Episode 117: Exploring Innovative Agricultural Practices with Steve Diver

Hi friends, welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. This is John and today I have back on the podcast for a second episode, Steve Dibber from the University of Kentucky. At the moment, Steve has been a friend of mine for some time. We've been in similar circles and there are a small handful of people who I consider to be walking encyclopedias. And Steve is one of those people where he has had such a diverse background of experiences in the biological agricultural space that we could have conversations for hours and hours and not even begin to tap the fount of knowledge and experience that he has been able to accumulate over the last several decades. Steve, thank you very much for being willing to join me and for being willing to have a follow up conversation to the previous one we had. Can you tell a bit? Our audience here at the podcast has grown significantly. I think you were one of the first two dozen or so episodes, I'm not sure exactly which number. And our audience has grown a lot since then. So I certainly would refer all of our listeners back to that episode as well once you listen to this one, because I'm sure you're going to be very intrigued with some of the things that you hear. But can you tell us a bit about your story and your background and the scope of the work that you're doing and the scope of the encyclopedia, if you will.

Well, John, thank you so much for having me back on the podcast. And yes, it's a real pleasure because, you know, we know each other because we're on the speaker circuit. But yes, you've been really instrumental in pulling together a framework of ideas and practices and products that farmers can really tap into. So we've kind of set the tone for this podcast around microbiome and soil biology. And so let me just kind of go back into the 1970s, which was a really revolutionary time in the country. I was in junior high and high school. Back then I was in Oklahoma and my parents joined a food co op and they brought home organic apples and I ate those. And I was like, well, there is something going on here. I want to know more about this. And so since high school I have worked in horticulture. I started working in retail garden centers. And so I went to college to study organic agriculture in the 1970s. And at the time it was just like a regular kind of ag education. But you could always go to the library, check out every organic ag book there was on the bookshelf. And so I got out, started my first professional job in 1984 was after I got A, you know, bachelor's master's degree was a the extension horticulturist in Muscogee County, Oklahoma, which was a really rich area in that part of the state in the river bottoms for peach production, blueberries, vegetable production. Really good learning experience, learning to work with people. And here's an interesting thing that you and I have in common, John, is that it's often the question that farmers and gardeners have that spur on new ways of thinking and trying to wrap your head around, you know, the question of how can you answer? How can we control pests? By reducing the use of pesticides, by building plant health and crop vitality. So anyway, so during this time sustainable agriculture was a thing that I was interacting with. People from the Kerr center for Sustainable Agriculture in Poto, the Land Institute in Kansas had been around. Meadow Creek Project in Arkansas had been around. So you know, we're talking the early 80s and there was a whole movement already starting in sustainable agriculture. So the there was a couple opportunities that came up there that I pursued that led to this long term interest and learning curve over the last 40 years. And that is that one was a bio organic orcharding workshop held up in Missouri. So some colleagues and I went up there and spent several days with Michael Maltus, who was a biodynamic farmer and he was raising produce and he was helping Morningland Dairy do biodynamic and organic dairying. And so I learned with a master from the very get go he would, you know, shove his pitch, his fork, his digging fork into his beds and they would sink down the soil tilth was excellent. And so, you know, you really got to young person out of college still green and getting an exposure to a master organic grower who has his paying attention to humus. He had a really beautiful compost windrow and the excellent quality compost he was making. And then also other things. So that was one good experience. And then here's the next one, John, and that is that in 1985 I went to the Acres USA conference in Kansas City, Missouri and that was it. I mean I was hooked because you know, it was like, okay, you go to the trade show and I remember this booth so well and this company still around, they make a bacterial inoculant. And he had these pictures on the booth table from the work that this organic farming company from Iowa did. And so they had pictures of corn roots, they had pictures of corn ears, and they had pictures of corn ears incur mason jars. And what happened is you had the conventional corn inside the jar had turned rotten. It was black. It was rotten. Then you had this organic corn inside the Kerr jar that still looked like a beautiful ear of corn. And what is going on? So that.

That's it.

What is going on here? So that led to a hole lifetime of learning about this.

I had a similar experience being exposed to the Acres USA conference for the first time was it was a similar, almost conversion experience of being exposed to all of this information and a very different way of thinking about agriculture and agronomy. And you sharing that story of the corn. You know, it reminds me of the early days. I have to dig out the photos, but we have photos of corn crop. Some of the early crops that we work with that was stored in plastic bags. And we did a planter application. And the section that the field of corn that was treated or that just received the standard 1034 treatment is completely covered with mold inside the plastic bag at room temperature like two weeks after harvest. And the treated has no mold eight weeks later. It's just. It was a remarkable contrast. Anyway. Striking parallels.

It is in A little bit more behind that story is I do know a little bit more about the farm couple. They did publish a book and it's in some of my workshop slides. But we do know, for example, that they did all brick soil testing. They did calcium to magnesium ratio balancing. They did use the biodynamic preparations to make compost. And so they're paying attention to humus. They're doing crop rotations and cover crops. So they're doing. They're doing both mineral balancing and humus farming. Hey, that. That's really the basis of regenerative agriculture. And so then another key concept here is shelf life. And I've seen this myself. I've had farmers do this many times is you take the produce, set it on the kitchen table, on the kitchen counter, and just watch it over time. And so this sort of the classic result is that more or less industrial raised produce will rot. It will just turn, it'll get fuzz on, it'll get mold, it will just go downhill because the internal quality integrity is just not there. And then the organic produce will. Will just basically shrink and dry down. So it's this integrity. And then. And then of course, you have this progression of ideas. In my own experience was, you know, the progression from. From organic to eco agriculture is little bit more than just compost and cover crops. It's adding in the mineral balance and the nutrient ratios. That's really what ECOAG is about. Since we brought this up. Let me just go ahead and share my fundamental framework of working with farmers and teaching. And that is that the three pillars of eco agriculture are minerals, biology and energy or biophysics. And this actually is echoed by my late friend Hugh Lovell, who taught quantum agriculture. He taught exactly the same thing. It's minerals, biology and energy. And so under that umbrella, each one of those is a huge field by itself, with many pioneers and scientists digging up all this information and. But all three of them together is really where the interplay and integration works better together than any one of those alone.

Well, as long as we are authentic seekers of truth and authentic seekers of explanations of why did a certain thing happen? So we observe something in the field, why did it happen and how does it happen? Invariably, it'll lead us to the nexus point of those three pieces interacting with each other, and we could have a whole conversation. Maybe we'll get into a conversation about the biophysics aspects, because I think that's an important piece of piece that we may have touched on a little bit last time as well. But that's often the area that surprises unfamiliar people the most, because it is the most unexpected. And yet it's also one of the domains that often holds the answers to some of the observations that we have no explanation for.

Absolutely. So in everything, there's this progression. And at its heart, at the very basic of biophysics, is in bioenergetics is just the classic physics and chemistry and biology working together. And. But now this is very interesting because now you can get into cellular metabolism and this is really a nice dove where biology and energy dovetails. Because, you know, the really basics of soil biology is cellular mechanisms and cellular organisms. Whether you're at a. You're at a bacterial or fungal stage, or you're an animal or livestock or human stage, you know, you're dealing with prokaryotes and eukaryotes. So. But, you know, in that field, you know, physics is part of this equation. So there's no reason to ignore that. We do find, in my experience, we do have farmers that push back when you start talking about biophysics, they don't like it. They don't, they don't want to accept, you know, that there's other types of energy at play. But, you know, there's nothing to really argue that, you know, magnetism is a natural part of cellular, you know, functioning. And really, now what's interesting is all along, really, when you look at what has really propelled holistic agriculture, whether you're talking about what kind of alternative farming system you're talking about, is it biodynamic farming or eco agriculture or regenerative ag? It's really about what farmers gravitate towards and that is a real sense of soil health, trying to aim for healthy local food production system and achieving crop production by reducing or eliminating pesticides. And so this also echoes with the integration of holistic agriculture and holistic health. So now what's really interesting is Dr. Jack Cruz, who's talking about quantum biology and you know, how the circadian rhythm, how simple can it get? You know, can you get back into your circadian rhythm and reduce blue lights in your life and eat a healthy diet and boom, you're very healthy. But it's related to quantum biology.

Yeah, lots for us to dig into and I want to get into some of those topics. But for the moment, Steve, I want to go back and talk about the food shelf storability testing. I know this is something you've talked about. I wrote a blog post a long time ago describing some of the things that we've observed in produce that dehydrates versus decomposes. And yeah, I have several interesting pieces that I want to bring forward here in my mind. For a long time I had associated this shelf stability with mineral nutrition and mineral nutritional integrity, that when you had proper balanced mineral nutrition, you would be able to increase shelf stability for much greater periods of time. And I think this is kind of a big deal for us to understand from a, from a food systems efficiency perspective because depending on when you're speaking about fresh fruits and vegetables, depending on the crop you're talking about, we get anywhere from 20 to 30% and sometimes as much as 40% loss post harvest, where it's lost in shipping, transport, storage and in the refrigerator at home. And for many produce items, the majority of the loss, upwards of 40% for most fruit and vegetable crops occurs at home in the refrigerator once it's left the supermarket shelf. And there's a few pieces that I want to bring up around this. But what tell us a little bit more about what you've experienced and observed.

Let's go back to eco agriculture and the three pillars and talk about some of the way where that came from. And so as I said, the first ACRESA conference was, I went to was in 1985. But you know, after that I'll just go into a little history to put this into perspective is that I wound up leaving Extension to go manage an organic blueberry farm in the Missouri Ozarks. And you know, that was a really good Learning experience, a good hands on, you know, raising cover crops and making large scale compost. But I wound up working for the ATTRA National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, which is managed by ncat, national center for Appropriate Technology. And I did that for 18 years. And so that led to a lot of interesting experiences. And so the foundation there of eco agriculture are these numbers of pioneers. And so Kerry Reams was one of them. And this is where the concept of nutrient density comes from, is the experience from William Albrecht, who was a professor of soils at University of Missouri, who was very instrumental in teaching a whole new generation of soils consultants. And then Kerry Reams was the other guy. And Kerry Reams talked about the importance of minerals and the energy behind minerals to really build health in soils and crops, really getting that crop vitality and nutrient density. The whole concept of bricks measuring bricks in fruits and vegetables came from Cary Reims. Now we know that the refractometer, for example, is a precision optical instrument that is widely used in various industries. It's, you know, if you go to get your antifreeze tested at an auto shop, they can use a kind of a refractometer. The grape growers test the grapes for the refractive index of sugars before they harvest. But what Carrie Reams did was very interesting. He talked about poor, average, good and excellent quality fruits and vegetables based on this mineral nutrition and biology working together to create these nutrient dense crops. And that's where this concept of shelf stable produce comes from. And so that, that integrity, that internal integrity. And so that's one example. Another one I will throw out is that in my work in Texas, I worked with, you know, both small scale and large scale vegetable growers. And one of the things I came across was a very interesting practice that the melon growers and cantaloupe growers down there found out is that they would dunk the cantaloupes in a solution of calcium and they would get much better shelf life and stability, less rot.

Intriguing. The frame of thought that I used to have historically was that you actually need to get the nutrients into the fruit internally from a growth perspective. You need to get it incorporated into the cells from a physiological perspective. But you're describing that they actually just applied it externally. And I'm sure they had penetration into the fruit to some degree. I'm not sure to what distance, but do you have any idea of the mechanism for how that was effective?

It would have been minimal penetration into the epidermis. Right. But that additional calcium was, you know, it's obviously related to cell structure. But somehow the additional calcium was very effective on increasing shelf life and were very demonstrable.

Fascinating. So for all of our listeners, we actually, we. I had no expectation of getting into this conversation with Steve, but we're actually launching a study to evaluate the shelf life and the nutrition and microbiome profiles of four crops as an initial study. And that is going to be launching this growing season. And we are looking for growers of honeycrisp, apples, tomatoes, the exact variety yet to be identified, onions, exact variety yet to be identified, and spinach. And we're looking for growers who are producing superior quality in comparison with other, hopefully other farms in the local region who share similar geography and geology and soil types. So if you have any insights or any connections to who those growers might be or are one yourself, please contact us because this is something we'll be launching the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, that's great.

That's perfect timing, Steve. I wasn't even intending to have this conversation.

That's great. Well, it kind of, it goes back, you know, I do work at a university and I have a long history of working both with either nonprofit organizations as a crop advisor, you know, working at a university in either an extension. Now I'm a farm superintendent. I manage this horticulture research farm. But then I also did work in private industry. So I will say that in my experience, I do value the interplay between the academic and sphere and then the farmer practitioner knowledge. I think that is what makes modern agriculture so interesting. I don't think one by itself is what you should focus on. I think you should look at and see what's going on in both places.

I missed an important word that you said, the interplay between a farmer practice and academic. Did you say fear Sphere.

Yeah, sphere.

Oh, academic sphere.

Sphere, yeah. So in other words, you know, I, I access a lot of literature, I get a lot of ideas from looking at a worldwide survey of literature. And, you know, we can talk about, you know, humans and organic and soil biology going back decades. But yeah, no, I really have been driven by what farmers are doing and I think that is where the cutting edge is. And let's just talk about a bell shaped curve. So everybody has a concept or vision of what a bell shaped curve is. And you have, on one end you have laggards and in the middle you have this group, you know, a large group of people that are, you know, within some field of knowledge or technology. And on the far end you have the early adopters, the cutting Edge. So the early adopters are definitely these cutting edge farmers. The university is in the middle. There are a few professors at universities who are out on the cutting edge. Yes, but a university is like a ginormous Titanic ship that is very mighty and it moves through the water, but it turns slowly. Now farmers are, they have much more freedom, they're on the cutting edge. So yeah, it's, I've learned so much from, from both.

Well, it is fascinating to me how much information exists in the academic sphere that never makes its way to the field, that never makes its way to the farmers. That is in many cases extremely valuable. It's where over the last six to nine months we have been doing this exhaustive deep dive on cotton plant physiology. And the depth of information that is known about cotton plant physiology and how to manage that is remarkable. I would speculate less than 10% of it has actually made it into production scale agriculture. Enough is known right now. It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years as we figure out how to implement and apply what we've learned over the last nine months. But I'm not afraid to speculate that we're on the cusp of seeing industry wide 40 to 50% bumps in yield improvements across all the farms that we work on simply from implementing the stuff that has already been known for decades, but that no one has applied. I just bring that out as a particular recent example in my own personal experience. But I found that pattern to be true just over and over and over again, where there is a great deal of knowledge that is known in the academic sphere, but that was never communicated effectively to the agronomists and the farmers in the field.

Well, you're being very shy. I'm sure you have a really in depth knowledge about cotton. Let me tell you two things about cotton that you may find interesting. And maybe you have come across some of this, but one is that some of the most interesting work that's been done at universities is the relationship of potassium to cotton bolls and the how they have dehiscence. In other words, the bowl is tight, right? It has to open up. That is a relationship to potassium. And so there's a very interesting history of work on foliar potassium in cotton. And what's interesting in my work, in my work in horticulture, I've done a lot with pecans. And it turns out that the pecan shuck that will split open and reveal the pecan nut has a very similar relationship to potassium. There's a Very rapid and great amount of potassium that is transported from the leaves into the shuck and that causes this osmotic condition for the shuck to split open. That's a physiological reaction. So. So, you know, we have this common interest in foliar analysis and SAP analysis and also in sophisticated foliar blends, which is a hallmark of eco agriculture. So that one is pretty well known. You can check out University of Arkansas has done a lot in that area. Here's another one that probably not a lot of people in academia have gotten into, but does come out of the alternative ag experience. And that is this relationship of soil fungal, you know, food webs and so forth. And that is that an interesting thing about cotton in the tropics and where it comes from. It's a perennial and it's very woody. And you know, you think of a forest, that environment, that long term environment with very little soil disturbance and long term deposition of lignocellulosic mulch. And over time, that is where fungal soil ecology really thrives.

Steve, you mean it might not be a great idea to plant cotton in soils that are tilled to a depth of 12 inches a couple times a year and exposed to the sun? Exactly.

Look at our cotton lands that are just tilled and treated with biocides and just gotten the bazooka treatment of industrial agriculture. What can we do? Shifting over, incorporating more, you know, living mulches with cotton and cover crops and building soil health and soil biology is that you can really make a big difference just by managing soil biology. Now that this gets into another thing, John, that I think really is really helpful and that is what is the hallmark of regenerative agriculture. And you may have your own ideas, but let me tell you what I think is the hallmark of regenerative agriculture that is has been so widely popular, has been adopted by so many broad acre farmers, and that is that if you build it, they will come. In other words, soil habitat management is the basis of soil biology and soil habitat management is biological farming practices. It's everything together that involves minimal soil disturbance and cover crops and multi species cover crops and grazing of animals on multi species cover crops and multi species livestock grazing and the addition of intercropping and everything that goes into managing the soil habitat is where the primary impulse for soil biology to thrive and grow and become diverse. And what we're really after. People have heard about the soil food web, that's very important, but what it really boils down to is microbial abundance and diversity, density and diversity of microbes around the rhizosphere and around the phylosphere. And that is exactly what farmers have the ability to manage on a farm. They can modify both of those environments by the way they manage that farm. Now the second part of this is the inputs, the exogenous inputs of special microbial blends. That is where some of these products come into play. That's where there's a huge interest now of raising on farm biofertilizers, is there are special cultures that have special functions that you can grow in great quantities and have those and injecting those at the root zone with the seeds at the seedling stage and therefore influencing the whole, whole life cycle of that crop.

Steve, every time I let you describe a paragraph then I have about three follow up questions and all three in very different directions. So, so I'm going to go back to hole opening for just a little bit and then we want to dig into your comments on foliars and on developing the microbiome and these ecots and these biological products. You described hole opening being associated with potassium and cotton and then you transferred, you made the leap to describing that there is something, there's a similar mechanism with pecans and I would anticipate that the, there's a similar mechanism that occurs with other nuts like almonds as well. It's a good example of how understanding the physiology of one plant very, very well can often transfer and lead to insights into other crops. And this is something that we see so commonly in our work at advancing eco agriculture. What other examples of that have you observed?

Yeah, so you can basically frame a lot of your work in agriculture around annual cropping systems and perennial cropping systems. There's so many similarities. And so, you know, and sometimes a horticulturist can observe things that like a forester wouldn't commonly think of because you know, we deal with so many orchard crops and vineyard crops and here you have tree plantations but, but they're very similar. We call it orchard floor management or vegetation management. How, how do you do that? You know, what are your options? And you know, weed control is a big issue and soil biology is a big issue. We're learning more and more about that. You know, we could go into that more detail. I published an article there in Acres USA on the spectrum of, you know, cropping systems and basically the above ground plant diversity influences below ground soil food web diversity. So we know that we've seen these charts.

A bit ago you mentioned the comment or the phrase of build it and they will come. And I've been so. I'm continually amazed by soils which, as I chuckled at the term that you used, that they have received the bazooka treatment. And I've been amazed by how when these soils are planted into cover crops and land stewards begin to care for these soils, how incredibly resilient they are and how rapidly they recover. And so it is, it's remarkable to see the. The potential that exists if we simply begin managing differently. And I know you were among the early innovators in looking at these various higher quality biological amendments and using the external inputs to shift the profile, to shift the microbiome. Tell us a little bit about that work and what you've learned along the way.

Okay, sure. So let's just go back to. Just go back to the 1980s, and when you would pick up a book about organic farming, they would mention soil biology. But it was not in detail in that what really shifted was in the early, early 90s, and, you know, when I worked for Attra, we had access to 600 different periodicals and newsletters from all around the world. And so there was this new movement that was starting up called nature farming. It was coming out of Asia, out of Japan, and they were talking about effective microorganisms, which was a culture that had phototrophic bacteria, lactic acid bacteria, and yeast organisms, and usually actinomycities that you could brew yourself and make these concoctions and you could add leaves in there or fruit in there, and you could, you could make all these different on farm recipes. And then similarly, there was another system coming out of Korea called Korean natural farming. And they were doing something similar. They were doing indigenous microbes and they were culturing these different things. And so this whole evolution started there in the, you know, 1990s, early 2000s. Compost teas got really big in the 90s and early 2000s. And so I was involved with that. You know, just an interesting story is I was invited to go out and speak at a seminar in California in 1995. And so I had already studied with the lubkes from Austria, and I already knew about humified compost. And I'd already studied with Milkinsee and Dan Scow and, you know, some of these other people. So I go out there and I was speaking about disease suppressive compost and microbiology and biological control. And there was another young professor on the stage named Elaine Ingham who was talking about the soul food web. And so that was when my first introduction to the soul food web and Then an interesting thing is they invited us, Elaine, myself, to a large vegetable farm there in California. And they were doing large scale compost teas. And amigo Bob Contisano, who's one of the well known organic ag consultants on the west coast, he had helped him do this. They had ginormous vats of compost tea, one of the biggest vegetable farms in the whole country. And they were applying 100 gallons of, you know, they're applying, you know, so many gallons of compost tea on, on Broad acre vegetables. And they were getting tremendous response on soils that had become very depleted over time from industrial agriculture. And they were introducing this broad spectrum of biology back into the soil. And the crops really responded. And they would just make a, you know, foliar application to young seedlings. They would go down, it would coat the leaves, it would go into the root zone. And so that was very interesting. So anyway, so I did work in compost teas for many years and then I had an opportunity to go down to Texas and work and go into private industry. And that was with Betsy Ross, with Betsy Rossgrass Fed Beef, that I became their soils consultant and helped them do rd. And our focus down there was very interesting, John, because what we were doing was the next generation. I'm talking about 2006, 2007. And what we were doing were liquid compost extracts. And a guy named Dennis Fronick has a patent on making a compost extract machine. And so we had this machine, it would make 2,000 gallons an hour, and we modified it to make 3,000 gallons an hour. And we literally would get various kinds of compost substrates and we would blend them and get as much diversity and as much biology as we could into a compost extract. We put them into 1 ton trucks with a 500 gallon tank on the back. We would pull a thousand gallon nurse tank. And so we have 1500 gallons. We would drive out and we would spray pastures and pecan orchards and vineyards. We would do, we would do urban landscapes. And so what we did was develop a concept in the terminology around liquid biological amendments. And this is very interesting because now you have a tank blend and the tank blend is primarily liquid compost extract, but then we would add in different substances to feed and stimulate the soil biology. And so now you can add in molasses, like a gallon or two gallons of molasses per acre. Some people might just put a quart seaweed, you could put in soluble nutrients from rock dust. You could make an on farm microbial brew. And so that is the whole tank blend. It's not just one thing that's very important for people to understand when they talk about compost teas and compost extracts. It is not that alone that drives the system. It is everything that you put with it. And you can get into these custom blends. And then if you're trying to grow turf grasses, that blend would be different than something you would put on to, for example, a pecan orchard, which is a very different kind of a cropping system in a different kind of a soil ecology. So that was one really big thing. And here's another, here's another story that goes along with this is there was a bioremediation specialist down in Texas named Carl Oppenheimer, and he worked with archaea bacteria. And in his world they use the terminology bio augmentation and bio stimulation. And so that's where bio augmentation means you're adding biology, you're adding some kind of microbial culture in some fashion that you have purchased because they have specialized functions or that you have brood on the farm in mass quantities. So that biogmentation is adding biology and biostimulation is adding these microbial food sources, these carbon food sources, humic acid and molasses and kelp and crustacean based meals. These are all stimulating, you know, the soil food web and the fungal biology. So anyway, so this, this combination is how you understand liquid biological amendments. Let me give you one example. We had a ranch. This is a ranch southwest of Dallas. And this is in the tall grass timber region, which is a mixture of prairie grasses and trees. And so this ranch was in that region. And what we did is we went out and did a soil food web test. Now this is very interesting because at that time the whole country was listening to Elaine Ingham and she was saying that all grasslands are bacterial. And she emphasized this over and over at conferences. And so, however, what we did is on our soul food web test, we found a fungal to bacterial ratio of 7 to 1. The soil had 7 times greater fungal biomass than it did have bacterial biomass. And yet most of that was not active. Do you know what we did? We did not go out there and spray compost teas. We went out there and sprayed microbial food sources. And it was like you had just unleashed the prairie dam. And so that ranch exploded with native grasses and forbs that came back. They had always been there. They had been over grazed and beat down. But when we went out there and found this, we just simply stimulated and fed the existing soil food web and the native flora completely responded to this. You could see it from the roadside.

Wow, that's a remarkable story. So can you give us some other examples of. You described how when you're developing these liquid biological amendments, you would develop custom blends, you would develop different protocols or different combinations to produce different outcomes. You described the differences of how you would manage differently in a pecan orchard versus in grasses. Can you give us some other examples?

Another thing that we did down there, and I became a specialist in this, is working with very degraded land on mine reclamation sites and on flood control detention basins in the Houston area. So Houston is known as the Bayou City. And it's an area where they get incredible tropical rainstorms and they get dumped on massive amounts of water, like, you know, 36 inches of water in over, in 24 hour period, that kind of thing. So what they did is they have these flood control detention basins to hold water. They're like large urban lakes, you know, and then they have earthen channels that maneuver between them. But all of this land is highly disturbed through really large construction equipment. And essentially what they're doing is they're exposing very impervious clay subsoils to the surface that are now functioning as topsoils. In other words, these are very degraded soils. And so that, that is where we started learning, like, hey, how can you make a blend that you could go out and spray in a large area? Because guess what? You can't afford to buy and ship enough compost in the whole state of Texas onto the vast areas that we're talking about. Even though that would be really nice, you know, to put one inch of compost on that ground, that'd be, that'd be premium. It's just not. It was just practically, you know, infeasible. So that's what I'm talking about. And that's where the archaea bacteria would come into to the picture is, you know, and also just thinking about succession is what kind of organisms live on very primitive soils. And so that's where algae comes into the picture and those sort of things. But it really is the classic spectrum of bacterial dominated and fungal dominated cropping systems where it comes in, into the picture and then also what may not be apparent to people is not the same blend all through the year, it changes. So what you would do at the seedling stage and at the vegetative stage and at the flowering stage may be three different things.

So you mentioned that you were using these liquid biological amendments and spraying pastures for forages, for beef production. Can you give us an example of what a season long protocol might have looked like.

In our instance, we were doing a service based, so we would try to get three sprays out over the course of a pasture season. You would have to consider what part of the country you're in. Are you dealing with cool season pastures? Are you dealing with warm season pastures? We happen to be down in Central Texas, very hot, very, you know, kind of, you encounter very dry cycles. And you also have to consider like, you know, have you grazed it over or have you hated over. And so you would just, you would kind of go around that you would come in spring and you know, after winter, you know, and make that transition period and then you'd have say like a haying period and then another one in the fall, something like that.

One of the aspects that I'm intrigued about this conversation, you spoke a bit about how high quality foliars are a hallmark of eco agriculture. And that's one of the topics that I want to get into as well. But when we look at where innovation is coming from in the regenerative agriculture space, in the grazing and beef production space, there's certainly a lot of innovation, a lot of forward momentum with improving grazing management and whether you want to call it adaptive grazing or whatever terminology that you chose to use, there's a lot of innovation and a lot of progress happening with grazing management, focusing on species diversity of forages and so forth. But that hasn't really extended to bringing in the external inputs that you're describing to really shift the soil microbiome. And part of the reason for that might be economics. In fact, that's the argument that people would give. But what I've observed with the relatively small number of beef operations and grazing operations we work with that in fact, the crop response, the forage's response to well designed foliar applications or well designed soil microbial applications is in fact remarkable. And there are significant economic crop responses there, but they're not commonly observed because there is this paradigm in this particular industry of focusing on very low inputs that we need to save money on inputs and eliminate all inputs. And so I'm just curious about your take on that and the observations that you had when you were doing this work for grazing and beef operation.

Sure. So going back to regenerative ag, and you know, why has it been so widely popular with what we consider to be broad acre farmers and grazers? And which is great because guess what, now we have very large acreage over a whole ecosystem that is being managed more Regeneratively, and we're gaining benefits from this. So after many years of teaching, I'm actually a farm manager. You know, I don't teach classes at the university, but I get it. I get invited, for example, to go up on campus and teach something. And so after many years of doing all this, it's so simple, but it can be all understood in this one meme that people say they show some of the work that Alan Savory has done where he has grazed holistically. One side of a fence and it's covered over in vegetation, it's obviously being protecting the soil, it's reducing the soil temperature, it's retaining soil moisture. And the other side of the fence has been continuously grazed and it's been grazed over, it's bare, it's denuded, the sun's beating down on it. You know that if you have bare soil and it's denuded that everything is deteriorating. So quality, the ability to come back and, you know, get anything to grow there. So that meme results in. It's not the cow, it's the how that is so important for people to understand. It is simply an understanding of the management process that is the difference between those two sides of the fence. It's the same climate, it's the same soil, it's the same ability to grow vegetation, but it's how you understand and manage the agro ecosystem makes this huge difference. So that's for sure one thing. And, you know, working with Bessie Ross was. Was very interesting because I'm a horticulturist, but it was a beef operation and they did grazing and they started off doing rotational grazing and they progressed into mob grazing and strip grazing. And the benefits were enormous. And we had people visiting from all over to come see this. And so that is a huge thing, is just how you manage that. And then the other thing is that people have different ideas on how much inputs are and whether you should. You know, some people in regenerabag are of the opinion that you should not buy anything, you should just do it all on your farm. But, you know, I'm not gonna go there. There's a really broad spectrum. And one thing for sure is that every farm is different. Right.

I would argue that the people who hold those opinion lived in very privileged contexts.

Yes. You know, there's a couple of them that have done well that way, but there are so many different kinds of farms within one state, within one county. We know that things vary. And so we know in our world we have to you know, help farmers where they're at. And so I will say that for sure, if you are doing broad acre farming or grazing and you know, this opportunity to do on farm brewing of microbes at a low cost and then perhaps you know, purchasing some say for example, some selective microbes that have very specialized functions and you combine all that together, it's very powerful. And also, you know, it's the same thing with foliar feeding. You're now instead of putting on, let's say you need some, some copper and zinc or manganese for your soil. Are you talking about putting on 20 to 40 pounds of actual, you know, manganese sulfate per acre or are you talking about doing a foliar of several ounces of magnesium sulfate per acre? That is across the board. It doesn't, we're talking about grazing, forages, vegetables, fruits, it doesn't matter.

Well, there is this principle and we might be getting into the biophysics conversation here, but there's this very common response that we observe when we use foliar applications of nutrients where the measured mineral content in the crop, when you, when you consider the crop biomass and biomass growth and you measure the levels in which that mineral has increased the quantity of increase that the presence of that mineral, a crop far exceeds the quantity of the mineral that you applied often by several orders of magnitude. In fact, I received a very funny text message from another agronomist a couple of days ago where she was quite puzzled that she had applied a trace mineral, foliar to a crop and the trace mineral showed up in the crop at levels as she calculated the math, it was 65 times higher than the amount that she had actually applied. And that's, that's something that we observe as a very common phenomena. So do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, nature bats last and she's far more complex than we know, even though, you know, we have 100 years of soil science and so forth. But just think about hypo accumulators, phytoaccumulators and how this is really a well known phenomena that plants will hyper accumulate minerals from the soil even when the soil is low in that mineral, which is very interesting, particularly when the soil.

Is low in that mineral.

There's been a kind of in deep organics, you know, going back people had this concept that sometimes plants will accumulate minerals in their plant tissue that are missing in the soil so that they take them up from, they are accessing them from the rock parent material by exuding organic acids and enzymes from their roots. They solubilize them, take them up, hyper, accumulate them in their tissues, and then when those plants senesce, they return them to the soil as a form of balancing out the soil that of what it needs. Somehow this is related to your question on foliar absorption, is that they have the ability to somehow make use of that and turn it into an exponential result. It's not a linear straight for straight. Right. It's an exponential, you know, accumulation.

There was a case in Kansas with dry land, Kansas wheat production a couple years ago where this farmer had some fields that were just covered with tansy was a major problem. And, and on these same soils, these same fields, he struggled to get enough calcium into his wheat. So we were pulling samples, SAP analysis samples, to the growing season. The calcium levels were often in the 6 to 800 part per million range, when ideally they should be roughly double that. And he chose to take some SAP samples of the tansy. 8,000 to 10,000 parts per million calcium on the same soil right in amongst the wheat crop, an order of magnitude higher calcium levels.

Absolutely, yes. It's part of the whole spectrum of how plant ecology works. It's fascinating.

But Steve, I don't know if you've quite answered my question yet on the economic benefits of spraying pastures for beef. Given the economic environment that exists today around forage production and beef production, is there a case to be made for foliar applications of nutrients and of liquid biological amendments in pasture situations?

Well, in my experience, we saw it and you know, this gets into the economics and how, how cheaply can you make some of these on farm inputs? And so, you know, when you get into Korean natural farming and Jadam natural farming, you're talking about a very low cost. You know, you're talking about the cost of like grain, like rice, and the cost of milk and the cost of sugar. And then you're culturing local microbes in, into these various recipes and you're turning around, you can make an extract. Now you've got, you know, less than $10 an acre, you know, expenses, even some of the microbes that you can, you can buy a mother culture from and brew on the farm. And with the cost of molasses and some herbs, you can make a really interesting, you know, microbial inoculant and spray it out there. So but you know, it's, it is ultimately both the management of the habitat, which is for sure the style of grazing that you're doing, and doing a good job of that, that is build it, and they will come but the second part is very selective approach for making the microbial inoculants like a liquid biological amendment tank blend. And also, you know, maybe you need a little trace elements to tweak things, something like that. And, you know, you're keeping these costs down below, you know, $30 an acre or $50 an acre, something like that.

I am often surprised by when. When you get the formula right, when you get the recipe right, how small significant the response can be. And I'm reminded of don't recall whether it was molybdenum or selenium on New Zealand soils and New Zealand pastures. I think it may have been molybdenum where they were documenting, simply addressing the soil and the crops significant needs for molybdenum that were not addressed from their geological soil substrate. They were getting anywhere from 20 to 30% yield responses on pasture forages with an application of molybdenum that was not significantly expensive and it was being applied at rates of ounces per acre. It was very inconsequential.

Yeah, absolutely. Molybdenum would be a good example. Cobalt would be another example. Very small amounts. Those two especially, I mean, out of everything that you're talking about in the agricultural toolbox, those will be applied in the most minimal amounts. You know, boron would be 10 times that amount.

Right.

You know, calcium would be a thousand times that amount.

It's so easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking that response is proportionate to the quantity that you apply, when in fact, that is not even anywhere close to being true for some of these trace minerals and some of these biological amendments.

Well, they're very interesting. And just going back, tie this back to soil biology is that. Let's go back to what soil biology is. And that is that you're talking about cellular organisms. And so bacterial organisms and fungal organisms and protozoas and nematodes, these are all just basically dealing at the cellular level. And so you're talking about dimensions of the nano microsphere. And so the important point here is that you have enzyme activity that is happening inside these cells. And it's fascinating is that you can have 60,000 different carbon compounds that are made in the cytoplasm of a cell that starts with photosynthesis. But what's really important is the mineral foundation. This Earth was completely just a, you know, volcanic Earth, you know, and at some point, you know, billions of years ago, we had microbial life get started that evolved, you know, that started a whole chain reaction of life on Earth. But it started with cellular organisms with, with blue green algae, their ability to fix nitrogen and then add, add to the oxygen in the atmosphere. But what's important is that these trace elements are key cofactors in these enzymatic reactions that are part of cellular metabolism, whether you're dealing at the microbial level or livestock or human level. That's why they're so important. And so, you know, there is this. There's been that tendency, especially in some parts of the students of the soil food web who have said that all you need is the right biology to make any nutrient available on any soil in the world. And I'm a soils consultant. I don't believe that. And I've trained my, my students to not buy that. And that the point is, is that, you know, things vary so much in soil types, you know, across your own county or across your own state. That's why, yeah, a little bit of a supplemental mineral in the right ratio, in the right blend can make a big difference. And also it goes back to the same thing, is that when you apply biology and minerals together, they work better than when you apply them alone.

There's power in synergy. And to echo the point that you were just making, we have a great deal of geological diversity in the geological substrate that is parent material for lots of different soil types. And you just, you end up with very different mineral foundations as a result of that.

Well, this brings up. It's another really interesting little meme that came out of Graham Sait's work. Who, who Graham State, who has, you know, Nutra Tech Solutions in Australia. And he started coming to Acres USA and learned all this, you know, the history of Albrecht and Reams and so forth. But he has a really interesting meme. It's called M E N D Microbially Enhanced Nutrient delivery. And that says that it is the nutrient density and diversity on the rhizosphere and phytosphere that makes nutrients more bioavailable. And this essentially is. It's not just, you know, Graham saying he got that, you know, by studying with the Lukes, you know, density and diversity of microorganisms. And they got it from Selman Waxman, the microbiologist from Rutgers University. So, you know, we all, we all learn and we synthesize from each other and we improve by doing this. And so. But that is really the essence of a lot of this, is that, you know, the more density and diversity of these microorganisms and it's the diversity of genera and within species, within a genera with different functions. You're talking about, you know, nitrogen fixation, phosphorus solubilization, manganese available, you know, availability and you know, just go down the list of ecosystem services. But by managing the system, that's what region Nevaga is so good at, is build it and they will come is building the habitat, the soil structure and soil humus and organic matter, which is the, you know, integrally tied to soil biology. You cannot have soil biology without soil organic matter and you can't have soil organic matter without biology and you can't.

Have either of those without plants.

Exactly. Plants.

A diversity of plants in the sunlight.

And we live on a mineral rich earth. Yeah, yeah.

So you mentioned a key phrase early in our conversation that caught my ear, being that high quality foliars, high quality foliars are a hallmark of ecological agriculture culture. And we've had this conversation around liquid biological amendments. And I'd love to ask you the question, what defines a high quality foliar?

Okay, so we have an idea that we have a result in mind and we have a function of the practice in mind. And so, you know, by blending these things and understanding some of the things that go into a foliar blend, you know, so for example, in adding carbon to a blend that has nitrogen, helps make that more available. And also the water quality, the PH of the water and all these different factors go into a high quality blend. So then you can customize them, you know, depending on the crop and the time of year. And again, what you would do at a vegetative stage would be different than you would do at a flowering stage. That's crop cycle management.

We use foliars extensively, as I think many of our listeners are aware, for crop cycle management. And you can approach agronomy from. I think we need to approach agronomy and crop management from two parallel and complementary perspectives. One is, one perspective is how do we need to manage our soil, geological, biological context, what is needed for that? And the second is what do we need to manage the crops physiological stage of where we are right now? We're managing plants and seeking to have optimal nutrition and microbiome for plants so that they can have the greatest benefit and the greatest response for soil. And those, those two are complementary and parallel tracks. And it's my perception is that there have been some who have lost sight of the need to focus on plants and have focused almost exclusively on building soil.

Absolutely, yeah. So John, here, I'll turn the question on you. So what is exciting in your world? What do you see coming down the pike at this interplay of minerals and biology.

I received some photos from a couple of growers who were running seed treatment trials for us. That kind of blew my mind a couple of days ago. And I've been advocating for years. We have this product called Biokoat Gold that is a microbial seed inoculant that is actually developed and grown in association with living root systems. Because there's a great deal of the microbes that, that are needed in a healthy microbiome for disease suppressive soil can only be propagated in the presence of a living root. So you don't get them from compost tea. And yet this. You can't really buy inoculants like this in the marketplace. But we have one we've developed that's been very successful and popular for a long time. And it's one of our most popular products for very good reason, because it's so effective. But I've always felt that there is still something missing. There's not enough there, and there's not enough there for a lot of the seeds to overcome the lack of nutrition that they receive from the parent generation. So I went down this rabbit hole of exploring mineral seed treatments. Not biological seed treatments, but mineral seed treatments. And rather than we've been putting minerals on the seed surface on the seed coat a decade and a half, that's nothing new. But I wanted to see what would happen if we actually got the minerals into the seed. And so about, I don't know, two months or so ago, we released this product called Seed Flare, which is a combination of liquid trace minerals that are designed to actually be absorbed into the seed, and it can be applied and treated months before you plant. And Steve, Seed Flare is going to become one of our most popular products. It's inexpensive, comparatively speaking, it's easy to apply. And the goal was to have seedlings that emerged dark green and photosynthesizing and they would just take off and go, well, not only did we get that, but we get leaves that the cotyledons and the leaves are so thick and so waxy and glossy, they look like plastic. Was one of the comments that received from the field that these seeds look like plastic and they're just. They take off like a rocket. I have never seen seedlings grow this fast. And of course, the good news is that when you partner this mineral seed treatment with a biological. Just in the same nature of what we've been talking about, this plant is now photosynthesizing and producing so much sugars and translocating sugars to the roots as root exudates. You know, what that is going to do for microbial colonization in the rhizosphere. It's remarkable to observe.

Right. So it's fairly interesting to hear you that, hear you talk that way and what advancing ECOAG has, has to offer in the product line and integrating all these concepts into something that's really available to farmers. But when you were talking about that, what came to mind is an echo of. Another eco ag pioneer was Anna Primavesi. She was one of the best known soil microbiologists in organic ag specialist in Latin America, in Brazil. And some of her work, it's just amazing how much of a parallel it was was. She said it was the, the blend of minerals and trace elements in the proper ratio applied as a seed treatment that completely influenced the health of that crop into the crop season. Including something, for example, like rice blast, which is a fungal disease that happens at the, you know, at the flowering and seed maturation stage of a grain. And you have addressed that at the seed treatment level.

Seed treatment, of course, the relative quantity of product that is needed per acre to produce an outcome is very, very small. And it's remarkable to me, Steve, what we are seeing right now. It's premature. We're going to expand our testing on corn as well. But corn seed maggot and weevils and all these various insects that attack seedlings and seeds at very early stages. The name is escaping me of the one bug that attacks pepper seedlings right at germination. That's a major problem on peppers and onions that we were trialing this on. They're gone. Insect problems are completely gone.

That implies cellular metabolism. That's what that implies. It implies cellular metabolism. And therefore the plants are exuding something that is talking to the soil, you know, the rhizosphere, all the community of organisms that live in the microrhizosphere. And that is therefore, you know, somehow competitively excluding the seed maggots or whatever, gnats or whatever that are causing problems on the roots.

Cellular metabolism, as you were describing earlier, enzymatic completion, where you have a completely functioning enzyme system because you've have all the trace methods, minerals present and whatever the various mechanisms are. I look at this and I look at, okay, we have, we have all of the, these various GMO crops for control of various insects at different plant life stages, but control of root worm and Bollworm, etc. If our initial success continues, I think we've solved that problem and we've eliminated the need for insecticides on a major scale.

So, and the Bioco gold, that's a microbial product, is that correct?

That's correct. There is a mineral component as well, but it's primarily microbial.

Does that have some of the azoaspirilum in there and Photobacter in there?

Yes, yes.

Fascinating. So you know, again, these are the free living nitrogen fixing organisms that are part of the soil. And just going back again to the evolution of holistic agriculture, we can go back to, you know, the 1920s, 30s, all that culminated. Let's talk about the Russian experience. And so one of the very classic books is Soil Microorganisms and higher plants by N.A. krasilnikov. Well, Krasilnikov published that book in 1958, but guess what? All of that work was done in a few decades preceding that work. But that's where this, you know, all this, you know, concept of the rhizosphere, root exudate, soil enzymes, soil vitamins that are produced by microorganisms comes from. And the Russians actually produced massive quantities of Azodobacter and had farmers raising crops and getting crop yield boosts from a Zodobacter. So anyways, yeah, Biocoat gold has those in there. Plus it has, you know, a concoction of other good things in there.

Well, you know, there's this common experience that we have at AEA that is still puzzling to, it's puzzling to people who haven't experienced it and observed it. And even sometimes when they have, we talk about how we have to take this systems approach, this whole systems approach to reducing nitrogen, synthetic nitrogen applications, and that the microbial inoculants are a part of that and it's common for us. Steve, I would speculate. Oh, I don't have to speculate because we, we actually did some back of the envelope analysis here a year or so ago. The majority of the growers that we work with, we end up reducing nitrogen applications anywhere from 30 to 70% in the first year while getting simultaneous yield increases. How does that happen? How does that work? Well, we are creating an environment where these free living nitrogen fixing bacteria can thrive in proximity with the crop. It's, it's not that difficult to figure out. And then in contrast to that, there are many other competing products in the marketplace today which are framed as replacements or biological replacements for synthetic nitrogen and they're put into these mainstream ecosystems and then they don't thrive, they don't deliver results. In fact, there was a study that was released recently from a Canadian agronomist who studied them fairly and he found a positive crop response in two out of 64 cross crop years. And it's not difficult to understand or why that, at least to me it doesn't appear difficult to understand why that's happening because they're putting these microbial inoculants into a mainstream system that is designed to shut them down and then wondering why they're not effective.

We see that more and more as companies that are part of the corporate space, get into some of these biostimulants and microbials and pitch them to kind of, you know, standard corn and soybean production. And yet if you're still using largely conventional ag practices that have not adopted the habitat based management, you're just feeding them to, to the wolves, you know. And this goes echoes back to one of the things that you said earlier, John, which was that biological systems can be very resilient. That's true. Humans, human health can come around through proper exercise and diet. That's biological resiliency. And so the, you know, one of the real big pushes that regenerative ag has had is that it's build it, you will come. You're aiming for this soil habitat management, adopting these biological farming practices which are basic, you know, to every kind of alternative farming systems. Humus management, soil organic management, adding cover crops, keeping the soil covered with this living roots. It's so powerful and you know, anybody can do it really if they have the mind to do it. And it goes back to the meme, it's not the cow, it's the how. But I really like that about regenerative ag and I'm really glad to see that happen. I'm really excited to hear the really great stories that are coming from farmers from all over, you know, and I follow some of them.

So Steve, the way that you just said that just now triggered really resonated with me and I'd like to point out something further. If it's true that it's not the cow, it's the how, let's reframe that. It's not. Let's reframe it away from a cow. We could say it's not the plant, it's the how it's managed, it's not the microbe, it's how it's managed it really. If it is the how for all these living organisms, then the determining factor is the farmer and his management decisions.

Yes. Yeah. Okay, John, so let me add something to. I asked you a question and you Shared some really interesting things about seed flare, biocoat, gold, and they were good examples of, you know, microbial density and diversity and adding, you know, certain mineral blends to seed treatments. So let me throw one more thing out here, and that is that I think we're on the cusp now. We're right now came out of World War II of the chemical era. Okay, we had a really big push for the chemical era. And you know, we can't really, you know, can't really detract from the common farmer experience over that timeframe. Because guess what, we had a professor who was a real specialist in fruit production. And you know what he said? Because here we are in the, in the 1970s and we were like these young, you know, ecological students minded students. And, and what he said was that, you know, what these herbicides, you know, helped farm families in the drudgery of standing out in a field in the hot burning sun in the south with hoes hoeing weeds. So, you know, you can't take that away from the whole farmer experience. You know, all these tools have, you know, helped farmers get to where they are. So we came out of the chemical area really. I would say right now we're in the biological era. But here's my next point. The next era is the era of quantum biology and biophysics. And so that is where the leading edge, I believe is in that is, you know, all this culminates, for example, let's just say that it all culminates in say like biocoat, gold and seed flare. So all this knowledge culminates in that, you know, everybody from Albrecht and from, from Reims and from Krasilnikov and, you know, and John Kemp and you're all the people that you have interacted with. And yet what if we add in. So for example, a little bit of magnetism or a little bit of electroculture or some other thing that, you know, what is the nanometer frequency of the, you know, red light frequency or whatever that goes to the C treatment. That is the unexplored space. But that is the frontier, Steve.

You can't be giving away all of our secrets of the stuff that's buried in our products.

Yeah, I do know more than when I let go. I'm not saying specifically that I know something that you have going on. I'm just saying that I do know a lot that I can't tell people.

So let's get into this a little bit because this is a topic that we could expand for hours and perhaps we do need to Have a more conversations around this. But first, and by the way, I completely agree with you, I have stated publicly on any number of occasions that the agronomy of the future is going to be an agronomy of biology and biophysics rather than an agronomy focused on chemistry. Obviously the chemistry needs to be a component, but it needs to be a component and not defining it in its entirety, which it has been for the last century or so. So what do you mean when you say quantum biology? What is quantum biology?

Okay, so it's a good question because I am not trained in physics. I know a lot of farmers that could just whip out, you know, any kind of electrical project on. They could rewire a building, et cetera, et cetera, you know, so. But I have studied physics a lot in my spare time. And so, you know, quantum really refers to this, the, the dimension of subatomic at its very, you know, basic, you know, level. So, so when we talk about quantum biology, we're talking about things that are on an energetic level. And, and, you know, we're talking about frequencies and waves and photons and things that deal with the, you know, the biophysical sphere. Yeah.

And the reality is that light and sound, of course, are components of the electromagnetic spectrum. But aside from those things that we have direct access to, direct exposure to the remainder of the spectrum very much tends to be, for most of us, tends to be out of sight and out of mind. And yet we know that cells and cell membrane proteins and DNA and a broad array of different molecules all function as antennas. And plants also have direct antenna structures on the leaf surface and as components of the leaf as well. These living organisms are communicating in the electromagnetic spectrum with their environment continuously and responding to what they perceive. The same is true of biology. The same is true of microorganisms as well.

Absolutely. And so, you know, let's talk about another pioneer, Phil Callahan. You're familiar with his books Tuning into Nature. You know, Phil Callahan was a, he was a radio specialist in, in World War II, and he spent a lifetime as an entomologist doing research and often for government contracts, studying the way they, their antennas receive electromagnetic communications. And so his whole approach was an energetic approach, approach or biophysics approach. And so, you know, people have tried to understand that and explore that in eco agriculture ever since then. So. But yeah, no, we, if we cannot ignore the fact that cellular metabolism and organisms, from plants and animals to humans, all are electrical beings. And so, you know, what does that mean? What does that mean? If, if we had an understanding that, you know, that light, you know, has different spectrums and different frequencies and all of those things together, from electrical to magnetism. And, you know, the electromagnetic spectrum is infinite. That's how it is explained. And so that is a whole new territory. And, you know, we actually know a lot more about that. I'm not letting on to how much, you know, ECOAG actually has a very advanced understanding of this.

Steve, what do you think would happen if I went to a conservative Amish community and I told the elders that even, even if you're Amish, you're still electrical?

I think there's got to be a way to explain this. And I have thought that was meant.

To be a joke.

Well, what do you the answer?

Oh, I think it would be a really fun conversation.

I'll tell you an Amish joke. This is a really good one. I love this one. And I tell my wife this one and I always laugh and she doesn't get it because she's not a farmer. But we do have an Amish community down the road from us here in Kentucky that we interact with, we purchase supplies from, and they have a growers meeting there every spring. And one of the respected elders gets up and says, it's going to be a good year. We're going to have an inch of rain every Saturday night. It's such a great Amish joke because no farmer is ever going to achieve that. But, but that would certainly be perfect because, you know, then you can get all your field work done, you could get your vegetables planted and it would all be taken care of, you know, with one israin. Yep.

Ay, ay. So, Steve, I think you are in your role as a walking encyclopedia and you're with your interest in quantum biology, you also have a unique perspective, perspective on a question that I get asked a lot, a question that I have been hesitant to provide very detailed answers to. And this is the question around water structuring. So I have observed early on one of my first dozen or two podcast episodes I had Gerry Appalak on and I'm hoping to have a follow up interview with him again. I've been very fascinated by understanding the nature and the various properties of water and how they interact with living systems. Because some of the things that we've observed in the field with various water structuring devices that are used in foliar applications, that are used in irrigation systems, there is no question that they produce some remarkable responses occasionally. And one of the reasons I've been hesitant to speak about some of the observations that we've made broadly is that the results appear to be very variable and very inconsistent. Some devices are more consistent than others. But some of these devices produce absolutely phenomenal results. But then you take them somewhere else to a different farm and there is nothing. You go from a remarkable yield response or a remarkable, remarkable crop response to just seeing nothing. And I think I'm coming to suspect that a part of the variability is changes in the electromagnetic environment around where that device is placed. Is it in close proximity to an irrigation motor or to something of that nature? I, I'm speculating here at this point, but there is no question that in, in my opinion, water structuring is something that we need to understand much better and be able to apply effectively because it holds a lot of promise and is very needed, I believe, in many different farming operations. And I'm aware that you have done some experimentation with various water structuring devices. What have you learned and what can you tell us about water structuring, John?

That's right. And so that is a huge topic. It's very interesting. And we got to go back to cellular metabolism and mechanism. And we are, you know, a water based beings. Our whole bodies, like a human body, is composed of like 85% water. But you know what, you could not take a person and squeeze them and water would come out. It's more like hamburger meat. You know, it's full of water, but it's structured. It's tied into the cellular, you know, molecules and so forth. And then, you know, Gerald Pollock's work is very interesting. Water is very interesting, is the base of life, right? It's the basis of life. It has incredible numbers of anomalous properties. And then on top of that it has this whole thing known as structured water. So, you know, think about like a liquid crystal. And that's what it is. Water is like a liquid crystal. And so it's very amenable to absorbing influences from its environment. And so that can include electromagnetic influences and frequencies. It even can take on an impression of objects and can be, you know, transfer that information. There's a term called bioinformatics. And so water is a very malleable substance that can actually carry information. And so, for example, in liquid biological amendments, another technology I did not mention is you could actually use electronic homeopathy, for example, and charge frequencies in water and convey that information out onto the field. But let me talk about some of the research that I've done here. I do manage a very busy horticulture research farm. I'm Primarily handling the research requests that we have from faculty and grad students. But I do have a small research program on the side. And over time, I've accumulated several different kinds of structured water devices. And, you know, without going into detail on the brand name, you know, some of them are based on vortex, and some of them are based on magnetism, and some of them are based on frequency. And so, but what we've done, we do these seedling trials in the greenhouse. We grow something like a radish crop or a turnip crop because you get the root, you know, harvest weights, and we grow some other kind of an upright crop like tomato and corn, and we just grow them for like four weeks. This is very common in greenhouse pot trials to assess, you know, products and, you know, in mechanisms is see how do seeds germinate and how plants grow. But what we have observed, and we can see this even at tomatoes, you plant a tomato and at the thinning stage, which is like, you know, 14 days to 19 days later, you can see obvious differences in the growth of the tomato seedling. And we can weigh the fresh weight and the dry weight, and we can show like 45% greater biomass density, structured water grown tomato seedlings than in tap water. And then when you carry that out, sometimes we won't see a difference, for example, in the plant height, but we will always see a difference in the density of the shoot weight and the root weight. It's fascinating. What that implies is that this structured water is being assimilated by plant cells and influencing cellular metabolism. And in a way that it's, you know, in tune with the crop, with the plant. Like in its natural environment, for example, where you have streams running through forests, very pristine environments, and the water is cascading and moving through the stream in vortices and in hitting rocks and moving in a rhythmic fashion, that kind of structured water is the kind of, you know, structure of water these devices are mimicking, which is, you know, tied in again, to a very natural kind of habitat where plants grow and where humans would drink from pristine water. I remember going to a conference in Mississippi and someone got up and said, you know what, when we grew up, we wouldn't think twice about dipping a cup out of the local creek and drinking it. Can you imagine any place in the country where you could do that today in an agricultural producing region of this. Of the United States?

Not in an agricultural region.

No, no. And so, yeah, we get sometimes so far removed from what is a natural condition. You know, just in just going back to Soil biology. Let's just think about what is the ecosystem that we're trying to mimic and that that would include, say, for example, prairies, forests, wetlands. That is the natural ecosystem that regenerative ag and every kind of alternative farming system is trying to mimic is designing agro ecosystems that mimic natural processes. And so, yeah, so that the same thing with water. What is pristine water and what is structured water in its natural habitat and how that is healthy for plants and humans.

Steve, I'd love to go down that rabbit hole even further, but this has already been such a wonderful conversation and I think there need to be more. In fact, our conversation has been so rich as I've been sitting here just enjoying our interaction. I'm wondering why you don't have a podcast or why we need to find a way for you to get more of your information out there more readily and more broadly. I'll ask you one last question. What is it that you're working on that you're excited about right now?

You'll love this one. The next one that I'm going to talk about is plasma activated water. And so we got a hold of some plasma activated water and basically it's like lightning and crop response. Very commonly observed by farmers and in the agricultural literature is that after a thunderstorm with lightning, you'll get this greening effect on the crops. And that is atmospheric nitrogen that has been boomed by the lightning, by plasma, has gone into the water. That's atmospheric nitrogen infused into the water by the way of electricity. And so there's, you know, a couple different companies that are making these units now. And basically it is, you know, a mechanism that infuses plasma into water, atmospheric nitrogen into water. So what this, what this saying is that one gallon of water is equivalent to two units of nitrogen to two pounds of nitrogen. So if you're raising 200, you know, 25, 250 bushel corn, you're putting on 200 pounds of nitrogen per water. That is 100 gallons per acre.

So let me make sure I'm understanding this correctly. Say 2 gallons of water is the equivalent of, or, excuse me, a gallon of water.

A gallon of water is equivalent to 2 pounds of nitrogen? Yes.

So when you say it's equivalent to, does it actually contain that level of nitrogen or is it producing a crop response equivalent to that level of nitrogen?

One or the other? That's what we're still figuring out. I have some, I have in Q, is some, some specialized water analysis. I don't have the results back, but I Do know, for example, if you send a sample to a lab, it does not come back in ppm. Nitrogen. Right. That is not what it's coming back as. Yeah, but it's there. It's there in the water. And so that's what we're doing. We're doing a trial in the greenhouse, and again, we're doing, like a pot trial with. With seedlings and growing stuff.

You know, I. This. This is going to be really fascinating. Can this technology be marketed as a fertilizer or how is it market? I just. I have fun with regulators all the time. I could tell you lots of.

Oh, yeah.

Lots of stories. So if you want to have. If you want to claim a nutrient in a product, it has to be measured in a laboratory with. With very specific methodology. And there are lots of biological components. A biological. Or you could say biological nutrients that do not show up on that AOAC methodology.

That is correct. Yeah. No, this would be. To get around that this is just water conditioning. Yeah. And I know the history of the regulatory things, and that's a whole other conversation. The humic acid laws from the 1970s are still in place in a number of states.

We have a product called Humocarb, which is very concentrated humic acid. And a decade ago, the state of California told us that we cannot include the syllable carb in the name because it implies that the product contains carbon. And the only ingredients that the state of California recognizes as containing carbon are molasses and seaweed. I kid you not.

Yeah, it's a challenge working in that environment. I know the regulatory environment well.

Steve, this has been such an enjoyable conversation. Thank you for joining me and for sharing your wisdom and your experiences. I've really enjoyed it. I'm sure all of our listeners are as well, and I look forward to having more conversations with you again in the future.

Absolutely, John. It was a great conversation. I don't know if you're going to be able to use the whole podcast, but it was nice to be back here with you.

There's not a sentence that's going to get cut.

Okay, great. All right, well, keep in touch. All the best. Thank you, Steve.

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