Episode 127 | John Kempf on Soil Redox, Energy, & Nutrient Availability [A Regenerative Future]

Foreign.

Welcome to A Regenerative Future with Matt Powers. I'm your host, Matt Powers and today we're talking with John Kemp, who's actually the host of the Regenerative Agriculture podcast, which is a fantastic, amazing, rigorous, scientific, cited, in depth podcast for farmers, for soil technicians, for soil scientists, for anyone interested in the depths, in the pragmatic and how they connect.

He is a researcher, he is an.

Author, he is a podcaster. He is amazing.

He's, he's a farmer.

He, he's, he grew up on a farm. John understands it all. John is forward thinking, he's a leader, and it is a pleasure to talk.

To him today about some very difficult.

Amazing concepts that I'm going to be writing about in my book. But I'm learning and talking about the edges and the limitations and the implications of what these concepts and new ideas mean. So that's what we're diving in today.

So get ready and get set because.

This is going to be new information. If you love soil, then you love John. Here's John Kemp.

Here we go.

I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm in northeast Ohio. And in the early 2000s, we were very heavy pesticide users. My dad was a pesticide distributor for the local region. We were the first farm to try all the newest, latest and greatest cocktails. And in the early 2000s, we had a three year period, 2002, 3 and 2004, where we lost greater than 70% of our four primary crops, which were cantaloupe, zucchini, cucumbers and tomatoes, to a variety of different diseases and insects that we were not successful at managing with pesticides. And then in 2004, the third year of that three year period, we began renting a field from a neighboring farm that bordered right up against one of our own fields and planted both fields across the field border into cantaloupe. At harvest time, the soil that we have been farming for the last decade with the intense pesticide applications had 80% of the leaves infected with powdery mildew. The new soil that had been in a dairy farm rotation without the pesticide applications, there was no powdery mildew. And there was this knife line right down to the center of the field. In fact, there were healthy vines growing right in amongst the unhealthy vines. So that really caught my attention. I wanted to know what are the differences between these two plants and what allows one to be susceptible to powder mildew when the next one right beside it is resistant? And that was really what led me down the pathway Asking these questions about plant immune systems ultimately of course leads to nutrition, which leads to soil biology and microbiology. So that was really what got me started down this pathway. And then I've had many extraordinary teachers and very wise elders who helped direct and guide my learning. And I wouldn't be where I am today without them. So I've been very grateful for their instruction.

I know that many of us are very grateful for your synthesis.

And.

There are the people that are the trailblazers, the people that are the researchers and they're the people that are the reporters. And then there are people who do all of it. And you definitely have your feet and your hands in all of it. And that's why it's so valuable that you break things down into really bite sized pieces for all of us and release such great content. So there are some things that you've released recently that have been in the soil farming, permaculture, gardening community that are kind of shocking, kind of paradigm shifting and altering concepts that have, that you've been highlighting that, that are in some of the graduate school programs, that are in some of the collegiate programs, university programs, but they're not, but they're tangential. I've been bringing up my own things in my own studies that I want to talk to you about. But it's similar where people are like, oh, I'm reading about that in my biological investigations course. And it's like, well, they're not doing it in their practice in the agricultural classes. And you're really creating that bridge of understanding between the research and the pragmatic which, which is the bridge to the new, to a new regenerative agriculture, to a new regenerative economy. So I would love for you to share with us some of those insights.

There's a long list. I think the one point that you made is so relevant and so important is that there is. When I first started on this pathway, my interest and the central question in my mind was really a question of plant immune systems. How can a cantaloupe plant be resistant to powdery mildew when the exact same variety planted and managed in exactly the same way, 24 inches away, is susceptible and consumed by this disease? So what is plant amino and how is it produced? That was kind of the central question that drove me. And whenever I spoke with scientists in the agricultural domain of agronomy and plant physiology and so forth, the response was something along the lines of there's no such thing as plant immunity. And yet I came to discover that there are thousands, tens of thousands of papers and journals, even books that are dedicated to the topic of plant immune systems, but nobody in agriculture was talking about it. And so I think there's, I've discovered that there's this large body of science and of research that is, for any number of reasons, stuck in academia largely and hasn't effectively been transferred into the field of all the various things. There's the concepts of plant immunity. But I think the one that I am really passionate about at the moment, and I'm trying to communicate to growers is the idea that plants don't only absorb simple ions from the soil solution, that they in fact absorb entire molecules and even living microorganisms and use the nutrients contained within those microorganisms as an energy source. That plants, plants are not vegetarians, they consume bacteria. And this to me is such a, an important idea and is something that is so necessary and important to communicate because it completely changes the framework of plant nutrition away from soluble fertilizers that you can buy in a bag to the primacy of nutrition from biology. That's really where plants need to be getting their nutrition from. And so that, to me, is an idea. When we look at the research work of Dr. James White at Rutgers University on the process that they are naming rhizophagy, root feeding on living organisms, there's the German research and French research that has been done over the last 40 to 50 years. There's an abundance of literature that describes plant root systems having the capacity to absorb large molecules and antibiotics. We know on the conventional agriculture side, many growers, historically at least, used to apply neonicotinoids, systemic insecticides on the seed that would then be absorbed by the developing root system. And this insecticide would be transmitted throughout the entire plant and kill any insect that consumed it. And we know, of course, that this particular group of insecticides is indicted specifically as one of the major contributing factors to honeybee die offs in this country and around the world. And so you ask the question, well, the mainstream hypothesis that is widely accepted in agriculture today is the idea that plants only absorb honeybee soluble ions in the soil solution, calcium and magnesium and nitrate ions and so forth. And the obvious question becomes, well, if that is the case, if they only absorb soluble ions, how is it possible for them to absorb this insecticide as a large molecule? So it becomes obvious when you look at the overwhelming evidence that plants do have the capacity to absorb large molecules. And when they, when soil biology and soil health develops to the point where plants are absorbing the majority of their Nutrition in the form of microbial metabolites and in the form of living microbial cells. They, these plants become so healthy that they can become resistant to all diseases and all insects. And that is a really big claim to make. That's a significant claim, but, but one that is completely grounded in both the peer reviewed literature and an actual field experience as well. It's not a hypothetical claim. It's something that we have been doing in the field for over a decade.

What's so fascinating is that we're seeing bridges be built through this, this research between different disciplines and traditions. The endophytic breakthroughs that people are talking about as well. Do you want to talk a little bit about what endophytes are?

Well, endophytes are. Endophytes is simply a classification that is given to microorganisms that live inside the plant structure. These are bacteria, they are fungi. So there's different types of organisms, different species of organisms that are classified as endophytes. And essentially the definition of an endophyte is that it lives inside the plant's tissue, the stems, the leaves, and ultimately in the seeds and through the roots. They are both absorbed from the soil and they're also carried on the seed coat from one generation to the next.

Correct me if I'm wrong. You had a conversation with a gentleman about the seed, the endophytes in the seeds and that being related to nutrition.

Well, these endophytes are, they're related to nutrition and they are also directly related to disease resistance and disease suppression. So when we think about all of the soil borne pathogens, primarily soil borne fungal pathogens, such as Rhizoctonia and Pythium and Fasarium verticillium and so forth. Phytophthora, all of these various soil borne diseases can be completely 100% suppressed when the growing root system is colonized with these endophytes. The best way to colonize the moment when a plant is most susceptible to infection is shortly after germination. So when you have a seedling that germinates in soil, perhaps it's early spring, the soil is still cool. The native soil biology is just beginning to increase its activity. And in those moments immediately after the seed germinates, for the first few days or few weeks, it is very important for the seed and this young seedling to have the endophytes that were on the seed coat colonize the root system because they are the protection for that developing root system over the first few weeks. And the way that they suppress these soil borne pathogens, they don't kill them, the pathogens are still there, but they actually begin feeding on the pathogens, they tap into them and they begin withdrawing nutrients and they change their behavior. So you still have Verticillium or Fusarium or any of these organisms in the soil profile and they may still infect the root system, but you don't get the expression of a disease because these endophytes have changed their behavior. Instead of producing disease symptoms, these organisms that previously were pathogens now actually have a beneficial relationship with the plant and they contribute nutrients to the plant. So the presence of these endophytes completely changes the expression of organisms that might cause disease. So there is no correlation between the presence of a pathogenic organism in the soil. I don't like to call it a pathogenic organism, but let's just call it an organism. There's no correlation between the presence of an organism in the soil and an actual disease causing infection. The correlation depends on, the correlation is between the endophytes, the disease suppressive organisms and whether they are able to colonize these potential pathogens. So there's the whole disease suppressive aspect. And then the other aspect is that these endophytes as well as the free living organisms in the soil profile contribute nutrition to the plant. They actively go out and extract nutrients from the soil mineral matrix that the plant signals that it requires. And they provide these minerals and these nutrients to the plant in exchange for sugars and enzymes and essential fatty acids and amino acids from the plant. So there's this whole symbiotic relationship happening where plants are sustaining the soil biology and the soil biology is both feeding the plant and also defending it. These, these plants are these organisms in the soil. The old saying is don't bite the hand that feeds you. These organisms are protecting the plant as their food source and they are feeding it to make sure that it can continue to feed them. It's no different really from ants farming aphids. We have microbes that are farming plants and vice versa. We have plants that are farming microbes. They both benefit from the relationship.

It's so powerful when you begin there and then you begin to see the bioelectric side, the chemical side, and, and start overlaying it as, as I say to try to see it all, how it works in tandem. But before we go further into that, and I do want to go into that because eh, is amazing, I want to go just touch upon, a little bit further upon this endophytic concept because I think that a lot of people, you know, they get caught up, they're like, no, you know, plants are just these, like these things. But they do have immune systems. And as it is implied, they do have a microbiome. They've got a living world within them of microbiology. And then they also, which is was implied, they also have a virome. They have, they have viruses within them just like we do, that are good viruses that have been transformed by the microbiome, by the endophytic microbiology to perform specific tasks, to be repurposed and to be beneficial. And it's so, I mean we've all heard, you know, that everything's always covered with viruses and this and that and the other. And whenever we test our cell phones and our, our, the handles on doors and our, and our cars, we find that there's E. Coli and all these crazy things all over everything all the time. Why aren't we dropping dead? Well, because we have this system in place within us and so do the plants. So speaking of. Initially you said that the best way to inoculate these plants with endophytes. I have friends over here, the west coast from different disciplines, a lot of Korean natural farmers, but also people who are just working with em. Effective microbes, bokashi and, and anaerobic fermentation where they're taking characteristics from certain plants and certain exodits from certain plant roots and they're applying it and to the tune of certain folks taking certain aerial route exodus that we all know about and then spraying that on other plants. And the actual archaea nitrogen fixing bacteria consortiums that are actually the atmospheric nitrogen fixers are being repopulated on our plants endophytically. And they've always were there. But because we declined their ability to do this by like lack of nutrition in the soil, lack of nutrition on the plants, they lost this capability. Have you heard about this?

Absolutely. This. There's a whole body of research again around the study of the phylosphere or the phyloplane. And the phylosphere is a word that is equivalent to the phylosphere is to leaves what rhizosphere is to the soil. So in a healthy plant, the leaf surface is coated with microorganisms, bacteria, fungi and others that serve a very similar function as the biology in the root system. So it's common for us to talk about the biology in the root system and the effect that it has in supplying nutrition and disease suppression and the symbiotic relationship that it has with the plant. Essentially this same process, with many of the same players, also occurs on the leaf surface. The plant releases sugars and amino acids through the leaf surface to feed biology. And the biology consumes dust in the atmosphere and provides some of those minerals and makes them available to plants. And specifically, they are also very important for protecting the plant from airborne pathogens. So this whole study of the phylosphere, the phyloplane biology, is of equal importance and value as understanding what's happening in the rhizosphere. And so if you want to produce disease resistance to powdery mildew or downy mildew, or bacterial speck or bacterial spot or canker, kind of the list goes on and on. The solution is quite straightforward. We need to produce plants that are so healthy, their photosynthesis is at such a high level, they are producing an abundance of sugars. They're transmitting these sugars out through the leaves and through the root system, but also out through the leaves to feed the biology on the leaf surface. And that biology that is present on the leaf surface will prevent possible infections. They will out compete any potential pathogens and potential invaders that might land on that leaf surface. So the point that you made, Matt, is very appropriate in terms of the context and the environment that we live in. We are exposed to viruses and exposed to pathogens all the time. Plants are exposed to pathogens all the time. The example that everyone understands, you might have a variety of cucumbers, let's say, that is resistant to powdery mildew, and a different variety is susceptible. And we assign those differences in susceptibility to genetics. We say that one is genetically more resistant. The question that we should be asking is, why is it genetically more resistant? How are those genetics expressing themselves that allows one variety to be susceptible and in a second one to be resistant? And ultimately, when you do the research, you really dig down to the fundamentals. Those genetics invariably express a different nutritional profile. Plants absorb nutrients differently, with different degrees of efficiency, and that means that they produce different compounds. We know that in the case of the plant that you alluded to, we have different terpenoid profiles, different cannabinoid profiles. These are not just a result of genetic variation, they're really a result of nutritional variation that stems from the genetic variation. So again, we're just taking the long way around the mountain to say things in a different way. There is no correlation between the presence of a pathogen and an actual infection. It does not exist. We should anticipate that the pathogen is universally present. Some plants become infected and others do not because of their level of nutritional integrity. The one tool that I have observed and experienced, I've been able to look at many different types of compost and compost production methods and processes. And there is one that has just emerged in the last few years which seems to be producing results an order of magnitude better than the next best alternative, which is considering we're talking about compost production and that there are some very good compost producers that is really saying something. And this is the Johnson sue bioreactors that were developed by Dr. David Johnson at New Mexico State University. The compost and compost tea that is being produced from these bioreactors when applied to soil, is producing biological responses that I haven't observed any other compost or really even very many other commercial products produce.

It's fascinating, isn't it? It's like they combined a bunch of different, like it's, it's, it's a non turning pile that's aerated.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's really fantastic. And one of the coolest things I heard about it when it was, we were initially talking about it, was that they found a microbe that hasn't been observed since Louis Pasteur was documenting microbes. So that just goes to show, you know, how vast this territory is that we're, we're dealing with when we're talking about the soil, food web and micro microbiology there. So I would like to know about, more about eh. I think people understand ph and they, they understand it with acidic to basic, but I don't think they understand it in terms of hydrogen and I don't think they understand EH and how important it is. So perhaps let's dive into this and show, show folks what is so exciting about this and why it is so vital to farmers everywhere.

Yeah, I get really excited about EH and understanding the implications of managing redox in our soil and farming ecosystems. And so when we think about ph, many, many people have some level, even a very fundamental level of understanding about ph. Ph being a measurement of acidity versus alkal, a scale of 0 to 14 with 7 being the neutral point. And then there is a similar scale that is called eh which measures reduction versus oxidation. And it is quite sad really that there is so little understanding and discussion about EH in agricultural systems because it has at least as big, if not a bigger impact on nutrient availability and disease suppression than ph does. In fact, the two interact very closely together and they move together in biological systems to some degree. So when we think about the whole topic of EH is a very big one. Explaining it in depth is probably more than I should attempt in an audio recording. But if people want to dig into it more deeply, we have a lot of resources available online. I did an interview, a podcast interview with Olivier Husson and we have a six hour long webinar recording on the Academy for free that he was so gracious, gracious enough to share with us.

Everyone should go, like today and watch it.

It's incredible. It will blow your mind. Because he is able to identify and predict disease and insect and pest susceptibility based on redox profiles in the soil and within the plant. And that is pretty incredible. So what is reduction? What is oxidation? Maybe let's begin there. Oxidation we all understand to some degree when you have weathering, exposure to the elements, sunshine, wind, rain, that causes oxidation. From a chemical perspective, you can also have oxidation when you have, when you rapidly burn cells. So if you have a salt fertilizer that you get into a cut on your finger, that's cellular oxidation being produced by those salts. And so we have some extremely oxidizing materials that we can think of, such as hydrogen peroxide or sulfuric acid, for example. Those are both very potent oxidizers. From a chemistry perspective, then, when we look at the other end of the spectrum, where we have very reducing materials or very reducing environments, some common ones that many people would be familiar with would be apple cider vinegar or yogurt, or sauerkraut, or corn silage, or blueberry bog and a rice patty. What these environments all have in common is anaerobic fermentation. So we speak about reduction versus oxidation. And to a degree, we can also match that by speaking about aerobic versus anaerobic. Aerobic environments generally being oxidized and anaerobic environments being reduced. And there are many ways that this ties into agriculture and plant nutrition. But I think one important point is that we've been taught for decades that soils should be aerobic and that compost should be aerobic, when in fact all of our disease suppressive organisms and our greatest nutrient availability doesn't happen in aerobic soils. It happens in very slightly anaerobic soils. And I think this is the other aspect of understanding reduction oxidation, which is sometimes shortened to redox, is that there is a spectrum just the same as there is a spectrum with ph. It's not only 0 and 14, you have this whole range in between the two. The same is true of reduction in oxidation. You can have a very highly oxidized environment, like a desert soil that bakes in the sun. And you can have a very reduced environment, like a blueberry bog or cranberry bog. And then you have a lot of spectrum in between those two polarities. And it is actually slightly on the reduced side of the spectrum, slightly anaerobic, where we have our greatest nutrient availability and our best disease suppression. So the one key point is that all of the trace mineral metals, I shouldn't say all of them, but in particular manganese and iron and copper and cobalt are only absorbed and physiologically active within plants in the reduced form. They can't absorb and use the oxidized form. So if we use iron as an example, if you have a piece of steel or iron, you expose it to the elements, it begins rusting. That rust is oxidized iron. And when we conduct a soil analysis or even a dry matter based plant tissue analysis, they will often report that we have excessive levels of iron. And in fact, those iron levels that are showing up on the test are oxidized and can't be utilized by the plant. They may be showing up inside the plant, but they're not being used by the plant. And the simplest way to test this and measure this is to get a reduced chelated iron and apply it as a foliar spray and observe the plant response. In over 90% of the cases, there is a tremendous plant response to foliar applications of iron because they don't have enough or because it's in the wrong form. So having soils in a slightly reduced state and having our microbial populations be the types of microbial populations that thrive in that environment is critical to supplying optimal plant nutrition and to disease suppression.

The way I discovered that the con. The. The contradiction of the aerobic and, and I think, I think that they originally were trying to just be congruent with, with the way that the, the law worked. And so they, that they wanted to compost, they wanted to get it hot. Everyone was thinking like, you know, we got to get things up to a certain temperature to make it clean, to sterilize it. And that's why even today you'll find people saying that a hot compost will sterilize the soil and it won't. It's not sterilizing anything. It's favoring the conditions for a certain microbiology that's aerobic. And so I think that's what their perspective was. But for me, when I heard about it, I initially was upset because if you look at it, it's like, okay, so, all right, we've got some soils that look aerobic up here, all right, and like you said, slightly anaerobic, but we have these pockets that are tying kind of tiny. But on the whole, we can kind of generalize and say we got some aerobic soils over here. But then when you go to the tropics, when you're in the tropical rain forest, the quote unquote poor soils. Oh, it looks bad. It looks real. It looks like we're like the European conqueror is. And we're installing, you know, plantation style. Like, it looks like, again, like we're putting our cultural thoughts on other cultures. It just looks bad because the fact is, it's like it rains so much there that it's. That that's not aerobic at all. It's facultative. Is. Is a way to put it. And so for me, I was like, oh, man. And then when I heard about the nitrogen paradox down there, about how the rains come in so rich with nitrogen because of the lightning that sheets across the rainforest that the legumes don't even nodulate there because it's all free associating nitrogen fixers, which they hate oxygen, so that's why they form the nodules and disturbed soils only in the tropics. I just felt like, oh, man, I really want to walk this back and get it right this time because a lot of people have passed around that idea. Aerobic only. Aerobic only. And it's not just a detriment to the soil. It's a detriment, I feel, culturally, because those soils are so different down there, that we need to be sensitive to all this on a different level.

Your point is very appropriate, Matt, and it brings two other important examples to mind. One of them is with compost manufacturing and the idea that we want to have aerobic compost and that we should be turning our compost. Yet when you turn compost with a compost turner on the large scale machinery that is sometimes used, many very good compost producers will go in and put in an oxygen probe and a temperature probe into the pile after it's turned. How long do you think it takes after the pile has been turned for all the oxygen in the center of the pile to be consumed? About 30 minutes max. And so 30 minutes after turning, 100% of the introduced oxygen has been consumed. And now you switch back to an anaerobic environment. So this whole conversation about producing aerobic compost, it is being turned and aerated, but it's not truly aerobic in the sense that it is not Constantly being exposed to elevated levels of oxygen. And to the point that you made about nitrification, nitrogen can this. We're shifting a bit, actually. In the examples that I gave earlier of very reduced environments, I used. One example that I used was apple cider vinegar. We know that consuming fermented foods such as sauerkraut and yogurt and apple cider vinegar gives us a lot of energy. Why? Because these foods contain a lot of energy, particularly apple cider vinegar, because they contain an abundance of free electrons. So they have a surplus of electrons, which is really what we're talking about when we're talking about redox from a biophysics perspective. Reduced environments have an abundance of electrons, so they give us a lot of energy. And then there's a slight shift when we start thinking about electrons and hydrogen versus oxygen from a redox perspective, how that ties into nutrition management, particularly nitrogen. So nitrogen can be either in the reduced form or in the oxidized form. Specifically, it can be in either ammonium or nitrate. So ammonium is NH4, the presence of four hydrogens, that is reduced nitrogen. Nitrate is NO3. The presence of three oxygen atoms indicates that it is the form of nitrogen that is present in an oxidized environment. And when you think about how this translates to plant development, think about the plants that are natively adapted to growing in very reduced environments. Rice and blueberries being the perfect examples. Blueberries are dependent on absorbing the majority of their nutrition, nitrogen in the form of ammonium. They don't have the capacity to metabolize large amounts of nitrate, and they can actually get nitrate toxicity and nitrate poisoning as a result, because they are adapted to growing in a bog in a very reduced environment. And as a result, they need ammonium nitrogen, not nitrate. And interesting enough, blueberries also, just to continue with this example, have really high requirements. The reason they are so often grown on acidic soils and believed to require acidic soils is because they have really high requirements for phosphorus and manganese and iron, all three of which are released in abundance in reduced environments. So blueberries don't need acidity as much as they need a reduced environment. And you can supply both, but you can also have a very reduced environment with PHS of 6.4 and grow an incredible blueberry crop on a commercial scale. I know this because we work with growers who've done it. All of this ties together and brings us back to the disease suppression piece. And perhaps the simplest way to say it. There are a few, very few exceptions, but the majority of pathogens in the soil are tremendously enhanced by nitrate and strongly suppressed by the presence of ammonium. And when you have nitrate within a plant, within plant SAP, that strongly enhances susceptibility to disease. The presence of ammonium suppresses the susceptibility to disease. So ammonium versus nitrate, reduced versus oxidized. You can think about all these different environments, the way they tie together. And one more aspect. We're using biophysics language when we talk about redox, but there's also biochemistry language that is used in our own bodies. So when we take vitamin C or anthocyanins or glutathione, we are taking these supplements, either in food form or supplement form, and they're considered to be very powerful antioxidants. So right there we have it in the word antioxidation. So another word for an antioxidant is a very strong reducing agent. So apple cider vinegar is a very strong reducing agent. So also a very effective antioxidant. And if we want to flip back to biophysics language in a different context, there's lots of discussions today about grounding and the benefits of grounding ourselves. Guess what happens when we ground? We have a flow of electrons from the soil into our bodies, much the same as you get a contribution of electrons from consuming apple cider vinegar. So it is not incorrect to say that grounding is an antioxidant. It's just the same as consuming vitamin.

C. And what is vitamin C chemically? What's the formula for vitamin C?

You expect me to know that off the top of my head? I don't know that it's mostly carbon, hydrogen and oxygen or entirely carbon hydrogen? Oxygen.

Yeah. I've been. So what's been happening on my end is, I mean, I keep bouncing up and studying the redox, but I keep going back to, like, foundational stuff. I got, I'm an academic, so I got bogged down a little bit in the geomorphology. But when I learned that clay, sand, and silt are all different fraction sizes of silicas, like they're all silicates.

Meaning.

They have silicon in, in their actual chemistry formula for, for their, their makeup, their, their molecular makeup. And, and then I was like, wait a second. So these guys are all cousins to the semiconductor. And this is, and, and this is why biochar improves the soil in many ways. And this is how they can conduct, you know, conduct things through the soil. And, and I, and I mean, things are communicating bioelectrically. Things are sending light to each other, like the bacteria that flashes light and communication. Plants are channeling light through their roots. There's so much that's like foundationally going on that's new that we've just found out, that I keep finding myself kind of taking a step back and going, okay, so what does this mean? Because it's like there's a new paradigm. Every time you find out one of those things, it changes the way things, how it really is.

To me, there is much that is new, but there's also so much that isn't new. When you look at Fritz Albert Popp's work in Germany on biophotonics back in the 70s and 80s, he was describing how all living organisms, and I use that word very loosely, are transmitting photons, are emitting light. All plants, as you said, all plant roots, are transmitting light photons down into the soil. There's been some speculation that the reason they haven't been able to culture some organisms in the laboratory is because they are dependent on these photons coming from living root systems. And this was research that was done quite a long time ago. We know that there are photosynthetic bacteria and algae that actually photosynthesize at depths down in the soil profile, far beyond what sunlight can reach. And they are absorbing photons that are emitted from these living root systems and also directly from rock particles. So rocks themselves also transmit photons. So there's really. If we had the capacity to see the rainbow of light and hear the symphony of music that other organisms can see and hear, they're communicating constantly all the time, it would be a really incredible symphony. So what you're describing and the approach that you're coming from is a very appropriate one. We have been trained in a system to think mostly about life and living processes in the context of chemistry and biochemistry, when in reality all living systems are biophysical, all living systems are electrical and magnetic. In nature, even if you're Amish, you're electrical. So, so when we change our perspective and we start recognizing that, wait a minute, plants are actually an electrical antenna that are plugged into a magnetic grid that we call the ground. And they are both transmitting and receiving electrical and electromagnetic signals all the time. And this is how they communicate with insects. This is why they're attractive to some insects that come and consume them. This is how they attract pollinators. It really changes your perspective on what's actually happening and going on in living ecosystems.

It truly does. Many people have characterized fungi as the architect behind. And that's an easy metaphor, right? The all knowing architect. But as we get into this, it seems more like energy, just like how today people are like, oh, governments are de emphasized economies, I mean, economies and money. And the flow of that energy is dictating things, really. Cultures, religions, everything still revolves around that when you break it down. And I feel like that's kind of what it is in systematically is in the soil, the energy.

Plants grow from energy. They don't grow from nutrients, they don't grow from fertilizers. Plants grow from energy. And the flow of energy is not limited by time. There is not a gateway that is limiting the speed at which energy can flow into plants, that is limiting the speed at which plants can grow. Plants have an advantage over us in that regard, if it can be considered an advantage, because they lack an endocrine system and an organ system that is quite like ours. So if you want to increase the flow of energy from soils into plants, you need to achieve soils that are coherent with your plants. You need to match the impedance, you need to match the level of coherence. And you could say sympathetic vibration. When they are. When you have coherent radiation, radiation is not the right word. When you have coherent frequencies, that's also not the right word. But I don't know how to describe it better right now. When you have this coherent field and this matching of coherence between the seed and the plant that you're growing and the soil that you're growing, all of a sudden you're no longer limited by time. And many growers have experienced this, haven't been able to, or haven't known the language to describe it very well. But many growers have experienced crops that were extremely healthy and things grew really well, and they were able to harvest in maybe 80% of the time that would have been anticipated, or 70% or 90% of the time. So this is an expression of a high level of coherence between. Between the energy flow in the soil and the energy requirements of that specific genetic strain of a plant.

So how do we establish that soil coherence?

That is the right question, and that's a question that I'm still learning about. There's a few things that I think I have learned, but many times over the last decade and a half, I've thought I knew something and then later discovered that it's not what you don't know that is a challenge. It's what you think you know that isn't so. And so with that caveat, with that caveat, what I believe I've learned so far is that it is important for soils if we want to achieve that level of coherence and much more rapid plant growth. We need to have high levels of paramagnetism and we need to have high levels of electrical conductivity that is not coming from soluble nutrients. The electrical conductivity that we desire to have in soils needs to be coming from microbial metabolites, organic acids and amino acids in the soil profile. So when we have this high level of electrical conductivity, which is associated, as you pointed out, with the silicon wafers called clay and silt and sand and quartz crystals called sand, so forth, when you have this elevated level of electrical conductivity coming from a soil with a strong geological foundation of sand, silt and clay, and abundant microbial metabolites, you can have electrical conductivity levels in soil as high as 6 to 800, with none of that electrical conductivity coming from soluble salts. There's always going to be a small amount of potassium and sodium ions and so forth that contribute to electrical conductivity, but they should be the minority. They should be 5 to 10% of our total contribution. So when we have those two things, when we have strong paramagnetism, magnetic susceptibility and strong electrical conductivity, that now means that we have a very strong electromagnetic ground that can, that a plant can tie into. And the plant now being, plant being an antenna, now being very well grounded, can intercept and transmit a much clearer signal. And it can also absorb much more of its nutrition from the air because it has this very strong antenna function that allows it to do so.

That is amazing. So it occurs to me when we tilling up our gardens, we're literally making it. We're shifting the EH towards oxidation and making it so that we don't have that reduced state for so many of those plants when they initially are setting their seeds, we literally, as like a habit, gardeners everywhere are favoring for, for, for that eh, for it to be higher. What advice do you have for managing that? And I know that we then water it and that immediately reduces too, but then it dries well.

The reason there is not. There has not been more conversation and more research around the implications and the application of redox is because it can vary and shift very quickly, as you just described. You can cultivate soil and introduce oxygen and it oxidizes very quickly and you can have 2 inches of rain the next day and it saturates. And now it becomes reduced very quickly, becomes anaerobic. So it's a very, it's a highly variable number, very dynamic number that Fluctuates very rapidly. And my understanding at this moment is that it is not so much the actual measured redox values in our soil that is really important, but it is the microbial community that is present in reduced soils that is important for us to maintain. So there are some groups of organisms that can thrive in soils that are oxidized where you have the presence of oxygen. We call these organisms aerobic bacteria or aerobic organisms. Then you have other groups that can thrive in completely anaerobic environments or completely reduced environments. And we call these anaerobes. Then you have two other groups. You have a group that are called facultative aerobes and facultative anaerobes. And what this means in plain and simple English is that these two groups, they can cross the threshold. They can be both in slightly aerobic and slightly anaerobic environments. They can't tolerate completely aerobic environments or completely anaerobic environments. They are in the middle of the spectrum. I find it interesting that when we talk about the impacts of endophytes and these various disease suppressive organisms, mycorrhizal fungi, and on and on, these organisms are actually in these two groups, the facultative aerobes and the facultative anaerobes. Many of our diseases, many of our pathogens, in fact, it's safe to say the great majority, greater than 90%, are in one of the two groups on opposite ends of the spectrum. They're either anaerobes or they're aerobes. The majority of them are actually aerobes, in my understanding. So it's not so much of the chemistry number, the redox number, in your soil profile, as it is the microbial community you support and maintain over time. And the tool that we use a lot with the commercial growers that we work with, is selecting the plants and the COVID crops that we grow. We know that each plant has a specific microbial population that it has a symbiotic relationship with. And some plants favor groups of bacteria and organisms that are aerobes, some that are anaerobes, and some that are in the middle. The facultative anaerobes and the facultative aerobes, the disease suppressive and what we refer to as reducing bacteria or reducing root systems. So we identify some plants as having reducing root systems because of the way they influence biology to have a reducing effect. And so examples of the crops that are really effective reducers would be buckwheat and oats. It's actually, it's a very short list that we know of for certain, there's many more crops and cover crops that we would like to know about, but there's not much research being done in this area. And so we don't know for certain. But the COVID crops that we do know for certain are oats, buckwheat, alfalfa, many of the forage legumes, and many of the brassicas and mustards. So that's kind of the short list that is in my mind right now. I don't think I'm missing any. So we try to have our cover crops that we use be heavily dominated by those species. And invariably we observed increased manganese absorption and increased iron absorption because we had a more reduced biology. Here's actually one dot that I didn't connect earlier is that it is the function of these reducing bacteria to convert the oxidized trace mineral metals like manganese and iron to back into the reduced form that plants can use. So when we use these plants in our cover crops and in our crop rotations, we see increased availability of manganese and iron and a more disease suppressive soil for the following crop.

So how do we test for these things? And then what are the caveats for the testing? Because I know that you're on a search on an epic quest to figure out what the best tests are.

So it is essentially valueless to measure the redox value of your soil profile because it swings so dramatically. You can get redox meters just like you can get PH meters for about $90. They're not that expensive. But the information is pretty much worthless and pretty much meaningless because it shifts and changes so rapidly. And what we really care about, as I mentioned, is we care about the microbial population. And how do you measure that? Well, there aren't really any laboratory assays that I'm comfortable recommending at this point because what we really need is we need an assay that can both identify the types of species that are present and the quantity in which they are present, both at the same time. And I'm not aware of any laboratory assay that does that at the moment. I would be happy if any of our listeners knew one. I would be happy to learn of one. But. So the approach that we've taken is really a very practical kind of experiential approach is to simply ask the question of how are the plants responding and how is the crop responding? So our tool for the growers that we work with is we use plant SAP analysis throughout the entire growing season. And from my perspective, the plant is the final report card what happens with the plant? When we have healthy plants that are resistant to diseases and insects completely 100%, we know that soil biology is working. Whatever we're doing is being effective. And if that's not the case, we know that we need to improve. I am very much not a black and white person. I have come to really appreciate the incredible nuance that is in all facets of life and particularly in agriculture. But to me, when people ask me the question, how do you define success? And how do you define the success of a soil plant health system? This is one area where it's almost black and white. Do you have disease and insect resistance? Yes or no. Either you've crossed the threshold or you haven't. That is really what in my opinion, defines a truly sustainable system. You can't have, you can't have a sustainable ecosystem as long as you are. As long as you have susceptibility to disease and insect pests.

So what should folks do in the meantime to understand and also to make progress on their soil at a farm scale?

So what we can do at the farm scale. The. The conversation about redox is so nuanced and it's such a broad conversation in. We hosted this webinar with Olivier that then got posted on the Academy and it ended up being six and a half hours long. A really in depth, intense webinar because there's so many topics that important to address and the most powerful reducing process in an agricultural ecosystem is photosynthesis. Photosynthesis, the process of forming sugars and transmitting those sugars out through the root system as root exudates, actually has a very strong reducing effect. And in one degree, in one sense, it seems overly simplistic to describe it this way, but ultimately, if we want to produce reduced soils, the pathway is quite simple. We need to have constantly photosynthesizing plants on our soil all the time. We never want our soils to be bare. So when we have green growing plants that are photosynthesizing and sending sugars out to the root system, they're constantly having a reducing effect and guiding our soil biology in the direction that we want it to go. Particularly when we have plants that have these reducing microbiomes, that is the. That's one piece that we can do the second piece. And there's a number of different influencing factors. But of course, the first rule of medicine is first do no harm. So stop and adding materials that have an oxidizing influence. Stop adding salt fertilizers, which are very oxidizing, discontinue with if at all possible, discontinue with aggressive tillage that has an oxidizing effect, discontinue nitrate applications, limestone applications. We actually find that limestone, because again, you have calcium carbonate CO3, you have the presence of oxygen. Limestone is a very effective oxidizing material, which comes as a surprise, was at least a surprise to me early on when I was still learning about this. So it is not. I think the important point is it's not that oxidation is necessarily bad or evil. We need to have small amounts of oxidation in our soil profile. The challenge is that we need a balance. Just as with ph, we need to have a balanced pH with E8s, we also need to have a balance between reduction and oxidation. And unfortunately, through a lack of awareness and a lack of knowledge, we have adopted management systems with fertilizer applications and tillage and limestone applications that have had a majority of very strong oxidizing effects. So we are no longer in balance. We've moved all the way up to the oxidizing end of the spectrum. So for us as farm managers, the way that we need to think about this is how can we balance out those oxidizing influences and apply some pressure on the other end of the spectrum by using specific cover crops and growing plants and regenerating our soil biology.

I think you answered the next question, what keys are most farmers missing with that?

Well, when you ask the question, what keys are most farmers missing, I think the one key that many farmers miss, and I've been a champion of the idea that plants are photosynthesizing at only a fraction of what they're capable of. And generally in the summer, in the neighborhood of 15 to 20%. So imagine what would be different and how your crop would be different. If you moved from 15% to, let's say, 60%, that would be four times more sugar production in every 24 hour photo period. That doesn't mean that you get four times more plant biomass or four times more yield. You might get a 50% or 70% increase or a 30% increase. So if you don't get a four times bigger plant, and if you don't get four times higher yield, where does all the extra sugar go? It goes out through the root systems as root exudates. When you sit down and do the math and you calculate how many pounds of carbohydrates per acre a crop produces, a corn crop or a tomato crop or a strawberry crop, you cannot economically afford to buy enough compost or to apply enough molasses or humic substances to match the carbon contribution of a really healthy plant that is photosynthesizing at higher levels of its capacity, moving from 15 to 60%. You can't afford to buy enough compost or carbon to match it. It's simply not possible. We're often talking about contributions in the tens of thousands of carbohydrates per acre, of pounds per acre. So there is this idea within, particularly within the domain of organic and biological agriculture, that it takes a healthy soil to grow a healthy plant. And that isn't incorrect, but it most certainly is incomplete. The question we should be asking is what creates a healthy soil? And the answer is it is the contribution of plants. Contributing photosynthes to the soil is really what builds organic matter. Look, the reality is that without the contribution of plants, soil is nothing more than decomposed rock particles. It is plants that contribute organic matter. And it is possible for us to rapidly regenerate soil health and rapidly build soil organic matter when we increase plants photosynthesis. What's the most effective way to do that? What's the most economical way to do that? The answer is the wise and well designed use of foliar applications of nutrients. I am a champion and advocate of foliar applications for this reason. I have observed many times growers start using foliar applications correctly and they are designed properly, and we get tremendous increases in soil organic matter. There is this idea that foliar applications of nutrients increase plant growth and can extract allow the crop to extract more nutrients from the soil. If that happens, and it is possible, it can happen, but when that happens, it's because the foliar application was not designed correctly. You can actually design a foliar application to increase a plant's photosynthesis and contribute organic matter to the soil. Foliar applications are the single most underappreciated, underutilized tool because they allow you to harness the plant's photosynthetic energy, download more carbon dioxide and more sunlight into the ecosystem. You can bring more energy into a soil system by harnessing the plant's photosynthetic engine than by any other method. That is the piece that every grower needs to implement. If you want to build soil biology, if you want to build bacterial populations that are measured in terms of tons per acre, they need a food source. And that food source should be coming from plant root exudates. You can't afford to buy enough molasses to feed soil biology to the same degree that plants can. If you want to build very large, very robust microbial populations, use foliar sprays to foliar feed green growing plants to increase their photosynthesis from 15% of their total capacity to 60% of their total capacity. Or in other words would be to say from a Brix reading of 3 to a Brix reading of 12. And you can produce absolutely incredible soil microbial populations. So if you want to build biology, feed plants.

So where would you recommend folks learn more about foliar sprays? What books do you recommend or courses do you recommend on foliage rays?

There's the one that I'm writing because there isn't one that in existence right now that I can point to very easily. I would point to our webinars. I've produced several webinars on how to design effective foliar sprays and our webinar and also our course on the Academy on the plant health pyramid where we describe exactly which nutrients are needed to produce this effect within plants and to increase the plants photosynthesis. So you can look us up on YouTube, on the Advancing EcoAg YouTube channel and on the Academy Academy Regen AG.

Incredible. The work that you're doing is. And I watch, I watch your, your webinars. I, I'm taking the Redox course and I look forward to this, this, this book, is it your first book?

I have several that are in the works, so no promises as to when it will be out there, but it's in the works.

Nice. Nice. Well, I look forward to that book and all your books because you, you've got a fantastic hold on, on soil on the cutting edge of soil. And you've got a very humble, patient perspective on it too, which is really what, what it needs, especially with the, with the way our testing is, the way the science keeps gaining more and more depth and also the way that you've got the pragmatic solutions mapped out. So I highly recommend everyone visit your website, subscribe to your podcast. Please feel free to share your website and all your information so that everyone can do that.

Yeah, the central repository, the place where you can kind of find everything easily is my personal website@john kempf.com and I would invite all of you to sign up for the blog. I send an almost every day, not quite every day, short post out with things that I'm learning and thinking about and reading about. And I'm having a lot of fun with the podcast. I really enjoy it and I hear that people really enjoy receiving it as well. So it's kind of a central repository. From that website you can find the Academy and the courses and Crop Health Labs and all the various enterprises that I've helped to get started. And that's John Kemp.com youm should be able to find it really easily.

I think everyone is going to go there now because the, the amount of information we've covered, the amount of things we've touched, it really showcases how great and vast this study is and also how exciting it is and pragmatically useful, profitable and beneficial. So I hope that everyone does that.

Thank you very much, Matt. I've enjoyed it tremendously. Thanks for having me on.

Thank you so much. So I hope that you like that.

John is amazing.

He's very helpful.

We talk about things, I send him questions and he always gives a very honest answer. If you like this kind of thing, please subscribe to John Kemp subscribe to Regenerative Agriculture, the podcast. Check out Regen Ag for courses by John. He's got the free soil Redox course, the one I'm taking, the one we're talking about with Olivier Husson. Check that out. It opens up a whole bunch of new ways of thinking about things. It really plays upon everything we've been talking about here today.

His podcast goes into depth with the.

Professor doing their research, and he's also trying to make that connection with how.

To make it pragmatic.

So it's not just all the theoretical realizations, you know, that they see and they've documented, but there's no connection to how a farmer is actually running his farm. And so we've done a lot of debunking with a lot of this information. We see that, you know, the ionic perspective of soil and of roots is not correct. We see the traditional perspective of compost is partial. We see that aerobic is not the only that aerobic is a component of a vast spectrum of oxygen and oxygenless environments. Nitrogen fixation wouldn't happen in, in environments that were anaerobic. So we need anaerobic environments for just the most basic of soil mechanisms to occur.

So this is where we're at.

There's a lot of questions, there's a lot of amazing answers and solutions that are actually coming in right now. The foliar, as he talked about, is it. I mean, we can change the soil, we can set the stage stage. We can get the soil coherence correct. But then there's a threshold and it's much easier, faster and potent and effective to use foliar sprays for so many of these different things. If you're into Korean natural farming, you know what I'm talking about. And if you have been following some of these different people on the Internet and some of these cutting edge, you know, research and, and discoveries that have been made and there are a few books that document these things, very large, expensive college and graduate school level books. And there's not much broken down into manuals. But that's what John's doing. That's what I'm working on too. I'm doing the general, the full giant everything you need to know about soil style manual regenerative soil science and solutions, which is coming out in 2020. You can pre order it on my website, thepermalcoachstudent.com John's working on a book which I'm really excited about.

Actually.

A lot of my friends are having books come out in 2020. So a lot to be excited about. There's a lot to be grateful about in the world, even in the midst of this pandemic, even in the midst of uncertainty, of difficulty, of challenge. And I'm sure that I'm not the only one facing those. I'm sure you are facing those too. And together we rise. Together we're going to overcome them. It's going to be through communication. It's going to be through helping each other. It's going to be through doing the work and being honest about it and saying, you know what? We don't know that we don't know it. And John's very good at that. What he doesn't understand, he's oh, I'm going to interview that person next. He's a seeker of truth and I love that. So if you're a seeker of truth, please, please stay tuned. Subscribe to this podcast, share it with your friends and check out thepermaculturestudent.com for free courses.

Free.

Amazing cited peer reviewed accredited ebooks and also amazing resources of all kinds from beginner to advanced with just me or up to over 70 educators from all over the globe. So we've got everything. We've got you covered. If you're looking for accredited education for a homeschooler in your household right now or a college student in your household right now, I've got you covered. If you're an adult looking to transition your career, I've got you covered. This is the One Stop Shop, the permaculturestudent.com for the regenerative future for a permaculture based society. Check it out. It is all there.

I've been working on this stuff for.

Years now and so much of it is free. So go there, check it out, share it with your friends and family. Especially now, because someone can literally take my free courses, learn permaculture, learn gardening and never pay for anything. And be amazing and be self reliant, anti fragile and be an expert at all this stuff as well because I got all of it cited and LinkedIn. You can just go there and keep going deeper and deeper into the journals that are. Many of them are publicly available, available, and the rest you can actually email the authors and they'll gladly send you the PDF. So I hope that you like this episode. We'll have more soon. I am so grateful that you're listening that you're opening yourself to living more regeneratively. Thank you for choosing to live regeneratively. I am Matt Powers. Grow abundantly, learn daily, and live regardless generatively. And I'll see you soon.