that I would ask.

Or things I would think about, I.

Know you're, you mentioned you're already using iron, but what would happen if you used more? My reason for that suggestion is because one of the roles played by iron is that iron is the foundational or a critical element for increasing the production.

Of all the carotenoids. So astaxanthin and zeaxanthin and beta carotene and so forth.

And these carotenoids are all photon receptors. So when we think about collecting photons.

From light and improving photosynthesis, we commonly think of chlorophyll.

But chlorophyll actually captures only a very.

Small amount of the available light spectrum, the visible light spectrum.

These various carotenoids, each of these, I think there are seven, if I remember correctly, there are seven carotenoids involved in photon reception, photon absorption, and these seven carotenoids each individually also only intercept a small segment of the available light frequencies and then they all transfer.

There's this cascading staircase effect where they transfer photons from one carotenoid to the next to the next all the way down and transfer it into chlorophyll.

And all of those carotenoids are iron based compounds. So this is just an idea that's.

Popping into my mind. I have no experience with it, but.

It might be worth experimenting with elevating.

The iron applications even further to see.

If you can absorb more of the limited available light.

Something worth trying.

Question from Lucas Hubbard do you think.

The soil moisture maintained by a dust mulch?

I had the idea of a dust mulch in my mind, something that I wanted to comment on. Why is a dust mulch effective? Because it breaks dust percolation. So having this conversation about percolation soil moisture moving upwards through the soil profile and the benefit of a dust mulch layer is that it breaks the percolation.

Moving up to the soil surface and being lost into the atmosphere.

So there's an example of how farmers can use percolation or breaking percolation to.

Their advantage and how we might One of the things that we might think about anyway, sidetrack from the question.

Do you think soil moisture main.