Episode 118: The Unintended Consequences of Herbicides with Frank Dean

Hi friends, welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. This is John and this is the fun show where we talk about all the various topics related to regenerative agriculture, agronomy, plant nutrition, human health, soil health, livestock health, and all the ways that those things interconnect. And today I have as a guest Frank Dean, who is a research scientist and chemist. I've been looking forward to having a conversation with for some time. Frank, thank you for being willing to be here and to share some of the things that you've learned. Perhaps as a starting point, can you tell us a little bit about your, your life story and your journey as it relates to the agricultural space and some of the things you've been working on?

Oh, well, it started years ago. I'm sure you've heard of Stoller. I worked for Stoller out of college and all his patents. I'm the one who put together all his chelates and bioforge and Stimulate and all his products. And then we had a falling out. So I went to work for Lidochem, which is a chemical distributor. And the margins on chemical distribution are not as good as they could be. So the idea was, is if I went to Lidochem, I could develop some end use products that would have some value in the marketplace and they'd be able to move some finished goods as opposed to raw materials. So I've been doing that for over 20 years with Lidochem.

So Frank, one of the conversations I've been looking forward to having you with you is around this. This topic of chelation. Chelation is often advertised or promoted in a positive sense, that we have nutrients that are more chelated, therefore more readily bioavailable. And then on the flip side, when we talk about the mode of action of various pesticides and herbicides, then the mode of action is being described as also being a chelation. So what is the difference between those two? How is it that on one hand we have chelation being a positive, on the other hand, chelation having the ability to kill plants or other organisms?

Well, herbicides, for instance, have the ability to chelate certain metals. Now they're not being distributed really on the ground, they're being distributed on plant tissue, which means that the concentration of metals in the plant is much, much lower than it would be in the soil. So you have this herbicide, say going into a plant, collecting all the manganese or iron or copper and eliminating the ability of the plant to sort of have normal metabolism. You need these metals, zinc, copper, manganese, iron, as enzyme catalyst inside the plant. If the metals are not there, then the metabolic reactions inside a plant either get slowed down or shut down. And then, as you know, if you have mineral deficiencies in plant, oftentimes the plant becomes very attractive for fungus, bacteria, and insects. Whereas if you had your full load of micronutrients, along with your adequate nutrients, you become much more resistant. So the idea is, is there's a couple of things we have to understand that the metal is an individual atom. It's an individual atom. A lot of times you'll see them as a little circle on a piece of paper with two little plus signs which says, you know, that it's positive. Now, what a chelate does is chelates are often weak acids. And as you put it in water or solution, only a little bit of the acid comes off a weak acid, and then that acid has a negative charge. So if that weak acid can find the metal, then you go from a plus two to a plus one. But if there's more than one weak acid on a molecule, the second arm of the chelating agent attaches much more easily, which means that your original Plus 2 cation now has no charge at all. And for instance, with EDTA, you have, say, the metal, an individual atom. EDTA as an acid, has 36 atoms. And if you connect two of them, you get no charge at all to the molecule. The new molecule, you collect three, that iron or copper begins to take on a negative charge. Things like carbonates, sulfates, phosphates, that could make certain metals insoluble have negative charges. Now, your metal has a negative charge, it becomes immune to attack. So you have this little round ball of a metal, and it's now being covered by 32 other atoms. Even if the chelate was to fall apart somewhat, there's still no room for the negative charge anion to attack the metal. So you got this blanket or web around the metal, protecting it. Then when it's taken in by the plant, the plant has a ph of, say, five and a half, and it's six. Well, that's enough to start to begin to break the chelating agent apart and free up the metal. Whether the plant disposes of the chelating agent or metabolizes it doesn't matter at that point, because if you were in the soil, the roots will set out organic acids. Those are enough to release the chelating agent and make the metal available in the plant. The SAP has the ability. Now, as far as herbicides go, they have the same properties. However, the herbicide is shutting down. Metabolic processes inside a plant, shutting them.

Down by removing the enzyme, cofactors, the metals.

That's right. And when it shuts it down, other parts of the plant get backed up in the precursors to the enzyme, which become toxic at some point, and that's what kills the plant. And so the idea is, for instance, glyphosate, it's a weak acid. And when you take a weak acid and you place it in a solution, water or SAP, it may have a lot of acid potential, but it's only going to release a very small amount of it. For instance, you could put 100% EDTA in, in water, and you might end up with a pH of 3 as opposed to hydrochloric acid, which would be a pH of 0 or 1. So it only releases a little bit of hydrogen at a time. Now, that is what's called the dissociation constant. Now, you're going to hear this word when you talk about chelates, the formation constant or the stability constant, which turns into a math problem, because they're really the same thing. If you take the number one and divide it by the dissociation constant, you get the stability constant. So if you got a stability constant of 6, that tells you that out of the hundreds of millions of acids available, hydrogens, only 1 million at a time are going to be available. See? So you don't get that very low pH, it stays in equilibrium. Now, once that hydrogen is dealt with, another hydrogen will come off to maintain equilibrium. And that's how it works. So when you look at glyphosate stability constants, they're pretty strong. And so when I say that, I mean, like, say the fermanganese, it's a 12. Well, that means only 10 to the 12th. Only one atom in 10 to the 12 is going to be available in solution at any time.

That's a very tiny number.

That's a very tiny number. Now, imagine you have 10 to the 6 parts per million of, say, manganese or iron or copper in your plant tissue. How do you overcome that? You see, the glyphosate is only going to really, if, say, it grabs a manganese, it's only going to Release it every 1 in 10 to the 12. Right? So you can see that even though the manganese might be available, there's not enough in a plant to make that happen. There's not 10 to the 12 in a plant. So you can figure out what the plant actually needs by taking the stability constant one over the stability times the concentration in the plant and you'll find out, oh, maybe there's no metals that are going to be available, and that's what's shutting the plant down. And so different herbicides have, you know, different chelating abilities. Some of them go after copper, some go after iron.

As I understand it, as I've understood it historically, and I think what you're describing is that the, the relative difference between chelation as a source of nutrition and chelation as a binder of nutrients is a reflection of the stability constants. It's a reflection of their chelation bonding strength.

Absolutely correct. And the concentration of the metal available. So say you've got 20 parts per million copper in your plant, and the herbicide comes in and collects all the copper, but it's only going to release one at, say, one over 10 to the 12. You're not going to get any released ever.

Yeah, you're not going to get any released ever relative to what the biological needs of that plant are.

Right, exactly right.

Functionally, the plant has a 100% copper deficiency. And here's the interesting point. This is one of the pieces that I found so fascinating about this entire conversation, is that when you then have a functional, complete copper deficiency, that's enough to kill the plant.

Yeah, it truly is. Because it truly is. And the same with manganese on corn and beans or alfalfa. Yeah. You come up absolutely with no ability. That's why people like you will go out and apply manganese in the herbicide sprays.

Yeah.

And you got to think about what you're doing, John. You got parts per million inside a plant to overcome the deficiency caused by the herbicide. You're going out there with, you know, maybe a pound of manganese or a chelated tenth of a pound of manganese. You have to overwhelm the amount of herbicide applied just to get your adequate nutrition again. So essentially what you're doing is you're tying up the herbicide with the agent you're applying, and then you have to overcome that with the excess. And it sounds like a lot, but say you're going to go out and spray beans with the glyphosate and you know they're going to turn yellow, so you want to apply some manganese. And when you apply the manganese, you don't apply it in parts per million. You're going out there in percentages, parts per hundred. It's ten to the six is what's caught up. And you're putting out ten to the one. So you're overwhelming the ability of the agent to chelate what's inside the plant.

So, Frank, we've. In the course of this conversation so far, we've opened up about half a dozen different cans that I thought I want to get into, but I want to talk about genetic engineering resistance, and I want to talk about tank mixing minerals and historical residues and soils. There's lots of things for us to. To get into here. But before we go, I just want to bookmark a couple of those and I want to go back. When we apply an herbicide that has a very high chelation stability constant, and it has the effect of killing the plant as a result of removing all of the enzyme cofactors, removing some of the metals, these metals from within the plant. What is the. The chain of dominoes that occurs that results in plant death after mineral metal chelation. So you remove all the copper from a plant, or you remove all the manganese from a plant. What happens after that that results in plant death?

Well, you, first of all, you tie up all the metabolism and then you have a backup of precursors which become toxic inside the plant. Second, the plant loses its ability to defend itself against insects, bacteria, and fungi. So whether the plant dies from just excessive buildup of precursors in the metabolic chain, or it dies from exposure to fungus, insects, or bacteria, it all seems to happen at once. You know, when you get tied up, the enzymes, they fail to be formed. And so like for glyphosate, you have the essential amino acids being blocked. So that means you cannot produce any phyto accents, which are a plant's natural antibiotic. You can't produce any plant hormones like indole 3 or whatever. If you can't make that benzene ring, you end up being able to not protect yourself and make yourself available for anything that can attack normally, an attack on a healthy plant, A fungus gets on a leaf, the plant produces lignin, it contains that fungus inside that cell, and that cell becomes a suicide cell. But that does block the fungus from spreading to other cells. That's a good, healthy plant. If you cannot make litan, the plant cannot contain the fungus. And so you don't have the suicide cell, you have a suicide plant.

Yeah, I think this is one of the ways that I've heard this express and I've even expressed it myself. This, a lot of this, Frank, I've chose to go down a different pathway. I dive deeper into herbicide and chelation chemistry a decade ago, and a lot of this conversation is coming back to me, and I've kind of not Necessarily lost sight of it. But it's just that there was a need to focus on solutions and not just continuously communicate the problems. But one of the. I forget the papers that I read or what led me to come to, to this assessment, but it was my understanding that when you apply glyphosate to a plant, you also affect the microbiome around the root system. And not only do you have a suppressant effect on the disease suppressive organisms, but you actually enhance a group of various different pathogens, particularly Fazarium. And that Fazarium population just explodes within the plant. My historical understanding of glyphosate resistance in weeds has been that we're not so much selecting weeds that are resistant to glyphosate as we are selecting weeds that is resistant to fusarium, which is, we've been selecting disease resistant plants for a long time. But I'd love to get your perspective on that. How accurate or inaccurate was my historical understanding on what needs to be refined there?

100% accurate. John, here's the deal. In 2002, Monsanto filed a patent on glyphosate as a biocide.

Yep, I read the patent.

Not a herbicide, a biocide. Which means it has the ability to kill a lot of different life.

When you look at all the families that are listed on the patent and you recognize what they mean, it makes your head spin.

That's right. So the idea is that a good guy say that. You say you got a bacillus subtilis protecting your plant from insects and, and disease in the roots. You apply the glyphosate. The glyphosate comes down and kills that bacillus subtilis, which then becomes food for the Fusarium fungus. When bacteria die, they're full of the same nutrients we are as plants are, and so they just become food. So it's recycling, but this way it's, it's selecting out only the, the bad guys can survive and the good guys can't. And that's absolutely true. And then that goes, you know, into what Senoff and Samuel put together, that the idea of consuming food with too much glyphosate could affect the microbiome of your own belly.

Right.

And that will disrupt, you know, human metabolism. And so those things, you know, I tried to eat organic. I don't know about you. I, for many years grew my own food. I'm getting too old for that now. But so when you're aware of these things, you just have to be careful. Now I'm not saying that all herbicides are bad. I know they're necessary. I know that insecticides and fungicides are necessary, but it's usually because there's something else wrong in the system.

Well, when you think about their mechanism and these various modes of action, what I find so intriguing about the herbicide story, the story of chelation, is that within the story is the kernel of truth that provides the answer to a lot of other challenges. Like if you can make a plant sick by depriving it of trace mineral metals completely, then the counterpoint to that would be that you can make a plant healthy and resistant to diseases and insects by supplying an adequate balance of all those trace mineral metals that it needs as enzyme cofactors.

Exactly right. And that takes me back to a book, and it's called Red from Stones.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, so you've read it and. Yeah. And so this happened in Germany, and with the idea being if you give the plant enough nutrition, then down the line, your livestock become more healthy and more productive, your plants don't die prematurely, and disease gets minimal. And so I always thought that was a really important piece of work, and especially for the organic side or the regenerative side, that we would think of something like that book and say, you know, that really makes sense. And he did it 150 years ago.

Yeah. If we come back to your comment, the comment that you made about the presence of glyphosate in our food impacting our microbiome, there's now an abundance of literature and research on this. If anyone cares to go look, you can find the information. And then, of course, we know that depending on the soil microbiome and soil geology, and glyphosate can remain in the soil profile for much longer than has sometimes been communicated. In some cases decades. Actually, say. In many cases, it can hang around for decades. And one of the ways that that's reflected in my own diet and the family, I don't. We eat many organic foods, not perfectly. We know a number of local farmers that we source things from that are not organically certified, because I'm not persuaded that organic certification is necessarily a correlation to a reduction of toxins, particularly in the case of glyphosate and some of these other herbicides which hang around in the soil for a long period of time. I saw some lab reports, this is half a dozen years ago, maybe longer, that raised my eyebrows all the way to my hairline. I've seen glyphosate analysis from quite a number of different grains coming from different crops. And there's a general correlation between the quantity of trace mineral metals that a crop packs into its seeds, given the opportunity, and the glyphosate load that could be in those crops. And I still remember seeing some garbanzo beans that were over 4000 parts per million on a lab analysis. And let's just say that my wife's favorite food of hummus is no longer a favorite food in our house.

Right. And it's the same with oats. You know that it's a practice to take the oats down with the application of glyphosate to get them to dry down faster and more uniform. So oats has a very high too. Yeah. And if you tie up the metals in the plant, how are they going to move to the seed? And here's something I'll tell you. And you know, I've worked with seed people before, and I always thought, well, maybe taking tissue samples throughout the year gives you a snapshot of that afternoon. But if you want to know what's happening with your crop, you take the seed out of the bin, send that to the lab, get that checked for, say, total nutrition, and you'll find out what's being blocked in your field. You know, you might have 4% potash and none in the seed. You might have lots of calcium in the field, but none in your seed. I want to see the lab analysis of the mineral content of what you're selling. If you're working on a golf course, I want to see the turf cuttings. But if you're working on apple trees, I want to see the apples get sent in for mineral analysis just to make sure that what is in the leaf is actually transferred to the fruit or the seed or whatever you're selling is what should be sent to the lab. That's always been my thought.

So this is one of the cans that I had bookmarked, mentally, that I want to go back and dig into a bit more is what are the agronomic implications of historical herbicide residues in the soil profile? When you describe the significant chelation constant or stability constant that glyphosate has, to me, that means that relatively small amounts can have a significant impact on some trace mineral metals, which is something that we've believed that we've observed in our consulting. So can you tell us a little bit about that? What does this look like?

It looks like when you test your soil for metal content, you're going to get the metal content, but you're not going to be told what's being tied up by the herbicide in the soil. Now, think of it like this. If your herbicide is collecting metals in the soil and wrapping it up in a blanket, it almost becomes inert. It becomes nobody's going to eat it.

It becomes biologically inert.

Right, right. And so it's just free to build up over long periods of time. And then what happens is, say, spring, you want to plant soy, and you got X number of parts per million glyphosate in the field. Well, Jim Wellman found that if you get over 100 parts per million in the soil, that there's a lot of replant going on. And so he did studies for several years on that, and later I can send you some PowerPoints on that. And what he found is if you introduce enough biological activity to the soil, then you will be able to knock that back pretty quickly. So that was something that was pretty unique. So you're looking at replanting, slow starts, uneven emergence, things like that.

When you think about soils that have 100 parts per million of glyphosate residue that has accumulated in those soils, I know this is a math problem, but can you help us think a little bit about. Because many of us are not, and I'm not familiar with this math. What does that translate to roughly in terms of quantity of trace mineral metals that are complex and tied up?

Okay. Say you have iron or manganese or zinc in the soil, and you have phosphate out there. You're going to end up with zinc phosphate, manganese phosphate. They become little rocks or stones. They're really not available. They're not in solution. They're minerals. Now, when you get the glyphosate out there at higher concentrations, you don't have the adequate biological activity in the soil to loosen up those minerals. You know, it is the bacteria and the fungi and the mycorrhizae that make those minerals available and water available. If you don't have them in the field, you end up with. With issues. I've seen studies where people try to overcome stuff like that, where they would put out, say, a couple of ton of chicken manure. But then when you send the chicken manure in for analysis, you find that it has, you know, labeled rate of glyphosate per ton.

Yeah, I've seen that.

Yeah. And so how do you get over that? And if the stuff is inert biologically in the soil, because it's killed everything that could take it apart, all you can do is add to it. Now, I've been to Florida a couple times. I know you have the idea.