Episode 155: Rethinking Agriculture, Health, and the Science That Connects Them with Robert Verkerk, Ph.D.

Hi friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. This is Jon Kempf and this is where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to regenerating our soil health, our human health and our ecosystem health, and constantly exploring how those are interconnected and interrelated. Our conversation today is one that I've been looking forward to for quite some time with Robert Verkirk. When we're engaged in agriculture and when we start interacting with living systems, we pretty soon figure out that it makes some type of sense for all of these systems to be connected to each other and for human health, ultimately to be connected to ecosystem health and to the health of what we're producing in our agricultural systems. But many of us understand this intuitively to some degree. But Robert comes with the receipts and.

That'S, this is why this is going.

To be such great conversation. So Robert, I'd love for you to tell us, tell us a bit about your story, the journey you've been on and the scope of the work that you're involved in.

John, great to be with you. My, my story is basically someone who spent 40 years trying to understand nature and in that process trying to understand humankind and the interaction between nature and humankind. And that's taken me through academia. I've, I've basically did my first degree in ecology. I then I basically became a, an environmental campaigner in Australia dealing with chemicals in the environment, particularly in agriculture, but also around other pesticides and other chemicals that were deemed to be safe by governments, but scientifically was already emerging, that they had many health problems. And we really created a movement, a people's movement, a grassroots movement of people's people who also suffered from multiple chemical sensitivities who were not being seen or heard by the medical profession. And we work closely with the early movers and shakers in the, in the integrative medicine and functional medicine community. People like Mark Donahue, who really was the first to identify malgic encephalomyelitis, me, multiple chemical sensitivities. I was also, I am chemically sensitive. It's been one of my big drivers towards natural living. And so I did that for some 10 years working with the Total Environment Center. We got a lot of chemicals banned. We ended up being responsible for one of the very well known quarantining of dairy farms up the whole New South Wales and Queensland coasts of Australia. Basically based on us identifying organic chlorine chemicals that were being used in agriculture and then finding their way into dairy and then into the food supply, possibly.

Already some listeners of the podcast who are unhappy with what you're describing your historical activities to be.

Yes, exactly. I, I then thought it was high time I went back to, to uni and I did a master's and PhD in in really agricultural sustainability. And my focus for my PhD was something we call multi trophic interactions. So it's basically looking at complex ecological relationships within agro ecosystems. The goal of it is to understand those so you can bring them into balance and reduce the amount of chemicals or go for a zero chemical input. And, and obviously that work led me, I then went on to seven years of postdoc research working in eastern and southern Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and advising governments and working with organic farmers in particular. And I did everything from working on small scale organic farmers through to being taken on to work on, you know, people like big, big markets like Marks and Spencer's in the UK were growing a lot of legumes for the UK market and also becoming increasingly disillusioned with the politics and the nature of science. I then got offered permanent tenure back in 2002, just at the time when I was also really becoming very, very interested in the way in which those of us who are working on food production of healthy chemical free foods, you know, how that worked with human health. And I really saw that there was no connection. In fact, I remember being at a meeting at Imperial College where we as agricultural scientists, we got together with the medics and I was talking to an oncologist, a leading oncologist at Imperial College said, hey, you know, we found these really interesting plant compounds in cruciferous vegetables that you know, have, they basically act as, as pesticides. And you know, a lot of the plant breeding that's going on is breeding these bitter compounds and sulfur containing compounds out of the plants to make them theoretically more palatable to people and particularly to children. But in so doing, the plants are becoming compromised by insect pests and pathogens and the rest of it. But what's even more interesting is that these very compounds that act as pesticides, natural pesticides, seem to have a hormetic mode of action when humans consume them in very small quantities and they seem to have these anti cancer effects. This oncologist looked at me and said, I really don't know what you're talking about. We use chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery for cancer treatment. Everything else doesn't work. And, and that really kind of woke me up. And you know, at the point that I was offered permanent tenure, I accepted it twice and turned it down three times. And, and basically that was why I set up the alliance for Natural health back in 2002 as a vehicle for my life's work to really explore this connection of human beings, to work at changing the political system, the scientific and regulatory frameworks that were often constructs that would give power and control to certain groups of people. You know, you could argue a corporatocracy, this link between corporations and governments that was becoming ever more strong. And so that's the organization I set up in 2002, and I continue as its executive and scientific director, both in Europe, internationally, with our base in the UK as well as in the US and that journey continues. And of course, we're now at this incredibly interesting. I couldn't have forecast back in 2000 to where we would be now with, for example, biotechnology, with artificial intelligence, with the geopolitical shifts that we've seen and you know, let alone with social media and what's happened to the Internet. So it's a, this is a pivotal time. I, I honestly believe that those of us who are around and seeking to have an influence of some sort on the system around us, this is the moment we've been waiting for, John, and we're here.

Certainly, there certainly is a, there's an openness and awareness. We have a window of opportunity that we haven't had up to this point.

That's for sure correct, and probably more so in the US than anywhere else.

Yeah. All right. There's, there's several pieces that I want to dig into, Robert, but you, you mentioned a key phrase that really caught my ear, and that is the scientific framework and the regulatory framework that exists that, that has enabled this or has been created to facilit this unholy hegemony, if you want to call it that. But let's, let's talk a bit about the scientific framework, because we have these. In some ways we appear to have very different models of scientific understanding in agriculture and in human health and also in other places where we have innovators and pioneers who are pushing the cutting edge forward. And then we have what the majority practice and the two are worlds apart, literally exists, seem to exist in completely different worlds, completely different models of thought. How do we reconcile this and how should we think about the scientific framework that has been developed or that holds mainstream sway today?

Scientific framework ends up being a system that we use to understand what is happening around us, to better understand the world around us. And inevitably it is something of a join the dots picture that we make up in our Minds. So we have little pieces of information that come in that create a view that then policy and regulation and investment is all based on, on what that picture shows. And the difficulty is if you assume that the level of understanding that we have at any point in time is representative of a true or real picture of the world around us, then I would suggest, think again. And what, what we've seen is, is basically this system. You can only do very comprehensive studies that would be regarded as a high quality study. In other words, they would have high internal and, or external statistical validation. So they would, you know, essentially have statistical power for you to be able to make broad assumptions about the probability of that experimental system representing the real world. I mean, that's what confidence, that's what probability is all about. When we say we do something at a 95% confidence level, what we mean is that if you repeated that exact, exact experiment a hundred times, 95 out of a hundred, it would give you that result. However, what it doesn't tell you is that how alike or relevant that experimental system is to the real world. And as we see, I saw this in my time at Imperial College London, actually the, the way in which, when I, when I started doing research in the early 1990s, there was such a thing as blue sky research. In fact, some of the original work that we were doing on, on looking at multi trophic interactions was pure blue sky. To really understand, you know, our premise was the most complex ecosystems that we know about are rainforests and coral reefs. A agricultural monoculture is one of the simplest agro ecosystems you can get. And it's inherently unstable. You get a herbivore coming into that monoculture, you know, it will do pretty well because it doesn't have this multiple layer of, you know, predators and parasitoids and you know, hyper parasitoids that are regulating it. So the premise was, how do you then make an agro ecosystem more complex to make it more like a rainforest? If you look at a rainforest, you don't see broad scale defoliation going on yet you can see the representation of a broader community of herbivores by a million miles compared with what you see in a monoculture. Yet the whole system is imbalance. So how, how do you do that? So in the early days we could get research to do that. And then something really changed as we moved towards the late 1990s when corporate funding became dominant. You know, you had to start to do things that particular corporate funders wanted to do. And even funding that was going through governments was coming through from these corporations. And that starts to, if we go back to our join the dots image, trying to understand what the world really looks like and how it works, you start to see that we, we end up biasing our research towards certain things, often that are in the interests of certain groups of people, certain corporations, certain kinds of governments. So I believe that we're seeing an ever greater distortion through the scientific lens. And, and even if you look at the age old scientific method, this, this is a method that's been around actually for thousands of years. It was, you know, the ancient Greeks worked with it. This idea of, of observing something, then from that observation, developing a hypothesis, then creating an experiment to test that hypothesis, publishing it, putting it into, sharing it amongst your colleagues. This is the peer review system, arguing the hell out of it. This is the discourse process that is critical to see. You know, it's like putting a whole bunch of information into a colander and seeing what you can push through. And only truth comes through those little holes in the colander. And then you, you start to get a sense of what can stand up to scrutiny. At Imperial College once a month, we as postdocs used to have to present, one of us would be selected to present to all of our peers and all the top academics, these are some of the top ecologists in the world, in order that we could be torn apart by them. When I talk to people at universities these days around the world, I say, look, do you do any of this? I mean, what are you doing with discourse? No, no, no. It would be viewed as, you know, it doesn't sort of meet the criteria for being socially acceptable anymore. It exposes people too much and people who do better in public speaking do better in that kind of environment. But it's that, that environment is a, it's a, it's, you know, essentially being around friendly critics. That's how you process should work. All of those systems one by one have been systematically destroyed. And, and during the COVID pandemic we saw this like a catalyst being thrown into the equation of the decimation of that scientific process. So that's why I would argue we, we don't really have science which is nothing more than a tool now it becomes a tool that has a specific goal and that goal is often to benefit certain parties and disadvantage others. And it certainly doesn't give us a balanced view of how the world works or how different processes operate within this complex system.

I see some related pieces that appeared to me to be blindingly obvious in the agricultural domain Specifically, for many, the scientific method has been equated in their minds largely with single factor analysis, which does not lend itself to understanding ecosystems and understanding how these extremely multifaceted and multifactorial ecosystems relate with each other. And that creates enough noise that there is this constant refrain of correlation doesn't equal causation. And actually, I'll take a step back just a bit. I'm of the persuasion that the reason our agriculture has gone in the direction that it has over the last 70 or 80 years is in large part due to our intellectual property protection framework. In order to be able to protect ip, you need to have a documented mode of action, a mechanism. You need to be able to describe how and why something works. And you might get it wrong, but you still have a patent, you still have protection for it. And so the result has been that we have developed pesticides with a single mode of action, or genetically modified organisms with specific genes, or specific sets of genes that have been modified. And now in the domain of biostimulants and biocontrols, we are still going in the direction of having a specific bug for a specific disease, when we know that this is not how natural ecosystems work. They always work, as in, in the case of biologicals, they tend to work as a consortium, as a community. So if we had, in my opinion, if we had an intellectual property protection framework that facilitated the use of consortiums, the use of communities, rather than specific mechanisms, specific modes of action, we would be in a very different place. And our agricultural production systems today would look very different because there would have been different economic incentives or economic incentives to go in a different direction. So I've kind of given you a lot there, but single factor analysis, intellectual property protection around single modes of action. And this idea that just because there is a correlation doesn't mean there is a causation in biological systems. And so that tends to be this very dismissive conversation around the impact of biologicals when there is an abundance of evidence in the field, in the real world practice, that these tools do make a significant difference. So kind of giving you a lot there. What are your reactions?

Well, 100% you can draw. I mean, this was the very issue that we were working on in the 1990s with multi traffic interactions. We were always looking at multifactorial systems and trying to really understand that complexity. And you need to have multi layered complexity to create stability. Stability requires complexity. Simplicity is always going to create an unstable ecosystem. So for me, when I, when I transitioned from looking only at agriculture and Then move that thinking into healthcare. I thought, oh my God, this is exactly the same system here you have randomized controlled trials that if we think of the statistical systems that are used to measure effect so that you misinterpret, if you like, statistical significance for biological significance. That system actually came out of Rothamstad experimental station near Harpenden. That was, that we liaised with out of agricultural research that was done in the late 1800s and that's how analysis of variants was built. That was then put in the medical area into an RCT randomized control trial system that really took, became center stage in what was going to dominate in healthcare by falsely considering that a product that had gone through a RCT based assessment system, which is what FDA and drug regulators have been doing since, you know, in the US since 1938, that the system, you know, the Food and Drug and Cosmetic act came into play in the post World War II period when organic chemistry came to the fore. We started to see ever more, you know, organic molecules being used that could be patented. In the early days, the vast majority of them were based on natural molecules, but they had to put the patent on them in order to get the, the patent and that, that intellectual property protection. And, and now we, we have a system, I mean we've just, we have a paper in peer review at the moment where We've been studying 18 jurisdictions around the world, including the European Union and the United States, over 120 year timeline. In other words, a complete, you know, long view of the whole system. You can see that all these regulatory systems initially came into play in order to protect consumers or the environment. Now what they do is they often work against consumers, work against people and they work to protect particular interests. You know, we've seen BMJ clinical evidence that's now been disbanded because the results were so stunning. It, before it was disbanded, it had found that of the 3,000 or so medical interventions that it had investigated, no more than 10% of them were found to be beneficial. Some 50% of them, this is when you look at Wider data, some 50% of them were of unknown effectiveness. Yet we still call them safe and effective.

This goes back to. You mentioned a phrase a bit ago that caught my attention and that was the difference between biological significance and statistical significance.

Absolutely. I mean this is how statistics is, is used. And now of course we've got. I actually visited with the head of my research group about three months ago. Our labs at Imperial College, our labs used to have gas liquid chromatographs and all sorts of equipment to measure what's in plants and proper wet lab. And, and we had plants and insects. That's principally what we were studying. And there were other guys studying nematodes and other soil organisms and bacteria as well. The same labs still have the gas tanks and the, the sink there, but essentially all you see is rows of computer screens all around it. Essentially all the research is working in there. And you know, it's also increased in terms of the number of people. When you have a wet lab, you can't have too many people working in it for safety reasons. But all the work has moved to, in silico research. So they're all becoming modelers. So they're all already working on a synthetic reality. And that's why when you look at, I mean it was shocking for us to see it, we, you know, neither the head of my research group nor myself had imagined that might be the case. The glass houses that we used to grow all our plants in was stacked up high with all these bird boxes and other paraphernalia that had been used for all the field studies that had previously been going on that are now being taken out of the, the, the forest and the woodlands around the, the site and being put in those. And we were told from the gardener, Pete, who was there from our time, he said it's, it's an absolute shock, but all but one glass house is going to be taken out by a bulldozer in the next couple of weeks. So that, you know, the transition of how science is being done now with very few people really understanding the, the breadth and depth of it and what it implies or what in silico research is all about and how we move to a synthetic biology future. These are really important questions of the day that, that are really not being.

Discussed very widely, how science is being done now. So what you're describing in essence is that science is no longer in the field of the field, it's no longer grounded in physical reality.

It's, it's both essentially the models and the simulations are viewed as a, as a superior way of investigating what's happening in nature. We, we did a lot of modeling work, but all the modeling work was based on real world data points that we had spent months and months, sometimes years collecting and then the model would give us an understanding of the processes. Now it's viewed that you don't need that data collection step at all. That's just really resource intensive. And the concern that I have is it gives you a completely and utterly false view. You Know, we move ever closer to a way of evaluating nature in the same way that we might evaluate the financial systems that, you know, the financial systems that humans use do not exist in nature. You know, that, that resource allocation piece that we use this science of economics to understand is, is, is done. You know, it's divinely inspired in nature, but there is a, there is a movement of resources that keeps the system running. It's the same way when people say, right, you know, let's, let's abandoned livestock in agriculture. And you know, some of us go, wow, have you seen what animal poop does to, you know, soil microbes? You and I were just talking about that with poultry poop just before we came on. You take, take an element, nothing goes to waste in nature. So you, you, you take, you take that poop out of the equation and, but you know, as you, as you simulate and simulate, then you have layer upon layer of simulation until you are no longer looking at a, a model of reality. You're looking at a model of a model, the simulation of a simulation. And of course then you go, you know, look at Nick Bostrom. Are you familiar with Nick Bostrom's work, you know, on the simulation hypothesis? Elon Musk and others have picked this up and you know, he's, he's suggesting that, John, we could be living in a simulation now. You know, the view is that any advanced civilization would have so much computing power that there would be no ability to discern reality from a very high level simulation. And that, that's the journey that. This is why I think the transhumanist or the transhumanism and, and post human or post biological debate needs to be had now because we're sitting on this bifurcation point in which we either choose to leave behind nature, you know, and, and you know, let's shoot off to Mars and other planets and see if we can recreate some kind of form of, of life beyond it. Let's, let's not really look at how we can better integrate humans with nature on this biosphere because it's all gone too far and this sort of gloom and doom positioning that we increasingly hear and in my part, the way in which the climate change debate has, has monopolized other critical areas of environmental concern, particularly linked to biodiversity, you know, soil destruction, acidification of oceans, etc. Yeah, we're always kind of missing to.

Some degree, I think, the whole conversation around the development of AI and transhumanism. The reality is from, from my perspective, to some degree that ship has already sailed like the bottle has been opened. Where there, there is a portion, there is a segment of humanity that is already on that pathway and happy to be there and intend to accelerate as rapidly as possible.

Correct. We are fascinated by technology. You look at any, any kid given many kids, I, I try to do the, the opposite with my own kids. You give them a stick and a leaf and a stone and vis a vis some Lego blocks or, you know, definitely a remote control motor car. They, they are very often drawn to technology. It is the, you know, it's what makes us such phenomenal tool makers. But that obsession can go too far. And, you know, we, if you look, for example, at this particular problem that the Maha Commission in the US is trying to explore now, why are American kids getting increasingly unhealthy? Why are autism rates going through the roof? Why is it 1 in 30 kids are now somewhere on the autism spectrum disorder spectrum? And, you know, these are really, really complex questions. And I, like you, I've had a chance to read the Maha Commission's first report. I personally now take a risk in saying this on John Kemp's podcast, but I don't think it goes nearly far enough. I think the. We talked about multifactorial issues. I don't think they've got all the factors in there. You know, the, the cultural change. You know, we, we're being killed by culture now, and nature could be the savior, but only if we can understand the value it brings and, and what reconnection with that is all about. And I believe it probably needs to start with the food that we eat, because the food that we eat is the most intimate way that we experience the external environment.

Robert I want to come back to this conversation of the intersection of human health and agriculture. But before I lose sight, I don't want to lose sight of something. I want to go back to something you said just a little bit ago, where you were describing the modeling and where we now have so much of our science and research is based on modeling. And of course, all of this has just been accelerated to a remarkable degree recently by AI. And we're talking about AI developing new drugs and new treatment methodologies. And on and on the list goes, what are the practical applications? Or we've been having this somewhat abstract conversation, but what are the practical implications of this modeling work taking precedence in the average person's life, in an average farmer's life?

My sense is we can fix it. Now, I'm certainly not going to be a Luddite in saying that we don't need modeling. Modeling is incredibly helpful. But what we need to be able to do is to have real data points that allow us to check whether our models are giving us a good enough view of, of reality because they're based on, on a reality that's if you like the baseline. So my sense is if that modeling is being used to create a new pesticide or even a new biological, that where within the, the, the, the reason for that, that biological existing is, isn't the entire web in which it exists within a natural system, then I would say there could be some severe limitations of it. You know, it's very easy to create a, a model that, that delivers a result that is very impressive, that, you know, impresses shareholders, that allows investment to take place, that allows a product to be produced. But we've seen a thousand times over very, very promising pesticides or drugs just deliver, you know, very poor performance in the field. So models are very useful. They, they can accelerate dramatically, particularly with AI, the speed at which we can get views. But they're only as good as the models. And we need the fit of those models equates to natural systems.

That's the key phrase. They're only as good as the models. And the piece that I don't understand is how can you accurately model a biological ecosystem when we readily acknowledge that we understand less than 10% of what goes on in that ecosystem?

That's the problem. So what we do is we take certain elements that we see to be major influences and we forget all those others. You know, and it may be right that, that, you know, let's say there's a hundred different influences in a particular ecosystem. In reality, there are going to be many more than that. But it's a user a couple of.

Orders of magnitude short.

Yeah, but it allows us to work with percentages. So if there were a hundred processors, there still may only be, say, 20% of those that are really, really big factors. And the problem is that if we then miss the other 80% of them working together, those, those effects are much more important. So we, we see exactly the same thing happening in human health care. We see, you know, if you, if you look at a randomized control trial that looks to find the statistical impact of an intervention, that specific therapeutic effect, we look to see if that is statistically significant. But we know that there are a whole bunch of other things that are happening at the same time. The placebo effect, the Hawthorne effect, that's the effect of, you know, when you go and see a doctor or Practitioner, how other changes in your behavior may influence your health. And any good physician will also, even if they've come to deal with knee pain, will probably look at other parts of your system. You'll have concomitant treatments. You'll have a statistical effect that we call regression to the mean. All of these things act together. And we showed this would be about 18 years ago, the problem that when the head of the chair of complementary medicine that was arguing randomized control trial should be the only way of evaluating complementary medicine, when he himself, Professor Edzara, showed his diagram of all the effects, he said, look, we're just looking at specific therapeutic effect. And he had all these other effects showing. And I said, but Professor Ernst, what, what an individual experiences is the totality of effect. Let's call it total effect, the effect of all of these things together. And that's the problem that we see both in agricultural research and in human research, that we don't have a great enough understanding of the huge number of interacting factors, even when we try and isolate them because we see a bigger effect level, you know, they're still representing only a part of that effect. And the other thing we generally see is that most studies look at a particular effect at a given place and time. These are little snapshots in time that when the environment changes, the, the way in which those factors interact with each other also change dramatically. So often we're, you know, it's why research that took place 20 years ago probably has maybe much less relevance today.

Yeah.

So two thoughts based on what you were just describing. One is you said that 20% of the factors are considered that are contributing to the model can be considered as macro drivers. They're, they're, they're major drivers. They drive a great deal of the influence. And our observation in biological ecosystems, I would suggest, tends to support that. That can be true in, let's call it in average circumstances or inconsistent circumstances. But when you have extreme circumstances, exposure to fire, extreme drought, extreme various climactic or major ecological impacts, that all of a sudden those 20% factors that drive the majority of the outcomes are now displaced by others. And there are other factors which take precedence. And so this, this is another example where in my mind, the model is so disassociated from reality that it cannot capture the way natural ecosystems will accurately, will actually respond.

Correct. Spot on. And also some of these factors, we have very little understanding of what the impact of, if you like, let's call it exposure or dose has on the system. So when we look at say plant chemistries, nature very, very rarely delivers a linear dose response. In fact, it really never does. You know, we used to think it was typically a sigmoid, an S shaped dose response. Now we see this, this feature of hormesis being a very, very common process. You know, whether you're looking at the effects within the wet, the way in which a, a tannin for example, or plants, what we think of as a plant secondary metabolite can slow down the growth of a herbivore to bring it in line with what it was experienced during evolution. And so that the entire system of predators and parasites parasitized that keep that herbivore and Czech are imbalanced. So we, we, some of the work we did showed that for example, the, the loss of, of plant secondary metabolites, the deliberate breeding out of them to improve palatability and to make food less bitter and you know, more bland, essentially was accelerating the life cycle of specific herbivores. And you know, if you just look for example at an aphid that might have a life cycle time of say 21 days to shorten it, just to say 18 or 19 days, which happens through reducing the amount of plant secondary compounds, also increasing the sugars content. So these guys are feeding on the, on the phloem and the SAP and that sugar just in the way it gives kids eating their diet pops or sorry, their sugary pops, sodas, adhd. It does pretty much the same to the developing aphids and so they develop more quickly and once they develop through two or three days more quickly, that few hundreds of thousands of years of evolution no longer works and the whole system goes out of kilter. And that's, that natural enemy complex just breaks down.

Yeah, that means you have geometric changes in the population dynamics for the rest of the season.

Correct.

You know, it's just an interesting, a comment that I'd like to make on that is we've lost sight of the fact that we could take these plants in the opposite direction. Instead of selecting for fewer of these compounds, we could manage nutrition and microbiome for optimal health and solve the problem more easily and more readily and, and improve the human health outcomes and the ecosystem outcomes all at the same time.

Yeah, heritage, heritage, you know, varieties are a big part of that movement. And you know, we, we, there's a much, much more we could do to protect seed stock, to increase the amount of cultivation. One of the reasons that that's not seen as popular is because the, the so called yield, if you measure it just in terms of you know, product yield by weight, for example, seems to be less than conventional crops in many cases. But that's not the case when you look at the effects of pest pressure. And if you look at quality and yield from a nutritional standpoint, let alone a health standpoint. So we look at the entire, you know, we've got to look at the way that these agro ecosystems connect with the health system and with the economic system to really understand whether they have value or not. And we're not doing that because we are famous, you know, about putting everything into silos and then not connecting the silos.

Yeah. So what you said at the beginning just brought me back to another, another dimension of science from a modeling perspective. I'm not letting go of this bone just quite yet. And that is just as in the, the Brassica example, the direction that we've chosen to gone in from a breeding perspective and what that demonstrates in our lack of systemic thinking. One of our observations has been that when we manage plant nutrition and microbiome to optimize plant health, then plant expression changes, the ecosystem changes the plant and microbial dynamics change in ways that we don't fully understand and are just beginning to hopefully be able to measure to some degree. And so my point is simply that we have a lot of this modeling work that is based on unhealthy plants and unhealthy ecosystems. And the real is the majority of our plant physiology work that has been done in laboratories for the last 60, 70 years has been done with no consideration for the microbiome. And the microbiome component has been ignored when we now understand that that is largely guiding and influencing plant phytohormone responses. And just plant physiology to a large degree is shaped by its interactions with the microbiome. So that means that a great deal of the historical work now needs to be called into question. And to a comment that you made earlier, how accurately do laboratory conditions represent real world conditions? And we're discovering that they haven't historically. And so if the models are based on historically inaccurate data and information, then how useful will they be really going forward?

Which is why you need to look at the data from the local conditions. You mentioned something very interesting about plant expression, epigenetics. What we know is that plants that have had several generations that are growing in a specific environment really release a pattern of gene expression that's completely different from the same cultivar that's growing in different environments. We took a so called resistant Brassica from Horticulture Research International, one of the Big international horticultural researchers that, that produces resistant crops for export around the world. And we took this mini coal cultivar that's widely regarded in northern Europe as being resistant, took it to East Africa and initially we, we thought it would work very well in the highlands because you know the interesting thing, the highlands of Kenya, the cultural changes during the British colonial times meant that they brought all these European fruits and vegetables and basically lost a lot of their own traditional knowledge plus their own traditional foods for these Western ones. But they were getting plagued with all sorts of different pests increasingly in, in the Kenyan highlands. So we, we took these, these plants out very quickly, realized that they had no resistance at all in Kenya, whereas they had great resistance in northern Europe. And it turns out it wasn't until it wasn't to do with the soil microbiome or any of the natural enemy complexes. It was to do with the effects of ultraviolet light. So the intensity of the equatorial sun at high altitude was breaking down. We could only see this with electron microscopy, was breaking down the wax platelets that were the primary resistance mechanism. But during my awesome story. Yeah. During our work that we were doing there, we met people who were doing PhDs and other research on indigenous plants, which is something that we felt was incredibly important. And you know, they were finding that some of these traditional foods were now almost absent from any cultivation in Kenya. And the only places where you could find them was, was on roadside verges for example. They, you know, they were part of the so called weed population. And of course, let's remember, a weed is largely a plant whose virtues we've yet to understand. I remember, I remember hearing that in, when I had a weed science lecture in my masters and I was asked the question by the weed scientists, anyone here give me a definition of weed? I thought, I thought I was being really sophisticated here, put my hand up and said a plant considered undesirable in a given time and place by human beings. I thought that was a really comprehensive definition. And he said no, no, no, no. It's a plant whose virtues have not been understood by humans. That's awesome. But, but yeah. So epigenetics, this way in which we can condition gene expression patterns that are specific to that locality. And if we're doing modeling, my goodness. Because we, the amount that we know about how gene expression patterns change according to the environment means that there is a huge risk that our models won't be relevant to that particular part of, you know.

Most of certainty.

Yeah.

I wrote an article several months ago on the, the use of technology to facilitate regenerative agriculture and how technology itself can be designed to either have a regenerative impact or not. And now it's a bit much to get into here. But Robert, there's another important conversation I want to get into. You brought up human, human health, human health impacts on the first MAHA Commission report. And we've discussed that we have this, this window of opportunity. And you know, many people in agriculture are feeling very defensive that we know that these pesticides are safe and they have. The regulatory agencies wouldn't permit us to use things at unsafe levels. And the discussion that we've been having in some part is really a discussion of questioning the foundational principles of how we think about these things and how we approach science and testing and ecosystems perspective generally. And the, one of the paradigms that keeps coming forward is this idea of LD50, lethal dose 50. Just how we think about pesticide safety and how we think about biotechnology, how we think about the introductions of MRNA vaccines into livestock, how we're thinking about the introductions of genetically modified organisms into soil microbiomes. We, in, in many ways we are, we're opening, we're going in new directions and we're. Arguably even the use of pesticides will last 70 years could be argued to be a relatively new or recent development. How should we think about safety from an ecosystems perspective rather than from a statistical perspective?

Well, let's start by looking at LD 50s. I mean, we've got. This was a debate that we were using in the 1980s to challenge that it was completely and utterly redundant in terms of looking at the impact either to, for environmental health or human health. It is only an acute toxicity measure. And it's only an acute toxicity measure that's directly relevant to the specific animals that are being used to experiment with. And there are many cases in which the most common models used are rodent models using mice and rats in particular, that they don't equate because of specific genetic differences, but that closely with, with human beings in the first place. But, but the most important fact is that you're, you're looking at an acute model that, that determines how much exposure you need to be able to kill 50% of your population. The reality is it tells you zero, literally nothing at all about delayed or chronic toxicity. Most of the concern we now know from environmental toxicology really comes because of the effects of mixtures to which we're exposed. So the principal toxicological method used by regulatory agencies is still let's look at one chemical at a time. So while we see for example, Secretary Kennedy focusing attention on food dyes. If you look at Jack for the, you know, the, the UN committee that looks at food additives or any of the FDA assessments or any of the EU assessments, many of these, for some of those compounds go back to the 1970s and 1980s where there was a big focus on acute toxicity, not on chronic toxicity. And so it's this sub lethal daily exposure, sometimes completely subclinical effects for days or weeks before any effect is caused, combined with the effects of mixtures, which we never look for. I mean, there is no regulatory agency that's really looking at the effects of mixtures. The closest we get to it is, for example, if you look at the, the work that's now going on on PFAS compounds which, which also in pesticides, but they're also in nonstick pans and they're in waterproof clothing and they're, you know, in automotive synthetic lubricants and they're pretty much everywhere. You know, that is an entire group the per polyfluoroalkyl substances, the entire group that share one thing, which is this bond between carbon and fluorine. And for me it's like, my God, it was 30 years ago that we're fighting about a group of compounds that had this very persistent bond between carbon and chlorine, organic chlorine compounds. And you know, those have been ditched. Now we see exactly the same repeating process. You know, when we fought those battles back in the 1980s, they said, okay, we will get rid of aldrin and deodren. And then they kept heptachlor and clawdane for some time longer. Right. Then for other uses they said, ah, well, let's use, you know, organophosphate compounds like chlorper, phosph and oh, but it's not, it's not as stable. So we're going to have to use it a lot more without any attempt to look at what that chronic exposure would do to the ecosystems around it. And I know some work that was being done in Western Australia only a few years after they banned organic chlorines was already showing that leaching of chlorpyrifos from agriculture and from termite control was creating even more problems because it was, the chlorprophos was more mobile in the water systems, the water courses and it was, you know, affecting all these wetlands and other, you know, mainly water, marine and freshwater systems. So yeah, we, we, we need massively to grow up in terms of understanding toxicology. We, we need to understand, we need to create new models for looking at the effects of complex mixtures. That's what we're exposed to. Most of us exposed to 20,000 or so industrial chemicals every day. And we have, you know, you take a few food dyes out of the equation, I can bet your bottom dollar it's not going to have a huge impact on children's health.

So I have, I guess the bottom line question is, from your perspective, how significant is the contribution of agricultural chemicals, specifically as a subset of industrial chemicals? And I think as, as a part of that question, the way you framed kind of long term systemic exposure, you framed it in terms of days or weeks, but the reality is there are lifetime exposures. And also, I suppose one of the things that really caught my attention was a study that was published, I say recently, it might have been half a dozen years ago, where they described the multi generational health effects on mice of glyphosate exposure. This might have been Serlini, I don't recall for certain, but where the parent generation fed grain laced with glyphosate at permissible limits, had some limited health effects, but not significant. But then the third, the second, the third, particularly the third and the fourth generation had extremely severe effects even though the second and third and fourth generation had a clean diet.

Yeah.

And so I look at the public health epidemic that we have and I asked, I think it's worth asking the question, how much of this was created 50 years ago by the exposures that our grandparents had in their adult life and how much of the implications of what we are doing today is yet to be discovered or yet to be determined in 100 years from now? Because remember, in many cases we're not looking. We don't really want to know.

Look, I think that is absolutely correct. In addition to that, the model that separates out the active ingredients from the excipients, the adjuvants that are used in the formulations, is another problem. And of course, Seralini's work has also shown that it is not just the actives, the glyphosate and the breakdown product ampa, but it is the other excipients that work together as another mixture to which we're exposed. Yes, I think there is no doubt we can start to see, see from the science of epigenetics that, that some of these effects can be passed down, you know, transgenerationally. We, we're babes in the wood. We, we, we've never had any previous experience of being exposed to so many new compounds. And that's why for us, this concept of creating a separation between new to nature substances versus substance to which we have had evolutionary exposure is extremely relevant because we have all sorts of detoxification, biotransformation mechanisms within us and agro ecosystems and ecological systems also, if they are allowed to respond naturally, have built in mechanisms for dealing with natural toxins in the way that we, we don't with humans. And in fact what's interesting is that we, we're starting to see the emergence of work that shows us that some of this chemical, this, that there is an advantage, an evolutionary advantage to having some selection pressure from chemical stresses in the natural environment. And in fact the way in which many natural products work. If we look at the benefits of curcuminoids in turmeric, or we look at resvera, resveratrol in grape skins, or you know, Japanese knotweed, for example, the way that the primary mechanism seems to be a chemical stressor mechanism, and one of the reasons it is being seen, particularly through disciplines like psycho neuroimmunology, that you know, bring together the interaction between all these super systems, that's how we work. But not, you know, medicine tends to break us down into individual systems. We need to look at them all together. They'll say that the, the many of the health problems that young people face to today are the result of lack of specific types of stressor that we are adapted to having. So we need a stressor to create resilience. If we live in cotton wool environments and don't have those stressors, same thing we see it in agriculture. We see if a plant does not receive any herbivore stress at all, or pathogen stress, it is less resilient than one that has received that stress. You know, we saw that years ago with copper fungicides. You know, if you look at the development of salvestrals, these, you know, specific polyphenol compounds that can have very protective effects in terms of dealing with pathogen stress. They produce these natural compounds that will protect against herbivores or pathogens. They're also very beneficial when humans have them. But when you use copper fungicides, you kill the fungal spores. When those spores germinate, the hyphae penetrate the skin and trigger the production of those sylvestrals. So we need to find mechanisms by which we can produce stresses that we are adapted to. So yeah, new to nature, if we look at the field of nanomaterials, for example, seeing this massive growth of synthetic nanoparticles, of which microplastics are a part of that equation. And if you look at what's happened in terms of regulation in this area in Europe, they've decided that anything, any material along one or more of its dimensions is between 1 micron and 100 microns, will be regarded as a nanomaterial. And if you want to put that into the food supply, you need to be able to prove that safe. And so we, we started this debate, I don't know, it was probably 10 years ago with the regulators in Europe, said, hold on, do you want us to send you a list of, of all the natural substances, materials, nearly every single one of them is a nanomaterial. And you know, every hormone is, you know, peptides and you know, vitamins, and these are all nanomaterials one way or another. And, and we even see, you know, self assembly, you know, nano sized droplets being produced by the bile inside us. And so it's very easy for them to set up a regulatory fence that prevents innovation from happening, which can be quite a problem. And the guys who then producing the synthetic compounds have got the bucks in their back pocket to navigate and overcome that regulatory fence and they get their product to market and then some of the natural stuff gets actually locked out. So that's how these regulatory ring fences can actually work against us. But really critical decisions to determine what we are, what we've evolved around and what we haven't evolved around.

Robert, so far we've largely been having a conversation around where have we gone wrong and where are things that we might reconsider. But I'd like to get your perspective on where is the opportunity? Where is the opportunity for? We specifically have spoken a bit about the impact on agriculture, the impact of agriculture and the farming systems and methodologies and tools and technologies we use on human health. Where are the opportunities with this window of opportunity with Maha, where are the opportunities to really shift that?

I think if we can fundamentally start to use nature as our instructor, as our teacher to understand how we can make systems, you know, we are a very complex biological organism that's completely codependent on natural ecosystems, that fundamental premise is not widely understood, it's not recognized, it's to a degree assumed by some. But when you don't realize how complex those systems are and which parts of it we really are finding indispensable. So the economic model that we use to determine how we're going to allocate resources, I believe that is the purpose of economics, completely has the wrong value system because it doesn't use an ecological system to Value worth or you know, value in, in the system. And two examples would be, or three examples would be soil, air and water. Another one might be sunlight.

Exactly.

All of the energy that comes into the biosphere comes, nearly all of it. There's a little bit that comes from geothermal energy and electromagnetism from the, but the vast majority of it, even the chemical energy that is produced by animals or the photosynthetic energy produced by plants, obviously coming from the sun. So when you look at the current plans for bioengineering to start to reflect using aluminium in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space to cool the earth and get through global warming, I go, hold on guys, this is a bit like the problem I face when I take my 240 volt, you know, electric toothbrush to America and plug it into 110 volt power supply. I can't charge my toothbrush. You know, there's not enough energy to, to charge my toothbrush. So I, sorry, I have to go manual America. But, but you know, if we don't understand how important incoming solar radiation is or how valuable the soil is or the air and the water is, we don't give it enough, we don't value it sufficiently to look after it sufficiently. And, and so the economic model has not caught up with what we know about our codependency on natural systems. So using nature as our teacher to, you know, whether we're looking at, let's take two areas that we've been talking around, agriculture and healthcare. You know, in many respects the systems that break down in agriculture and in healthcare are often attributed to a disconnection from a natural system. And we try to look for new silver bullets. We try to look for new technologies believing that if we innovate sufficiently in the technological area, we will come up with a solution instead of going guys, the more we can make it like a rainforest, the more stable the system will be, the better we'll all be. The fewer inputs. We used to very much when we started to become frustrated with, with labels such as the organic label as a, you know, we were very early critics of the fact that it was just a free from agricultural system. You were just taking synthetic compounds out of it. But there was no effort.

That that's why regeneration, there's no assurance of quality.

No absolutely, let alone sustainability. And everyone assumed organic meant sustainable. And we were saying from an academic perspective early on that absolutely not. And, and that's why many of those early trials where big growers would just, you know, compare their organic carrots against their conventional carrots. And they'd say look, there's not much yield difference. And then they'd be the muscle to put that out and say look, there's no difference between organic, I mean we were jumping up and down. So yeah, we, we, we have to reappraise everything that we do. And if we could do it through an ecological lens, a lens of nature, I think we could be much closer to finding solutions that work in the long term.

This has been a fascinating conversation. What important topics mean? I'm almost hesitant to ask this question because I think you and I could have a conversation for about four hours. But what are the important topics that we've missed talking about so far?

I think the arrival of new genomic techniques, GMO version 2. Essentially this notion that we can use, we've moved in biology. We've moved from using a kind of anatomical lens, a cell biology lens, a molecular lens, and now we're using a genetic lens. And you know, there are going to be other lenses that we're going to need to use later on. They will include looking at the energetic value, the resonance, the quality quantum biology side of, of nature and all the rest of it. We haven't got there yet. There's the beginnings of, of that work. So as soon as we start tweaking the genome, we are literally playing God, but we don't have enough the same level of understanding that God does. And you know, for example, the, it's.

Like trying to make jewelry with a sledgehammer and anvil.

That's a very good analogy. Yeah. And it, you know, when, how, how many years ago was it that we all came to the conclusion that what we had previously heard was junk DNA? You know, 98 of the human genome is junk DNA. Realizing actually this non, all these non coding areas are absolutely essential. So when you insert a new trait somewhere in this genetic ticker tape, you then have a completely unpredictable non local effect on another part of the genome that change the pattern of gene expression. The trait could be produced in a natural system through natural animal breeding or plant breeding. Guys, you can use it and you don't even need to tell people about it. Won't even appear on the label. Now that is, that is devious, you know, in the, in the sense that everything would suggest that the non local effects of that kind of genetic alteration could have untold consequences that could have multi generational transgenerational effects. And to, to suggest that it won't has got to be very, very naive at the least. So the arrival of synthetic biology as well I think is another huge area that we, you know, and of course the fact that Covid was used as the COVID to bring all of this in. The fact that bored cow, you know, made it to market in the United States, telling with very lovely marketing, you know, behind it, that this is beautiful vegan milk and it's producing the same protein as in natural cow's milk. I mean that is fiction. It is absolute fiction. Because, you know, as you may know, John Fagan from HRI has studied this and found 94 compounds in bored cow milk that are unknown to nature. Because, because these are, you know, this is a, a modified yeast that is producing casein, but it's producing a bunch of other things that we don't know about as well until you start evaluated. So this biotech machine, this desperate desire to try and to see a problem, sometimes exaggerate a particular type of problem while ignoring another bigger problem, like loss of biodiversity on the planet, for example, and then to come up with a whizzy bang, you know, solution in the form of a patented biotech solution. I like that, a whizzy bang solution.

I'm going to keep that one.

Please feel free to use that. No Peyton on that one. So I mean these, these, this is a, this is a scary future and if it's done with the ignorance of the public simply because they haven't been told and they've got a bunch of regulators saying, guys, don't worry, we've got this covered, it's the same. It's the same whether you do it through nature or through new genomic techniques.

Easy argument is, well if it's the same then let's just do it the old fashioned way.

Yeah, I wish. But there's certain people who want to make money out of doing it the new way. Yeah. So yeah, time, time to wake up to all of these changes and time to ensure that the people can have a voice again that the erosion, if you look at the globally all the democracy indices are going the wrong way towards ever more authoritarian and totalitarian government around the world. So I think the current score from the Economist is that there's only about 6 or 8% of nations on the planet today that have true democracies.

Wow. And considering sub 200 countries, that's a very small number. That's 15 or 20 countries around the world or less.

Yeah.

You know, I'll wrap this with one thought. Many in agriculture are understandably unhappy or frustrated with, with the state of technology and with what is happening with Maha and just the whole. They feel stuck. They feel stuck because they, they've become familiar with a chemical toolbox that they're comfortable with that is easy to use and they've been told that it's fine for many years. And now that message is shifting and we're being told that it's problematic. And so it's very easy to. When you feel your, your safety and what you're familiar with being threatened, it's very easy to react to that and to just automatically, to just, to just take the default position of whatever is threatening me is, is inherently and automatically wrong. And I read a couple dozen books on toxicology and I'm persuaded that if any farmer read what I've read around the impacts that these compounds have on human systems and on ecosystems, they would probably be much less certain of their position.

Look 100%. 100%. I think time for a complete re evaluation of the way in which information is communicated. The reality on pesticides there is, as you say, more than enough data to suggest that the net harm is greater than the benefit. However, you can point to specific research papers that say the opposite. I would suggest that what people need to do is look at the funding sources. This is what, when we talked about this being a window of opportunity, the fact that for the first time we see one of the most powerful governments in the world saying, do you know what? There's a problem here with transparency and there's a problem with the conflicts of interest. One of the reasons that those farmers are being fed a view that still makes sense to them, that there is a net benefit rather than a net harm, is because they're being given a selective slice of all the available information. So the information that you have read in those six books does not turn up in their email systems. It's not shown to them in any way. So, yeah, we need to understand fundamentally the war that we're involved in today is a war of information in which information completely depicts, you know, the, the human mind is a blank canvas and we just are conditioned by the information we receive as children, as adults, as, as in the particular line of work that we're in. And we, we tend to equate a belief that we have with truth, when in fact beliefs and truths can be completely and utterly different. All we look for is a consistent logic structure that shows the information that we have resonates with that belief. And if we feel that that information resonates, we say we have found truth and that's why we have so many people, including people who worked as, work as sales agents for the agrochemical companies who are selling these products to farmers honestly believe that they're doing the right thing because they only have a selective slice of information. So we need to become very, very resourceful in terms of the information that we look for. That's one of the jobs that we as a non profit in the alliance for Natural Health. We, you know, we've just done a piece on, on GLP1 receptor agonists, you know, weight loss jazz and we've literally just put into an article all the stuff that is absolutely categorically well known about these GLP1 receptor agonists that is on information leaflets, that's on government websites, but it's not landing in the feeds of the people who are using them and there's a lot of people getting very ill and the potential long term consequences. Actually it's one of the things that's in the Maha Commission report when they look at over medicalization, it's one of the over medicalized problems that they foresee. So it's good to see that's in there. So yeah, let's be very wary of where the information is coming from. Let's recognize that governments over the last few decades have really gone to bed with specific corporations and in many situations act as a mouthpiece for the benefit of those corporations. So you, we need to cultivate this view of, go out and search for independent views that don't necessarily come from government and see if there's coherence. Also understand that many of these issues that we deal with are so complex that there is no black or white. There is no one truth and one lie. We're living in such a polarized environment that we've got to understand the nuances of the shades of gray and the lack of understanding we have of these complex situations and sometimes just put up with a degree of uncertainty. But with that knowledge of the potential uncertainty, let's see what works at a pragmatic, at an empirical level, which means really understanding what works in the field, whether in agriculture or in the clinic, in healthcare, that's what we could do a whole lot better than we are.

Thank you Robert. I think from that perspective, understanding that biological ecosystems constantly exist and interact on a spectrum rather than a poor yes, no world. But you know, when we look at things from the foundational principle perspectives we ask, we should ask the question of trying to understand the root causes and understanding that we don't get headaches because we have an aspirin deficiency. We don't have poor health because we have a medicine deficiency, and we don't have disease and insect problems in our fields because we have a pesticide deficiency. When we try to address those foundational root causes now, we can have a very different conversation.

100%. We're on the same page. John, thank you.

Robert.

Thanks for being here. Thank you for sharing your work.

Thank you so much. What a pleasure to talk to you.

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