Episode 174: Scaling Regenerative Practices from Micro-Farms to Row Crops with Briana Bosch

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to growing things, growing healthy things, growing healthy people, growing healthy soil, growing healthy plants. Uh, I'm delighted today to be joined by Brie from Blossom and Branch, who I encourage you to check out on YouTube and on Instagram for all the awesome work that she's doing, both scaling up and scaling down these concepts and ideas around growing healthier soil and plants and people. Brie, thank you so much for joining me today and for being willing to have this conversation. Give us some context for the scope of all the fun you have.

Yeah, thanks for having me, John. I've been a fan of the podcast for many years. It's informed a lot of what I do, actually. So, yeah, I've got two farms. So one is what we'd probably consider a microfarm. It's 2 acres. In Denver, just outside of Denver, Colorado, and that is a flower farm. So that's the reason why it's small. And flowers are cultivated, grown, harvested pretty much primarily all by hand. And so scaling that up much beyond 2 acres with one person is, is difficult. Then we also have in Minnesota, we have 180 acres in corn and soybeans, and that is an almost a century farm in our family. So just just 2 years to go, and pretty conventionally farmed. We've started taking chunks of that and converting it over to regenerative. So adding a little bit each year as we kind of learn more about these processes. So it's been really interesting adjusting and scaling things both up and down and seeing what works in different climates and lots of different fun experiences.

And then you also do something that I think there are a number of there are a number of farmers who do this well, but many more who don't even attempt it at all. You talk to people, you talk to lots of people. So tell us a bit about that.

Yes. Yeah. You were just talking about the conference circuit and I just got home from that as well. Lots of this, that's kind of how I started. I never started out being like, I wanted to teach people how to do this. It really became, I was learning how to do all these regenerative practices. I was scaling them down to a scale where I felt I could do it on my market farm. And in doing that, I was showing it. It's just part of social media and being an entrepreneur. Now, I was showing it and I got a lot of questions, you know, how do you do this? How can I do this? Tell me more about this, lots of interest. And so I just started to tell people what I was doing and teach them along the way, the things that I failed at, the things I succeeded at. And in that, I gained, you know, quite a few quite a significant audience of people who were interested in very similar things and just took off from there. I do have a background in journalism. I have a background in education. I have a master's in marketing, actually, in business. And so I knew that maintaining that authenticity—

I kind of wish you wouldn't have said all of those things because now everybody's going to think that it's out of reach for them.

Well, and what's funny is I don't even feel like I use it. I got my MBA because I thought I was actually going to work in the corporate world. And then I went into farming. And I don't— marketing is actually not— I think really what farmers need to be doing is more truly more branding and authenticity. Marketing is really a lot of numbers and data analysis and who's my target market and all this stuff, which I really honestly don't do. Don't tell my teachers from business school that. But what I have found is really important, and the major thing that I did learn in school was how important authenticity is. Because once you lose that, once you lose trust with your customer, once you lose the true voice of yourself, it really cheapens what you're doing. It really, it thins it out. And so what I've found, you know, in growing an audience, I'm almost, I think across platforms, I'm at almost 1.5 million now, but I get asked all the time, like, Will you promote this product? Will you sell this thing? You know, daily I get probably 10 or 15 emails, right? Turned down $50,000 of product offering last year. And I do that because to me that if I start hawking all this stuff that you really don't need, you know, that you really don't need to grow regeneratively, it really cheapens the message. And that resonates with people. So people do know they can trust me. You know, when I say like this worked, this doesn't work, they know that I'm not doing it just because I'm getting paid to do it.

What's— what is— this almost sounds like an elementary question, but I think it's important one for us to talk about. What is authenticity exactly? Um, I mean, there's different answers to that, but one of the, one of the things that occurs to me is the kind of the— I don't know quite the right word for this, but the social media presence. That most people present is curated. It's curated to be the best versions of themselves. And there is an aspect of authenticity that I believe— to be authentic also requires a degree of vulnerability. There's sometimes you can show the comedy of when things don't go well, but sometimes learning from experience is painful. Communicating that authentically and just putting it out there is like, yeah, this really hurt. It hurt financially, it hurt otherwise, is something that is, I think, part of perhaps, at least for me, one of the most difficult things about being authentic, but also one of the most necessary.

I totally agree with you. I think authenticity has a lot to do with, you know, evolution as well of yourself and evolution of the practices and being open and transparent about that. I personally struggle quite a bit with with that piece of it as well. I mean, I do show failures. I mean, as you said, I kind of tried to do it in a comedic way. Like, look what actually happens when I'm trying to graze my sheep on my market farm. It's a comedy of all these things that go wrong, right? But it is difficult because social media also tends to reward success and it tends to reward these very curated type of things. I think that's changing a little bit. I do think that's changing. I think people are leaning more into the reality with AI generation and all this stuff. I think now people are like, okay, no, show me real humans and real failures. But it's a struggle for sure. And of course, anyone getting into regenerative practices is going to experience those failures because it's so foreign to a lot of us who've been doing this for any period of time. There's no real guidebook to, you know, what to do in XYZ situation. So for sure, we've had our share of failures. And sometimes those things end up well, you know, and we share that too. But like, yeah, we weren't able to get our cover crop in when we wanted to last year in our corn that we were interplanting, and therefore we had to drone it in. And we droned it in a month later than we should have. And but that ended up actually working really, really well. It wasn't our plan, you know, but I do try to be authentic. But for sure, I think it's something that all of us could work on because it helps the regenerative movement, I think, when we are honest about it.

When you, um, you mentioned the appeal or kind of the, the framing that is desired by short-form social media content to really grab attention. And in this world of where we're now seeing this rapid, um, just explosion of AI-generated content, are you seeing more of a shift to people engaging more deeply with long-form content? And I just for myself, the way my life is, I don't have a lot of space in my life for listening. So I abandoned listening years ago already. If people send me podcasts or YouTube clips, I'll get them transcribed. I'll read the transcript because I can read the content. If it's truly considered high-value content, I can read it in a quarter of the time that it takes to listen, or probably less. Um, so, and so that kind of by default, the, the high-value content that people share and really highly endorse is long form and not short form for the most part.

I'm exactly on the same page with you. I don't have time, you know, and I feel bad because I follow fellow creators and garden and farmers on YouTube, but I never watch their content because it's the same. I literally just don't have time to sit here and watch a half an hour of movie or video, but I know a lot of people do. I mean, clearly there's people who love watching them and do learn that way, or they want to see these things in action. I mean, maybe for people who are more experienced, like, okay, I know what it looks like to plant a cover crop, or I know what it looks like to harvest corn, you know. But for a lot of people, they've never seen that, and so that can be helpful for a lot of people. But I'm the same. I'm like, give me a— give me something. I'll do a podcast because I can listen to it while I'm— while I'm doing something else.

And, and that's often the place where I have phone calls. My life seems to be filled with phone calls instead of listening conversations. But I'd like— so you responded to that question in kind of as a personal user, but do you have any observations also from your audience? How have your audience dynamics shifted?

You know, I would say that YouTube— I mean, I'm just trying to put more information out on YouTube because in terms of long form, the information I can give in a half an hour video versus a 60-second reel with a however many character description, it's just never enough to really explain. Like, it doesn't explain what a rhizosphere is, you know, it doesn't explain root exudates. You can't get into that really in 60 seconds in any meaningful way. So I have seen, you know, the people who are more serious and want to learn more about the regenerative practices themselves tend to migrate over to YouTube. So that's really— I feel like that audience is more of like the soil health, um, wanting to see the farming piece of it. And then short form is more like, hey, look at these pretty flowers. Okay, here's how we grew them. If you want to learn about that, head over there. So I do try to connect them, um, so that it does drive people who do want to learn more somewhere meaningful. But I don't always do that either. Sometimes I'm like, okay, here's a 10-second clip of something. I I don't have time to, because it is very time consuming. And that's been the challenge is a lot of content creators just create content. That's all they do. I'm farming 2 farms. I have 2 young kids. I just wrote the book and I do content creation. So you get what you get is what I tell people. Like, if anyone's like on YouTube, they're like, can you adjust the volume? No, I literally don't have time. I can't turn up your volume on your thing.

This is another aspect of, of authenticity. Uh, one of the things that I've noticed on different social channels is that the reality is we have these incredible devices today that we call smartphones that are really much more than just a phone. Um, and anyone can walk out into a field and record a short video clip about what they're seeing and what's happening and what's going on. And that is It's been intriguing to me that that content that is unscripted, live, real— this is what's happening, this is what's going on— that is often what produces the most engagement, the most conversations, and from what I can tell, seems to produce the greatest change, has the greatest impact.

Yeah, especially now, as you mentioned, with AI, you know, taking over this space, is that now people are questioning everything they see. So yeah, the the more real it is, the more like, okay, here's someone doing this, here's someone in the field. I think that just human, on a human connection, that's what we're looking for. So I am seeing more of that. I think it's an opportunity where a lot of farmers could be sharing more about the realities of what they are seeing because I talk to farmers all day. I talk to, yeah, I talk to my audience, but I talk to farmers too because I want to know, I really want to understand what they're going through and then try to transcript that so that people can understand it. Because a lot of what I hear on my end from home gardeners, consumers, is they're like, well, why aren't more farmers doing this? Why aren't more farmers growing regeneratively? Why don't we just start cover cropping? Why don't they just start? And it's like trying to explain all the intricacies of like, well, maybe they don't have the equipment, the right planter. It's not the same format. They have to switch stuff out. The timing, the, the eat, the whatever the growing climate is that they're in, how are they going to terminate it? You know, there's so many, and it's a pennies game, right, for most of them on acreage right now. And so there's so many intricacies, but people just hear regenerative and they're like, well, why isn't every—

this is obvious, why isn't everyone doing it? Exactly.

So it's really been— I— it's been really helpful and interesting, I think, just to kind of have those conversations. But I found that When I do talk to farmers about it, they don't want me to really necessarily share that. So that's been a struggle because—

Why do you think that is?

I think that right now there is a fear, and it's legitimate because for a long time, I think farmers have been blamed for a lot of things and they're kind of pigeonholed right now into this system that they're working within. A lot of us are trying to break out, but it's not always doable. And so I think they are a little gun-shy because they are used to being blamed for a lot. And so I think they're scared to really speak the truth about what's happening because they've heard so many times like climate change is because of farming, tilling is bad, everyone's tilling, you know, not that those things aren't true, But there's a lack of understanding from the general public about what farmers truly experience on a day-to-day basis. So I think I love trying to bridge those things together. I struggle with farmers not wanting to necessarily be on camera or speak about these things, but I mean, it's up to them. There are ones who are, it's just, they're hard to find.

When I look back over the course of recent history, the last 60, 70, 80 years, it is entirely— it is accurate to say that farmers have been through policy directives and market forces. They have been guided into a certain position that is less than optimal for themselves and for the people who are ultimately consuming food that they are producing. It's also true that there is some element of personal responsibility in that. And it's also true that perhaps to a large degree, the public discourse and the fear that farmers feel about being authentic about the struggles that they face is because their voice hasn't been heard. I've been in DC on several occasions recently, and it's intriguing to me how the people— that there's a small group of people relatively speaking, who is in charge of putting policy together, is in charge of making decisions, who in the famous words of Eisenhower, whose plow is a pencil and whose field is a— they're 1,000 miles from the closest cornfield. And it's because, and particularly now, I see the era of AI compounding this even more. The most The most dangerous perspective is not not knowing, it's being certain that you know and being mistaken. And that is a common perspective, I think, in people who, they start learning about the human health challenges of certain pesticides and they go deep down this rabbit hole and they become obsessed about, well, why Why are we using these things on our food supply? And they start comparing and contrasting with Europe and they start looking at what's happening around the globe. And they develop these very strongly entrenched and very passionate opinions and perspectives. And they've never talked, or they very seldom talked to the people who are actually doing it. And part of it is because those voices of fear that the growers have of putting themselves out there true today has also been true historically. And so therefore, their perspective— there is very little sympathy for their perspective because their perspective isn't known.

I totally agree with you. Yeah, I agree with you on all the— everything that you said. I mean, there's so many different components and pieces of it that there is, as you mentioned, a level of also personal responsibility on the policy side. There's also the fact that, you know, I know that a lot of them, whether they'll say it or not, had different expectations than what's actually happening. And sometimes does that come down to, you know, potentially, you know, I hate to say it's not an education issue, but it's a cultural issue, I think. And it is, it's ingrained. And until we start having these conversations and And social media can be so toxic for this, right? Some platforms are worse than others where, you know, you show anything using any kind of herbicide and it's like, you know, without a context of like, okay, well maybe here's the half-life. Maybe here was the alternative to using this. This is something I talk about in the book, even just for like home, home growers is the problem of noxious and invasive weeds. You know, noxious and invasive like buckthorn, for example, or multiflora rose, or any of those that you literally cannot get rid of unless you do a cut and a brush technique. You know, you're not spraying it all over everything, but you've got the stump, you brush it on. You know, that works on a home scale. But even showing, even showing that and explaining, like, we're not contaminating soil profile, this is very targeted, this is the only way to get rid of this noxious invasive, and there's still so much anger and pushback because of a dogma that people get into of like, this is always wrong, but it's great and regenerative. We're always thinking about context and contextual uses. And if an herbicide allows someone to start cover cropping, we're always weighing that. Is that better than not cover cropping at all?

Yeah. So in those instances where you've received this this strong negative feedback? How have you managed that? How have you responded to it?

Usually I have to balance for my mental health how much I look at certain platforms. I mean, honestly, like Facebook, for example, I usually don't look at it at all because on there it just is a very— I don't know what it is, but it's just very aggressive and people are nasty. I mean, it's not just like, oh, I disagree with your practices. It's like, 'You're a terrible person and I want you to die.' You know, I mean, like, really horrible stuff. And so, you know, with Instagram and even on YouTube, I'll get into this and be like, okay, here's the science, here's like why, here's what invasive plants do to the rhizosphere, here's why it's important that we manage certain things ecologically as humans. And, and that conversation can happen more naturally. I do try to back it up scientifically, um, and use people with more experience than I do to instate those things. But yeah, sometimes you just have to admit that and let it go that there are going to be people who are going to disagree. I prefer that it happens civilly, but that's—

Yeah, we've become a society where civil disagreement has become increasingly challenged, it appears.

Yes.

So I've really enjoyed this conversation, but let's talk about growing plants.

Yep.

Tell us a bit more about your flower operation. You said that it's 2 acres in size. Tell us a bit more about the environment that you're growing in, the cultural management practices, and how it's evolved. How did it come into being?

Yeah, so we're high altitude. So Denver, we're 5280, basically a mile high. So that comes with challenges. We have a lot of hail, and we talked about water restrictions that we're pretty low on snowpack for a couple years running now. And so hot. Um, we're forecast to get 91 degrees on Friday, which is absolutely wild. Um, our temperature swings always are crazy. We, we can get a 60-degree— I remember a couple years ago, it was September. We usually don't get our first frost till October. It was September, it was 90 degrees during the day, and the next day it was going to snow. And we still had dahlias in the field, we still had weddings, we still had things to do for another month. So we were out covering all of the plants, and it was 90 degrees. And the next day it snowed. So we get a lot of extremes. And then in Minnesota, obviously a little bit more temperate, still a fair amount of extremes out there and increasingly so, but different sets of challenges like excess moisture is, you know, tends to be a problem out there or runoff or erosion because that's in the middle of farm country and dealing with herbicide drift and that kind of stuff. And then here locally, we're urban. So we don't really deal with that kind of thing. We deal more with people using rat poison. It's very different sets of challenges.

And how have your growing practices evolved over time? Where did you start and where are you today?

Very interesting. If you look back at my Instagram far enough, you will see our fields covered in plastic mulch. And plastic hail netting and plastic hoops and plastic frost fabric.

And that's how I grew vegetables 20 years ago. It's very familiar.

Yes, you know the picture, right? And that's just because that's how I— when I started growing flowers, I had never grown flowers before. That was my first time doing it on that scale. And so that's what most of the big producers do. So I did it. And then as I started getting more into the soil health, I started listening to your podcast. I got a microscope. I started looking at my compost. I really got into the weeds on like what's happening beneath the soil because I just think it's fascinating. And, um, and then I started to see, you know, I pull up the plastic at the end of the season and how compacted, how cracked the soil was. I mean, literally cracking. Clearly no organic matter had been getting down onto that soil all year because it'd been coated in a layer of plastic. And then I started to see little pieces of that plastic, like in birds' nests and just floating around on the ground. And then I started thinking, like, maybe this isn't the way that the soil is going to be thriving. Maybe I should be looking more to nature to see what's happening. And so I started slowly removing— I think the first year I took a third of the plastic away, and then the following year I removed it all. People think I have like I have tons of weeds. I started with tons of weeds. I had bindweed, I had thistle, I had hemlock, I had all of those. It's not like I started with some pristine ground. So I did have heavy weed pressure. I just learned how to deal with it differently. But that took a lot of trial and error. It took, you know, how do I scale this down? Because I'm not cover cropping with a tractor here, you know, I'm, I'm doing it by hand. Just, I do permaculture beds, so we're not out here with huge machinery. We just can't. I don't have that kind of space.

So how did you deal with the weeds? What did you replace the plastic with over time?

So a combination of things. It depends on the crop, you know, for more perennial plants. So, you know, production peonies or roses, for example, we do— I do a combination of like living ground covers for the walkways. So native grasses like blue grama that don't take a lot of water because they don't want to be irrigating. And then I'll also do, you know, a higher carbon mulch. So something like wood chips that's going to break down more slowly. Usually I have to top that back up, you know, every few years or so. And then in the annual area, so I've learned how to, you know, separate my annuals and perennials. I love interplanting. I think it's great, but I've learned I separate perennials and annuals and I separate by, you know, production time. So are they producing in the summer or are they producing in the spring? Because they both get treated differently, but I cluster them together. So I can always either have a cover crop on the ground in the spring, or I can have one on the ground in the late summer, depending on what the production crop was in that bed. So I do a thick cover crop. I, I overseed it fairly heavily. Um, and I let it grow in, either it'll winterkill terminate, and then I have the mulch in place for the next year, or I'll terminate it in the spring manually, plant into it, and then I have my mulch. So it saved me a couple things. Like, one is that I'm not having to bring in and worry about mulch, right? On a smaller market farm scale, applying mulch, finding mulch for 2 acres is challenging. So growing it has been much easier. And then, of course, we're doing wonderful things for the soil profile at the same time. So it's like a one-two punch. I'm growing my mulch, I'm adding organic matter to the soil, and I, you know, I can get extra nitrogen, I can inoculate that, I can get the soil biome up and going. So to me, it's a no-brainer, but it was figuring out how to implement it.

And on that journey, how many years has it been since you started this, and how has the soil health evolved, and how has plant health evolved in that timeframe?

This is year 8, and I'd say probably year 6 since we've been kind of doing these practices. Gosh, I can't even say how much easier it has gotten to, to run my farm. You know, people think that cover cropping is a lot of work, but I look at that and I say, well, I used to have to like roll up this fabric every year and then roll it back out in the spring. And then, you know, that was work too in and of itself. And I'd have to bring in mulch and I'd have to fertilize. Like, there were all these other things that I had to do before that now actually I don't have to do. And the same for things like pest I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say like, oh, I have no pests. That's not true. Of course, that's never going to be true. We have a lot of invasive pests, for example, like Japanese beetles. There's nothing that's evolved with our ecosystem to really handle a lot of that stuff. But things like the grasshoppers, things like the earwigs, I have not had a thrip on my flowers, which is a major problem in flower production. I can't even remember the last time. We used to have to bag our dahlias individually to keep the pest pressure so that they didn't eat the petals. We can't sell a flower that's been decimated by a grasshopper. So we'd bag them and remove the bags at harvest. I mean, it's so time-consuming to do that. And now I haven't had to bag a dahlia in 4 years. And a lot of that, yeah, the COVID cropping, the ecosystem stuff that we're implementing also helps with that. The biodiversity and the COVID cropping helps with that. And it's just fun to me, like, it's like a weird little puzzle, you know, to put together. Like, okay, what's something that if we're having pest pressure in the dahlias, okay, maybe we're going to try interplanting buckwheat, because that's going to bring in a bunch of beneficial insects right at that peak time when they're starting to flower. And then that's an easy one to terminate by hand, you know. So figuring out all those little things has been really fun. But the soil profile is the thing that when people come and they look at our soil, we're in Colorado, we have heavy clay. Everyone here almost loves raised beds because they like, I, we have to bring in the soil. The clay is too hard. It's too big. Our soil looks amazing. I mean, just phenomenal. And it's such a pleasure to work in because it's spongy, it's soft. It's got this, it's got that texture where the soil life is active. And so it's, it's really enjoyable to work in.

Well, if you've been doing cover crops every single year, plus you're bringing in— in the case of the perennials, you're bringing in mulch and so forth— then yeah, you would have soil that would be very different condition from what you started with. Give us a bit of an— for the benefit of our listeners, can you tell us about what is the market opportunity in flower production, really? I have some close personal friends who are flower farmers, and it's one of the 50 things that I would really like to do someday that I'll probably never get to. But I've been really intrigued by it. And I've been intrigued by the market dynamics as I've come to understand them. There's obviously, it's local and regional, but there seems to be tremendous opportunity in many parts of the country.

Gosh, when you start looking at, just like we were talking about conventional, sorry, when we're talking about conventional row crop farmers, and how they've been subject to these market conditions that are way beyond their control, the same for flowers. You know, back in the '90s is when, you know, the U.S. government started subsidizing Colombian flower growers to try to combat the cocaine trade. And so they started subsidizing greenhouses in, you know, Ecuador and Colombia to try to combat the drug trade. But essentially what they ended up doing is decimating the American flower farming trade. I think it plunged by like 90% in the— over the '90s, because closer to the equator, of course, they have much longer growing periods. They can grow for more of the year. So a lot of, like, our rose production shifted to the Southern Hemisphere, and it decimated the American flower farmers. So I think just in the last 10 years, we've really started to see an uptick in this awareness of, okay, most of these flowers now are being imported. They're not grown locally. There is really high rates of pesticide and herbicide use in those growing conditions, unfortunately. And people wanting to maybe turn more back toward local flowers, which is great. You know, there's a lot of opportunity, I think. I think it's one of those places where knowing your farmer is really important because I see this, unfortunately, I see where flower farmers, you know, buy in a lot of flowers and maybe it's like, okay, well, this flower isn't necessarily Some of them they grew, some of them they bought. And if people are supporting local, they really, they want it to be local. So knowing the farmer, getting out there, talking, showing the field, like here's the tulips, we're pulling 'em up, we're harvesting 'em, here they are now, buy them. I think people like to see that. There is so much opportunity and acre-wise, it nets for sure the highest profit, you know, of any crop that you can grow, but it comes with—

That's accurate for the record, even higher than marijuana.

Oh, is it even higher? Actually, I didn't know. Yeah, yeah, that's 35 an acre. Wow, I didn't know that. Well, good for me. I'm in Colorado, I could grow. Yeah, but, but yes, but it comes with a lot of labor, you know, very labor-intensive work as well.

How— for people who might be interested in exploring it further, what are resources that you would suggest that people are considering or interested in possibly growing flowers for their local market?

Check out our YouTube. There's lots of great books and resources out there. I would say for those who want to grow regeneratively, yeah, pick up a resource. I obviously just put out the book where I show really, if you're going to pick up a book on the market—

What's the title of your book?

The Regenerative Gardener's Handbook. And we go into things like netting because, you know, on a farming scale, on a flower farming scale, we always have to worry about the product looking perfect. You know, produce, you worry about that as well, but flowers even more so. And so we can't have like a weird shaped stem, so we'll use a net to make sure everything stays upright. Well, in traditional, you know, usually what we're being shown in most books and stuff is this plastic netting, which is kind of an a nightmare when we're looking at, like, at the end of the season, we're pulling up this plastic netting, and it's literally these little 6-inch holes, and then we're throwing that in the landfill. And I'm just picturing, like, the birds and things getting caught in this. So we started using things like jute netting. You know, it's totally doable to do this in a way that is lower in plastic usage. It's not contaminating either the soil or the environment with plastic. But I'd say, yeah, I mean, check out the YouTube, check out the book. There are more growers getting into it now, doing more regenerative practices. And think outside the box, you know. Yes, look at the flowers that you want to grow, but don't necessarily look at these entire fields covered in plastic mulch and think, I have to do that because that's the way everybody else is doing it.

And if you want to be profitable, stay small.

Stay small is a great tip, especially for the first couple of years, because I think people underestimate how labor-intensive it is to harvest flowers by hand, um, and to process them and strip them and bunch them. And if you're making bouquets, to make the bouquets, to keep them in the cooler, take them out of the cooler, drive them to the market, you know, very, very time-intensive. And so people are like, well, I'm going to do an acre. Oh my gosh, if you start out on an acre, yeah, you're going to be burned out immediately. So starting on a quarter of an acre, and you can be fairly if you're doing the right markets, if you're saying, okay, I'm going to tackle custom upscale weddings, you can do that on a smaller scale. CSAs, wholesale, for that kind of stuff, you want bigger property. And then also limit the number of varieties that you're growing the first year, because flower farming, it can be easy to start like, okay, I'm going to grow 50 different things in one space because there's so many beautiful flowers and choices. But really, it would be best to focus on, you know, 5 for your first season and really learn to grow them well, and then branch out and find out, okay, here's the gaps maybe that I need to fill in.

It just occurs to me, I was about to move to the conversation about the Minnesota operation. But one of the things that we missed talking about is you spoke about how insect pressure has declined, you no longer have the threat pressure and some of the things and, and Well, we didn't really speak about disease pressure. How has disease pressure changed over time?

The only thing that we still battle is powdery mildew on the peonies. And actually, I got some of the pinion in the fall, which was like a game changer for this. Yes. So what happened? You know, so I treated, I treated with pinion in the fall and we all, I mean, the powdery mildew was already pretty heavy at that point. It's just very common in peonies, and that really isn't like a— it's just like, it's like, you know, you just at some point in the season you probably get it. Um, and within, I'd say within 2 weeks, the plant— I mean, they looked almost like back to what they look like in the spring.

I didn't even know you tried it.

I did. I got the special, like, before it was even out there. Katie brought it over, um, one of the AA employees brought it over like in a little jar, like a little honey jar. She's like, it's not honey, don't drink. Um, so that— but that's the only— we don't deal with— we used to deal with, um, I mean, even, you know, we grow produce, so like things like blossom end rot. I mean, some of that has just been learning planting times and watering methods, But I haven't had, gosh, I haven't had a fungus issue in 5 years. And it used to be things like, oh, botrytis, we would get a lot, especially with the colder season flowers. And I haven't seen this. I haven't had to deal with anything other than powdery mildew for years. And even the powdery mildew is, it's only the peonies. It's only the peonies.

Yeah, well, I predict the day will come when you won't need pinion on the peonies anymore either.

I hope so. I'm waiting for that day.

Yeah, so let's, let's get into the Minnesota operation a little bit. Are you still primarily corn and soybeans?

Yeah, yes, it's one of the things that I've been struggling with because obviously soybean— I mean, both markets right now are very volatile. Soybeans, yeah, you truly are on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

You have flour production on one end of the spectrum and then mainstream commodities on the other. That must be quite the yo-yo.

It's bizarre because yeah, on the retail side, you know, retail, I have total control over my pricing. I have total control over, you know, all of this stuff. And then I pivot to the corn and soybeans and it's like, oh, you don't set your pricing. You don't really market your grain. I mean, you do to an extent, but it's not marketing, you know, like I market my flowers. Wildly different and wildly different how out of control I feel like it is. So that's been a struggle. Um, it's, it's also just been even, even just getting, getting people to, to work with me on it. It's in an area where it's very conventional. Um, they're actually, they just built an oatmeal up there that's opening this spring, so I'm really excited about that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So that'll open up a new market opportunity for oats, which is fabulous because this is again, like one of those things that people are like, well, why don't the farmers just grow something else? It's like, well, if there's no mill to take it to, I think a lot of people, again, they don't understand like really the way that marketing these huge crops works. And if there's no mill for us to take, I want to grow a small grain, but if I can't, if I don't have a mill to sell it to, you're out of luck. So, um, I struggle between— I want to do corn and soybeans, I'd like to integrate a small grain, I would love to do a perennial wheat like Kernza. Um, I struggle with that. And then I— but on the other hand, I want to still do what most farmers are doing and show these practices and these processes in a way that, that people can be like, okay, well, I know I'm going to grow soybeans because they all still are going to probably grow soybeans. So how can we show these practices in a way that people will still relate to.

And you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that you have been doing some experimentation. You've been gradually transitioning various sections at a time as you've gained more experience. What have, what have been some of the things that you've tried and what did— what has that transition looked like? What's the process been like?

You know, I had this— so of course I've been working with the, with ad consultants at your— at AA. And, um, and, you know, I think I was torn because I listened to your podcast, obviously, and I know a lot of the conversation is often about like this gradual transition and that it doesn't have to be this all-at-once thing. For me, you know, I'm not— I have, thankfully, basically our YouTube supporters, our YouTube viewers are paying for this project. Um, so I don't have the pressure of like, okay, on this, on this 20 acres I have to make sure that I make X dollar. I was more interested in the soil health stuff. So for me, I kind of jumped in. I was like, we're going non-GMO corn, we're going totally herbicide free, we're going no fungicide, we're going half or two-thirds of nitrogen application all at once. Right. Okay.

You said a couple of things there that are pretty intriguing. No herbicide and no fungicide. That's quite the cliff to jump off of.

It was a huge cliff. And part of it was because, as I mentioned, there is this, and it's one of those things that I think that farmers do struggle with. Okay, yeah, I have 1.5 million people watching me do this. If I go in and I start doing regenerative practices and I'm using a GMO corn, there is going to be a conception, a perception there whether it's true or not, there's going to be a perception there that, well, you're not really doing it regeneratively. Or if I show herbicide, they're going to be like, well, you're not really, you know, this isn't really good for the ecosystem. This isn't. So it's a mix of trying to do it in a way that's really going to truly appeal to people. But the other side of it is that I kind of wanted to show like, oh, here's what didn't work when we did that. Here's why sometimes that can be not the best. Um, an example of that would be like our waterhemp. We have waterhemp, especially in one— like, we call it the little boot, um, of the farm, and it's like the tip of the boot, and it's right by the creek. So we've got CRP land there. Obviously there's a lot of seeds and stuff over there. So the waterhemp started. I had said, you know, no herbicide. So, so the waterhemp started coming, and, uh, this is where like I'd want it. Ideally, we would have gotten our cover crop in earlier, and we would have had it interseeded into the corn at like V6. We didn't get there, and so it wasn't there when I needed it to help keep that weed pressure down. So that waterhemp was taller than the corn, especially in that one area. Of course, we took a hit on that on yield for sure. That was one of those situations where it was like, okay, well, maybe we start with we keep the herbicide, you know, for the first couple years while we are getting this cover crop system down and really nailed down and the timing. And then once we get that down, then, then okay, we can start to eliminate these other things. I was really happy with how it performed. Still fungicide without— I mean, we had very little fungus issue. I did do double spacing on the rows, so we did a 60-inch corn. Um, we did both, we did a 30 and a 60. The 60-inch corn, just the air circulation in and of itself, I think helped quite a bit. There's 7 rows.

Did you keep the same plant population on 60 inches?

We did. We kept the same population for both. I think we did 30, 32,000 maybe. Unfortunately, we didn't do twin row. Our farmer's planter was not set up for it. So it was, you know, it was pretty tight in there. But interestingly, I mean, the patches where in the 60, the patches where there wasn't the weed pressure, we were yielding 220 bushels. So I was pretty happy with that, you know, in terms of, again, because we were able to cut the fungicide and the benefit of that 60-inch row was that we could get cover crop growth outside of the season we typically can in Minnesota, you know, Minnesota, shorter growing season. So usually the struggle that we had, and our farmers had tried cover cropping in the shoulders, but when you're dealing with, okay, we can cover crop after November and we need to turn it by April, the growth you're getting is just so minimal. So that's when we started doing the intercropping instead. And gosh, I was so happy with how it performed, both in a biodiversity standpoint, but also interestingly, I think it opens it up. And I'm sure you've had people on before, that, that do the 60, shift it over, you know, for the next year, plant the corn into the COVID crop residue, and they do corn on corn. I mean, that's— when you're bringing in a 10-species cover crop mix, you've got biodiversity there, you know. As long as you're not dealing with something with cornworm, it's something doable that we could start looking at. So again, I don't want to do a lot of monoculture, but it's just, it's, it's kind of the reality of the system again.

Oh, what happened after the waterhemp experience? You— I'm not sure exactly when that happened, but I'm curious, have you had any follow-up experiences where you were able to get cover crops planted earlier and perhaps regain some degree of control over that?

So what we're trying out, what we're trying this year is we're basically doing an early, um, an early planting. We're doing a very dense planting of soybeans. So we are doing soybeans again this year We had thought about maybe trying oats. I think that might be something we get into for next year. So we're doing a much higher population, especially in that area. I am kind of of the mind of like, okay, we've gotten this far. We've done, you know, under our belt now without herbicide. Let's see how it does another year. You know, maybe we'll do a pre-emerge. It's possible.

We'll try that if it looks like And just for clarification, when you've been going without herbicide, has there been any tillage in the system?

Did not till for— it's been 2 years, no till.

Okay. And I'm curious, earlier in our conversation, we spoke about the somewhat vitriolic reaction that can occur on social media when you— when farmers— and when you speak about the use of herbicides and so forth. So what has the counterpoint to that been? What, what has the response been when you've showed that this is what we did, um, and the results in this particular scenario were less than ideal?

So, you know, it's interesting because I think people— I don't think people like your average consumer understands quite as much. You know, the farmers I think would look at that and be like, okay, yeah, you took a yield hit, probably not something I'm going to do. Um, an average consumer looks at it differently, and they look at it and they're like, wow, this is great, look, it can be done. But they don't— again, it's one of those things where they don't understand that like a 20-bushel-an-acre difference can be the difference between profit and not profit. And if that's the difference that you get with a hit from, from waterhemp Then yeah, your average farmer's gonna look at that and be like, no, not can be.

It's not can be the difference. It is the difference between red or black, especially in this market.

Yeah. I mean, a 5-bushel difference, right? It can be, yeah, anything. And so I think this year will be interesting. I mean, side note, but I think this year will be interesting with fertilizer prices and to see if that's still the case, to see if it's still worth putting on all the inputs for what the price is. I don't know, things that keep me up at night. But yeah, I mean, I think there's a big gap between people who really are in the farming world and know what the dollars and cents are and the people who are looking at this and saying like, oh, everyone should be doing regenerative. It's very hard. And it's one of those things I'm trying to bridge is like, Here is why. When you look at this giant waterhemp patch and how we had to like even combining that, how difficult it was, and that was more labor intensive. And yeah, you can't do that on 4,000 acres. It's—

I have a question that I'd like to get your perspective on. That's a question that I've been thinking a lot about recently. We, we understand that there are many growers who are for a variety of reasons, some imaginary and many real, are feeling stuck. They're feeling stuck. They can only produce— in the case that you described, logistically, if you, if you want to produce something other than corn and soybeans, you have nowhere to go with it. There are many growers in that scenario, and there's a wide array of, of very real reasons why they feel stuck. And you see, you have the benefit of having a different perspective as well where you have a very successful flower farm enterprise, a very different environment, very different context. When you think about— I suppose the question is for farmers who truly want to opt out, they want to go in a different direction, but they have no idea how to do that or where to begin.

I'm so glad you asked that. I think that's a great question. And I think it's something that a lot of viewers might, you know, it's something that I've been thinking about because again, I look at it, I look at all of this from a business perspective, just like every farmer I think does to a certain extent of like, yeah, this has to be profitable for us. This has to be profitable for future generations. And at the same time, looking at, there is this interesting context of people who want to know their farmers, people who, have an interest in buying food that is being grown in this way and knowing that the nutritional difference is significant. And so you have this opportunity of, okay, we've got the consumer who wants it. We've got the farmer who is working now within this system that is not working anymore. And how do we put those two things together? There are some people doing some work in the space in creating apps and that kind of thing that connect farmers with consumers. I think that what I see happening for those who are really motivated to do it, maybe who have younger generations who are questioning whether they want to be farming or not because of all these issues, I think there's a great opportunity for people to start doing converting 5 acres at a time, 10 acres at a time. Okay, even if you're not getting it certified organic, you're just going to start Growing regeneratively on this soil, you're going to start dabbling with things like heirloom wheats. You're going to start dabbling with things like oats, black oats, you know, the specialty crops that there is a market for home consumers and say, okay, I'm going to start doing this. At the same time, I'm going to start making these connections with my local consumers. I'm going to start making connections with, I'm going to start making this painful social media post. I'm going to be out in the field. I'm going to show this.

Painful, you say?

Just a little painful. It doesn't have to be painful, but, you know, I'm going to start showing—

perception is reality.

Perception is sometimes reality. Maybe they're going to say, like, here, yeah, I'm going to do a video from my tractor showing us planting this and, like, showing this beautiful farmland. And here's where this wheat's going to come from. And I'm going to start taking a list of people who want to buy this wheat that I'm growing regeneratively. Maybe I have shareholders, maybe I have 20 people who are going to help me finance this. And in return, at the end of the season, they get a 5-pound bag of this beautiful heirloom wheat that they can mill at home. It's a huge mindset change, I think, for a lot of farmers to even think about doing retail work. But the potential, especially now early on, I think is huge. Um, the people who are out there selling this like heirloom wheat, or even doing small-scale milling, I mean, the amount that they charge— when you look at how much they're charging for 5 pounds of, of heirloom wheat— is, is— there's a huge opportunity. But most of them are not growing it themselves. Most of them are buying it from another source and reselling it. But if you can tap into that, like, people want another farmer. They want to see the land where it's being grown. All these pesticides that have just been, you know, made that the EPA has now said that can be used are scary. And there's no one knows what's going to be on their flower anymore. People want— and people are in tune with this. They know what's happening. They want the opportunity to buy the stuff that's not been treated with it and to buy it from someone they trust. So I think there's an opportunity, but it's going to take uncomfortable uncomfortable transition periods where farmers maybe have to learn how to market retail, how to ship retail, or even if it's partnering with someone else who's going to do all that shipping and retail work for you. But I think there's opportunities, but it's uncomfortable growth.

I'm of the opinion— there are perhaps exceptions, but I'm of the opinion that generally The biggest financial opportunities are in the smallest scale operations. I think there's more— for many growers, there's greater financial opportunity in growing 1 acre of wheat and selling it as flour than there is in growing 50 acres of wheat and selling it as grain. So there's that value-added component, there's additional component, but the point that you made when you start selling wheat by the pound as flour, instead of by the bushel, um, the— yes, there is additional labor, there is additional overhead, but proportionate to the value derived from that is completely disproportional. And, um, yeah, I have so many thoughts on this topic. Just as a one thing I'll share, it's kind of tangentially related, but on a personal note, I want to make certain I have a 5-year-old daughter and I care deeply. I have, I have teeth quality issues because of what my diet was like when I was growing up. I want to make sure that she is in a very different position. And so we are growing a large proportion of our food and I'm making certain that that is extremely mineralized. So We are growing oats and we are growing wheat on a garden scale. We're a family of 3 people. I need a bushel or 2 at most, and I'm growing that grain with deliberately high doses of calcium and boron and zinc and all these magnesium, all these various elements. We're measuring the nutritional content and we are milling our own grain. And by the way, I know for a fact that I can't buy grain that has the flavor and the eating characteristics that this grain does, even that grown regeneratively, because I'm able to really focus on it and really take care of it. It's like, do you realize, I don't think people really grasp and don't really know how easy it is to grow a bushel of grain in a garden. It's no harder than growing 20 tomato plants.

Right.

And so I'm a bit of an outlier. In the sense that I'm willing to go to that extreme, to that distance. But at the same time, there are many people who have that same passion, that same drive, that same desire. They don't necessarily have the same capability and the resources that I do. They don't have the same knowledge base, but they are willing. They want to set up their children for success and their grandchildren. I think some of the research that is emerging in medicine of the realization that actually We determine our grandchildren's health by our diet is really starting to, to get into the consciousness of a larger proportion of the population than we might expect.

Yeah. And it is wild when you think of it that way, like how it's not just what they're eating that week or that month, you know, like you said, I mean, it's what they're eating now and they're finding this. I'm sure you've even found too. You know, with colon cancer and how at birth, you know, even at birth, those levels are being— your risk level is going up or down. Every choice that, that we make when we're feeding them. And it is scary, I think, for a lot of people just seeing what's been happening with, with the EPA and the pesticide usage and, and things that are now being allowed again that have been banned for years or that are now being allowed, like all the PFAS containing pesticides and there's no labeling, there's no testing happening. There's no, you know, at least, you know, we mentioned Europe, but at least in Europe, you know, France just did a big, a big test on all their green products and found that actually even a lot of them were contaminated with PFAS, but they're testing it. You know, that's why we're not even really doing that. And I think a lot of people know.

And here's, here's something that we should all be thinking about. As farmers. We started this early in this conversation. You spoke about how there is often the need, perceived or real, to have herbicides and fungicides and tools to facilitate a transition. But when you look at the farming community and their— the farming community is delighted about their reaction, their response to these new pesticides being approved is delight. They're like, yes, finally. We have this. Yeah, you know, there was this recent social media phenomena. It's still ongoing, but to a greatly reduced degree where there was all of this outrage being expressed from tenants against landlords and against, and it was being labeled as being against capitalism and against landlords and against the system was rigged and on and on the system goes. And a large part of that was stimulated by all of these social media ads from landlords talking about, hey, the tenants pay my rent, I'm making all this money, I sit at home and do nothing, I make all this cash. People were outraged by that, justifiably to some degree. And then we get the introduction of new pesticides which are known to cause harm to some degree and stay in the soil forever.

Yeah.

And the farmer's response is a response of enthusiasm and delight.

Yeah. Oh, thank goodness I can finally get rid of this. Yeah, this week.

Consumers look at that and say, you really don't care about me, do you? You really don't care. So the reality is we have to acknowledge and we have to admit that the— we do not have— the agricultural community does not have the moral high ground on some of these issues. They perceive it as it is the moral high ground in their own personal best interest, and they perceive that the system has forced them into this position, for which an argument and a case can be made in part. But in part, but also, um, this— I think we have to acknowledge and face the reality that in the fullness of time, give it a decade, two, five, I don't know how long it's going to take, but in the fullness of time we do not have— there will come a recognition that we do not have, have not had the moral high ground, and that to some degree we, we accepted this, we, we embraced it. And therefore, to some level, there is a certain level of guilt by association.

And it's still wild to me, like you meant— you touched on this earlier as well, but the health implications of a lot of these, these chemicals for the farmers themselves, not even just for— not even for the consumers But for the farmers themselves, and we see this like in our home community in Minnesota, the cancer rate, the Parkinson's rates, I mean, through the roof, especially when you look at it relative to a rural, to an urban area. And I don't know how, if it's not, if it doesn't impact them enough to care when it's their own families, their own health. I don't know how to, how to communicate that, you know. It's like, I don't know how to get people to care about how this is impacting their own health and other people's health if they don't even get it when they see it in their own communities, in their own families. I don't know. And it's something that I struggle with as well.

How much of that do you think is ignorance?

I, I, I— we touched on it earlier, but I do think there's, you know, and I, I hate to say like ignorance. But I think there is an education issue. You know, certainly in rural areas, I think there's, there's a lack of funding. You know, there's a lot of a cultural issue. But I do think that there is a lack of understanding of how these things impact them. But then I look at it and I said, well, there's all these studies, there's all these news reports, but then I'm looking at it from a biased eye, right? I know how to interpret it. I know how to interpret a study. I know how to read a study, right? A lot of people don't. Um, but you'd have to think that when they're seeing it in their own community, that it would trigger something like, okay, maybe, maybe there's something that we're doing here, um, that's causing this to happen. I struggle with it a lot. I think there's a, there's a big cultural ingrained frame of mind, and that even if a farmer is personally feeling like, okay, maybe I'm starting to question this, if everybody around them is still in that groupthink mindset of like, no, this is fine, this is the way we've always done it, it's really hard to be the one to break out of that.

I think there's also an aspect of— I'm not quite sure how to articulate this well, but there, there is an aspect of, uh, an adversarial culture. And the adversarial culture is, I'm always— as a farming community, we are always being attacked. We always have to push back. We have to defend ourselves against consumers, against the government, against— against— like, there is the perspective we are constantly being pressured, we constantly have to be on the defensive. And that mechanism, that culture of defensiveness, moves to a culture of dismissiveness of anything that is against what we are doing.

Yeah, they kind of fuel each other.

Yeah. Anyway, I had no expectation of getting into this conversation, but I think it's an important one.

It is an important one. And it's one that I think a lot of people are, are wondering. It's something that I hear every day in like talking about things like tariffs, talking about things like the trade wars, talking about the grain prices, talking about now fertilizer costs, now gas prices. How all of that is going to impact farmers when they're already heading into a season where they've been hit once and now they're getting hit probably significantly more. And having this conversation where I'm going between, I feel like the go-between sometimes of like, here's the farming, here's what farmers are doing, here's what's happening on the market. And consumers are sitting here like, why are they supporting? Why are they in favor of this? Because it seems like this is not in their benefit, this is not in their favor. And it's really an interesting conversation. It's something that I, you know, I constantly am like trying to psychoanalyze what's happening, um, and, and I haven't been able to— I really haven't been able to come up with an answer yet. And no one can give me an answer, you know, even when I have off-the-table, like off-the-record conversations with people and I'm like, can you tell me what your thought process is here? And I still don't really get an answer, which, which makes me think that there's something that, you know, that it is like a defensiveness or something that they maybe do know. Maybe they do know and they do recognize it, but there is a pride issue and an ego issue of, okay, yeah, I'm seeing this and I know that this is happening, but if I admit it and I say, okay, yeah, this is not going well, I look weaker, you know. And that is certainly farming mindset of like, I gotta be strong, I gotta be, you know, I can't rely on anyone, I need to— that's just, that's a cult, that's for sure a cultural thing in farming. Um, and maybe that's, maybe that is what it is, I don't know.

Well, many people don't realize, many people are familiar with the language of, of marketing of when there's Everett Rogers research on the diffusion of innovations of how new technologies are adopted. And if they're not familiar with the name or that terminology, they're often familiar with this curve that's referred to as the innovators, the early adopters, the early majority, late majority, and the laggards. And what many people don't realize is that that original foundation research was done on farmers. It was done in agriculture. Yes, it was specifically conducted on the adoption of hybrid seed corn by farmers in Iowa in the 1970s.

I had no idea. Wow.

Yeah, I think it's a lot.

Yeah.

Um, and it's, it's, it's an academic book. It's now— the work has obviously evolved significantly since that original research, but it is still a fascinating insight. And you can still read the original research. It's a fascinating insight into farmer psychology and decision-making. And yeah, I'll just leave it there. It's— if anyone is interested in that topic of the subconscious decision-making of the things that we don't consciously think about as a farming community, it's a rather revealing mirror to hold up and look into.

Sometimes people don't want that mirror. Sometimes people do. I'm gonna check it out. Yeah.

So We've— I've really enjoyed this conversation. There's one more piece that I was going to get into before we got off on this, uh, this tangent. The, the— your growing practices on your grain crops, you spoke about reducing herbicides or eliminating herbicides and fungicides. You spoke about some of the weed pressure. I'm curious about the disease outcomes that you've had, but also with the dramatic reductions that you made in fertilizer applications.

What you were—

you spoke about the things that you're taking away. You haven't spoken about the things that you replace them with.

Yes, which is probably especially, especially at the beginning. And this is something I always touch on too, like with home gardeners, because there's all these recipes and like biochar and compost teas and all this stuff that you can get into, right? But as you go down the road, at least I found in my own practice of regenerative principles, once you've implemented them in your cover cropping and your mulching, you don't have to be doing all of that other stuff as long as you have what needs to be creating, right, this like healthy rhizosphere. Now, of course, we're always going to need some things, like there's always going to be like probably nitrogen and mineral needs and that kind of stuff. But it's been interesting to see how in the beginning I feel like inoculating, you know, adding some of these, especially like the inoculant type stuff, has really jump-started the soil health, the ability to reduce nitrogen, the ability to reduce things. And I'm talking about on my Colorado farm because obviously we've been doing that longer here. Um, I inoculate every single seed that goes out, whether it's a tomato, whether it's a zinnia, cover crop seed always gets inoculated, the corn, soybeans, every seed that I plant gets inoculated. That to me is like the lowest, right, like the lowest fruit for getting that soil health up and going, especially in the first few years. That's been one thing that we've really emphasized. You have a question, John, I can feel it.

I was about to ask, what inoculants have you experimented and tested with and what have been the results that you've observed?

So on our Colorado farm, we've been doing BioCoat Gold. We've been doing SeedFlare. So SeedFlare, interestingly, we planted, we were planting the corn and we got to the end of the planting, we'd upped the population a little bit. And so we ran out of corn for the last strip and had to run. Thankfully we're working with Albert Lee Seed, who's phenomenal, and they're close by. So I was able to run down there, grab a bag of seed, run back, but we didn't have a chance to inoculate it with SeedFlare. So came back, planted that row, and that row came up like 4 days later. Wow. I just thought it was funny because I think it's funny because as we're applying all this stuff, our farmer, our applicator, was like, you know, I could tell there was this like—

Checking your sanity a little bit.

Yeah, like, what is all this woo-woo stuff you're putting on the seeds? And so that personally, for me, that was a little bit satisfying to see. But again, if there's nothing else I'm going to encourage people to do, and I always do, it's inoculate your seed. Like, that's the first biggest bang for your buck. It's there when the seed germinates. All of that is there. Then there's the other stuff that we've been doing. So we've been using, you know, things like MacroPak. We did sap analysis testing on the farm in Minnesota. So the sap analysis was so interesting to me, both on it, like doing it, you know, cutting it, figuring out like which stage, which leaf I should be using, shipping it off, getting the— getting that information, seeing it and being like, oh, we did a control, of course. So we did our field and we did our neighbor's field, which is, you know, conventional, and, um, still had full rates of nitrogen. What was the most interesting number to me was how much nitrogen was in those leaves, like way beyond what the plant would be able to use. And of course, I'm looking at that from the perspective of, like, from my home farm, I've learned I don't over- fertilize, especially in spring, because then we get aphids, or any other number of problems. And so I'm looking at this and like, okay, A, we're spending a bunch of money we don't need to, to be fertilizing nitrogen, when clearly the tissue analysis is showing this is more nitrogen than this plant can even use. So that was really interesting to me. And then the only thing we use during the season is we did drone application. Well, we did an in-furrow plant, we did an in-furrow I think of a macro pack and some micros. So I think there was boron. Our analysis showed that we needed to add some manganese right around fill stage. So we did that. And then beyond that, I think it was only macro pack that we really applied. And so we have a bunch of jugs still sitting there because it's like stuff I didn't even need.

Based on, based on what you're describing, I'm curious about your economics because it sounds like your total budget was a fraction.

So unfortunately, where we got hit was the application, the applicator rate, because obviously we're doing 20 acres. It doesn't make sense for me to get a tractor and to start farming it myself, so we're hiring it out. Um, so where we get hit is the applicator rates, paying someone to come by and I'm gonna plant things, I'm gonna drone. You know, once you can get, and of course that's its own issue, right? Is the cost of like, right, all implements and repairs and all that. And I know they have to cover all that, I get it. But interestingly, depending on when we sell our corn, of course we haven't sold it yet. Even considering that we took a yield hit, it was maybe a couple dollars difference per acre, even considering the yield hit that we took. I, I would not change— let me just put it this way. I haven't run the final numbers without, without the applicator rates, which is how I'd have to side by side it. I would not change anything that we did last year because the nitrogen cost last year was so high that by the time if we had applied the full rate, it would have been the difference between being profitable and not being profitable on that corn.

So, and I think that math for many growers that this year is changing to an even greater degree, obviously, with what's just happened here in the last couple of weeks.

I think this year is one of those years where it's going to be— yeah, I mean, everyone's going to have to make that call. Like, if you don't have animals on your farm that you can kind of close the gap with, yeah, I think a lot of people are going to be looking at how do I, how do I reduce that. And of course, if you're if you're only looking at it though as a, I have to get my nitrogen in, but you're not looking at it from, I have to get the soil profile mineralizing the existing nutrients. And if you're not getting the organic matter in the soil, it's a frame of mind. It's still a frame of mind that has to be navigated. I think people will cut nitrogen, but if you're just cutting nitrogen and you're not implementing other things this year, to me, it's like, if there's going to be a year you're going to start doing inoculation and you're going to start changing your practices, this is a great year to do it.

There's lots of economic incentives that align to create that. You know, this reminds me of a conversation, one of the early conversations I had here on the podcast with Gary Zimmer. I asked him a question, something along the lines of, if you wanted to facilitate mass adoption and you had a magic wand that you could wave to change one thing, what would it be? And his answer was, I would make nitrogen really expensive.

There you go. It is. I mean, really, because once— that's, that's what it is, is people are going to continue doing the same thing if they're getting yields. Now, of course, it doesn't make sense to be yielding like 240 bushels an acre with everybody's yielding that much. Then we're just driving the price down anyway because there's such a lot of corn on the market, which is kind of, you know, part of what we saw this year. If everybody would start scaling down their inputs, and yeah, take a bit of a yield hit, but the soil health profile is better, and the input cost is lower. Everybody's price will go up because yeah, there'll be less corn on the market too, which, you know, right now we have a glut, we have too much, we have too much, which is driving that, you know, yeah, from a marketing perspective, from a business perspective, yeah, we all know the equation, right? Supply and demand.

Well, getting farmers all aligned collectively to produce less has never been successful and is unlikely to ever be in the near-term future.

Nope. But if we can say, hey, look how many passes you're doing on your field, right? With gas prices being what they are, and, and who knows, going into summer and fertilizer prices being what they are. Yeah, I mean, you're gonna do it. If you've been thinking about it, seems like this year is a no-brainer.

Yeah. Well, this has been a very enjoyable conversation. Thank you for all the provocative thoughts that you've brought and shared. I've really enjoyed it and I look forward to more conversations with you in the future. Thank you very much for being here and for all your work.

Thanks for having me.

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