Future of Agriculture - Challenging Assumptions About Regenerative Agriculture with John Kempf

Today's episode will challenge several commonly held assumptions about the future of agriculture. Take regenerative agriculture as one example, which most defined by the ability to improve soil and sequester carbon. But those are outcomes, even byproducts, not the complete definition of regenerative, says John Kempf.

It's easy to make the argument that regenerating soil health is the fundamental that underlies all of those pieces, but it misses the perspective of regeneration of the larger ecosystem.

John is leading crop health consultant and the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture. He designs innovative soil and plant management systems to help growers realize the benefits of regenerative transition right away.

Every recommendation that we make needs to.

Produce an immediate economic outcome this year, this crop season, not five years down the road.

We talk about what it means to be regenerative, the results they've seen from working with over 10,000 farmers across 4 million acres, why they've launched an equity crowdfunding campaign, and how we can all.

Start to look at agricultural problems and.

Solutions through a more regenerative lens.

Far too many technology tools help you do the current thing better. They don't help you rethink the fundamentals of the system.

Prepare for one of the more thought provoking conversations I've had in a while with John kempf from Advancing EcoAgriculture on today's future of Agriculture podcast. Hello fellow ag nerd. Thank you so much for joining me.

For another episode of the Future of Agriculture.

My name is Tim Hamrich and every week you, you and I get to hear from the founders, farmers, innovators and investors, the people shaping the future of the ag industry. Now, before we dive in, I want to thank our quarterly presenting sponsor, which.

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Of Agriculture Podcast alright, now back to.

Today'S episode with John Kempf. I've followed John's work for quite a.

Long time as a listener to his podcast, which is called the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast.

His episodes go really deep into the nuances associated associated with bringing a more biological approach to farming and a more regenerative food system overall. It's really impossible, in my opinion, to listen to one of his episodes without learning something or expanding your thinking in some way. I highly recommend that one to all of you ag nerds out there who also listen to this show. I knew already that he had a successful company at advancing eco agriculture that offered services and products to commercial scale regenerative farms, and I knew had been.

Around a long time.

So I was intrigued when I heard earlier this month that they were launching an equity crowdfunding campaign on an online platform called We Funder. And that prompted me to reach out to John to see if he'd join me on the show to talk about some of these issues and share about this fundraise that they're doing, because I was certainly interested in it. Personally, I thought some of you might also be interested in it as well.

And I'm sure glad he did, because.

I got to ask a lot of the questions that have popped into my mind over the years of listening to his podcast. In some cases really fundamental things like how we define regenerative agriculture, because it can be a bit elusive what regenerative transition looks like on commercial farms at scale, how he thinks about research in complex biological systems, why they're doing this crowdfunding campaign. Who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of regenerative pioneers? That was a fun one and so much more. I can almost guarantee you that something in here is likely to challenge your own paradigm on food and agriculture. I know that some of it definitely did for me, and I think that's good. I think we should all be stretched and challenged and forced to check our own assumptions from time to time. We do start off a little bit more philosophical, but then I promise we get into several specific examples, followed by the details of his company, their solutions, and how their model is helping to drive this regenerative vision forward. A quick bio on John before we dive in. John Kemp is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, a plant nutrition and biostimulants consulting company. A top expert in the field of biological and regenerative farming, John founded AEA in 2006 to help fellow farmers by providing the education tools and strategies that will have a global effect on the food supply and those who are growing that supply. Through intense study and knowledge gleaned from many industry leaders, John is building a comprehensive, systems based approach to plant nutrition. John comes from an Amish farm in Northeast Ohio, which is where he first, in his early experiences, started thinking about some of these biological solutions that might work on his own farm. I'll drop you into the conversation here where I asked John to share how he goes about defining this term regenerative agriculture and why he's skeptical about attaching certifications or verification processes to that term. Enjoy this conversation with Jon Kempf.

My personal vision and mission is to have regenerative agriculture become mainstream globally, to have significant adoption.

80% adoption by 2040 is the goal that I've stated for myself.

And one of the challenges that emerged from the use of organic certification is that it immediately created an in group and an out group, and it immediately created an us versus Them dynamic. And there were other scenarios and other.

Stuff going on involved in that as well.

But having an us versus them dynamic is not healthy and not useful, particularly not if we want to gain significant.

Adoption on a wide scale.

So there are arguably some possible advantages to having it be a bit more amorphous and being a bit more adaptive, adaptable and fluid. But as this conversation is evolving, I'm observing people are rapidly defining regenerative agriculture in the context of soil health. We started 20 some years ago, or perhaps longer, with a group of key individuals within the USDA and within nrcs defining what was initially five soil health principles and then recently they added a sixth one. They're now called the six Soil Health Principles. And then magically a couple years ago, these six soil health principles were redefined.

As the six principles of Regenerative agriculture.

This is a very short sighted view from my perspective, and I have a Few challenges with one is that it places complete responsibility for regeneration on the farmer and places no responsibility on the other stakeholders in the supply chain. So it's again a case of asking farmers to do more and other aspects of the supply chain, extracting that value, rather than working with growers or benefiting growers for the additional work that they're doing. So that's a fundamental challenge that I see in that particular framing. Regeneration, at its most fundamental level is about regenerating relationships at all levels, regenerating relationships between plants and soil microbes, between livestock and the landscape. And it also needs to include regeneration in the relationships in the supply chain and producers. Right now, when you think about regenerating relationships, you're going from A to B. What is A and what is B?

A.

A, what I would call a degraded relationship is a relationship that is extractive and that is not collaborative. You're trying to seek for yourself as much as you can at the expense of the other. It is a competitive relationship, and that's the type of relationship that exists today between most ag input suppliers and their customers, between offtake and producers. And instead we need deeply collaborative and synergistic and symbiotic relationships. And what that could look like is instead of General Mills and other large CPG companies requesting that farmers be regenerative certified, instead of regenerative certified farms, we need regenerative certified supply chains. We fundamentally need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship. We need more people who love and care for the land and the landscape. So to have more people in the landscape, you need to be able to support them, you need to be able to pay them well. That means there needs to be a regeneration of rural economies. And so when I think about regeneration, it's really these macro pieces I see. Regenerative agriculture has the potential to regenerate rural landscapes and rural communities, rural economics, regenerating ecosystems, regenerating public health, and as a part of that, regenerating soil. Now it's easy to make the argument that regenerating soil health is the fundamental that underlies all of those pieces. And that's true, and that's why it's so seductive. But it, it misses the perspective of regeneration of the larger ecosystem.

And it sounds like what you're talking about there is really shared value. I mean, in order to bring more stewards back to the land and to make it more profitable, those, you know, further downstream, the supply chain may need to share a little bit more value upstream to the farmers to incentivize that Behavior. Is that right?

That's exactly right. It needs to be a symbiotic instead of an extractive relationship. And there are a few examples of these types of relationships that I've observed. Perhaps the pinnacle example that really inspired me was a group of farmers in the Netherlands, vegetable farmers, who have this relationship with a packing and distribution organization called Bakker and a grocery supply chain that is called Albert Hain need to do a case study and publish or get the information published on what they are doing. But the short version is that Albert Haine and Bakker and the farmers have a very unique and beautiful relationship. Not a single one of those organizations has salespeople, and not a single one has buyers. They have complete price and margin transparency. Every organization sees the books for every other organization in that supply web. And the farmers, the growers, actually set the retail store prices and the sales and the discounts. So this is an example of an extraordinarily remarkable symbiotic relationship. And I've now observed other types of relationships here in the US Just very recently, citizens of humanity has developed these.

Types of relationships with growers who they.

Are asking to produce regeneratively grown cotton where they are actually. Not only are they paying a premium for the cotton, but they're actually being proactive and investing in growers and giving them the funds up front to facilitate a transition if that funding is needed. So they have really gone above and beyond in developing these types of symbiotic relationships. It's those types of relationships that need.

To come out of the supply chain.

Yeah, we did. We did an episode on the California Cotton Climate Cotton Coalition. There's a lot of season there. But anyway, Canon Michael, who I know has also been on your show, was on here talking about that. And it's certainly an interesting concept. And one thing that I wonder is, like, how do you make sure that in that situation, you don't just take the extraction from the farmer and instead put it on the consumer who may or may not have the ability to afford healthy food. You know, healthy food at a larger premium than it is today. How do you make sure that, you know, ends up really being kind of a shared fare system?

Well, there's an interesting example in France. While it now includes 18 countries, in Europe, there's an organization called Blue Blanc Cor.

I interviewed Pierre Vail, the founder of the organization, on my podcast. It was a fascinating conversation.

The short version is they have conducted extensive medical review testing in human subjects, evaluating the benefits, the human health benefits of high omega 3 content, animal products. So they've specifically been measuring milk, meat, beef, pork and eggs, if I recall correctly. And they were able to demonstrate dramatically improved health response in people. And through a coalition of governments and public intervention, they were able to facilitate an arrangement. Right now they work with growers to be certified. Their growers are certified under the Blue Blanc cord label and they are outcome verified. Every batch is measured and tested and the growers receive a premium for the.

Product that they're producing that is higher quality and has these known health benefits.

And the price on the grocery store.

Shelf is the same, it's identical, even.

Though the farmer is receiving a premium because they were able to show and to bring such collective social pressure to bear that the social pressure alone was able to get the retailers and the supply chains to say, we're willing to do our part to bring this to the market. And so we're willing to give up the 1% or 2% premium that the producers were getting that they would have attached and passed that all the way.

Through to the producers.

So the producers are getting a premium. The retail supply chain is not participating in that premium.

You see, I mean, this is why I love listening to you and talking to you, because I'm already starting to question the, the inherent assumption that was going to be in my next question, which is like, what's a farmer supposed to do with all this? And I think your first response is, yeah, that's kind of the problem, is like we're putting it all on the farmer to do something about this.

Exactly.

So I, I really appreciate the perspective. I mean, it's, it's sinking in.

So it sounds like what we really.

Need is very, very intentional, facilitated conversations throughout the supply chain to work together to attack these problems. And it obviously starts with shared value. But what should those incentives look like? Back to the farm, as far as kind of farm transformation. We talk a lot about COVID crops and reducing disturbance, but again, it's getting back to soil health principles, not regenerative systems thinking.

And so if you are the facilitator.

Coming in with General Mills and their farmer suppliers, okay, we're willing to all share the value here. What types of practical transformations need to start happening?

Well, I'm going to answer the question differently than I might have a few years ago and that I believe that in many cases the right answer is not what you need to begin doing. There's many of things, many things that you can begin doing, like incorporating cover crops and keeping your soil covered, minimum tillage using good nutrition, microbial Inoculants, there's different things, there's many things you can do. But I'm actually of the persuasion that perhaps one of the most important pieces we need to look at is what are the things we need to stop doing. And I'll give you an example of what I'm thinking about. First I'll use an analogy and then I'll use a couple of ag specific examples. When you have a person who is not feeling well, they go to a doctor and the doctor will frequently prescribe.

Some drugs to address whatever symptoms they're experiencing.

And over a period of a few months, often side effects will begin emerging and they'll go back to the doctor and they'll get a prescription for a.

Second drug to cover up the symptoms of the first.

And that cycle repeats itself several times until three or four years down the road you end up with a person who's taking six or seven drugs who arguably might be better off without any of them. And the point I want to make is that every point in that journey, the doctor never intended harm, he always intended benefit. He always wanted the best thing for his patient. And we have a similar situation in a lot of our agronomy and agricultural management, but the situation has evolved over.

Decades instead of over years where we.

Start doing things and then we add other practices and then we add other practices to cover up the side effects of initial practices. And we end up in this quagmire that when you look at it from a fresh third party perspective, looks really idiotic. It's easier to see others than it is to see ourselves. And so I can quickly give you two examples of what this might look like. We started working with cotton roughly four years ago, and right out of the.

Gate, we have no previous agronomic experience working with cotton.

And we suggested some fairly radical changes. And in the first year we get.

A 60% yield response.

Six, zero. And you go, wait, what? These guys know nothing about cotton. How is that even possible? Well, as it turns out, in cotton production, the standard practice is to put on roughly 50 units of nitrogen per.

Expected BALE target yield.

So that usually translates to 150 to.

200 units of nitrogen as a standard application.

But then with that amount of nitrogen applied, the cotton plant grows really aggressively. It becomes tall and luggy, has wide node spacing, and you can end up.

With a really poor quality crop.

So the solution is to apply plant growth regulators. It's very common for growers to be applying somewhere between 7 to 12 Plant.

Growth Regulator applications per year.

Now the interesting thing about a PGR application is that a PGR application will completely shut down photosynthesis in that plant.

For a period of about three days.

And then photosynthesis gradually begins recovering until it completely recovers 10 to 14 days after application, at which point, in most.

Cases, a repeat application is now being applied.

So you've dramatically suppressed the photosynthesis of that plant. And we look at that from a fresh perspective and you say, wait, what? You're driving with one foot on the accelerator and the second foot on the brake. How much sense does this make? So our recommendation, when we started working with growers, many of them initially that.

We started working with were irrigated.

And so being irrigated, they have the.

Capacity to add nitrogen through the growing season as needed.

And so we said, okay, we're going to change the game. We're only going to add nitrogen when.

The crop needs it, and we're going.

To measure every two weeks of the.

Growing season so we know exactly what's going on.

And as a result of that one change, we reduced nitrogen applications from 150 to 50 pounds. There were zero PGRs applied, not a single application. No fungicides, no insecticides. We reduced potassium applications by 60% and we got a 60% yield increase, not as a result of doing more things, but as a result of doing fewer of the wrong things. And I want to be conscious of time. I have other examples. Apple production in Washington. There's this common phenomena of fruit drop where as many as 40 to 50%.

Of the fruit will drop off the tree the last four weeks before harvest or even the last two to three weeks before harvest.

This was also a deliberately created situation. Roughly, let's say 30 some years ago, 30, 40 years ago, there was a problem with fruit coloring. And the root cause of the problem that the fruit didn't color well and didn't stay red or didn't turn red was because the soils were no longer able to supply enough cobalt and manganese, which are fundamental for producing good coloring. So the solution, proposed solution was to put on a foliar spray of abscisic.

Acid about eight weeks before harvest, six to eight weeks in advance. And abscisic acid promotes very good fruit coloring.

Abscisic acid originally got its name being associated with abscission because it was thought to cause, and it does cause fruit drop and fruit stem release from the tree. So another effect that increases abscisic acid in a plant is drought stress. Whenever you have drought stress, it'll increase.

The abscisic acid in a plant by an order of magnitude 10 to 20x or more.

So this practice was first started roughly 30 years ago, then flash forward another 10 to 15 years and now a second problem emerges that we have newer genetics, newer varieties that have large cells inside the fruit. And these fruit don't store well, they don't hold well in storage. And the cause of this as a problem or the root cause of the problem is that we need a lot.

Of calcium and copper to form strong and flexible cell membranes.

And so growers are applying lots of calcium. But in addition, they arrived at the idea that, okay, the last four weeks before harvest, we're going to shut off.

The irrigation water, we're going to do.

Water deprivation so that we have less water inside the fruit, so that our fruit isn't quite as large, and so.

That we reduce the fruit storage problems.

Well, then they can't figure out why they have 40% fruit drop. It's because A, we're putting on the abscisic acid and B, we're doing water stress. And so we're creating this high abscisic acid con in the tree. And of course the tree is going to drop fruit. So our recommendation when we started working with apples is first of all, you address the cobalt and manganese and so.

You eliminate the first abscisic acid application.

And second, you address calcium and copper, so you have strong flexible cell membranes and then you eliminate water deprivation. All of a sudden you don't have fruit drop anymore. So I'm using these as an example. I deliberately did not use corn or soybeans or wheat as examples because it's easier for us to see other people.

Than it is to see ourselves.

But the reality is that this scenario of doing the wrong things or at the wrong time is almost universal in a lot of our crop management approaches where we're doing the wrong things and we're creating a lot of our own problems.

And this gets back to a mindset shift that I have benefited from you, which is regeneration is maybe if we're going to create a focal point, it's not going to be soil health, it's not going to be carbon sequestration for sure, but maybe it's going to be plant health and that creating healthy plants creates healthy soils and starts to regenerate systems. And those seem like two good examples.

How do we start to see our.

Own blind spots though? Because obviously those farmers, and like you said, this happens everywhere. Everyone's doing it because they think they need to do it. They think it's the Right thing to do, it's necessary.

How do we start to see our.

Own blind spots in this way?

Oh, boy. That's an analogy to the question of what defines open mindedness and how do you say it? Well, part of it is exposure and gaining learning ideas from other people, of course, But I think fundamentally it is constantly challenging assumptions and asking the question, why exactly are we doing this? And is this really the best way.

To be doing it?

It's, you know, there is this remarkable phenomena as we started using plant SAP analysis and measuring what's going on with crops. In many cases, the greatest yield responses that we have gotten have not come.

From applying more fertilizers or applying different types of trace minerals and so forth, but instead they've come from removing things. Removing potassium applications at the wrong time, removing nitrogen applications at the wrong time.

So the most successful growers that I have observed, I've had the privilege of.

Working with thousands of them at this point.

The most successful growers do not delegate responsibility for their agronomic decisions to advisors. They hire consultants, they hire agronomists, they work with other people to get input, but they're the final decision maker. They do not delegate the knowledge required to make decisions. So the best farmers are the farmers that if they're an apple grower, they deeply study exactly what is required to produce a high quality apple. What is the cell? What's happening with plant physiology? What does cell division mean? What do all these pieces mean? They don't delegate that knowledge to anyone else. And so there is this pattern that I've noticed where the most successful farmers, both financially, economically successful, but also successful by other metrics in life and family and so forth, are those who prioritize developing a personal understanding of how to increase revenue. And they delegate to others how to reduce costs. I point this out because this is in direct contrast to the way regenerative agriculture is so commonly framed. Say, oh, this is a pathway to reducing costs and reducing inputs. That may be true, and that's certainly attractive to some people. But the most successful growers are those who prioritize and understand how can I increase crop revenue and how can I increase profitability? When you focus on it through that lens, reducing costs usually happens, but it's a secondary outcome.

It's not a primary outcome.

And this brings me to another thing I wanted to have you talk about, which is, I imagine with the thousands of farmers you've worked with over millions of acres, at this point you are convinced, am I right? That applying these regenerative Principles to a farm can be a profitable move in the vast majority of cases for conventional farmers.

I have never seen it not be a profitable move, not once.

And the way that I approach this is to say the fundamental foundational principles work. And if for some reason they didn't.

Produce a response in a certain year, then obviously there's all types of environmental factors as well. But there's also the possibility that we missed something or didn't apply something correctly.

Again, the thought process when I first started advancing eco agriculture a decade and a half ago was I have this mission of having regenerative agriculture become mainstream.

In the next three decades. At that point, three and a half decades.

And how do we get there? Well, I believe that you achieve what you incentivize. And if you want to provide a pathway to scale, to significant scale, you're not going to get there by having a conversation about future rewards. Many farmers are not in the financial and economic position to say we're going to make investments this year and next year and the year after that in improving soil health and cover crops and so forth with the hope of seeing a future reward five years down the road. That doesn't work economically for most operations. So in our work, when we started doing our agronomy work, I really prioritized and spent a lot of time studying where are the applications, where are the trigger points where we can put on very targeted applications or targeted management that produces an immediate economic outcome in the first year? I obsess over the idea that every recommendation that we make needs to produce.

An immediate economic outcome this year, this crop season, not five years down the road.

I have a couple of presentations on YouTube where I go into some detail.

On what we've discovered.

But the bottom line is there are.

Two areas that are significant wins consistently.

The first, the greatest, the single greatest.

ROI application consistently is a well designed seed treatment. Seed treatments are inexpensive, they're low cost breaker, and they deliver over and over and over again. When they're well designed, they're very consistent. If they're not well designed, then they're highly variable.

And the second category comes as a.

Surprise to many people and that is foliar applications. Well designed foliar applications also have a consistent roi.

Then side dress, planters, applications, all these other types of stuff.

Those fall down into different categories depending on your specific local context.

But when you look at regeneration or.

Facilitating a transition through an economic lens, you make different decisions than those that are often promoted.

Cover crops are important for regenerating soil health, but they May not be the.

Most important thing this year, particularly not if I'm under financial duress.

In the spirit of this kind of full value chain approach to regenerative agriculture, a lot of people listening are not farmers. They may be agronomists, they may be retailers, they may be others in ag business. It would seem for this transition to really happen at scale, to get to the 80% you mentioned earlier, we're going to need people all along the value chain. I wonder how does that start to happen where we have more consultants whose job it is to say, facilitate conversations between food companies and you know, grain elevators and farmers, or somebody who's a crop consultant who's helping with kind of regenerative principles. Are we starting to see that today and how does that sort of materialize.

It? Certainly it's starting to happen, but it's very early days. What I find interesting is that there are many smaller innovative CPG companies in.

The, let's say in the 1 million to $30 million range. They're starting out, they might have a couple years of experience under their belt.

There must be, I'm not exaggerating, there.

Must be 200 or more of those companies right now who are actively looking.

For crops that are regeneratively grown and.

Can'T find them because there is no one facilitating those connections. There's a lot of interest in having access to high quality ingredients, but it's very difficult, or shouldn't say it's difficult to facilitate, but there hasn't been a lot of facilitation yet.

So that's, that's one example. The reality is that what we're describing to some degree requires a reconfiguration and a rethinking of financial incentives and the.

Way that they're currently structured in the system.

Input suppliers are a good example. Or crop consultants. What percentage of crop consultants receive a part of their compensation as a result of product sales? I don't know the exact number, but.

It'S a large number, probably upwards of 80%.

So you have this inherent conflict of interest where the consultants interests are not.

Aligned with the grower's best interest.

So there are some of these pieces that need to shift in a macro.

Context for the highest and best good relationships to evolve from that.

Right, well, let's talk about advancing eco agriculture. Maybe give us a little bit of kind of a high level overview of the company today and then I want to get into where it's going in the future.

Today we're a team of about 80.

People working on 50 some crops and about 4 million acres mostly here in North America. We're starting to do quite a bit of work in South America and other parts of the globe as well, but mostly North American centric.

We originally started doing a lot of.

Work with fruit and nut and vegetable higher value crops and more recently half a dozen years ago started doing a lot of work with broad acre crops and were surprised to find how little innovation there has been in that space compared to some of the higher value crops.

Back in 2006, we originally started as a consulting company and then shifted to.

Being more of a specialty plant nutrition and microbial inoculants type company.

We're now in the process of shifting.

That again to being.

We've always had extremely strong consulting service.

But we're now shifting again to be consulting service centric with the products being associated with that or available on an as needed basis.

So yeah, it's quite interesting today about 4 million acres that we work with. And what we really became known for originally in the fruit and vegetable space was the ability to help farmers grow crops that were highly resistant to diseases in insects and virtually eliminate the need.

For pesticides in many cases entirely eliminate the need for pesticides in a year or two.

The interesting piece that happens of course.

Is when you increase plant health, you can't stop yields from increasing. That's just going to be a secondary benefit and usually a very significant loss.

And real quick, if I could just clarify there, when you say eliminate the use of pesticides, do you mean insecticides, fungicides and herbicides?

Less so for herbicides particularly. I was referring to fungicides and insecticides. Yes.

We have a really incredible team and we're growing quickly and we have a lot of demand. I mean it's a great challenge to have. But one of our challenges the last.

Couple of years and going forward the next couple of years into the foreseeable future is hang onto the reins because this rocket is taking off.

It's like there's so much demand. We're in a very fortunate, lucky position.

I suppose you could say is that.

At this point we started in 2006, so we now have 15 years of experience in helping farmers transition to regenerative.

Ag on scale large operations, thousands or tens of thousands of acre operations.

And it's like who has that track.

Record of success for the last 15 years?

I'm not aware of anyone else out.

There that has that.

And so we have a lot of demand for that reason and it's a good position to be in but it.

Also means we need to scale rapidly.

Which is exciting and a lot of work.

Yeah. And I know in order to scale rapidly, you're currently doing a fundraise through the We Funder campaign. So that allows anybody who wants to become an investor in advancing ECOAG to do so through that platform. I guess a couple questions on that. You know, have you raised money in the past? And whether or not you have, why now are you doing this fundraiser? And why through We Funder?

Yeah, we've grown organically. We have not raised any outside investment.

Fundraising until very recently. I think we did one small round. I forget, let's say roughly 18 months or maybe two years ago, somewhere in there.

So the We Funder campaign is really.

The first significant fundraising round that we're doing.

And it's actually very meaningful to me because in the spirit of regenerating relationships and having aligned interests, I've always asked the question, like, for us as an organization, what does it mean to not just do regenerative agriculture, but to be regenerative? What does it mean to be a.

Regenerative organization and to have the.

That baked into our DNA? And I've always had the desire to.

Have employees and customers and our supporters.

Be able to participate in AEA success and to really be partners in our growth. And we've explored different options over the years.

We've looked at stock options and different things like that. But we've been a relatively small company, and.

This crowdfunding campaign is an administratively.

Easy way for us to accomplish that and for our growers to be able to participate in our success and for our employees as well.

And so that was a major driver.

For going in this direction and choosing to do a crowdfunding campaign versus other types of investment. That, quite frankly, probably would have been a lot easier.

Sure, yeah. And obviously you're raising this money for growth, but more specifically, are there specific initiatives or investments that you want to make with this money?

There are several. We have some very innovative research and development work that has been ongoing for.

A couple of years that really needs.

A significant injection to bring it to.

The marketplace that is really going to.

Deliver even, we believe, even greater and faster immediate economic responses for crops who.

Are just starting the transition. So we're pretty excited about that.

But then the other piece that we're working on is this computational agronomy or algorithmic agronomy. There is something that we have that no one else has. In addition to the level of experience in helping farmers transition, a foundational aspect of our success has Been that we.

Don'T guess about anything that's possible to measure.

We use data extensively and in terms of how we manage plant nutrition, one of the ways that that has manifested itself is that we measure the nutrient content of the plant SAP every two.

Weeks throughout the entire growing season.

So we now have this database with millions of data points on nutritional integrity.

And nutritional profiles through the growing season.

And we can partner that with microbiome data and with all the other types.

Of data that we've collected, irrigation water data and soil analysis, etc, etc.

And all of a sudden we now have the ability to very accurately predict disease and insect susceptibility into the future.

Based on a plant's nutritional profile.

Which means you also know the solution. You know that a crop is susceptible to a specific disease or specific insect because X, Y or Z nutrients is imbalanced. That means you can correct that imbalance and it changes the conversation. All of a sudden, the solution to a potential pest problem is not a.

Pesticide solution, it's a nutritional solution.

So we have some fairly well developed software technology that we have been using in house as this predictive engine. This is a personal baby of mine because I first formulated the possibility of doing this type of predictive work back in 2014. And to now be at the point where we have both the technology and.

The database to be able to do that is really exciting.

So I'm looking forward to the day when a grower will be able to get an alert that will tell him, hey, you need to begin scouting your fields for the emergence of this insect.

That is expected to arrive in the next three to four days.

And of your 11 fields, two of them have a high susceptibility rating because of these reasons.

They don't have enough magnesium or they don't have enough molybdenum or whatever the case might be.

So that's a significant piece that we're.

Hoping to invest in that I'm pretty excited about.

And that also that helps us scale. Because one of the key challenges is to help a farmer transition. Many people have identified that one of the key pieces that there's a desperate.

Need for is trusted technical advisors, people.

Who have the depth and the breadth of knowledge to be confident in facilitating a transition that people who have already walked the path before. And we have a great team of people like that, but we invest years and a lot of money in training and development before an individual is ready.

To start making recommendations on their own.

That's a scaling problem. And having having an agronomy computation engine can help solve for that scaling problem by making humans better, not by replacing.

Them, but by making them better.

Wow. I love that for so many reasons. First of which is, like you mentioned earlier, nobody has the track record that you all do of the years and the millions of acres of regenerative transition. And similarly, that puts you in a position, a unique position, to be the only one developing technologies that come from that context. And what I mean by that is we talk about this in genetics. If we're breeding crops for the current system, are we really optimizing for the right things when it comes to genetics? And of course, that's a whole other conversation. But similar with ag tech tools, if we're developing ag tech around the current.

System, if the system shifts to a.

Regenerative context, those tools may or may not still be relevant. And I think that's really, really interesting.

That's such an important comment, Tim.

I really appreciate you having that perspective.

Because if you develop ag tech tools for the current system, do they just exacerbate the problems that currently exist? For example, is any ag tech tool going to recognize that applying too much hydrogen and too many pgrs on cotton, far too many technology tools help you do the current thing better. They don't help you rethink the fundamentals of the system.

And to me, that is the next wave in ag tech, which we talk about. Ag tech a lot on this show is developing tools from this new paradigm. And it's not a new paradigm, but to a lot of us it's new of sort of. This regenerative context I think is super interesting. Along similar lines, you obviously are data driven. Driven. You're very scientific in your process. You talk to a lot of scientists. But I've also heard you say that, you know, the scientific method is maybe not sufficient for biological systems like agriculture. Can you explain that idea a little bit more? And how do you reconcile that in your brain of when to really employ the scientific method versus when it's inadequate or insufficient?

Yeah, that's a real can of worms to open, Tim. That's a real can of worms.

I waited till the last 10 minutes to mention that.

I know, I'm sorry, but I would.

Love to, to kind of just get.

A better sense of it, because I.

Wrestle with that in my mind. I want to be more data driven, more scientific, but I don't want to lose the imagination it takes to think about what's possible.