Episode 185: Pioneering Solubilized Urea and Foliar Nutrition with the Fabian Family

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to improving soil health and agriculture efficiency, and ultimately, hopefully, the production of food that regenerates our ecosystems and that provides public health. Today I'm here with some people who I would like to call friends of mine, but I need to have more conversations with them first. And that's the Fabian family from Canada. I've really admired their work and on improving nutrient use efficiency, and particularly nitrogen management efficiency, and the results that they're getting on their operation. So I'm here today with Patrick and Andrew and Stephen. Patrick, I'll direct my first question to you. Can you first kind of begin by giving us an overview of your operation and the work that you're doing, the scale, the particular farming context, and the scope of the work that you're doing?

All right, well, thanks for having us on, John Kempf. It's an honor to be on your podcast. We are part of a— I guess I'm a third generation, my boys are fourth generation farm in southern Alberta. We're 100% irrigation. And we ended up in 1987, I started growing pedigreed seed. And we started working with different ways to try and manage nitrogen management. We tried to work with different fertility options and using the conventional agronomy, and that just led us to doing different, um, things, different avenues, sometimes by necessity and sometimes out of curiosity. But it was one of those things that sometimes necessity is the mother of invention, and it forces you to think outside the box.

What are the scopes of this? What's the scope of the seed crops that you're producing?

We grow generally cereals, which would include barley, wheat, rye— sorry, barley, wheat, triticale, flax, corn, occasionally soybeans, alfalfa seed, pedigree seed canola, and peas, and some once in a while lentils. So we're We have a fairly diverse range of crops that we produce, and our target for all of the crop production is for pedigreed seed. Sometimes that's not always possible. We'll grow for rotation purposes, like for this year we've got hemp in one field, things like that, but we try and keep a balanced rotation for maintaining supply of varieties of seed that our clients would use in this area.

And within—

what was it about your operation, or I suppose my question is, what attracted you to— what got you started paying attention to nutrient management and nitrogen management more closely initially? What led you down this pathway?

I would say in the late '90s, It was a situation where things were getting really, really tight on the farm, and using a conventional agronomist, they were making recommendations that we would need to raise a crop. That particular year, we had put in, uh, our crop, and everything was really super dry in the fall. And on one of our farms, which is flood irrigation, we had elected to do fall irrigation, so that's fine. That's not uncommon around here. In the springtime, it was really, really, really wet, and our agronomist finally, uh, got the test back and said, okay, to produce an 85-bushel crop of hard red spring wheat, we're going to have to put this on there. And so we went out there with, uh, I can't remember what the numbers were, but it it looked like a blizzard coming out the back of the spreader. And the idea was we were going to work it in today and seed it tomorrow. Well, tonight it rained, and it kept on raining and kept on raining and kept on raining. Long story short, we had— we were unable to seed that field. So the field had to go fallow for the year. And the following year, we came back and took our soil tests again and we had 8 pounds of available nitrogen and it's like, this is not going to work. And so we looked at different alternatives to, to see what could be done. Of course, our agronomist had the fertilizer dealer on speed dial. They were ready to put on another 284 pounds of product. And this is a recipe to get out of farming very quickly because it wasn't sustainable.. And so when I had suggested to my agronomist that there is this thing about melting urea, she was very upset about the fact I would even entertain the notion of such nonsense. And when I decided to go ahead with it, she called me back 3 days later and said that she was not able to sleep all night because she was bothered by this, this folly of what I was trying to do.. And for the first time in my life, I got fired. She said, if this is what you're planning on doing, I'm going to have to let you go as, as me being your agronomist, because I don't want to get in trouble for making or being part of these kind of foolish recommendations. So we came across a gentleman who was very, very knowledgeable, gentleman by the name of Gerald Anderson. I've got deep respect for him. He really showed us the way on how these, uh, this process was done. And, uh, right up into the time that he retired, he was our agronomist, and, uh, we learned so much from him. And that started, that really started the journey when we realized that, you know what, everything that we been told is not necessarily 100% accurate. There are other— Pardon me?

It's incomplete. We're often given the impression that this is the, this is the entire story.

This is—

there is one right way to do it.

Yes.

And you start digging into it and you soon realize actually there's multiple roads to Rome. And, uh, there's one that's optimal for those who are selling inputs and one that's optimal for the people who are buying them, and they're selling the same two pathways.

Right. And so consequently, this was something that we decided to carry on with. And then we got on to solubilizing urea. We called it melting urea back then. And we honestly didn't know what we were up against. So I got this tank and I had Andrew record what we were doing, because if something would have went wrong and there was a big explosion or whatever, at least they had video evidence of what it was that we were doing, because Remember, back in those days, nobody talked about this. It was voodoo magic, it was evil, it was wrong, it was unconventional, and there was no assistance whatsoever. And so we were going into this blind.

So let's, let's chat a bit about melting urea, solubilizing urea. Why is that a good idea, and why is liquid urea better than, say, Liquid 28 or 32?

Okay, well, one of the things that we— when we started doing this, we were told that the buried research that was out there indicated that there was a 4.2:1 efficiency factor when you can put it in the form that the plant can utilize., and take in as a foliar product. And that intrigued me because as a younger farmer trying to get, get this figured out and try and pay his bills, if you can use 25% of a product and get the same effect, you have my attention. So that's what we went on and tried to do.

So you're, you're referring specifically to a 4.2% efficiency factor from foliar application versus soil application.

Not 4.2%, 4.2 times the efficiency.

Correct.

Yeah, so we're putting on in our, in our solution that we make, we end up with an 18-0-0 product which has 2 pounds of nitrogen for every gallon that the solution contains. So 2 pounds, we put on 5 gallons, which is 10 pounds. So we're paying for 10 pounds of nitrogen, but the plants are seeing the equivalent of 42 pounds of soil-applied urea equivalent. That's getting—

that's a pretty big— that's a pretty big economic deal in today's world.

You would not believe the pushback the first years on how this was nonsense and how plants don't have teeth and all this other nonsense that the— I want to call it mainstream agronomy. And I'm not trying to cast a bad light on them. They've got their place. But we also, you know, have to realize that they were educated a certain way. And as we had just discussed earlier, there are other roads to Rome, if you will.

Yeah. So what started happening, those early experiments, those early days when you were sort of playing around with putting on foliar urea, what started— what were the results that you were getting? What were you seeing?

Well, we were seeing the same output for the reduced input. We did find a couple of learning curves that we had to negotiate around. One of them was we had, um, once again there was no education out there, there was no track record or prior experience that we could lean on. And so we put this with our herbicide, for the most part everything worked fine, and then one time I put it with a particular herbicide that we use up here called Tundra, and it's a contact herbicide as well as it contains a systemic mode of action. And we absolutely fried the crop. So I was just about in tears because this was a brand new variety. I was one of the few seed growers that had it, and I absolutely cooked the crop. And so I called Gerald up and I said, you need to come out here because I, I don't know what I did and I don't know what to do. So he came up and I said, I'm not even going out in the field with you, I'm so sick to my stomach about this, I don't even want to go out in the field. He says, okay. So he came back to the house, knocked on the door and said, he had this funny grin on his face and he says, go fishing.

Back in 2 weeks.

Yes.

He says, go fishing and don't look at it for 2 weeks. He says, you got new growing points coming. And he said, boy, are they coming. But he said, it's going to look like crap for the next couple of weeks. Well, so we did. And believe it or not, that turned out to be one of the best barley crops we've ever had. And so from that point, once again, it's one of those things you put back into your mental notebook. Okay, well, we can do this, but we need to adjust a little bit if we're going to use a mode of action that's a contact mode of action as opposed to systemic. So little things as we went along, we were learning these things, uh, one precept upon precept.

You know, I want to just take a quick sidebar here from this, this main conversation, but, um, your, your comment, the comment that you just made, it was the one of the best barley crops that you've ever had, and it had that severe stress. And there's this prevailing pattern, um, across a wide variety of different crops that when there is substantial stress at relatively early growth stages provided they have the means and then the follow-up capacity to recover from that, those are often extremely high-yielding crops. This is a prevailing pattern. I've seen it across beans. I've seen it in green beans. I've seen it in cereal grains. I've seen it in cotton. Seen it in tomatoes. I've seen it in many different crops. And I'm— there's some interesting physiology of what happens here, but the short version is that when a plant has severe stress early in its life, it essentially immunizes against stress later in life. So when it has stress later on during, during the, the grain fill period, or any type of stress that occurs later in life, it just shrugs it off and keeps right on going because it's to some degree been immunized to it.

Well, let me be clear that the plant wasn't— the, the field was not the only thing that was being stressed at that point in time.

Yeah, yeah, I can imagine that. So there's so many, so many follow-up questions here, but just real quick on that last one, John.

So I work for a vegetable seed company in the Netherlands. So that's where we've crossed paths before as well. So on the early stress conversation, that's something that we see as well across a variety of crops is that when the nicking is off and we have to do trimming, Generally speaking, of course, there's some varietal and genetic differences, but generally speaking, when we do the earlier trims, those are the more responsive crops where we get better yield, but more importantly for us, quality. So on germination, energy, off-types, or sorry, inbreds, those different things. So yeah, there's a, there's a huge response from developing that stress early. It's something that we see across a variety of crops.

So for people who are not familiar with the terminology that you were using in terms of nicking plants, can you describe the two different operations that you were describing and the scope of how much of the crop or the plant you're removing?

Yeah, so basically in hybrid seed production, basically the nicking is the timing of the males and the females flowering. And so generally speaking, you want the males flowering earlier,, so that there's sufficient pollen for when the females are receptive. So trying to time up that with a variety of strategies of sowing dates, transplanting dates, trimming, etc. Yeah. Yeah, thank you.

So this, this conversation around urea applications, you, Patrick, you were describing How you started by doing applications with the herbicides. Are you still doing that today? What does your— what does a common crop growing period look like? How many different applications are you making and at what stages?

Well, it depends on the crop. Generally, on a normal year, we would make on cereals 2 applications. Sometimes we might make a third. First application would be— now we're talking about the solubilized urea— the first application would generally be when we have our herbicide going on. So we'll piggyback that at the same time. And then Andrew is our mad scientist. He's the one that is responsible for adding the different nutrients and everything else to balance the nutritional load on that plant. And then the second time would be when everybody else is usually putting on a fungicide, we would be putting on, or maybe just a little bit before, we would be putting a second application of nutrition onto the plants.

Yeah, can I interject on that one?

Sure.

So on the cereals, we try to get that second application before stem elongation. So at that tillering stage on the canola, we'll try to get that second application on before or at bolting. On corn, yeah, I mean, we'll do 2 or 3 passes, probably before V7, V8. And our flax, I mean, we again, try to get that on before flowering. And then later on, like on the cereals, Dad was talking about that third pass, you know, if we're starting to see some of that cannibalization on the lower leaves, you know, then maybe we'll come in with a third pass and at that flag leaf stage or early heading, if we're again starting to see some cannibalization Try to follow suit with some of the other crops too, just being aware of what a nitrogen deficiency looks like.

Are you then making later applications on the corn as well post-pollination?

We don't have a drone, and I mean, quite frankly, the airplane at $18 an acre is rather expensive to put nutrition on. We would love to, but we don't. We try to go in as much as our high clearance sprayer will allow us to. The corn will be tickling the bottom of the sprayer essentially, and or even, you know, kind of leaning over as we're driving slow. But no, we're unfortunately just at the staging of the corn, we can't get in there before, or while just at pollination there. We would like to, but we can't.

Now, Patrick had mentioned that in your early applications you were using a rate of 10 pounds of nitrogen per acre. Have you experimented with various application rates, and what are the max rates or the max dilution that you are comfortable with?

Well, people much smarter than us have said that the plant can only take in 10 actual pounds at a time. So for us, it makes more sense to spoon-feed the crop.

Hang on a second. Hang on a second. It's like you're going to put it on the leaf and the plant is not going to absorb it?

Not going to absorb it all at once. I mean, we haven't really played with higher rates than that 5 US gallons per acre of that 18-0-0, which is 10 actual pounds. Um, not saying that it wouldn't necessarily work or you couldn't, but personally we just haven't. Again, we want to— we're more of the opinion that taking that same amount and spreading it over 2-week or 10-day period is better than trying to throw it all up front at once.

And what, uh, I, I know that Patrick mentioned a bit ago that you're playing around with adding other nutrients into some of these tank mixes as well. What have you experimented with concentration? What is the maximum concentration that you're comfortable with? And this is, I know this is getting to be an important question for people who are flying applications on and trying to go with ultra-low volumes per acre.

Yeah, so we've had clients who have done just straight product, so taking that 5 US gallons of solubilized urea and just applying that. They haven't seen any kind of leaf burn, tip burn, that sort of thing. The only comment is that they find that there's crystallization left after those water droplets evaporate, but no plant damage or anything like that.

That's intriguing. And, you know, I would guess there's some environmental and climatic considerations here, but we know that urea is hygroscopic. And so if you are in a high humidity environment, if you're in a dryland environment, then it's a different story. But if you're in a high humidity environment, I would guess that any, any urea crystals that are on the leaf surface are going to dissolve over several day period.

Yes, and that would be true just in our area. We're technically considered a semi-arid desert, so our humidity levels rarely get above 60%, maybe only for a few hours in the morning.

What other nutrients have you experimented with adding in with the liquid urea? What are you doing today?

A little bit of everything, it seems like. This morning on the corn, put in some phosphorus, some potassium, some zinc, some molybdenum, some molasses, some trace micronutrients as well in one of the products— copper, iron, manganese. That product also has a little bit of zinc and some nickel in it, and we threw in some boron with it as well. Folvic, that's just a standard on every foliar application for us.

Yeah, and just for as a frame of reference, what stage is your corn crop at right now?

Well, we got shredded with hail about 3 weeks ago, so there's a lot of leaves with not much internode. So I haven't been out in a few days to really assess it, but Patrick, where do you think we're at?

V6, somewhere around the V6, because basically the plant had to start all over again. We had 3-inch stubs left in the field after the hailstorm, and so we basically had to start over from scratch after we put the hail recovery products on. And it's coming back beautifully, but it's going to be delayed.

So you had 3-inch stalks and you still had, uh, you had an apical meristem that was able to recover from that?

Yes.

Yes.

Wow. Yeah. All right, let's talk about hail recovery because I've had a lot of fun with hail recovery over the years. What have you been doing? What did you do for hail recovery?

Well, we're not going to take credit for it. We work with the gentleman who's much smarter than us. He's got his PhD in plant pathology and physiology and gave us the recommendations on this particular product that has some stress relief technology in it. It's a phosphorus-based product with some micronutrients and then some cytokinin hormones along with it and some boron to, yeah, basically help heal the wounds there. And we applied that immediately after, within 48 hours of that hail, and yeah, the plant's doing the rest.

I had this fascinating experience. This is now, I don't know, close to 20 years ago, where we had a cantaloupe crop that was about 70 acres down in, I think, South Carolina, if memory serves me correctly. And with severe, uh, hailstorm, severe hail damage, and the, the cantaloupe were approximately softball size, maybe 3 inches, 4 inches in diameter, still had quite a bit of growth left. And we were able to— we put together a hail recovery foliar application. The farmer was able to get about a third of the field applied immediately within the next— the following day, within 24 hours. And then additional rainstorms came up and he wasn't able to finish. He got another section of the field applied, I think, 3 days later, like 72 hours later. And about half the field got none whatsoever until 2 weeks later, just because it was ongoing. It was hurricane, hurricane event, hurricane weather, just ongoing wet and rain constantly. And when he got to harvest, there was these 3 dramatic differences where the section that got the first foliar, he had a full harvest with minimal scarring, even though there was scarring on the melons themselves, but they were still saleable and marketable. Second section had a substantial crop loss, but they were still there. And the third section, he might as well not have bothered with the effort of harvesting. And that was quite a learning experience for me about the timeliness of a foliar application after hail damage. Like, you have to get out there right away.

Yeah.

Well, as my dad likes to say, time is tissue.

I used to work EMS, and when we had a heart attack or a stroke patient, the longer that we stayed on scene playing around, the more tissue damage there was done to the patient's heart or brain. And so time was tissue. So, you know, let's get going here and get it down to, uh, primary care. Whereas, uh, same thing applies. I use that analogy for our hail. Yeah, you can wait, but you're going to have more ethylene production. You're going to have a harder time turning that plant around the longer you wait. So time is tissue, but in this case, the tissue turns out to be yield usually.

Yeah. So Patrick, earlier in our conversation, I asked you the question and we, we partially answered it, but not entirely. I asked you why urea instead of 32? And, or 28, and your, your answer was, well, there's a greater efficiency with foliar application versus soil application for urea. But this question still remains: why urea instead of 32?

Well, I'm not a scientist, but I can tell you what I found because I thought I was going to take the easy path one year, and up here we don't have 32, we have 28-0-0, but Same thing. And we decided, well, okay, it's already solubilized, it's already in liquid form, let's just go with that. And so we did that. And we ended up with a bunch of crop burning, we ended up with not the results that we wanted to see. It's like we weren't getting the efficiency of it. And Somebody who was much smarter than me said, well, duh, your UAN is roughly 25% of that total solution. Your urea is roughly 25% of that total solution. So let's take your 4.2 to 1, multiply it by 0.25, and you're ending up with a 1 efficiency factor. So you think you're getting that efficiency, you're not getting it. And then for no additional charge, you get to burn your crop from the ammonium that's contained in the solution. So good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.

So if I'm understanding your thought process correctly, you are suggesting that the 4.2:1 efficiency gain from foliar versus soil application is specific to urea and not to nitrogen in general?

That's what we haven't done much experimenting on side-by-side trials, but you stick your finger in a light socket and you get electrocuted, electric shock, uh, you're very hesitant to do it again. And I don't need a second shot across the bow to tell me that that's not necessarily the way to go. I could be wrong, I stand to be corrected, but at this point, that's what our assumptions have led us to at this stage. Yeah.

And our experiences.

Now, historically, crops and people in academia, academia who have played around with foliar urea applications have come to understand that there are some crops, particularly citrus, and I think maybe tomatoes and some others, who are more susceptible to a metabolite or metabolic byproduct that is produced from urea manufacturing called biuret. And there's been some emphasis in certain parts of, of the country and, and the world on, uh, making foliar applications with low biuret urea. Is this something that you've prioritized or are you just using standard urea?

We have heard a lot of talk about it. Um, once again, according to the standards that are in United States and Canada, urea is only supposed to have a maximum production level of 1% biuret in the manufacturing process. Otherwise, it has to be, you know, discarded or what have you, or can't be sold. We haven't to our knowledge, have ever experienced the problem. We have used multiple loads of urea from different manufacturers. We have never run into it. The biggest one I hear that coming from is somebody who's trying to educate and dissuade somebody from using urea. Solubilized. And the argument is, well, the Biuret is going to burn the field up and you're not going to get a crop. Fear plays a big part in this transition to foliar nutrition and foliar management, because there's always the boogeyman in the corner that, what about this? What about, you know, are you sure you want to do this because of all these risks out there?. And so there's a lot of talk about it. All it takes is, uh, one prominent podcast and everybody's fearful of the, the Bayerette. Um, I know we have had, um, inquiries from around the world. One person tried it in Pakistan and they tried it on their, their wheat crop out there, and they did see some burning.. But apparently the Biuret, there's no regulations over there, and that was problematic. Uh, in North America, I honestly don't know if I can say I've experienced or talked to anybody who has had a negative experience due to the Biuret content.

Okay, this is, this is interesting because, um, I, I was unaware of the, the North American production standard. I did, uh, just a somewhat surface-level digging into this a couple of weeks ago when I was asked a question on an Ask Me Anything session. And my memory is a bit fuzzy now, but from what I recall, first of all, grain crops, particularly C4 grasses, are relatively low susceptibility to the virus. They have a greater capacity to metabolize it than some other crops do. But, um, I'm a bit fuzzy now on exactly where the threshold was, but I want to say they were referring to anything as less than 1.25% as being low biuret. So if that is the case, then what you're describing is that the North American marketplace available urea largely qualifies as low biuret.

Right. And when we were in Burlington, uh, for that, uh, High Plains No-Till Conference, there was a bunch of us that had met. And once again, I love these conferences because you get such a diversity of knowledge. And there was a guy actually from the industry there that had a lot of experience with it, and he was giving us some education on that. And that's where I had actually learned that there is a, a national standard, and it turned out to be a North American standard, uh, for biorette.

Uh, one of the questions that I have for you— you are now— you've described your various foliar applications that you are doing on your various crops. Are you doing any soil application yet at all? Or maybe a better question, and perhaps a broader question, is what are you doing in soil for nitrogen management more broadly?

I'll let Andrew answer that one.

Well, we've tried to push the envelope, you know, last couple years. Really pushing the envelope. Last year we didn't put any upfront nitrogen on any of our crops, and I think we saw a yield hit on that as a result. Albeit, I mean, you know, like we had neighbors with their corn, you know, doing 190 to 200 bushels an acre, and we were at 177 with about 40 pounds of actual nitrogen applied. So, you know, when urea is $500 a ton, you know, that's a different conversation than $1,300 a ton. Um, so, you know, I think we maybe left some yield on the table, but, you know, you got to look at that and see operationally what's better for you. But typically We're applying 28-0-0 in-furrow with our liquid kit and using that at seeding time. We'll try to get a fertigation pass or two on. Yeah, we're under irrigation as well, so we'll try and throw some through the pivot if we can early on, and that's about it. Like, we really don't use granular fertility other than maybe gypsum or zinc sulfate this year, or maybe some potash where we're really high in potassium or magnesium. But yeah, for the most part, we're not using granular urea on the soil.

So just to jump in there real quick, John, just to expand on that. So one of the big focuses for us in the last few years has just been net income per acre. So we inherently know that we're leaving a little bit of yield on the table, but we're really trying to maximize or minimize what we're putting into the system. And we, we take soil tests every year. Obviously the starting point, we're making sure that we're not ending up with less nitrogen or organic matter in the soil on a year-to-year basis. So that's the starting point, but we're really focusing, paying more attention to net income per acre because Yeah, if we're just chasing yield, and one of Dad's favorite sayings is spending our way to success, that's not the model that we're looking for for longevity.

And what has your pattern been of improving profitability per acre? What has that looked like over the last several years that you've really been focusing on that?

Well, when wheat's $15 an acre or a bushel versus $7 a bushel, it's a very different conversation. And again, with the changing in fertilizer prices, it— that conversation changes almost daily, it seems. But, uh, the trend is up. I mean, no, we don't hit home runs every time, and, you know, we get events like hail or whatnot that come through and take all that profitability away. But at the same time, it comes down to managing risk. And if we don't have all of that fertility upfront and all that money invested and something like a hail event happens, well, yeah, we have some losses, but maybe not lost as much as what we could have. And then, you know, crops are looking great. Sure, we can throw some more foliares on. Things like that. So it's, you know, I don't, I don't like to say we have a particular way of doing things every year, because every year has different challenges. And we just got to roll with the punches and do our best, I guess.

One of the things that we have been, I guess, working with over the years without even realizing it, is trying to capitalize on efficiencies. Everybody wants a $10, you know, 1 quart per acre that's going to solve all the problems. And we haven't found that to be accurate or true. It seems like it's a combination of a bunch of little successes, 2% here, 3% there. Well, this one gives us 6% here. You do those things cumulatively and then you look over your shoulder and all of a sudden you're 30% more profitable than you were earlier on. You were asking about when do we go out with our nutrition, and this year I said, well, normally we put it on with our first herbicide pass. This year on one of a couple of our fields, it was so dry out here we didn't have any herbicide requirement. There was no need because there was nothing growing. However, our plants were at the 3-leaf stage. Our practice is we like to be able to put on a pass of nutrition that is all-encompassing, that has basically— it's like a lick tub for your crops, so to speak— that when the maximum yield potential is being set, and we're— from what we've been told, it's determined at the 3 to 4 leaf stage on cereals. We like to have that front-end loaded nutrition there in small quantities. So when the plant is making that decision, it can check all the boxes and go, yeah, we're gonna add another 3 rows onto this head. Doesn't mean we're going to get it in the end because it's a long way to harvest, but there's some efficiencies to be gained there by getting rid of mid-row banding, by getting rid of, um, you know, the 2x2 and putting everything right in the seed trench with the seed. It's our belief that every seed is getting it. And then some would argue, well, you're only putting on so many gallons per acre, it's a drip, drip, drip. No, actually it's not. Andrew's had it formulated so that we've put larger orifices on our drill and our planter so that we're we're actually adding water into the solution so it's a steady stream. So every single seed gets that nutrition in the furrow. And then, so there's a little bit of efficiency there. And then if we can capitalize on the 4.2:1 efficiency of the nitrogen, University of California Davis with the 17:1 on the phosphorus, little efficiencies there like that. And like I say, it's, it's little steps, and then that's where the profitability comes in. But it requires us to unlearn some of the things that our mainstream agronomy has taught us to be true, step over, and then be prepared and humble enough to relearn some of these other concepts that can indeed offer profitability if we're willing to go that path.

So in addition to the pieces that we've talked about so far, you mentioned putting the seed on the furrow, we've talked about the urea, you mentioned phosphorus in passing, but what are some of the other efficiency gains that you have implemented over the years that seem to be paying off?

Yeah, well, I think from a nutrition perspective, historically, obviously, there's been quite a bit of focus just purely on NPK. And so yeah, looking at different nutrient synergies and where we can implement, yeah, benefits there. So combining things like in our soil-based applications, always including humic with the nutrients, foliar applications always including fulvic, adding, for example, with our urea passes, we generally try to add carbon source as well. So whether that's in a perfect world, if we're not going with the herbicide, then we'll add humic and molasses so that we've got a labile carbon source and recalcitrant carbon source going with it. So some of those different factors that I think they play a big role in having some synergies of, you know, different nutrient interactions, different things that increase uptake, different, you know, modes of action that we can work in synergy.

And there's a couple of other things that we have stumbled across as a result of pulling back a lot of our upfront nitrogen up here. The conventional agronomic understanding is we put everything down upfront and what we have found by reducing all that and pulling the majority of that nitrogen out is that we have a less difficult time elevating our brix levels. We have less problem with lodging. We have, for some reason, no need anymore for fungicide applications.

Funny how that works.

What's that?

Funny how that works.

Funny how that works. So we start looking at this Okay, well, if we don't have to use a plant growth regulator, there's $20 an acre. If we don't have to use an insecticide, there's another $6 to $15. Um, and then your fungicide, if we don't have to use that, if it's 1 or 2 applications, there's another $20 or $40 an acre right there. So up here we're looking at an additional $70 to $100 per acre to manage the problems that come with the thinking that we have been taught as being 100% accurate.

They come with the dose of upfront nitrogen.

Yeah. And so on that upfront nitrogen, so, um, I studied in the Netherlands and there was a one, one research topic that we were looking at particularly on nitrogen management, um, that was new to me. Um, so this concept of futile cycling. And we were looking at—

what was the word before cycling? Futile cycling?

Yeah, futile cycling. Yeah. And so the study that we were looking at, I can't remember exactly how many kilos per hectare of nitrogen they were applying, but it was somewhere in the ballpark of like 300, 350 kilos per hectare. And they were showing that up to 76% of the plant's photosynthetic energy was being used to remove nitrogen from the plant sap basically in the root system. And so again, on that efficiency conversation, by not upfront loading so much nitrogen, more of the energy can be used for the processes that we're looking for productivity.

That's a big deal. And that's one that I've talked about. I was not aware of— I'm assuming that research has been published, but I've seen some older research that also spoke about the tremendous carbon requirement and photosynthetic requirement just to metabolize nitrogen, particularly nitrate. When I think about growing in your part of the world, you have a relatively compressed growing season to further south, and you have more rapid plant development, more rapid convergence of growth stages. So what challenges have you encountered with the logistics of putting on multiple applications per season? How have you managed that?

The weather. The wildcard is, well, this year is a good example up here. Like, Alberta has been inundated with excess moisture that we don't normally see. And so if you're planning, well, at this stage, we're going to be going out to put a nutrient application on to apply some nutrition. If we can't get out in the field, that can be a challenge.. And so, I mean, this system is not perfect. It's, it's going to have its challenges. That's one of the biggest ones that I can think of. Andrew, Stephen, can you guys think of anything else?

Yeah, it's just mostly that, um, the dealings with the weather and, I mean, the logistics. I mean, we, we farm about 1,000 acres, so in the grand scheme of things, it's not a super large farm, but even still, with my dad, myself, and our hired man, like, we often are just barely catching the window. And so this is where we're trying to find that balance of what are we putting up front so we've got a little bit of a reserve there versus trying to time these things up in the ideal situations. Because yes, in a perfect world, it'd be great to get out there exactly when the plant needs it, but we don't always do that. So, you You know, there's still got to be some of that nutrition and, you know, that nitrogen upfront. But again, we don't necessarily need all of it upfront.

Andrew, I know you spoke to this previously, but let's expand the conversation to some of the other crops as well, some of the small grain crops. What are your common nitrogen application rates on those other crops other than just corn?

Typically around, we aim for around that 50 actual pounds in the season combined from soil applied, whether that be in-furrow or through the pivot, versus, well, in addition to the foliar applications. But we'll target roughly around that 50 actual pounds of nitrogen.

And I missed Clara asking my question clearly, but How much of that total of 50 units is on the soil specifically at planting?

About 12, 12 actual pounds. So not a lot. And again, we'll try to time things up with the pivot to get things applied to the soil through the pivot early on as well. But Yeah, I guess the bulk load of our nitrogen applications are spoon-fed on.

Obviously, I think it's important just to mention as well that because we're a seed farm, typically we're not looking for a ton of straw production or tonnage in that regard. So our focus has transitioned over the few— over the last few years towards more phosphorus and potassium rather than nitrogen. Obviously we want to focus on nitrogen early, but for seed quality, seed yield, we're getting much better ROI from focusing on obviously the full spectrum of nutrients, but transitioning quite a bit farther away from nitrogen being the main focus.

Yeah, yeah, that's been one of the conversations that I've been wanting to get to is seed quality outcomes. But before we bounce to that, One of the things that I haven't heard you mention and that I'm intrigued by is the possibility— are you using any biologicals? Are you using any microbial inoculants? And I ask this question because the environment that you're describing, the management context, seems like an almost ideal environment for microbial inoculants to be able to express themselves really well. Because what happens in so many farming operations And this is— I'm puzzled by the lack of awareness that seems to be out there, but growers will apply large units or large volumes of, let's say, nitrogen or potassium or phosphorus or some combination of all of the above in a 2x2, in a furrow, or broadcast, and then put on a microbial inoculant and not be able to figure out why they don't get significant results. And it's because they've overloaded the system with electrolytes and they've created the signal where the plant doesn't need the support of the biology. And so of course the biology doesn't express itself. And it seems to me that you have, with the management approach that you've developed, you actually have the context for microbinoculants to express themselves really well and to actually show substantial responses. Have you experimented with those at all? What are you doing today?

Andrew, go ahead. Yes.

Yeah, we treat every seed that goes on our farm with the compost tea. And yeah, we've been using it for the last 7 years now. We no longer use the fungicide, insecticide seed treatments on any of our crops. I mean, other than, you know, the corn that comes treated or the canola that comes treated.

You're a seed production farm. That's heresy.

I know we've been given the song and dance. Here's the little plate of disease. Oh, you're going to make sure you get the best protection. Oh, you can't afford to have your crop die. You better put this chemical on to protect it. Well, we haven't seen that in the fields because our soil is not a sterile petri dish. It is—

anymore—

environment. Exactly. So for us, we haven't seen a drop-off in any of that. It's been great for us. We again use it as a seed treatment, and then on the corn, on the canola where it's already treated, we'll just apply it in furrow when we're seeding. And then come fall time, like, we don't bale off any of our straw with our corn or the flax or the hemp. We'll chop it up and apply the saprophytic fungal version of this compost tea and work that all into the soil and have that break it down and save a little bit of nitrogen for us that way too.

And you mentioned you've been doing this for the last 7 years. What types of— and you've been playing around with melted urea for quite a bit longer than that. What type of response did you observe from the biologicals once you started using them?

Well, you definitely notice the earthworms. That seems to be, you know, the most obvious one is the earthworms and how they come back. And, you know, in a shovelful, you don't have to, you know, start digging multiple shovelfuls to find an earthworm. You just digging the soil a little bit and, oh, there's an earthworm. Oh, there's another one. Oh, look at the worm castings here. You know, the, the smell of the soil, the— again, the— not saying we never have disease, but the infrequency of it, I guess, or how little disease there is, or if there is any kind of disease, how it's isolated to a very small area and doesn't proliferate through the fields or what have you. So yeah, and just again, overall plant health and what we're seeing in the sap analysis from nutrient uptake and what little we're applying and the response we're getting. I mean, that's not solely from the nutrients applied. There's a— the biology is helping facilitate those processes too. And yeah, I mean, that's my two bits about it.

But, and we'll return back to the seed dealer component of it. Up here in Canada, we're regulated as far as seed treatments go, and you have to comply with auditing and inspection and all that kind of thing. If you do have a spill or you get some on you, it's, it can be, depending on what you're using, can be quite an involving process based basically you shut it down and you gotta get everything cleaned up right away and clean it off yourself. This stuff, the beautiful part about it is you get some splashed on you, it's like, yeah, whatever, you wipe it off, it's like coral water, let's keep going here. And it's not a big deal. The toxicity level is amazingly low. Yeah, it's, it's, it's wonderful to work with. And we started offering it, uh, 7 years ago as an option with our conventional pink and blue seed treatments, and we showed each client, here's your option, you can do this, you can do that. Some of them chose to do the biological instead. The following year, when they were ordering their seed, nobody could remember what it was called, but they just, whatever that stuff was you put on my seed, I want that again. I've never seen my crop come out of the ground like that. And so after 3 years, we completely decommissioned our synthetic seed treatment line. And so now we offer biology, or we offer biology. So we do have choices.

Well, that's nutrients.

That's an awesome anecdote because that, that, that only would have happened with results.

Yes, and that's the biggest results, uh, is when the customer replies back saying, I don't know what that was, I couldn't remember the name of it, whatever you put on there last year, make sure you put that on there again. So in addition to that, uh, the boys have come up with, um, a number of years back after we started the biology, we started introducing on-the-seed nutrition in conjunction with the biology.

Now hang on a second here, who's borrowing ideas from who here? I thought I came up with that idea.

Oh, maybe you did.

Okay, no, okay, no, that's much older than I am.

We're sharing ideas.

It got— iron sharpens iron.

Yeah, yeah.

So let's, let's chat about that a bit as well.

What has—

what results have you been observing? First of all, what are you doing with the mineral seed treatments, and what results have you been observing?

Better root development, healthier starts. Some deficiencies are basically gone after using it early on. Yeah, just a better start, better yields. Yeah, I don't know, what else can you say?

Well, up here we have cold environments, uh, for seeding. A lot of times guys will go in and start seeding when there's still snow on the ground in the ditches and everything else. And application of zinc, for example, offers that enhanced level of frost protection. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but one of the research papers I read said that if, if the plant, the embryo, when it's sprouting, if it has additional zinc in it, it offers better resilience in cold environment. So that comes back to our concept of nutrition loading and enhancing the nutrition of our seed. That's some of the things that go into our foliar applications for Mum, because like I said, I go back to my EMS experience. Once a month, I'm goes into the doctor, get her blood work done to find out what she might be lacking so that the baby doesn't lack anything. And so if the doctor finds that she's inadequately supplied with a certain nutrient, they'll supplement that so that the baby isn't starved. We adopt that same concept. We've got millions of mothers out in our fields, and that is, you know, tissue testing, sap analysis. That kind of thing to find out what is required and then give that so that our clients, when they get seed from us, hopefully have a better product than what they would normally get.

Yeah, that's the next piece I've been wanting to ask you about is the quality of outcomes. But if I may, just a quick comment on our experience with mineral seed treatments. You have a number of crops, um, Well, there's two common scenarios. One is where a seedling emerges and it's not particularly dark green, it has a pale yellow color, and it doesn't— its photosynthesis is suboptimal for the first— any, any— can be a period of a few days to as much as a couple weeks. And that's because of a nutritional imbalance in the mother, as you just pointed out, and then that's not present in the seed. It takes some time to correct that. And, and I wanted to see seedlings emerge and turn dark green immediately. And the seed treatments have been a very effective way of doing that. And then the, the other observation that we've had is when you have some crops are very susceptible to insects very early, like flea beetles on canola, for example. And if you want to try to prevent that with a nutrition management-based approach, which can be done very successfully, you have to have the nutrition in the seed. So that either needs to come from the mother, from the parent generation, or it needs to come as a seed treatment that actually gets absorbed into the seed or into the seedling right as it emerges. Because it's— it doesn't make sense to go out there and spray an entire acre with a foliar application at that very early stage. It's logistically difficult. There's all kinds of difficulties with that. But if you get it into the seed and you get good nutritional balance into that seed from the beginning, then you can have those seedlings be resistant to insect pressure right from the point they emerge, and that's a lot of fun.

The difficulty that we have here is the seed distribution and propagation in Western Canada for canola, for example, is very, very tightly regulated, and the cards are kept very close to the chest on the seed companies. Their focus is more on the seed treatment side for fungicide, insecticidal activity, more so than nutrition, but I think it's slowly starting to come around. But just like anything, it's time for adoption, and there has to be a fundamental profitability factor put in there for the big companies to even consider it. But you're absolutely right. If we can provide that nutritional load to the plant or the seedling early on, it sets it miles ahead of crops that don't have that opportunity.

Yeah. So one of the frustrations that I have had historically, this is, I think, mostly true or perhaps most particularly true of corn seed production here in North America. There has been just abysmal consideration for quality. In fact, you could almost say, well, let me just say it differently. Quality is measured in terms of germination rate and not in terms of other factors such as emergence and vigor and so forth. That might be a better way of articulating it. And so as a result, we have lightweight seed, we have low-density seed, we have poor nutrition seed, we have a long list of complaints that could be registered about seed. Seed production practices in seed corn. And that there are other crops have challenges to varying degrees, some much less so, but I'm, I've always been very intrigued and believe that seed quality is foundational, foundational importance. And so I'm, I really want to hear from you as, as you've been going down this pathway using biologicals and addressing trace mineral nutrition, What has happened with seed quality for you in terms of germination rates, in terms of vigor, in terms of all the parameters that you're measuring?

So I guess we got an anecdote that we could talk about. It was about 5 years ago, a friend of ours, he wanted a sample of our hard red spring wheat. And just, I just want a 1 kg sample. Okay, sure, whatever, the bin's over there, go grab it. Didn't even think about it, whatever, he just does his thing. Talk to him again in a month and he said, were you curious as to why I wanted that sample? I wasn't, but now I am. What'd you take that sample for? So, well, I went to 4 or 5 other seed growers and got that exact same variety of that hard red spring wheat. And I got that tested and for germination, and everybody's germination was anywhere from, uh, it was I think 97%, and there was one guy that even had 100%. Ours was 98%. And it's like, okay, well, I said, "What are you trying to tell us here?" He says, "That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is the cold stress vigor test." He said, "We got that done on all of them." He said, "Everybody's dropped significantly. There was as low as 47% on the vigor, and the next high, or the highest one was 84% vigor." Vigor. He said, you know what, know what yours dropped to? He said it went from 98 to 96% on the Vigor. He said that right there, that's the result of your nutrient-densified program. So yeah, that was— we didn't ask him to do that or whatever. He just, he was more so curious and wanted to see what's there to this.

Well, the piece that, as, as we are starting to understand the microbiome better I'm coming to think of seeds as microbial inoculants. Every seed vectors a broad group of different microbes along with it. And so you— when you have the parent generation grown on soil that has been microbial inoculated and has been managed to enhance biology and to support biology, you're going to have a much richer microbiome with that seed, and that is going to express itself in greater resilience. I mean, the reality is, when you think about marketing your seed, it's not just the microbes that you're adding to the outside of the seed, it's the fact that on the inside, your seed has substantially higher microbial content than the seed that is grown in a different manner.

So in Dr. White's rhizophagy conversation, Are we essentially, like you say, inoculating with microbes from our soil into the seed and then helping to inoculate, I guess, other people's soils?

You're colonizing all your grower soils as well.

Interesting. Okay.

Yeah, it's a fascinating world we live in. It's all very connected once you dig into it. So thank you for that anecdote on the cold vigor, the cold stress challenge, what other— have you noticed changes in plant phenological expression or seed expression in terms of seed size, shape, plant size, shape, and so forth?

Well, I mean, we also add some cytokinins later in the growth cycle to get a larger seed. But that's sometimes the frustration of some of our seed clients. They say, well, your seed is so big and heavy that I have to buy more of it, and I don't like that.

But that's the expression of a fundamental misunderstanding of what quality seed should actually be all about.

Exactly. And we try to educate the growers on it, but You know, they, they, they see bushels and they, well, I can fit 400 bushels in there and I know what it looks like in the back of my tandem. And you put 400 bushels in and it's not that, that much volume. Well, we have to do it by weight. And, you know, a 70-pound bushel wheat is going to be different volume than a 60-pound bushel wheat. Yep.

Yeah, so generally speaking, on everything that we grow, we're getting heavier bushel weights across all of the crops that we have. And so yeah, like Andrew and Dad have been mentioning, we have to sell our seed by the pound rather than bushel now because people think that we're shortchanging them if we sell it by the bushel because everything's heavier. But, but yeah, we sell it by the pound now in order to help circumvent that. But, and then where exactly this is coming from in the program, it's a bit difficult for us to, to say because we're doing, you know, 10 or 12 different things at the same time with the microbial inoculum, hormones, etc. So we're not too interested or concerned of where exactly it's coming from. Obviously, the end result is our most important, uh, factor. If we had the time and money in it and, uh, resources to be able to dive deeper into it, then obviously we would, but The results are our main concern.

At some stage, if we have sophisticated seed buyers and sophisticated seed sellers, we might start having a conversation about selling seed by seed count as we do in the vegetable space.

But yeah, they do that with corn already. 80,000 to a bag.

Yep. Yeah.

So on that same note, so the vegetable seed company that I work for, exactly what you mentioned, John Kempf, everything sold on seed count. But in certain vegetables like carrots, for example, each seed company is throwing away a lot of seed that is good quality, but just generally too small because it slips through the farmer's seed discs. And so that's a big challenge that we have as seed companies. And that's one of the One of the anecdotes or trials that we have ongoing right now in the ground is conventional nutrition versus multiple sap analysis and foliar applications. And then we're harvesting those two lots separately for onions, carrots, and red beets. And we'll be testing the seed quality, germination, vigor, all sorts of quality metrics with our lab. And so This is something that we're trying to improve at Bayo. But yeah, it's a difficult conversation bringing in nutrition and environmental effects into kind of a genetic-based organization, you know, and so everything is quite involved and focused on marker technology and all the, you know, in-depth genetic components. But the environmental side, because the anecdote for me, I've been responsible for the organic seed production around the world, and we have the same genetics going in conventional and organic. And generally speaking, we see, you know, anywhere between a 10% and 50% yield hit on those same genetics. And so it's a nice anecdote to show on certain crops we can get very close. In other crops, there's a huge disparity between the conventional and organic, and it's again not a genetic component, but the environment in which we're placing them in. Yeah.

So Stephen, you have the benefit of a unique perspective. I've been, I expressed some quite direct criticism of corn seed production here in North America. I have less familiarity and less perspective with what vegetable seed production looks like generally, although we work with a number of vegetable seed growers in an agronomy and advisory capacity. But can you offer some perspective on the, I was about to say the state of quality, but what does vegetable seed production look like relatively to perhaps corn or to other crops? And how much room is there for improvement?

Yeah, it's a good question. So I think that's also been one of my big interests in working with Bayo is that, well, number one, the margins are quite a bit higher in the vegetable space compared to the commodity space. So the room for improvement in the season through sap analysis, through these various amendments, there's more space and room for that, not only financially, but then also farm size. So generally speaking, most guys in commodity crops, they're massive farms and it's difficult to get across every acre once, maybe even twice if possible. Whereas the vegetable space is quite a bit more involved, smaller hectares or smaller acres, generally speaking. Of course, there's massive farms in the US and other places, but yeah, there's generally more attention to detail in some of those different spaces. If we look at Nova Crop Control and sap analysis, much of their space and dedication arose in strawberries, bell peppers, and tomatoes. And I think in large part, of course, because those growers are looking to push the envelope and they have the means to be able to do that. So I think there's definitely more interest in space for improving quality in the vegetables, vegetables compared to the commodity crops, because also the attention to detail on quality, because the seeds are much higher value, You know, there's, there's just more time and attention to that. But yeah, just I would say generally speaking, there's still much, much opportunity and room to grow in that space.

This has been such an enjoyable conversation. What have we missed talking about?

Probably that's an entirely different conversation with a group of people other than ourselves, but the philosophical fundamentals of what we're talking about here with nutri— nutrient densification in our foods. I don't really see anything changing short term as long as the producer is, is paid on producing bulk X or Y. Until there's a component that recognizes the nutrition quality content of the grain or the corn or the peas or whatever, the soybeans that the farmer is raising. And unless he's remunerated for them, we're not going to be seeing much deviation from this mainstream agronomic advice that we tend to receive.

I completely agree. You achieve what you incentivize. And we've, we've incentivized production of volume with no consideration for quality, and there doesn't seem to be any collective macro effort to shift that anytime soon. It doesn't seem to be a priority from a public health perspective or from any other perspective, and so it's nice to think about, but I think it is— if this is something that we want to prioritize for ourselves, our own families, our own communities, then we have to take charge and we have to own it. We have to make it happen on a local level because it's I don't see it happening on a macro level anytime soon. I don't see enough collective consumer demand.

There has been an attempt in the past here. We've had groups and even a couple of individuals that really believe in the nutrient densification concept talking to the different grain elevators, and they don't even want to give you the time of day about it because it requires segregation, it requires extra inspections, extra testing. Extra, you know, handling. And they don't— they, they make their money on volume. And, uh, it's, it's very difficult. But like we are doing, and of so many of your growers and your clients are doing, we're not able to change, but we're able to affect the space that we have the sphere of influence in, and it starts there. And if we can start with our own thinking to allow ourselves to think of other concepts of what we've been told all these years, perhaps there's a chance that collectively the little groups here and groups there will rise up and it will, it will get better. The, as I've said for the last number of years, The current agronomic model that we have for North America is not sustainable long-term.

The pattern that I see emerging from a public health perspective, and I kind of— there's a part of me that doesn't really like the phrase of public health because it's very impersonal. But when you look at the patterns of across populations, I— it seems to me that we are going to see a continued divergence where there will be a growing group of people who thrives and generally live healthy lives to the end of their life, and there is a large group of people who— the majority are on this road currently— who will live too short and die too long. They have very poor quality end of life. And the last decade or two where their, their body just starts breaking apart, breaking down because of all the environmental toxins and everything that they've been exposed to. And, um, agriculture and food production is a significant contributor to that. It's certainly not the only one. There's food processing, there's, um, there's environmental toxins, there's electromagnetic radiation. I mean, there's a number of things that— a number of factors that contribute that, but food and agriculture is significant. And so when you think about that divergence and you think about the people that you care about and the people that you have responsibility for, I'm reminded of— I'm used to reading this story in German, so the translation might be a bit imperfect, but in In scripture where Jesus speaks about the proverbial story of the Good Samaritan, that story started with the question of, who is my brother? He said, be your brother's keeper. Who is my brother? Who are those that are near to me? You think about that for us as farmers and food producers, who is our brother? Who are we responsible for? Obviously we're responsible for our family. To what degree are we responsible for the people who consume our food? To what degree are we responsible for our own local community? Community. Um, there's certainly— there's, there's variations of degrees of responsibility there, but there's also, um, this, this phrase that I've heard, that if ignorance is bliss, then knowledge is responsibility. And the fact that we know these things and are aware of these things that so many people are unaware of, there's also a responsibility that's associated with that, of sharing that information and helping other people to be aware, particularly the people that we care about.

Absolutely. And to that end, that's why we on our website have dedicated a portion of it to an education center where, yeah, we have products that are available for sale and that, that we use and that we have available for clients. But I think, uh, from a philanthropic point of, point of view, we have a responsibility to the generation that's coming up after us, that if we can help them to be able to find a way, a path that's profitable, and being able to make it so that they can be self-sustaining, they can, they can function, they can have a normal life on the farm by changing a few things. I think it's a wonderful thing. An anecdotal story, we were attending a conference in Saskatoon, and I had a young fella at the dinnertime there tap me on the shoulder, and he says, "Are you Patrick Fabian?" I said, "Well, if I owe you money, no, I'm not." And he said, "I want to shake your hand and thank you with sincerity." I said, "Oh, okay, you're welcome. What's going on?" and he was a young fellow. He wasn't very old, probably early 30s if that. He said, we farm—

you're dating yourself.

I know, I know. Just look at the hair on my head. Black out.

We—

he said we were farming a small farm, dryland farm, about 2,500 or 3,000 acres, I think he said. And he said, we're going backwards fast. He says, I'm one of the guys on Twitter that keeps asking you questions. I was okay, well, that's, that's okay, fair enough. I didn't know who it was because I've got about 30 guys that are asking me questions on Twitter. But nonetheless, he said that we started following what you recommend and suggested last year. And he said, that's why I wanted to come and thank you personally. He said, by doing this, our crops haven't looked this good ever. He said, but not just that. He said, I had enough money at the end of the year that I was able to take my wife and family to Disneyland. And you know, you could have given me the winning lottery ticket numbers for the next lottery. It wouldn't have brought as much joy and satisfaction to me as hearing that young man make that statement. Because it goes deeper. If we can provide financial stability to these young farmers by changing a few things that they're doing, we can enhance their profitability. If we can reduce the financial stress in the marriage, we can reduce the stress in the family dynamic, we have a stronger family. And as a result, that young fella coming and shaking my hand made my entire month. Like, it was just, it was amazing. I love that. And that's one of the reasons we've had a lot of guys say, well, why are you sharing your secrets and all this kind of stuff? Well, it's not that we're sharing the secrets, it's just that there's another path available. And I, I feel like it's, it's, um, we're obliged in some respects to be able to share that and offer that as a solution to those that might want to look at it.

Freely we have received, freely give. And, and there's this foundational principle that the more we put out there— this, I found this to be so true in my life— the more you put out there and the more you share, the more comes back to you. People share their wisdom with you in exchange, and you have this compounded accelerated learning that you would never have if you kept things to yourself.

You're right.

Yeah. That's a wonderful ending note. Patrick, Andrew, Steven, thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your work and your wisdom. And I've immensely enjoyed this conversation. I'm sure our listeners will as well, and look forward to chatting with you again soon.

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.