Episode 203 | Regenerative Questions & Insights with John Kempf

It is so great to have you back, John. I, I, we, I was able to go on your podcast earlier this month and now we're back together again on mine. It is an absolute pleasure to have you on again.

It's such a joy to be here, Matt. And you know what? That is an important statement that it's a joy to be here. A couple of days ago I had a podcast interview, a guest for my podcast that's going to go live here in the next week or so. But this young lady made a statement, statement that really caught my attention. I asked her what is, what comes next for her, what is she going to be working on this coming year? And for the last four years they have been in survival mode, just scrambling of make it or break it. Yeah. And she said, this coming year I'm going to make a point of finding joy, of having a flower garden, of living joyfully and just making the time and making that a priority. And you know, we talk about how being in this, doing this work of working with nature, working with natural ecosystems and farming and soils and working with plants in, in this life enhancing way is a joyful enterprise. But in this modern world, we were sold the lie that technology is going to give us back so much more time to spend with family and friends and community. And instead it's just reset expectations for us to be busier than ever. And so when I tell you that it is a joy to be here in this conversation, I want you to know that I'm having a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to this.

Heck yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. You know, I had my birthday about a week ago and the thing I wanted to do was be in, be in with water in nature and be with my family with water and that the simple pleasures in life. I, it's funny, you know, I started off there and then I got sucked into cities and when I was a young man I went to New York City and, and, but, but I've always been drawn back to nature, to heal, to recharge.

And.

It is in that space, it is in that, that peace that I feel most connected. And it is, you know, someone talked about this the other day, Brennan Burchard said everyday riches. He was talking about how he just does certain things, has a ritual in the morning and it's an everyday richness in his life. And I really try to cultivate that. And so much of that was baked into our daily life 100, 200 years ago. It's like, you know, I've got A thing where I wrote an alarm that goes off on my technology to call my mom on Sunday. And I'm like, you know, and we were just talking about how, like, my kids grew up with their grandparents and their great grandparents in the same space, and we had those opportunities baked into our daily lives. And they were not through technology. They were the real thing.

Yeah, you know, I don't. I read a lot, and I used to remember very clearly exactly where I read things. Covid has certainly had an influence on that. Not a positive one, but sometime recently I was reading. I love to quote the source, but I can't anymore. But they were saying, essentially, a very healthy hunter, gatherer, civilizations, societies, whatever you want to call them, cultures, they would spend as little as 35 to 40% of their time, from what they can extrapolate and estimate, in active pursuit of food and shelter and keeping life going. And they had upwards of 50% leisure time, time with community and family and friends and so forth. Like, we think we've progressed, we might want to revisit what is actually meaningful if we believe that to be the case.

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, people talk about how we've lost community and we've lost our, you know, really the strength of our. Our culture in. In a lot of ways. And it really comes down to investment. It's like, are we investing in those things? And there are people still investing in those things, and they have richer lives because of it.

They have richer lives, they have better lives, and they have longer lives. If you look at the Harvard study on longevity, the foundational piece that contributes to longevity is the quality of our personal relationships, particularly with our spouse and immediate family. And it is those things that give us the greatest value and the greatest meaning in life.

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's why. I think that's why I've chosen the life I've chosen, because it's given me the most time. And focusing more on joy and time for time. Separating out that time, carving out that time, I think is the hardest part, because our culture doesn't train for. For the technology, trains. Absolutely. For the opposite. It trains for disconnection, trains for disassociating from the present moment.

So, Matt, how do you make yourself master over technology in your life?

Well, for one thing, I write physically. I force myself to write physically. I also have created all these rituals and neuroplasticity training I did to. So, for instance, when I was signing a book for Joel Saladin, he goes, no one ever taught you to write that way. And I was like, okay, Joel. Well, and then I had to explain, like, I taught myself how to. How to write differently. And so I put the pen between these fingers, not these fingers. And I did that when my boys were really young. I read it as an alternative way to do. To do writing, to teach, homeschool. And it was at the time where I was getting all my master's degree standardized test credentials in. And some of them were handwritten exams. And I was cramping. So I tried this other way. And I realized all in a flash because it was a. Easier. But I realized I could get into writing again now and I could rewrite my childhood neuropathways of using these two fingers now using these fingers. So refreshing all those writing modalities and schema in my brain. And so I started journaling like I've never journaled before. I've got a whole library of journals. I write. I Write at least 2 to 3 pages by hand a day, sometimes 10 to 20 pages by hand a day. I use ink. I figured out a long time ago that, like a permaculture pen is a fountain pen because all the inks were. Were actually made well before petrochemicals. And so they're made of plants and beautiful things. Like, you know, it was like beautiful. Brown is made of just coffee. Who'd have thunk? And so, like, I, I use ink and I make it this, like, very, this very enjoyable experience.

And.

And I also make myself just do it. I write gratitudes before I go to bed. And of course, I've got. I read physical books because I want to bring myself into the moment and to separate from. Because technology is about taking you away.

Yep. For those of you just listening, and I'm not sure if you're going to be able to watch, but Matt is holding a pen between his first and second fingers when he's writing all the way back at the base of his fingers.

Yeah. Yeah. And in the crux of the. Between the first and second finger is where I rest my, My, my pen. So, so I do that. I, I also really focus myself on the larger picture. My kids are 18 and 14. The time period that I have both boys at home at that kitchen table, at that dinner table, eating is limited.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I, I really focus on that. Absolutely. And you know, gardening, saving seed, those kinds of slow life choices grounds us in a way and it connects us in a way from. To our past that nothing else can. I think, I think there are.

You mentioned books, and I think there are a couple of things that people are really missing out on. Oh, there's. There's lots of things we could talk about making ourselves masters over technology instead of allowing the technology to be masters over us. I have one of the things that is an easy escape for me or that that could be misunderstood, but one of the things that I am actively working on and trying to maintain boundaries around, which is sometimes difficult in a super busy part of professional life, is I have time blocks where I'm working during the day or I have access to technology. And when the business day is over, it vanishes. It is gone. And, you know, the. I've actually gotten a second phone that is for family and friends, or they can call if they actually need to call, and to have a conversation in the evening or in the weekend or something like that, because the business phone can ring off the hook during the evening and the weekend, and it's just kind of tough luck for whoever has an emergency. And.

That sets everyone else free too, though, when you set that standard as a leader, when you set that standard as a leader, that really pulls it out of other people, too. To be like, you know what? I need to set that boundary that's so healthy and important.

For the last couple of years, I have really been trying to get to interview Wendell Berry on my podcast. He's not going to be with us much longer, most likely. And, well, certainly since the death and taxes are two things we can sure count on. But, you know, if you want to communicate with Wendell Berry, you need to write a letter and put it in the mail and it will be delivered to his post office box. And if you want to interview him, you have to find a time where you can arrive and sit on his front porch and record an interview, because that is the only way it will happen. So he has set very firm boundaries around technology in his life. Some of the people that I know and have great deal of respect for. How efficient and productive. No, I shouldn't. Efficient is not the right word. How productive they are, the great things they get accomplished in their life. You can only reach them two days a week. It's the only time you can talk to them. The rest of the time, they're unavailable. They're doing creative stuff, they're working on things, they're creating things. But I've actually gotten sidetracked from my original point. What I started to make is two things that a couple things I think people really miss out on is media in physical form, other than books. So books, I think, are extremely Valuable and important. But how many of us still subscribe to magazines versus consuming content digitally? The reality is some of the best content today is still. I mean there's a lot of power in the spoken word, in the media, which is why YouTube and podcasts and all those pieces where we can share images and audio together are so powerful. But I still find that there is something about writing an idea down that forces you to crystallize it and to clarify it. And many people, I think most everyone has the ability to give an hour long presentation or webinar on YouTube or to put the same information in a more coherent form in about a 2,000 word article. And you can reference the article and you can go back and reread it again and it takes a fraction of the time to really. People also learn in different ways. I understand that as well. But when I look at the publication of Acres USA and the subscription, the circulation that it has today versus what it had 10 years ago, there's been a remarkable decline in subscription, I think at the cost of our farming communities. Just generally it's like the wealth and the value of the information that is in that publication isn't captured in very many places online. It just frankly isn't. And yet that is being left by the wayside.

You know I was going to ask you about your next book and books are books and publications are physical anchors.

Yep.

And I talk about this to, with my son because. Because everything's digital in music. I'm like, you gotta figure out how to give them a physical product, an anchor. Because unless you're actually physically in their life. This is why I started, I started with physical books and I. And sometimes I don't do ebooks for six months to a year after the it's done. Because the physical anchor begins a relationship not just with me, but with the actual learning it process and the actual content in it that is completely different.

Yeah, we all learn in different ways. But there is something about holding a physical product in your hand and reading a paragraph and saying that wait a minute, I don't think I quite got that. And going back and reading it again and if necessary reading it again. Try doing that. Yeah, trying to that, try to do that digitally. Sure you can rewind, but it's not the same.

And being able to highlight things, being able to go back to it, being able to have that spot just like that dog eared spot that now it just sits broken at. You know what I mean? Because you loved it so much. As I put my book back together.

So I've. In reading, I've developed this. I have this. I don't know what they're called, the tags or flat. Not flaps, but tag, post it. Tags or flags. And I. Yeah, there you go. Exactly like that. I don't. I don't tend to use a highlighter or make markings in books very much, but I will flag paragraphs or sentences that I'm interested in, in referencing and coming back to. And I tend to read a book from COVID to cover. I read fairly rapidly and I'll read it all the way through and flag everything that I find of interest. And it's fascinating to go back to the shelf and pull books off. Some books might have five flags in them and others will have 500. And you can evaluate the relative merits of making a recommendation for that book to other people at a visual eye glance.

Yeah, that's true. But sometimes when you're looking for verification on something or the source for an idea, you end up buying an expensive book and they have like one flag in it and you're like. But you won't. Don't sell the book because that's the only reference you have. So.

Right.

Yeah. I love. I love books and I love the physical anchor of a magazine. Like acres of, you know, volumes like. Like this. I can't wait for your next volume. It's been five years.

The embarrassing part, Matt, is that the second volume has completely been completely finished. The editing and job is done. It's completely done for the last three years. It's just sitting there waiting for me to do the last finishing touches, write a forward, get the COVID done, and pull the trigger on it. And it's. It's something that I need to hand off to somebody else, I guess, because it hasn't made it to the top of the priority list and it doesn't look like it will anytime soon.

Well, I'm sure there are people waiting for that, but man, oh, man. Yeah. I mean, speaking of priorities, something that you've hinted at, something that I get asked about almost every time I go live, is testing. You have something you're working on. I don't know how much you want to reveal around it, but you're working on taking testing to a whole new level. And I don't know if you want to share anything about it, but that would be incredible if you could.

Well, well, well, let me see. How many people are going to be frustrated if I talk prematurely? Lots. Well, the short version is that Dan Kittredge and I have been friends for 20 years. And we talked about this vision for what it could mean to have an instrument that would be able to measure the nutritional integrity of whatever it is that you want to measure as a snapshot almost instantaneously. And Dan, of course, has had the interest of an instrument that can be used to verify nutritional integrity and what that really means and defining it, putting some parameters around that. And I'm in alignment with that vision. But I have a slightly different focus in that we want a tool that is first of all prioritizes practicality. So not do we just want to verify nutritional integrity, but we also want to know how can we make management decisions with that data? What do we need to do differently or to change to produce a different outcome. And so whereas Dan's efforts have really prioritized and focused on understanding the phytonutrient profile, we've said yes, knowing and understanding phytonutrients is important. And we also need to be able to measure the mineral content, what's the calcium and magnesium and zinc and selenium and iodine content, et cetera, et cetera. And so we have, it's public knowledge that at AEA we've made investments in a company in Pennsylvania called croptix. Croptix Devices. There is still a lot of homework, there's a lot of work being done, a lot of energy and resources being committed to developing the Croptix device. But the milestone that we're shooting for is to have a public release by spring of 26. We have been working on calibrations for the last year. There is still further calibration work happening this season. The long term vision, this vision is not, this is not likely to be a reality in spring of 26. In spring of 26 we hope to be able on some crops to have an instrument that you can hold a plant leaf into a clip and in a matter of seconds you get a readout of what the mineral profile is, along with an array of phytonutrients, chlorophyll, and one of the sensors. Our expectation at this point is that the first version to be released will have two sensors on it. And one of the sensors is Raman spectroscopy. And this is beyond my technical know how to get into in detail. But as I understand it, Raman spectroscopy doesn't require calibration for different substrates. And it's very good at measuring compounds. It requires calibration for measuring minerals, but it's very good at measuring compounds because of specific reflectance patterns. So you can measure phenolic Compounds. And you can measure compounds such as chlorophyll and a protein profile and amino acid profile and a carbohydrate profile and a fatty acid profile, measuring hundreds of different compounds for which the reflectance patterns are already known and there isn't particularly calibration required. Wow. So the dream is that the vision is that we will be able to. I've been talking for years about the plant health pyramid and how these plants physiological or nutritional profiles changes at different stages of plant health, while plant composition changes. The vision is be able to measure that directly, very affordably, very inexpensively, along with a mineral profile, and then understand how those correlate and ultimately, of course, also understand, with the microbiome lab DNA sequencing, understand how those correspond to the microbiome at all locations in the plant microbiome, in the rhizosphere, the microbiome in the leaf and in the fruit, and be able to really understand how those intersect and all the relationships that exist. So there's a lot of investments that we've made in this space and the technology is very exciting and it will completely revolutionize our understanding of agronomy once it's released. But there's still a lot of homework before we get to that point.

Yeah, you know, I'm so excited about it. I'm so excited especially about the idea that we'll be able to map out the amounts because people are like, oh, adding in purple on silver bacteria as an endophyte. It's good. And I'm like, yes, it is good. Where are we right now and where do we need to go with the amount? Because it's like mapping that. And then for the plant type, for the time of season, for relation to the growth cycle, you know what I mean? Like, all of these things are going to play out and be like, oh, well, you boost with your lactic acid bacteria at the end of the season when it's fruiting or when the skin set, you know, like, like these moments we're going to have specific bacterial things that we do that prevent, things that amplify, things that, oh, well, for that sugary, sweet taste, we do this microbe for that more tart, you know, blueberry, that's like firmer, less sugary. But you know, we do this with this microbe and then suddenly people are like, oh, I love the super tart. And they're actually, it's, you know, Acetobacter or something like that. Right. It's correlates to something actually specific. And once we have that mapped out and we can create standards, and then suddenly everyone's going to benefit because all these things go right into our digestion and amplify our digestion in different ways, especially like Acetobacter. Right, yeah.

The vision. The vision is exciting, but there is. I don't want to. To downplay the amount of work and energy that's going to be required because also there is going to be. In a sense, I suppose in one sense you could say, fortunately, we now have machine learning and AI and et cetera, because there's going to be data overload. When you're measuring hundreds of compounds within plants and thousands of microbes, plus all the variables of plant variety and growing conditions, environmental conditions, et cetera. It's going to be quite a fun challenge to try to pick the trees out of the forest.

Well, I've been doing the DNA testing, so I can tell you it's a Pareto distribution. It's a hockey stick. And so you have like E. Coli, then streptomyces, and then everything below. That's 1. Below 1%. And so you end up with these like, huge. And. And then what happens is you have like 25 that are the top, you know, 10 or I mean. Sorry, sorry, the top. Like, like they're. They're below 1%. And then it goes below 0.01%. It goes like a hundred. And then below 0.0001. You know, it's like a thousand. And then it keeps going like bigger and bigger until you have.

So you have this long tail.

Yes, such. And in fact, that we talked about last time, I don't think it ends well.

The.

They're always reacting as you're slim through the nanopore. They're reacting and changing their DNA. By the time they get circled back to the other end, they're different again.

So you're correct for many situ. Okay, let me. Let me back up. Let me think about how to communicate this. I'm persuaded that very few of us know what actually healthy plants and soil ecosystems actually look like. And so we're going to be measuring things that are suboptimal. And how is an optimal plant and soil different from a suboptimal one? And what do we even know? So I have this. This hypothesis that plants. And I'm going to shift for a bit to talk about nutrition, which is the one thing that we have a reasonable database on at this point. Mineral nutrition. I have this hypothesis that plants have the ability to homeostatically regulate their nutritional absorption and nutrient distribution through Homeostatic means the same way that we homeostatically regulate our body temperature. So they can choose what nutrients to absorb, which to absorb, how much to absorb and where to send it, given the opportunity to do so. Now, many cases in many environments, they're not given the opportunity to do so. They're kind of force fed nitrogen and potassium and soluble ions that they don't have a choice except to absorb, enlarge. And so when they are force fed, that doesn't just upset the natural homeostatic imbalance, it actually makes them unable to, to self regulate further. It's a little bit like someone removing someone's thyroid and all of a sudden their homeostatic process for regulating body temperature is no longer the same. They're now a couple degrees cooler. And so we've, what I've observed, I don't have a large data set on this, but there have been a number of interesting scenarios where we elevate, we bring certain nutrients into balance. So let me. There's so much to go down, so much fun going down into this rabbit hole. My, my perspective, my understanding of, of what happens inside the plant with James White's rhizophagy cycle, like we, we're beginning to understand what happens in the soil and at the root and microbe interface, but what happens when those microbes get up into the plant. So I'm of the. A year ago I used to describe this process as the plant cells would actually absorb the entire bacterial cell and then utilize the entire thing. They would take it apart and utilize the entire thing. I thought those bacterial cells or microalgae or fungi were being completely utilized by, by the plant cell. Well, my understanding of that is no longer the same. I now my current understanding is that these microbes are being absorbed into the plant cell and where they offload nutrients on a sphingolipid raft and they're essentially like a dump truck offloading nutrients and then they exit back out of the cell through an exotosis process and they go back into the rhizosphere and make, they can make a return trip, they can make multiple trips. They are literally behaving like nutrient shuttles. But what is really fascinating is at the, at the cell membrane interface, so you have these individual plant cells that are surrounded by dozens of different microbial cells, bacterial and fungal and microalgae endophytes. And the again, given homeostatic ability, these plant cells can choose, they can make a selection which bacteria they permit entry and which they deny entry. So based on their Nutritional composition to say, okay, you have, you have the calcium that I require, you have a zinc load that I really don't want. And it will, it will make decisions on what it allows entry and what it denies entry, which is absolutely fascinating. But this process, in order for each individual cell to be able to effectively self regulate which bacteria are permitted access and which are denied access, that cell membrane is required to have a strong electrostatic potential or electrical differential. This is where voltage charge of cell membranes becomes really important. The, the work of Gerald Pollack all of a sudden becomes very important because we know that plant, we know that human cells for optimal health. If I'm remembering I read too much human or plant cells, I think 70, 70 millivolts of, of charge differential across cell membranes, that charge drops too low, all kinds of interesting things happen. The cell is no longer able to be self determining. It's no longer able to choose which it allows access and which it doesn't. And also if the charge potential drops too low, then it no longer forms fourth phase water inside the cell, which has all kinds of implications for frost resistance and for fruit firmness and for overall quality. But at any rate, so it's, it's, there's a great deal that is determined by the charge that is carried on the cell membrane. That charge differential. So, and that, so the bot. All of this is just to say the bottom line summary is that a plant's ability to self regulate and have a strong internal homeostasis is dependent on cell membrane integrity. And now we're back at mineral nutrition and all of a sudden the mineral nutrition becomes really important. So one of the things that we've observed is that you can be growing an identical variety of a certain crop in identical conditions, field conditions, and if when you address the nutrients to make sure that you have strong cell membrane integrity, all of a sudden that plant's ability to homeostatically self regulate other nutrients becomes profound and it becomes visible in SAP analysis results. All of a sudden we addressed one or two foundational nutrients and all the other nutrients changed. Some went up, some went down and they flatlined. With SAP analysis we are used to seeing a lot of variability, a lot of variation. Things are there's a zigzag line of moving up and down based on what is happening with plant physiology and nutrition requirements at different stages of different reproductive cycles. All of a sudden when they can self regulate, those fluctuations disappear, they flatline. Yeah.

So my, understand that fits perfectly with my understanding. Dr. Bruce Lipton talks about how the cell membrane is the brain, the nuclei are the reproductive organs and genetic data. And so when you strengthen the membrane, you strengthen the. The discretion.

Exactly right. And the ability for discretion in some cases.

Dr. Zach Bush says his product Ion Restore, it used to be called, was. It's funny because if you read it, it says it's basically like soil water. It's like what it's called tetrahydrate. And, and it's. It's basically like compost, minerals. You know what I mean? It's unbelievable. But it's all to change the charge on the outside of the cell. That's what he says it's for. And it's, you know, not alive. It's minerals.

Yeah. It's a beautiful world we live in. And this, this is why I've. I don't know how many people that I've talked to have actually deeply read the. The work of these three pioneers, but I've. I don't belabor the point, but I reckon because I recognize that many people may not be ready for it yet or, or have aren't there yet on their journey. But the work of Jerry Pollack and James White and Olivier Husson. Yes, exactly. Cells, gels, and the engines of life. When you dig into the, The. The work of those three individuals in combination is the foundation for a complete revolution in agronomy and agriculture. It sets everything that we've done for the last 70 years on its head scientifically. And so we look back, the agricultural heroes of a bygone era, the Norman Borlaugs of the world, they set things. We have these people, Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver and Justice Liebig. There are a few people who were remarkably influential in setting agriculture on a completely different trajectory. In 50 years from now, we will look back and the names of Jerry Pollack and James White and Olivier Husson will be on that list, in my opinion.

I agree. I absolutely agree. It was you bringing those folks to my attention that completely just revolution revolutionized my understanding of the dynamics. And I think. I think so many people are focused on, like, the nouns, metaphorically, the nouns of soil science and static, like, static things. And this is what this is. And what they're introducing is like the verbs. And it's like the, the, the. It's like, how, how does compost tea even work? Like, no, do compost tea. And they're like, well, this is actually how it works. This is rhizophagy is how they're taking those microbes that you're brewing up and all that Bacteria and all that non, that generalized microbial like fodder, you know, and yeah, yeah, I definitely see it as they're providing the, the catalysts for our understanding in a way.

Well, it's when you, once you understand the why, you understand how something works, you're able to make all kinds of extrapolations. I had this interesting experience just, just a couple of days ago. We had, we had, having conversations with a group of growers who are relatively new to our work at aea. And they're, they're obviously learning, they're very interested, they're very passionate, but they're, they're just in the early days of their beginning journey and we're talking about this, this one major root disease and that they're having problems with. And so one of the consultants on our team just starts doing a rapid research about what, what influence does different forms of ammonia, different forms of nitrogen have on this disease? Does ammonium or nitrate have a, a suppressive influence or an enhancing influence? And the, one of the older growers in the, in the conversation said, yeah, well, 50 years ago, one of the things that we used to do is we used to grow a cover crop of oats, and a cover crop of oats had a suppressive effect on this particular disease. Aha. Well, there's a data point. We now know that data point. And then David finds this additional data that says ammonium has a suppressive effect on this disease and nitrate enhances it. And David is looking at this paper from back in the 50s, and he's saying, well, oh, okay, well, this makes sense. So you have ammonium that suppresses this disease and therefore you have a reducing environment. Well, his comment to the group was, oh, well, ammonium suppresses it, so that explains why oats have a suppressive effect. And there's probably other cover crops that will similarly have a suppressive effect. And they looked at him like he'd grown a second head because the paper you just got done reading had no mention whatsoever of oats. How are you drawing the connection between those two things? But for someone who's familiar with these foundational sciences, you understand that you have a reducing environment where ammonium dominates and that suppresses the disease, and that oats contributes to that, as do legumes and as do a bunch of other things. And for someone who understands the why and understands the how that the root cause, they're able to immediately connect these dots and make these extrapolations about why some things work and why other things don't. And for someone who doesn't have that knowledge base? It looks like you're talking Greek. I still remember the kind of a. Along the lines of Redox. I've become good friends with Ed Curry, who's this famous chili pepper seed breeder down in Arizona. And Ed's doing some pretty awesome stuff in lots of ways. But having the very first time I met Ed, where having a conversation across the hood of a pickup truck, and Ed is kind of challenging me and trying to figure out if I really know what I'm talking about. And he says something to the effect of, well, we have this major problem, I think it was with Rhizoctonia, maybe Fazarium. I forget is this. We had this major problem with this one root disease in our chili peppers. And a couple of years ago, we had this consultant and agronomist coming through our area and telling us that if we begin injecting hydrogen peroxide into our irrigation system, it will solve all of our problems. What kind of impact do you think hydrogen peroxide would have on this disease? And without missing a beat, I said, well, as I understand it, it would make the disease magnitudes worse because it's going to create an environment for that disease to just explode. And he kind of did a double take. And then he gave me this wry grin. He said, well, we ripped out all of our hydrogen peroxide injectors because that's exactly what happened. Everyone thought if we were injecting hydrogen peroxide, we would be sterilizing our soil and solving the disease problem. But it made the disease dramatically worse. And that's, again, it was understanding redox. Understanding you have an oxidizing environment is going to. To create a proliferating environment for some of these diseases, to me, made obvious sense once because I understood the how anyway. Too many words there.

Yeah, yeah, it's the same. I mean, we have so many people right now that are just beginning to transition away from doing the hot compost because they're like, it has to be aerobic. It has to be aerobic. And they end up having, like, pH8. And a lot of people are in California doing this. And so they've got, like, pH8 compost. They got pH 7.5 soil to begin with, you know, and everything's oxidized, getting locked out. And they're like, why? Because they see the initial nitrate growth, they see this initial flush of growth and no fruit. And it's just this basic understanding that they're missing. They need to let that age. They need to start reducing it rather than Oxidizing.

One of the things that I forget, whether it was Olivia Husson or James White or might have even been someone else, but one of the phrases that really caught my attention might have been James White. I think he said, we have to recognize that soil and soil microbes essentially live in a subaquatic environment. Wait, what soil is a subaquatic environment? Well, yes, on a microscopic level, when you have good soil aggregation and you're holding water within those aggregates, then you absolutely have a subaquatic environment.

Every 1% of. Of soils. Like 20,000 gallons of plant available water per acre in the first 12 inches, right?

Yeah, well, that's true, Matt, but think about. It's easy to lose sight of what that means. So if you just visualize a soil aggregate, a soil crumb that is comprised of three or four dozen soil particles that range from sand, silt, clay, and you have this crumb that's built together, the reality is the outside of that crumb, we look at soil that has this rich chocolate cake texture, and we see the outside of all crumbs inside that crumb. Unless that soil is really dry, inside that crumb is completely saturated. It's not 20 or 30% field capacity. The inside of that crumb is fully saturated with salt. It is wet. It's loaded with water. There are no air bubbles inside an aggregate here. I'm talking to the guy who has a microscope and can refute me in a matter of seconds. But. So we need to think about. Our microbes are living in a saturated environment inside, at a microscopic level, inside stable soil aggregates. That's what he was trying to communicate, is that soil microbes are essentially in a subaquatic environment. And that's the environment we need to begin managing and thinking about. I say we need to begin managing. Actually, we don't need to manage it. We just need to facilitate it. It'll manage itself.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. We can literally go and see diatoms. We can see rotifers. We can see all these things in soils that are really healthy or in a high water table like mine. So I see diatoms, I see all these, like, aquatic pond life kind of things. I see algae. What was actually fascinating was I saw algae, and I was like, oh, I'm in an aquatic area. And then later I learned like, you know. Yeah, Meredith. Right? You know, Meredith, like nc al Joy and. And soil algae. It's like algae is endophytic. So plants in so many different ways are missing this is what I wanted to say. Actually going back to way earlier in the conversation, my understanding of the world that we live in is the soils used to be way more acidic because the land used to hold way more water. The, I mean, you look at California, you have all the yellow invasive mustard, which is acting as a fumigant, shifting everything to more oxidized, more alkaline. That effect is happening everywhere. As we're drying out the groundwater, drying out the surface water, we're desertifying quite literally. And so for you, Matt, just want.

To make sure we're on the same page here. Do you think that having more water circulating in the environment was as acidifying when you had good fungal populations that were holding mineral levels stable in the soil environment?

Well, of course, depend upon the minerals. I mean, in Montana it's going to be acidic, but you know, you go to other areas, there's going to be just like here in Texas, you're going to liberate more limestone from the base. So it'll make it more alkaline even as you acidify with more water?

No, but let me expand on my question today. We have this expectation that nutrients will stratify out with acidic rain or not even just acidic rainbow rainfall. Generally we see calcium release at the surface, and the expectation is that over time, calcium will precipitate out. I'm of the understanding that when you have very healthy soil fungal populations and good soil structure, they will remobilize those nutrients and you don't get the same degree of acidification, or I shouldn't say acidification. Stratification, nutrient stratification. Is that correct?

That's an interesting, interesting idea. So let me get see if I got this right. So we're saying that. What do you mean by stratification?

Well, the old agronomy textbooks used to talk about how nutrients would settle out into different layers in the soil. The very top layers of the soil surface, you would have potassium and phosphorus accumulate and then calcium would be something like layer 10. And so these layers would occur at different depths depending on what that native soil geology.

So my understanding is different from that because I come from like a much more organic world. So, so I was taught by wor about worms. So I. The way I go about things, my default is go, well, how did it happen in nature? This is where like my, my permaculture and agriculture world kind of overlap. And so I'm like, well, there's, there's, you know, the, like. I think a geek worms, right? The ones that go like really, really deep. And they're pulling from the bottom to the top, right? And all of them are doing this and some of them cycles are like this, but then they link to this cycle that's doing this and then listen. And so it's like everything's in a chain that is exchanging from above, below with above and with roots, everything changes. So if you have a good root structure, if you've got a good soil, you can completely change the stratification and create this non, non uniform, well, non layered profile from what I've seen.

Exactly.

So I've melted profiles, so I've seen that profile. And then I've begun to do lactic acid bacteria, yeast purple non sulfur bacteria, essentially water kefir and em along with compost tea. And then I started doing this thing that, that I did years ago and I'm going to do it again. And I didn't realize what I was doing. A lot of the stuff I did, like putting water kefir grains in my compost, which is a pit compost or putting water kefir grains in my compost tea, I did like mob, like mob planting where I would put like 12 different kinds of plant types with several varieties within each plant type. And so a lot of it wouldn't grow. But it was the exit at flush that the initial seedlings gave out was so varied that I changed this decomposed granite from sugar sand looking like into loam that had no, no, no change in it. And, and if, if that is the process of me reversing time or reversing, you know, what had happened there through the desertification because in California they, they damned the water up above all the foothills. So where I was growing up with my boy, raising my boys that it was already so dried out for decades. So I did, I'm simply bringing back microbes, bringing back moisture, bringing back plant variety and all that stratification is changing, the ph is changing. And so if we, yeah, stratification is.

Changing and ph is changing. So is it necessarily true that rain, historically by having more water in the environment that we had the creation of more acidity? That, that was my.

I believe so. I believe so because of two things. A study that I was reading about how global ph is linked directly to humidity of soil and then the, the fact that alkalinity is rising. And of course there's places that like Montana, Idaho, Washington, their soil is acidic so their, their oxidation is raising, but their ph isn't right. Or maybe slightly, you know, but not really because it's Going to be held in place by the aluminum levels. Right. So. But. But on the whole, if you have the ability to develop enough organic matter, you can start being drawn towards the Goldilocks zone. You know, the. The things that I see that we can change come from an understanding of both ph and redox are profound because it's not just it like what, what I was doing right there was creating a historical overlay of what's happened through redox and ph. And I think we bring back the beavers. I think we bring back, you know, water management that is slow water management that allows things to recharge the aquifers. We'll see more energy in the land, we'll see more water in the land. We'll see more. More potential and more change. So, yeah, no, I definitely would say that, like, if we brought more water, we'd see more. More acidity levels in the soil. Of course, you know, all those things flip when you get in the water, as Livia always points out. It's like. And then he starts a tangent on his brother.

Yeah, it's. It's fascinating. Well, certainly when you look at the. The macro. Macro environments. I'm just thinking about what you're describing. What happens with soils when you go east to a high rainfall environment. It becomes acidic. Yeah. I mean, if you're here. If you're here in the eastern third of the United States and you do nothing with your soil for a certain period of time, depending on how you treat it, it'll be at a ph of 5, 5, sometimes in a matter of 10 years, sometimes it takes 30 years. But it'll naturally go down and stabilize somewhere around that ph zone in many regions.

Yeah. With all the aluminum levels skyrocketing. You know, Todd Harrington told me, and now he's been more vocal about it. He's been doing parts per million testing since the 90s alongside all the microscopy work. And he said all over America, uniformly aluminum levels have, like, skyrocketed. Hockey sticked on all measures.

Why?

I mean, he thinks it's from the spraying.

Geoengineering. Yeah.

And. And I mean, I think we have confirmation from rfk. I think we've got confirmation from whistleblowers. Now. It is not, you know, conspiracy theory to. To say that they were doing what, you know. All right. And so I grew up.

We're at the point. We're at the point where for some of these things, if someone calls you a conspiracy theorist, it makes them. It makes them look naive because. Yeah, I mean, we've got A bill passed Tennessee and Idaho and a couple of state legislatures making geoengineering illegal. So why would. Yeah, the point of place of calling that times of calling geoengineering with spraying aluminum a conspiracy theory are long past.

Yeah. I grew up with my mom telling those guys who are spraying the skies to make rain to take a hike because they had enough rain in California, in Connecticut, and because they were. These guys moved out from west, they were. Cloud seeding started in the 40s. Right. And so they just started moving west and they started looking for cheaper and cheaper particles to add to the aerosolizer so that they could do this work at a lower and lower cost for them. And so my mom, like, I grew up with my mom telling me, like, all these bozos are trying to sell us rain. I'd be like, what do you mean to be like, ah, they can make it rain. And it's like, ah. So I knew about all this from a very young age. The idea of where it gets off page is whether they're intentionally, like, trying to poison us. I mean, they definitely are on it. They are definitely poisoning us. Whether it's intentional or not, you know, that's where it becomes like, no one has any idea right now. Maybe we'll do another whistleblower soon.

But where they really got my attention in kind of a major way is I remember, I think it was either. I think it might have been 2012. The 20. 2012 or 13. 2012 was a major drought. I don't remember whether it was July of that year or the year following. But one of those years was very dry spring. And I had lots of friends and people that we were working with throughout the Midwest. And at one point, within a couple of days, I get half a dozen phone calls from people across Iowa like, what? What is going on? Our cornfields are gray. And they literally were talking about their corn being an off gray color that they had never observed before. And one of my friends scraped this residue off of his truck, scraped it off his windshield, collected a teaspoon of powder, put it into a bag and shipped it to a lab to have it analyzed. And I forget the exact proportions, but it was primary aluminum with a hefty dose of barium and some other elements in there as well. And yeah, that crop did. Was not very enthusiastic about whatever had been applied to it. So were they attempting to. To break the drought? The exact details of the timing on that, I'd have it back in my records because there was some electronic communication around that, but it was it was a pretty interesting phenomena that was for sure.

You know, this is all about accountability to me. I mean it's like if you have an industry where you can't like hold people accountable or verify results or like, because I mean that farmer has no recourse.

Right.

You know, and so there's no true accountability for the people applying that, nor do the people paying them are, we don't know who they are, so we can't hold, hold them accountable. It's, it's, it's, it's wild and it's not the way it should be. There's so many things like that now. But I really think that that's in part of the reason we're in, we're. The reason we're in the situation that we're in with agriculture in so many different ways is the fact that we don't have clear communication feedback pathways that allow for us to, to hear each other and see each other clearly and understand the consequences of our actions and monitor also the over the overspill reactions from other people. And if we had that, I think just starting there, you would have a completely different environment. You'd have people who would think twice before spraying something, think twice before, you know, treading on other people's freedom. And then you'd have a lot of people who are rise, just quiet, humble people have been doing the work who would rise and be exemplars. And I see that, you know, happen at Acres, at EcoAg. I see that those, those exemplars rise. And going back to the beginning, it's like the reason we love those events, the reason we love, you know, a gathering of people like even manifestation of the magazine is because we recognize, we recognize the rightness in that, that feedback loop of truth. People hunger for truth because it is a feedback loop that could gets us closer together and closer to, on, on path, closer to, to where we all need to be. And man, I really hope that. So you know about the database I'm doing, right?

Yep.

Yeah, I really hope we can figure out how to synergize with, with what you're doing with the database so that we could help people even more. Because that's really what it's about. It's about giving farmers the information they need to succeed quite simply and, and, and letting that truth roll forward.

Well, I have a lot of thoughts about data and the foundational idea that I'd like to communicate is that. Traditionally, and not just traditionally, but even the problem with a lot of data collection today is that it is not, it is not captured with the express intention and design of being intersectional with other types of data. And what I mean by that is, let's say that I want to really understand the microbiome and the nutritional profile of a particular crop and how they intersect with each other. And I'm on a farmer budget. I, I have some resources to try to really understand what this means in my, my context, but I certainly don't have unlimited resources. I need to be smart about it. So I want to do a certain number of microbiome samples, certain number of DNA analysis, I want to do a certain amount of SAP analysis or plant nutritional profile analysis. What is really important is to match all of those up in time to say, okay, I'm going to do a soil microbiome DNA analysis of what's going on in the rhizosphere and a SAP analysis or a phytonutrient analysis and it's going to happen. I'm going to pull those samples on my same trip to the field on the same day, at the exact same moment in time. And I'm going to do that consistently every, I'm making it up here every seven days through the season, all the way from when that plant is a young seedling until harvest or until even after harvest until senescence in the case of a perennial crop. When you do that, the educational curve, what you learn is an almost vertical hill. You learn so much about how nutrients and microbes interact with each other and how the plant interacts with its environment. If you go out there and you just ad hoc, you pull three DNA sequences, one at the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end, and you pull a SAP analysis seven times per season, every 10 days apart. Except you miss one day a couple times, you, you, you went out, you actually got to it two days late. And then the next time you went out there a day early to compensate, you end up with a foggy picture where, yeah, you might maybe learn some things. And if you really want to learn nothing, then you just go out there and you pull one or two samples just when you're ready to go do something, when you're going to make a management decision, you're going to side dress fertilizer, you're going to make a foliar spray as I'm going to wait to test until I'm actually going to do something with that information. You will not learn very much in that scenario. So it's taking a thorough set, collecting a thorough set of data that is matched in time and looks across an entire crop life cycle, you will learn hundreds of times more with 5 data points collected that way than 5 data points collected ad hoc through the growing season.

Right. Because it's its own variable. I also would say that just like that new, that test that Paul Stammers is promoting where it shows the movement inside the mycelium and they spent like three years with microscopes viewing these things growing in petri dishes. Longitude versus latitude. Right. So I would, I would always do the opposite. So I would always say ultimately the ultimate way to do that would be, yes, same time, same, you know, same day, keep the cycle, but then do the opposite, do 12 Tests in a day. You know what I mean? Starting off like, right, pre dawn.

Yep.

Morning light. Yep. Noon. You know what I mean? Like, because that, that, that it's not quite length versus breadth, but it's, it's, it's flexing things at different angles essentially.

Well.

And getting different range of expression. And I, I feel like that kind of thing in soil science is hardly ever done.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. There are a few things that are hardly ever done. So we understand that there are circadian rhythms. That's why you have a 24 hour cycle. We know. I mean, I'm trying to forget who might have been Arden Anderson a couple of decades ago, who hooked a Barrington instrument, soil paramagnetism sensor to soil and checked it every 24 hours and he discovered this very beautiful circadian rhythm. It looked like a sine wave up and down on a 24 hour cycle. And we know there are 28 day cycles, we know there's lunar cycles. We've clearly been able to measure and to document that there is a very clear 28 day cycle on nutrient absorption from the roots and from the top. And the peaks are not opposing to each other. Again, they're like a sine wave. Peak nutrient absorption from foliars is exactly 14 days offset to peak nutrient absorption from roots. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff here that you don't learn that by pulling samples sporadically through the season. You have to be consistent through time.

So did biodynamic know that?

I have no idea. I'm sure people knew it before we discovered it.

Well, you know, that's funny because I mean, that's one of the things I wanted to play out in the database. My whole thing with the database is I want it to be instantly valuable to the people using it so they can see before and after they can see their Actions between actions so that it will go viral. Those actions will. And it will be like, hey, the actions I took are AEA biocode Gold, you know, and this is the reaction, you know, and it will promote you. It'll promote.

There's only one act that matters, Dan. And there's only one action that matters, Matt. You just call it, hey, it'll solve all your problems. I have a few more to sell too, by the way.

Oh man, you're awesome. Well, people will see those actions, but they'll also over time to be able to compare and see those, the nuances. I think that there's so much nuance. There's so much. I talked about it in my post earlier today. The only way we're really going to know and this is impossible technologically right now, but if we take a cubic yard of soil and every particle is tracked where it is geolocated and then you test that particle biology, minerals, charge, you know, and then geolocate it there and then have the full range of ph, eh, all of it built into this 3D universe, you know, like a section that everyone can navigate through and then use as a data set. Not possible to do. I know, but, but that, that's ultimately what we need to know to understand what's really possible.

Well, I agree and I disagree with you at the same time. I agree in that knowing that and, and digging into the data in that way would be very revealing and we would without question. I'm sure we would learn a lot. But also would it, how significantly would it change the fundamentals that we know are already required? It might offer more fine tuning, but. So that's, that's the one, that's the one thought. That's the way that I agree with you. The way that I disagree with you is that we know that the action of observing things changes their behavior. Yeah. And the more you observe them, the more their behavior changes. And so when you have a three dimensional cube that's loaded with all types of sensors, I can't imagine that their behavior is going to resemble what it would be like if the sensors were absent.

Right. The thing is, that's what I mean. Technologically they would have to remove it from like a living active cube, you know, or, or cubic yard and then just, you know what I mean, be particlizing it and then dealing with it immediately.

But it's supposed to me like you're trying to fracture nature into its component parts once more.

Also the fallacy of science, Matt. Well, actually I wanted to demonstrate the Fallacy of so many concepts. So the thing I've discovered, you know what I mean, is that so much of this stuff is fallacious. You know, Tell me about some of.

The fallacies that you find perturbing.

Well, like this. This idea that if a soil has something, then. Then it has enough of it. People are like, all soils have everything. I'm like, okay, okay, I'm with you. That's. There's trace minerals everywhere, all over the earth. Right. But there are literally soils that just are deficient, and that's okay. It's nature. There. There are people that are convinced they can see all the bacteria. You can't see all the bacteria there. The math thing we've talked about before, where they're right, there's all these just. And they're so certain about it. That's the thing I think I am battling most. The certainty they have about. About what they've said and thought without even testing it, without even doing it in the field. And that's what I appreciate so much about what you do, is you guys are doing it at a field level, at a commercial level, and if it works, you.

You.

You swim. If you don't, you sink.

If it. If it doesn't work, we pivot fast because we're. I mean, from a perspective of responsibility for the growers that we work with and for our reputation, it's. Yeah, you pivot. And I mean, I change my mind on multiple things every year when we learn new information and we change and adapt constantly. Oh, my goodness. I had an important question that I wanted to ask you on something that you just said, and now it's escaped me. What were your fallacies again? Oh, I was going to ask you about the. The certainty. The certainty that people have that what they know is correct. And my question is how much of that is from the dunning Kruger effect, where people just don't know what they don't know, and how much of it is from people that are actually highly informed and just aren't thinking.

That's funny. I think a lot of it is dunning Kruger. And then a lot of it is that secondary tier that you're talking about where people know, but they're utilizing the dunning Kruger effect and almost leaning into it to get more followers or more buzz, I do think. And they're enthusiastic and they have no idea what they're talking.

Lots of evangelists.

Yeah. No, And I think that it's wild. I think that people feast on information until they get full. And then they get full and then they feel uncertainty. It's wild and.