Episode 156: Data-Driven Regeneration with Jonathan Lundgren

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of great conversations related to soil health and plant health and improving biodiversity. Today I'm back with a previous guest, someone who I have a great amount of admiration and respect and appreciation for for all the work that he and his team have continued to do. And that's John Lundgren from Ecdiosis. Jonathan, thank you for being here. Thanks for all the work you're doing. We. Last time you were here, we had a great conversation around some of the challenges that pesticide research and some of the historical work that you'd done. And I think it was a year or two after our conversation you launched the Thousand Farms initiative. And I've been watching that with a lot of interest. So why don't you catch us up to date, tell us a little bit about what you've been up to and all the good stuff that's going on.

Yeah. Oh, life isn't boring, it's not dull. I'll tell you that. We, yeah, once it gets to that.

Point, it's time to do something different.

Yeah, yeah, we, we kind of saw that there was a lot of farms that were doing some really amazing things. But we're scientists, right. And, and, and I thought that there needed to be data behind it that that could help, that science had a role to play in this whole thing that, that we could take and understand what these farmers were creating, put numbers behind it so that people that had never really experienced that before could say that there was some credibility behind these farmers claims about regenerative food systems. But what I didn't, I mean, I think in my gut I probably knew this had to be a big study, but I didn't quite understand how big it had to be in order to describe in, in an empirical fashion a continent's food system. That's what we ended up setting.

Pretty big bite.

It was a pretty big bite. I mean, we've been on 35 food systems of cropping systems at this point. Point five plus livestock systems, depending on how you want to carve those up, I guess. And our teams have intimately seen and, and measured this country's food system. It's. I don't know that that's ever happened before.

Yeah, I don't think so. What was the, what was the inspiration behind it? What was the, what was the motivation to evaluate so many different farms in so many different ecosystem contexts?

Well, we, I wanted to know, does regenerative agriculture really work? Is this, you know, I self assess right I'm, I'm, I wish I was always right, but I'm not. And, and, and when I'm not. Right. Yeah, I, I don't, I don't like that I have to have a system in place to kind of self assess so that I know that what it is that I'm feeling and experiencing is real, that it stands up. And science can do that. Right. That's where, that's the scientific method and what it's supposed to do when it's done. Well, yes, it can help, it can help in that. And I want, and so I thought that science had a real role to play here because there was a lot of claims and we're constantly being inundated with claims and information and boasting about what's possible. So much so that it's really hard to know what's real and what's not anymore.

And.

I didn't know that there was a whole lot of other scientific teams and I don't mean to be cocky in this, but I didn't feel like they were really connecting with the issue. And that was leading to spurious outcomes. Right. This was leading to global food policies that weren't reflecting what was really happening on the ground. It was, it was resulting in a missing interpretation of, of vast data sets that were done on experiment farms that weren't best management practices. And so I, The Thousand Farms is a very different style of science than what you typically see.

Now one of what, one of the things that I appreciated about the Thousand Farms initiative is that in many cases I'm of the persuasion that what we see as being normal, what we see as being common is very far removed from what is optimal and what is common and what is normal has been the basis for all of our scientific, on much of our, the scientific understanding that we've developed of how do these systems actually work? Well, they work in a certain way when photosynthesis is at a certain level and microbiology at a certain level. But when those parameters matters change, then the system changes in some significant ways that we don't really understand because we're not looking for it, we're not paying attention.

Yeah. And, and when we focus so much on keeping the current system alive or supported, then that stifles the innovation of that system. And, and where the innovation comes from is often the fringes. It's the wackos out there that are trying something that everybody else says shouldn't be happening. And so sometimes I think of us as the X files of agriculture.

50 year old stuff all right, so what was. Did you have any expectations of what you hoped to come out of it or what you hoped to discover?

You know, I've been, I've been on these farms before, right? I mean before Regenerative Ag was around. You know, Gabe and I were friends and Gail folk or I've been to his farm. Dwayne Beck was a huge. The burns is. I mean a number of these folks have, have been. And so it was really putting data behind what I had experienced on these farms in a way that captures what's special about those farms without robbing it. Like without me coming in and telling them what to do. The Thousand Farms initiative is a much humbler approach to science. It says scientists were never meant to be the experts on farming. We were always meant to be servants and that the farmers are experts at farming.

There's a lot of farmers who hear that phrase and say we wish we could work with more people who had that perspective.

Well, sign up, love to see your farm and learn alongside you from you because. And that's been, you know, so yeah. Does the data show it? Oh my gosh, John. The data shows us the, that regenerative. The potential of regenerative food systems in solving planetary scale problems exceeds any other opportunity. If we were to convert the US croplands and rangelands over to fully regenerative production systems, we would store seven years worth of our carbon emissions entirely per year. No, that's in, in sum. So this would just get the whole thing started first off, it would reduce those emissions to all. It becomes a sink and, or instead of a source of emissions. And so the comp. The, the mathematics behind this becomes very complicated. But just on the. How much so the carbon is in the soil. Seven years worth of annual emissions. When you compare that to the next best option, some technological solution, the results are laughable compared to what our food system is capable. What could we do with seven years worth of emissions?

You're about to get into a topic that I feel very edgy about because the whole carbon markets and the carbon marketplaces is a dynamic where I see farmers getting squeezed once more. But before we go there, let's, I want to understand the context a little bit better. How many, how many farms have you looked at so far and across what regions?

1400 farms we've been on over the last three years. And then our scientific teams. This isn't just like a parachute in, parachute out. We come out there, we visit the farms, we talk with the farmers, we listen to them, we measure the farms These are some of the best measured farms, like ever. We're, and then we also gather social data and economic data at the end of the season yields, things like this. But we're measuring carbon, we're measuring all forms of biodiversity on these farms. And then we give a 35 page book to each farmer at the end of the season that explains what we saw on their farm as well as, as what we're finding on other farms within their region and food system. And so it kind of contextualizes it a little bit and says, hey, these are some of the things that other farmers are trying that seem to be really helping and in improving this particular aspect of their soil. And this is what your numbers are at. There's no judging in this. Right. We're in this mess together.

It gives you a comparative index.

Sure does. Sure does. And it's free. We've been able to keep it free and we love that aspect of it too. I thought at the start of this, you know, and I think you're probably a data driven guy and I'm a data driven guy and I thought the data was what, what was going to matter the most out of this whole thing. It does, right? It does. But what is probably the most important outcome of this study is the relationships. And I, I didn't always understand how important it was for us to, for these farmers that are risking everything, they're, they're trying something different and sometimes they lose their family connections and their community connections and they're, they're working hard. And I didn't understand how important it was that for just people to feel seen and heard and, and that as a scientist, that was part of my job, was just to listen and, and be there. Right. So, yeah, we don't know what we're going to find on their farm. I don't care whether you're conventional, whether you're regenerative, whether you're biodynamic or permaculture or what. When we leave your farm, I hope you know that we care about you and we care about your farm and we care about your family.

Jonathan, it occurs to me that as a scientist, perhaps you need to develop a way to define and measure relationships and the quality of relationships.

Yeah, yeah. How do you do that? What do you do? How do you put that into a grant proposal?

You put that into a grant proposal if you don't want the grant to be, to come through.

Yeah, I'm gonna make a lot of friends.

Yeah.

So the, let's come back to the carbon number Seven years. If I'm understanding what you're describing corrective, you're. You're saying simply going through the transition. So there's an initial surge during the transition, that transition might be a year or three years or five. But during that transition, you can sequester seven years worth of carbon. Is that what you're communicating?

So, okay, yeah. With all this carbon information, you got to be careful in how you choose your words, don't you? There's so many people that are ready to glom on and instead of feeling this one. Okay, so what I am saying is that regenerative farms, the fully regenerative farms, the ones that are maximize or maximizing their regenerative score in, within our scoring system, because we have to characterize these based on. We can talk more about that. Compared to the conventional ones, they had 50% more carbon than in the croplands and in the rangelands. When you extrapolate that out, that's stored down to 60 centimeters. So pretty deep down into the soil, when you extrapolate that out, if we were to turn all of the acres over to fully regenerative, that would store that much carbon, how fast does that happen? Great question. Emissions are. How are these affected? Don't know specifically yet, but at this point, based on all models, these become, as I said before, these become sinks for carbon, not sources of carbon anymore. It really gets at this, you know, the methane production and stuff too. I mean, when you've got five years worth of annual emissions, cow burps and farts, you know, just don't hold the same weight. And I have a feeling that when you put those animals out onto that rangeland, microbes change dramatically. Yeah, I just. That's a hard part of this whole thing, right, is, is I can. I could be on a regenerative farm and I can feel it. I can feel the difference with all of my senses. You know, there's. There's insects that are, you know, buzzing around and I hear that and I smell the flowers or the plant volatiles and. And that's going into my brain and. And I'm the, You know, there's maybe the. The wind is brushing against me or critters are brushing against me, or I hear birdsong and my senses are all taking this in and putting it all into my brain simultaneously. And in one millisecond, it's turning it around and it says, you're happy. How do I turn that into a number so that somebody who's never experienced that can feel what it is that I'VE felt. Yeah, that's, that becomes a leap of faith. Yeah.

And that's what you're seeking to quantify with your biodiversity metrics, measuring the bird song and the insects and everything else.

Sure. But it doesn't, That's.

So.

There'S no heart in that.

Yeah, that's still all cerebral.

It totally is. It doesn't. Does that trigger somebody into. I mean, we all say we're data driven and, and yeah, that's, that's important. But, but does if we're that data driven, Boy, we make a lot of really dumb, dumb decisions.

Well, actually, I would, I would argue that none of us are data driven.

I think you're probably true.

We'd like to, we'd like to pretend that we are. There's a certain, you know, there's this story and I'm, I'm sure if our listeners look up the details, the. I'm probably going to be incorrect on a few of them because it's been a while since I read this story. But as I, as I recall it, there was a young man who's a neurosurgeon or a surgeon of some type, highly skilled, highly trained, very intellectual, a professional in California like 40 or 50 years ago. And they were studying the process of decision making, of how decisions get made. He was in a vehicle accident and had a H. Head injury. And as a result of his head injury, he lost the ability to feel emotion. And along with the ability to feel emotion, he lost the capacity for decision making and his life disintegrated. He lost his family, his wife left him, he lost his house. He became homeless because he couldn't make the decision to get out of bed in the morning and brush his teeth like those. Those very simple, fundamental decisions were very difficult for him to make. And as a result of that particular instance and other related studies, scientists came to the conclusion that all decisions are emotional. Every single decision is based on emotions that you then rationalize to yourself.

Yeah, that self assessment has to come into play, doesn't it? Yeah. We have to realize that we are emotional beings and that we. Yep. Our values and our belief systems really shape our interpretation of even the crudest data. And we need to self assess that we're, that we're making the decisions based on the data itself and truly listening to that. Or is there something bigger, you know, our gut feeling? I mean, that I have to admit, I follow my gut and my instincts a lot and I think so do.

All good farm managers and all good stewards. I mean, practically Any work is the more you're able to tap into that gut instinct, that intuition, the more, well, you have better guidance.

Yeah, I think that's the fundamentals of really good science too, isn't it?

Absolutely.

And then figuring out, okay, and then. And then on the other side, there's a scientific method, and we have to use that. That science for, you know, assessing the validity of something. But if you ask the question wrong, the data is going to lead you down the wrong. The wrong path. And so the challenge that I've had as, As a scientist over the last three years in the Thousand Farms initiative is when to say, you know what, John, your gut was wrong and. And the data was right, or and when to say the data was wrong and your gut was right. Yeah, and I'm dancing. I'm just dancing through this, trying to figure it all out.

So I've got a couple of questions for you. Do you think of a photon of light as being alive?

I don't.

Okay. Do you think living systems or systems that we don't perceive to be alive respond to humans more?

I don't know. I don't know anymore.

Yeah.

I'm not throwing it out the window, but I need to, John. I can walk on my own farm and I can be weary and I can be exhausted, and I'll walk out onto our prairie. And it's a native, unbroken prairie. It's never been tilled. It has 100 plant species on it. It's got insects crawling all over it. My body is just beaten because I've worked so hard during the field season collecting this information across the country. And I can go out there and every single time I'm better than when I left.

Yeah.

And there's a spirituality that I can't explain anymore. And I thought I had a lot of answers that I. That I'm. I'm having to relearn a lot of that stuff.

Where I'm going with this is we now well understand that plants respond to the presence of people in the landscape. They respond to our intention. Even before we take action, they respond to intention. This has been well documented, a number of books and articles that have been published. And so one way of saying that would be to say that they respond to being observed. And which we know is also true for inanimate objects, such as a photon of light. It responds to being observed. And so there is this characteristic. I think one of the pieces that you're struggling with that we've been talking about is how do you take this feeling, this Sense of presence and of interaction when you're out in the field and translate that into data.

Yeah, that's not easy without stealing something away from it.

And making process of observing it is going to change it. Just like the process of observing a photon changes the photon's behavior.

Yeah, well, we're a part of it, aren't we?

That's exactly the point. We are a part of it. We are the stewards. And the degree to which we can engage consciously and deliberately as caretakers and stewards is the degree to which we'll be effective at facilitating a change.

But that, that stewardship and that caretaking can't be self serving. I mean, at least. Well, it can't be disrespectful. It's got to be a humble approach, doesn't it?

Yep, I would say so. What have you observed that makes you say that.

We focus so much on economic currency. We focus so much on, on carbon. We focus so much on these, these elements of the farm that aren't making us more successful. They're not. I mean they're not making us happier necessarily. Sure. They're a part of things. Right. The, the only thing that I've found that correlates with just about every response in regenerative food systems, from economic resilience to community building to family, you know, life, the productivity fer, you name it. Life. Don't worry about carbon. Grow life on your farm. The carbon will take care of itself. That life is, is a respectful thing, right? It's a humbling thing. It's, it's, it's a. Yeah, I think that that's fundamental to regenerative agriculture and to being a human, our own humanity.

So when we think about that interaction. You and I were having a conversation before we turned the microphone on, but is there a scale at which that degree of interaction becomes limited?

I, I think, I think it does. I just. And that's not to say that we can't do better on a large scale farm, right? I think we can. But if we really want to maximize what a regenerative farm or a farm can do in terms of its productivity in all of the senses of currency, that means family stability, that means community stability, that means economic resilience, that means so many of these things. I think it's about farming smaller and better, not bigger and simpler.

Yeah. I've referred to this as a hearts to acres ratio. That and it's. Yeah, it's different in different ecosystems and different environments. There's no one size fits all and there's also some people perhaps have greater heart capacity than others. But there is definitely a component of, of there is a certain number of people who love and care for the ecosystem who need to be present in that ecosystem in order to really facilitate the change that is possible.

I think that's it we need and that there's a lot to unpack there, isn't there? Because I mean that means a lot more farmers on the ground. Yeah. I think that's fundamental to our stability. That means, that means communities that have to start forming around farming again. And, and, and how do we, how do we reset that value system? Maybe it's already happening. I mean there's a homesteader movement going.

On right now that's going like wildfire actually.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think a lot of times it's a, it's people sitting in their cubicles watching YouTube videos or something, dreaming about it. But it's there and there. Yeah. I think, I think we're trying to fill a hole that we thought technology was going to fill for us and it didn't work. Yeah.

Yeah. So we're having this conversation around the, the soft aspects, kind of the difficult to quantify but oh so important aspects of the work that you're doing. One of the pieces, this piece came up for me, I don't know, maybe three or four or five years ago, I attended a series of conferences where people got on stage and they started having the conversation around this expected J curve, this expected economic downturn for a several year period at the beginning of a transition. And I looked at that and I got kind of cross eyed and I said that's not my experience. That's not the experience of lots of farmers that I work with. So why is this the expectation?

Yeah.

What have you been observing?

We've been looking at transition as part of thousand farms where we revisit farms for the first like five years annually to kind of measure how different approaches seem to change things and, and how fast that ecosystem changes. The economic component is not something that we've analyzed yet, but I could tell you they're still in business after five years. What we've noticed is that within the first few years, 8, 90% of the of the farms abandoned all fungicides and insecticides. This is cash grain systems in the prairie states and in Washington, you know, big, large cash grain systems. So when we're talking about farming better, smaller and better. I mean smaller, not small. The. I just analyzed the Washington data the other day because we were, we had a team out in the palouse area. And 66% of those farmers, the regenerative ones, had abandoned all synthetic fertility as well as all herbicides. They made just as much money and they grew just as much wheat. That's a pretty powerful story right there. Think of the environmental impact of that on a watershed or a region or the country. If we were to, I mean, these farmers didn't need those synthetics anymore. My gosh, the implications would be profound. You know.

You mentioned a key word in your exclamation a little bit ago. Imagine what this would look like. Imagine the possible. And I think a part of our struggle is many of us don't have a context. We haven't captured a glimpse of that image of what is possible. And also we have forgotten what it used to be like. I speak with many people. This is before my. I didn't grow up driving around in cars, of course, but I speak with many people who describe about driving around in the 80s and 90s and getting their windshield plastered with, with insects. And that just doesn't happen anymore. There is now there's an insect holocaust.

Our kids don't. Aren't going to remember this, what that was like. They're not going to have that as part of who they are anymore.

What has to be true for that to be recovered? What happens if it doesn't recover?

Totally possible to recover. We've watched this happen, okay. I mean, within year one. So this is, that's the other aspect of this whole regenerative transition process. Everybody's always looking, okay, John, what's the dipstick? I need to stick it in the ground. I need to pull it out and see, you know, soil health full. Right? That's what they want to see. And, and so they're. What is the thing that I need to be looking for, John? To know that what's going on out here is, is real life comes back to your farm first. And that's what we measure. This is the transition process. Right? So the biodiversity returns to your farm. And then that biodiversity starts to do things. It starts to reset water cycles. It starts to sequester carbon and put it back down into the earth. It resists pests, proliferation, and, and, and then suddenly economic prosperity and fertility and reduction or elimination of all of those input, all those costs that you used to think you had. That is how this happens. But that life, boom. That's the thing. It's the thing.

How, how rapidly, how rapidly do you see life, how rapidly do you see life return? What, what orders of magnitude are we Talking about how does, does life in the soil and the ecosystem can increase by 10x by 3x. What does it look like.

Initially? I'd have to look at the exact numbers and it depends on the organismal group that we're studying. Right. Fungi, AMF come back at a really large rate, a great rate. Insect foliar insects tend to be very prolific. The birds end up coming back and you see about.

This is just it. The birds require the insect population.

Exactly. So it's all connected, right?

Yeah.

I mean that's, that's the whole, that's the bottom line. But yeah, over time, you know, I don't think that we know yet what the full potential is. It isn't an asymptote. Right. You don't see this going to maximum. You see life kind of going up and up and up. And I, and, and I don't. I. After everything that I've measured, everybody wants to know that that thing that says that, that what they're doing is right. What instrument do I need?

And eyes, ears, nose, mouth.

As a scientist, I have to tell them, go out on your farm every day and if you see something you've never seen before, you're doing it right. Yeah.

That's awesome. You know, just before we started this conversation, I got a text message from a wheat grower in the Palouse. So we have Baldi. He sent me a photo of a bald eagle. He said we haven't seen bald Eagles here in 50 years. It's the desert. We get 8 inches of rainfall a year. He has bald eagles.

That's pretty neat. One of our. We had an ornithologist out there. She saw a golden eagle. That was a, that was a really special moment for her. Working with those folks.

When you've, when you've looked at. So let's continue. I want to understand life improving life. Coming back to the, the insect dynamics of where I, where I started a little bit ago. With your background as an entomologist, I'm guessing you probably look at insect diversity in, in some detail. How, how rapidly can insect populations recover and to what degree?

Insects recover very quickly. And, and I knew that even back from the, my USDA days we tried this one trial where we planted some flowering oilseed crops that we were going to try to use as a way of diversifying crop rotations while simultaneously supporting native and managed pollinators. And year one, we planted these things and I went out there with a sweep net and we collected like bee species, like 80 species of bees from eastern South Dakota stuff I'd never seen before that were probably lurking in the shadows like waiting for an opportunity to take off. And within one year, you know, a couple of months, they went crazy in those fields. So it happens rapidly and then it doesn't stop.

What have you observed as you looked at these 1400 farms? What, what was unexpected? You'd had previous experience on a lot of these operations. You'd kind of knew a little bit about what was going on and how things were evolving. What surprised you?

You know, there's been so many things. This has been a life altering experience. I'm going to try to write it down as a book. Next year it'll be our 10th year of blue Dasher Farm. And so I'm, I'm going to try to tell the story of what it is that we've felt as we've traveled around the country and seen and measured and all of those things.

Things.

You know, I, I think, you know, the whole point of this was to gather data and that that's how we sell it. Right? Nobody else is getting the data and, and that data is important. We talked about that. But I think that as important, if not more important, is just the relationships that we've forged and, and how, how valuable those things are, the trust and how important that is for science to be accepted. I was out in vineyards, out in California working with my grad student. And he was talking to the farmer and she was, and I walked over to her. I'd just been doing soil course, so I was grubby and hot and gross and, and, and I shook her hand and I'm like. And she looked down and she's like, your hands are dirty. I'm like, yeah, I'm sorry about that. I was just digging cores. And she's like, no, that's a good thing. And I don't think that that happens enough. Right. That there's that connection. And it changed the whole dialogue that we had with, with that farmer because you know, we've, our scientists have calluses on their hands and dirt under our fingernails and we've, we've, we've all gotten poop on us from so many different animal species like as we work on the farm. And I, I didn't know how, how pervasive that is in my life. Every, every thing feels like it's a toilet in my life. But that connection is so important for us to understanding the truth. Boy, I could go on. I've watched. Okay, so the first four or five clusters, geographic clusters that we visited, I Mean, we've. Every year I'm watching as we lose three, three or four entire regions of farmers to climatic disaster. Our ranchers in the Texas panhandle got wiped out by a million acre fire. The Napa. Napa is not going to grow grapes the way that they used to grow them. It's all moving north because they can't do it anymore. The Central Valley of California, the water's gone and land prices are collapsing. I'm watching and measuring. I'm taking as many pictures as I can as I travel around the country, watching our food system decline, evaporate, disintegrate before our very eyes. And, and then capturing those, those stellar farmers that are making this work still, and, and putting data behind that so that for people brave enough to change, we can, we can show what farmers have done that seems to be working. Florida's gone. Agriculture in Florida, I don't think people understand that.

People don't realize what 90 or 95 reduction in Florida citrus actually means.

And they pick up the whole industry and they move it to Texas and to California and they keep doing the same broken thing, expecting different results. Guess how that's going to end, Right? Yeah. Another thing that I've seen and heard is, You know, how fallible we are in so many ways. The leaders. It's been interesting to watch sometimes the leaders become the hindrance to innovation. So the leaders of change. Some of the. And I want to be careful here. Okay. Because I'm not trying to be disrespectful. Some of the leaders in organic, for example, and I eat organic and I appreciate what it took to get organic to where it is today. I went to so many organic.

They were the pioneers on which we were building.

Absolutely, absolutely, totally. And I. Yep. But I went to so many of them and I talked with them and I'm like, I think no till organic is probably what we really need to be striving for. And boy, they, they shed so much blood on the hill of tillage that they're not going to let that go. And, and suddenly it becomes this. Okay, well, I don't think that no till organic can happen. And it's like, oof. But folks, we need you right now. And I can point you to the farms that are literally within an hour of you that are doing this. And it's working real well. And that's not with a bunch of plastic row covers. That's with a different system. And it's interesting to watch how, how that happens, how, how we can give so much to an effort to change and revolutionize something. But sometimes we need to be able to remember. Remember why we started the fight to begin with.

Yeah.

What the goal was.

Well. And also to ask yourself the question, what are we afraid of?

Yeah. Fear is a very powerful motivator, isn't it?

Yeah. What are we afraid of? I think in many cases the. I shouldn't say in many cases, but in some cases the fear of changes. We don't know what we're going to replace things with.

Yeah.

We don't know what the alternate tools are.

And. And there's so much. There's so much saying don't change, isn't there? There's so much saying that this has got. That you're going to lose everything if you try something different. I get it. That's hard. That's really hard to overcome. You have to have a certain moral fiber or something about you that makes you try something even when the rest of the world says you're crazy. Yeah.

As you've looked at all these various farms and different ecosystems, have there been any. And there are. You and I both know. We know so many people who are doing such amazing, incredible work, all of whose stories are worth capturing and sharing and talking about. But has there been anywhere where there was. I'm trying to understand what are the commonalities of those who are most successful, I suppose is the right word. What defines a standout either as an individual or a group.

Connection with the natural world, Connection with family, Connection with community. When we sacrifice those things, we don't attain what's possible. So invariably the most successful farmers that we've met are ones that prioritize those things and not at the expense of the others. Right. The most miserable. Can I say something controversial?

Of course. Otherwise, why are we having a conversation?

The most miserable farmers I met across the country are row crop farmers. They have. I think what's happened is that they got duped. They're completely trapped. This metric of success of growing their farms, to be a good farmer, you better get that next quarter. Right. Their grandpas and their dads were really good at that. And now these farmers are sitting here with, you know, 2 to 5 to 10 to 20,000 acre farm farms. And the only thing that they can do is grow row crops. Cash grain systems.

Right.

And so they go out there and they borrow $850,000 a year to make $50,000 a year. Right. And they stopped asking the question of where that other 800,000 go.

Yep.

Meanwhile, we've done the health metrics. And this is also going to be, we asked them, are you experiencing any of these diseases or mental health problems within you or your family? Row Crop farmers have 200 times or 200% increase in depression versus normal society. They have a 2000% increase in Parkinson's, a 200% increase in cancer. We're killing our farmers, John. Yeah, killing our farmers for corporate greed.

I want to understand that data. Is this data from all farms regenerative and non regenerative mainstream?

Great question. We haven't separated that out yet. It's a good question. But it is about row cropping farmers. Yeah. When we ask the same of ranchers, the ranchers have, have very similar responses to normal society or to the rest of society.

You know what one of the pieces that I find so interesting, Jonathan, is, and this, this again comes back to what we talked about a moment ago is fear is what you're afraid of is that those poor health outcomes, they are partially a reflection of being trapped in an economic system, being trapped in overhead, capex costs, debt structures, et cetera. Not seeing an easy way out. That's certainly a contributing factor for sure. Another significant contributing factor is the direct exposure to pesticides and significant volumes in drinking water and the environment, ecosystem and fertilizers. And when you share that data with them, you say you know, pesticides are implicated, fertilizers are implicated in this. That is not a message that they want to hear. They become very defensive. And the piece that I find so intriguing is that farmers are defending their bondage, they're defending the pesticide companies and the front, they're saying we must have these tools.

Yeah, isn't that something farmers know? When I present that data, that slide, every single time the room goes silent, there's a mic drop because there's an elephant in the room. They know that this isn't right. And, and they see it in their families, they see it in their communities. And it isn't the. I just, I have to ask the question now because I just. Ignorance isn't an excuse anymore.

No.

And, and I've been trying to frame the question differently now because it is such an important one of how do you motivate? What are the levers that finally get you into changing something? This was also in Napa. Of all the places, why am I sharing something many Napa stories right now? I don't know. But I was out there and they had this debate, right? One of my grad students had been working on sheep grazing and vineyards and showed that sheep grazing was very Effective. And a lady was like, I did this on my farm. I tried it again. So vegetation management with glyphosate. Vegetation management with sheep and with, I don't know, mowing or something like that. And she's like, they all work perfectly fine. But we save so much money on glyphosate. And so, I mean, you just can't dispute the numbers there. I got up there and I said, how much is your grandson worth? How much money is that worth? How. How much money is it worth when you have to look your wife in the eye and you have to say, I. I thought I was doing the. I. I heard it. I didn't think it was so bad. And I'm sorry. Is that enough? Is sorry gonna cut it? Well, as a scientist, you know, how many scientists are advocating just use a little less? Yeah.

You know, there's a combination of factors. This ties right into a presentation that I gave two days ago Saturday. I was at a homesteading conference in Indiana. And they had asked me to talk about how to grow medicinal quality food and why this was in an Amish community. Why is an Amish community interested in knowing how to grow medicinal quality food? Because there's kind of a growing collective understanding that in today's environment, it's not enough to just grow your own food. You actually have to be very deliberate and very conscious about growing superior quality food that can enhance your immune system. Because we now, we now have to mitigate against all the stuff that we are exposed to in our ecosystem, in our environment. And one of the things that I talked about was Eric Serlini's and colleagues study on the effects of glyphosate on future generations. So are you familiar with this study? I'm guessing you probably are, so you.

Can correct me if I have.

Yeah, the epigenetics. So for our listeners, they exposed or they. They fed the parent generation with non GM corn that had a measured dose of glyphosate contained within it. And then the subsequent generations were fed grain with no glyphosate, no measurable due to glyphosate. And the generations with the most severe negative health outcomes were the third and the fourth generation. You know, I think there's something biblical there about the sins of the fathers being visited on the third and the fourth generation. But how does that happen? Well, it happens because if you are sitting beside a lady, you're sitting beside five generations of women, the two that came before and the two after. I think this is something that we so easily lose sight of is that when a baby is formed in her mother's body, the eggs that she will have, those future embryos are already being formed in the mother's body. So when a baby, when she, when, when a lady is carrying a baby girl, there are two generations that she is carrying and that she. That she is carrying and that she is nurturing and providing with. With nutrition. And so there's this common refrain, this is not universal. There are lots of variation here within Amish communities, But there are a few Amish communities where smoking is still quite a thing in the use of tobacco. And it's a hotly debated topic, as it should be. And there's this common refrain that, well, my grandfather smoked and he lived until 95. Didn't hurt him any, can't hurt me. Well, what environment did his grandmother have when she was carrying his mother? That's how we have to look at it. We have to go back a couple of generations. And so when we look at. We have to consider our grandchildren, our great grandchildren and also not just the members of our family, but we have to remember that we are growing food that's going to feed a larger population. What about our future in laws who will marry into the family?

Yeah, yeah. Marrying a lot of baggage. So as. As somebody who got a start in ecological risk assessment. Right. And I guess I still am in that space. Okay, so take that times all of the organisms in the habitat. Exactly how on earth can we possibly assess the full, full risk that's associated with. With some of these things? And it comes back to a precautionary principle on some level where do no harm. Right. And if we come in this with the value systems of protect our. The the natural world, grow life on our farms, grow our families, grow our communities. Boy, those are. Yeah, I don't mind being a broken record on those. Yeah.

So you described how you share this slide. The room goes quite silent. What are other similar points that you are talking about that really capture people's interests?

Gosh, you know, I think when I show what is possible within these systems, when we put real numbers behind them, I do think that that gets their attention. But usually not until we share the stories of the farmers themselves. That tends to really help resonate things. We, we just have to use a different dialogue. We can't just get up there and show means and stare at standard errors of the mean.

Right.

I mean we have to, we have to contextualize what this all means. And we as a scientist, you know, I think to make something stick, you Also have to put yourself out there too. And, and sometimes it's. Yeah, you don't always just say the pretty things or the non controversial things. Sometimes we need to get people thinking.

So you, you have collected data from 1400 farms. I'm sure that data is giving you all kinds of insights into what is happening it for there are lots of individual farmers who are getting their own index and their scorecard about how they compare with other people in the region and overall. But for people who are not participants or people who are listening to our conversation, where can they learn about everything that you've been learning about? Has it, have you been publishing any of it anywhere?

Yeah, it's starting to come out now where we. So I shouldn't be sharing this in a podcast, but I will. You know, I learned a trick or two battling with agro industry and one of the things that I learned is that science is manipulated. Right. And so no way. Yeah, I'm afraid it is. And one of the ways that it's that this is strategized is you flood the literature. Right. With your, with whatever the agenda is. Right. And so our strategy with Thousand Farms has been okay, we published a couple of early papers, right. To kind of one of the only papers on regenerative economics of, of, of almonds and of corn production. Claire Lacan and Tommy Fenster early on. And then we, we've gone quiet and what, what's been happening is we've been accumulating a bolus of papers that we're about to sucker punch the scientific community with where it's like you are not going to be able to, you can't ignore this anymore. And evidence. Yeah, preponderance of evidence. Because you know what I was going through, I did a Google Scholar search which this is one way that we find scientific literature citations on a particular topic. You put in a search string and, and it reveals all of the papers that have that in their title or abstract. And so I did that with regenerative agriculture. Thousands of hits. And I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. I mean Claire's study back in 2018 has one of the top 1% of all science ever written in terms of, of social media impact and has more like 500 citations. This is an active area, right. One would conclude based upon the data that this is an active area of research. And then I went through the first 100 papers and I looked at them and look for a couple of things. Did they actually define what their regenerative system was? Was there any replication or was this just a single thing? Was this done on, on actual operating farms or was this on small plot research on an experiment farm somewhere? And I think that's it.

I don't think you had any left. Maybe one or two.

There was six. You know how many were. We did four. So it's this. We're poised this year alone to double the peer reviewed literature primary data on regenerative food systems and next year we'll quadruple it. I mean it's, we're just, we have this pipeline of papers that is going to keep coming and isn't going to stop and unless we get bumped off.

Yeah, that's, that's exciting to hear, John. I look forward to, to those becoming very popular and very influential, which I'm sure they're going to be. You know, it reminds me of. There's a similar strategy that was taken by Blue Blanc Core when they were trying to identify the human health benefits of nutritionally sound animal products that had narrow omega 3 to omega 6 ratios. They published 40 papers in like three years and completely change the landscape throughout all of Europe for understanding and recognizing what quality food is.

I hope that's, I hope that we have a similar outcome. We could help to. I mean the farmers are really the ones. We're not, we're not inventing this, right? The farmers are the ones who are inventing this. All we're doing is translating and, and I think that we have the opportunity to translate this into a language that, that could help to clarify it a little bit.

Well, this is wonderful news. Thank you for all the work that you're doing. John, thank you to your entire team and thanks for being here, for being willing to share your wisdom and experiences and I look forward to more conversations.

Oh, thank you very much. Appreciate it. John, always a pleasure.

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.