How Excess Nitrogen Creates Yield Drag | John Kempf and Advancing Eco Agriculture

Really glad to see you all here. I've been looking forward to this webinar this afternoon. And the process of going through the webinar and putting everything together made me realize that one, it's inaccurate for us to talk about nitrogen and two, or nitrogen as this thing because in fact all these different forms of nitrogen behave so differently that we should really be talking about nitrate versus ammonium and versus amino acids, etc. But it also made me realize that.

If we really want to get into.

How nitrogen creates yield drag and all of the interesting effects and side effects that it has on plants that we often don't consider that could be a 10 hour, 10, 1 hour long webinars rather than just one. So there's a lot that didn't get included today, but we got plenty here. Phil, I got a message from a Don McClure that he can't hear me at all.

Can you just verify that you can hear me?

We did a check earlier. I think it should be working.

Yeah, I can hear you all right.

I think it might be on your end, Don, but thanks for the heads up. Actually, Phil, you might need to text him that because he surely can't hear me saying that.

All right, we're going to kick things off. Welcome friends, to our webinar today where we're going to be talking about how nitrogen creates yield drag, what the mechanisms are for that and that contribute to that. There is so much in this topic, and this conversation really has evolved out of the last 15 years of experience of working with a different type of nutrition management system where we have one of the key principles that we've worked.

With and the way that we've managed.

Attrition at AEA is we want to have nutrition. We want to have plants absorbing nutrition from biology instead of from mineral or.

Ionic sources of nutrients, soluble sources of nutrients.

And over the last 15 years we've observed lots of interesting things happen, that when plants begin absorbing bacterial proteins and.

Amino acids and peptides directly from the.

Soil profile, they begin expressing themselves differently.

They begin behaving differently.

And this has led to a lot of study, a lot of research, lots.

Of efforts to try to connect the dots and understand what's happening and what's going on inside plant tissues.

And this topic, this whole topic of nitrogen, nitrogen interactions with other nutrients is much broader and much deeper than we can get into in a one hour webinar. So we've I'm kind of, I'm going to go provide an overview of the highlights of some of the big picture pieces as we understand them right now that really impact plant physiology and can dramatically increase crop yields once we start managing nitrogen differently. I've included a number of references and citations in the presentation, but there's many more things I'm going to talk about that I've probably missed, including references for if you want to dig deeper, I would suggest a first place starting point is to start with Marschner's Mineral Nutrition of Higher Plants. I'm going to grab my copy here. All of you, many of you, I'm sure, have seen this or have heard me talk about it in the past. I was rereading it again yesterday and this morning in preparation for this article, and the chapter on nitrogen is just simply fascinating. But of course we've learned lots of.

New things since this book was published. We've learned lots of new things around.

Rhizophagy and how plants utilize nutrients inside their cells. In addition to this book, there's a lot of bibliography to follow up on here, but I would also suggest Gerald Pollack's book Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life. And what was the other one that.

Was in my mind?

Oh, James White's papers on rhizophagy. So we're going to touch on a couple of those as we dive through this. But the short version is when you think about nitrogen, the common frame of reference that everyone uses is if you want more yield, you put on more nitrogen. We don't think about nitrogen creating a yield drag effect, but in fact it.

Does and it can be very significant.

And so we have the topics I'll be talking about today are at first glance, they may be appear to. They may appear to be counterintuitive, but when you really dig in and understand.

What'S going on behind them, they start making a lot of sense.

So with that introduction, I'm just going to dive right in. There's a lot that there just simply wasn't enough room to include. So I'm going to try to move pretty quickly and if you have any questions for me, type them into the Q and A box. I'm going to try to leave plenty of time for Q and A at the end and dig into any topics that you have or any questions that you have. I would only ask that you keep your questions focused to the topic on nitrogen and nitrogen interactions with implants and.

Within soil biology and how to make the overall system work.

Because given the depth of that topic, of what we could talk about, I.

Don'T want to go too far off.

Track from that so with that I'm going to dive into the screen share and let's talk about nitrogen creating yield drag. So, quick overview. I want to quickly touch on the nitrogen cycle and how it functions in soil and plant ecosystems as it's understood or misunderstood today. Briefly touch on rhizophagy and then give a quick overview on how nitrate creates yield drag and this this topic as because there was I soon discovered there's so much to this topic I needed to cut things out. So this webinar is focused specifically on nitrate.

For the most part.

We could have parallel conversations about ammonium and about other forms of nitrogen, but we're really laser focusing in on nitrate because it is the form of nitrogen that has the greatest yield drag effect by far and secondly it's the form of nitrogen that is most commonly absorbed.

In highest proportion by most crops. And I'll expand on that in a bit here.

Then I want to describe just quickly how microbial proteins increase yields and do.

Not have a yield drag effect and then how, as you're managing the transition.

Whatever your current nitrogen management protocol may be, how do you get to a place where nitrogen doesn't cause a yield drag, but does in fact give you.

The yield increase that you're looking for and that you're expecting?

So, so when we look at the nitrogen cycle, you've all seen diagrams similar to this, I'm sure, that describes the overarching nitrogen cycle as it's moved into the soil through nitrogen fixation process by different types of nitrogen fixing bacteria, Rhizobium and Azodobacter and so forth, and then goes through the nitrification process where it switches from reduced forms to oxidized forms.

Of nitrogen, which specifically ends up as being nitrate.

This diagram as it exists here is slightly incomplete. This is one of the better nitrogen cycle diagrams that I found online. But what is missing is it doesn't yet include the bacterial, that the plant's.

Capacity to absorb bacterial nitrogen or to.

Absorb entire bacterial cells as described by.

The rhizophagy process by Dr. James White.

So that's an important clarification, important distinction that I want to make that this nitrogen cycle, while quite thorough, is still missing the rhizophagy component. And by the way, that's also why when I talk about this book, Mineral Nutrition of Higher Plants, the rhizophagy cycle.

Is also missing from this currently described understanding of plant absorption of nutrients.

So the rhizophagy cycle, I really wish we could be live and I could see you in person so that I could ask for a show of hands of how many people haven't heard of the rhizoffige cycle. I've been talking about this for the.

Last couple of years. It's become much more widely known.

So what I'll just describe briefly, we'll just say Briefly, is that Dr. James.

White at Rutgers University, along with a.

Number of his colleagues, have described how plants can absorb nitrogen or absorb nutrients, generally from bacterial cells, where they are absorbing entire bacteria, moving them throughout the plant's vascular tissue. And the plant cells are absorbing these entire bacterial cells through various processes. But one is including a process called endocytosis. The short version is very simple.

The summary is simple.

The summary is that we can provide.

I believe this is not Dr. White's.

Perspective or his endorsement, but what we've observed, based on the field observations over a decade and a half now. We believe that plants can absorb the majority of their nitrogen requirement and their total nutrient requirement through this rhizophagy process. And when I say the majority, I'm talking upwards of 90%. So it's true that in a functioning living bacterial soil and fungal soil where you have vigorous microbial populations, you will always have tiny trace amounts of nitrate and ammonium. But in the healthiest soils, that's all.

That it will be.

It will be a trace amount.

It'll be less than 5% of the.

Total nitrogen in the soil profile will.

Be in the form of ammonium or nitrate.

The majority is contained inside bacterial cells.

And inside soil microbial populations. That's exactly where we want it because.

In this form, it's not water soluble, it doesn't leach, and it's available for plants to absorb even when you have drought stress, when you have limited water.

So.

I am really excited about the discovery or the elucidation. The description of the rhizophagy cycle that Dr. Hoyt and his colleagues have described, I've had him on the podcast, he's done a couple of webinars. There's lots more information available online around this process. But the bottom line for the purpose of this webinar is that it's possible to supply upwards of 90% of a crops nitrogen requirement using this process. And that is how you will consistently produce the highest yields and the highest quality once this starts happening. When I say the highest yields, I'm not talking about a 2% or 3% yield increase. What we have observed are significant yield.

Increases once plants start getting nutrition from this process.

So this is the ultimate end goal And I want to describe a bit at the end of this webinar how.

We achieve that and how we get.

To that end goal when we look at the energy requirements. I just find this intriguing that if we want to for commercial ammonia fixation, the Haber Bosch process is operating at 500 degrees Celsius under tremendous pressures. And it's interesting that bacterial enzymes can synthesize these same and can also fix.

Nitrogen, but at common temperatures and pressures.

It's fascinating the tremendous energy that can.

Be focused through these bacterial processes.

One of the key pieces is if we want to have the rhizophagy cycle functional and capable of supplying a significant amount of the crops energy requirement, we.

Must have good gas exchange throughout the soil profile.

The soil has to be able to breathe, has to be able to inhale atmospheric air that contains 70% oxygen and exhale air that has 20 to 30,000.

Parts per million CO2 for green plants to absorb.

Without that natural inhaling and exhaling.

You.

Can'T maintain the quantity. A large enough population of bacteria to.

Fix enough nitrogen to supply what the crops requirements are.

So here's a quick overview of the different oxidation states of mineral nitrogen or chemical nitrogen all the way from ammonium on the left go through to nitrate on the right and we can see lower left. Lower right you have the reduced versus the oxidized forms, which is something I've.

Been speaking about quite a bit over.

The last couple of years. But the point that I want to make and the reason I put this up here is to illustrate why we should not be just talking about nitrogen. In addition, this is the mineral forms of nitrogen, but then you also have amino acids, amino sugars, peptides, proteins, bacterial cells, urea and amine nitrogen. You have all these, this array of organic forms of nitrogen and plants can absorb the entire spectrum. However, the types of the form of nitrogen that they absorb has a significant impact on that plant's future performance. So one of the things that we've observed, I had this experience when I was early days, just starting out doing.

Consulting work probably 12 or 13 years.

Ago, working with a watermelon farmer in Texas. And we had put together a nutritional protocol. This was in fact I think before we had AEA products. So we were using industry products that.

Were available in the marketplace.

And the early on in the season, once we got to the bloom period or even shortly after the bloom period, once we have tennis ball sized fruit, the grower was just freaking out about.

How small the plants were. The plastic wasn't even covered yet. And we already had tennis ball sized fruit.

And the concern was that we didn't have enough vegetation, didn't have enough leaf.

Surface area in order to produce enough fruit and to produce a large fruit. Well that was not what happened.

That crop, which never, even when it was fully mature, when we went through.

Harvesting, there was still visible plastic, a lot of visible plastic. I would say we had some in the neighborhood of 65 to 70% coverage of the plastic at that point. That was the highest yielding watermelon crop that that farmer had ever produced up to that point and still is amongst his top yields on the farm today.

And I've experienced this phenomena over and over again. Specifically now I need to make some distinctions here. There's three different crop types in the.

Way that crops express themselves. You have a vegetative crop, let's say alfalfa or spinach or kale.

You have what we call a single fruiting crop, which would be small grains.

Or corn for example, where all the blossoming and pollination happens in a very condensed window of time, in a matter of a few days or a week most.

And then you have the extended or.

What I call the multi fruiting crops, which would be like watermelons and tomatoes.

Where you have blossoming and pollination for.

An extended period of a couple of weeks or maybe a month.

And it is really, it's this last group that I'm talking most about for this particular example, this crop, this group of crops which blossoms and pollinates for.

An extended window, soybeans would be in this group as well.

You will often find the highest yielding.

Crops have the least vegetative biomass. Why is that true?

It's true because usually what we have come to perceive as common and normal.

For these types of crops is excessive vegetative growth traffic triggered specifically by nitrate, that reduces reproduction.

So this watermelon field, even though it had a relatively small amount of vegetation.

Based on the farmers historical experience, it.

Had enough leaf in enough leaf surface area to fill a lot of fruit and it had.

These plants had really strong reproduction. They trying to recall now, I think we harvested an average of 3.2 melons per plant on that field, which was 50% above historical norms.

So how does nitrate create yield drag?

Five points or maybe six here.

First, excess of vegetation. It increases the crops water requirements significantly.

As I want to point out.

It drains a plant's energy which is again is counterintuitive. We're used to thinking about putting on nitrogen. We get this tremendous surge of plant growth.

So it's Increases plant energy. Right. In fact, it doesn't do that.

It drains a plant of energy. I'll describe why it reduces nutrient absorption.

Here's an interesting one to think about.

It increases disease and it creates a pronounced tendency towards premature death.

So let's unwrap each of these. Talk about the water requirement as a jumping off place.

There is a tremendous amount of water.

Required for the plant when it absorbs nitrate nitrogen for two reasons.

The first is that when plants absorb nitrate nitrogen and they convert that there is. It's difficult to speak in generalities here.

Because there's variation between different plant species.

But broadly speaking, most agricultural crops convert the majority of their nitrate in the upper parts of the plant, in the.

Vegetative parts of the plant, not in the root system.

So you get nitrate being absorbed from the roots, from the soil, water moving up into the leaves. And the conversion process happens in the leaves from nitrate to ami nitrogen, then.

To amino acids and proteins and so forth.

And the first, the initial steps in the nitrate conversion process to amine nitrogen require a lot of water. It takes three molecules of water for.

Every molecule of nitrogen or of nitrate that the plant absorbs.

And in addition to that, when the plant is absorbing nitrate and it's moving.

Into the upper parts of the plant.

And being stored in the vacuoles inside the cells, it also creates weak, watery.

Cells which lead to all kinds of.

Problems, including increased transpiration. So it takes more water because the plant loses water more easily. The elevated levels of nitrate reduce the plant's ability to control the stomata and the plant starts losing a lot more water. So the short version is if you give plants nitrate, it's going. If plants absorb a lot of their nitrogen in the form of nitrate, it's.

Going to greatly increase the plant's water requirement.

Let's look at what happens when plants absorb nitrate. Let's look at what happens in the rhizosphere. So this is the first paragraph is a direct quote from this book, Mineral Nutrition of Higher Plants. A direct reference says as ammonium or nitrate comprises about 80% of the total.

Cations or anions taken up by the plant.

And this is. I suspect it's not stated in this reference, but I suspect it's referring to 80% of the atomic weight or of.

The molecular weight, because obviously in terms of actual numbers probably wouldn't be that high.

It has a strong impact on the.

Uptake of other cations and anions, on.

Cellular ph regulation and on rhizosphere ph. Now, why would the form of nitrogen influence rhizosphere ph, because when the plant absorbs either ammonium or nitrate, for one of them it releases a proton, and.

For the other it gains protons.

So simple way to say it is to say that when plants absorb ammonium, it acidifies the ph in the rhizosphere. So you will drop the ph right around the root system and you can take a soil that has a ph of 7, 5 or 8 that's very alkaline, and you can have a rhizosphere pH of 3.5 to 4, which is very valuable for increasing nutrient availability.

So you can get a lot of calcium availability and trace mineral availability in these acidic soils right around the rhizosphere.

However, when the plant absorbs nitrate, the opposite happens. And this is such a fundamental common.

Problem across so much of agriculture is.

That when you have, now let's say you have a soil that appears to have a functional and a well balanced bulk soil ph, it's 6.2 to 6.4 somewhere in that range. And you would think the soil biology.

And everything is working really well.

When nitrogen fertilizers are applied to such a soil and they go through the nitrification process, the plant ends up absorbing the majority of its nitrogen in the form of nitrate. You can actually have an alkali zone in the rhizosphere where soil phs are upwards of 7.5, as high as 8 or greater. And you can imagine, well, maybe you can't. That has a tremendous negative impact on the plant's ability to absorb other nutrients. When this happens, when plants are absorbing lots of nitrate from the soil, that means they will do a very poor job of absorbing calcium. They'll do a very poor job of absorbing manganese, copper, iron, cobalt, zinc to some degree, and boron. So there's all these trace minerals, silicon. There's other elements that are involved here as well. But the short version is simple. We can simply say that when plants absorb nitrate nitrogen, it alkalizes the rhizosphere ph and greatly reduces the plant's ability.

To absorb other nutrients.

So if you want to create a plant, you know, in society at large here, I believe many of you that.

Are here and that listen to the.

Content that we've put out historically, when.

We look at public health and the.

Channel challenges that are present in our population throughout North America, and to some degree in all of western civilizations, but particularly here in North America, we have a problem that many people have full.

Bellies and are starving.

They do not Have. When I say they're starving, they're starving for good nutrition. We have a lot of empty carbohydrates. We have an abundance of carbohydrates, but.

Not good nutrition to go with it.

And so we have an obesity epidemic.

And all these challenges with degenerative illnesses.

Like heart disease and diabetes and stroke and cancer.

The list goes on and on.

If you want to create a plant.

Like that, you feed it nitrate. Nitrate for plants is the equivalent of.

Empty carbohydrates for people. You get lush, vegetative growth, lots of biomass, but without good nutrition, without proper.

Nutrients, without the proper minerals that that plant needs for it to be healthy.

So this. This has been well understood for decades.

This is not new information, but it's.

Just surprising to me that it's not.

More widely discussed and talked about.

Nitrate produces weak cells and weak cell membranes. So fundamentally, it is weak cell membranes that are one of the foundational requirements. You know, when we talk about the disease triangle, there's three components of the disease triangle. There is a potential pathogen, a susceptible host, and a proper environment. We don't give enough consideration to what is the definition of a susceptible host. A susceptible host is not just a random tomato plant, because we know that some tomato plants are resistant to one disease, and other tomato plants of a.

Different variety are susceptible to the disease.

So what defines a susceptible host is partially the terrain, the internal construction, and.

The nutritional integrity and the microbiome integrity of that plant.

And weak cell membranes are one of.

The fundamentals that define a susceptible host for many, many different diseases.

So often when we have bacterial infections and fungal infections, some types of viruses, we find that we have weak, watery.

Cell membranes from excessive nitrate application.

And this is also the foundation of why some crops die down early or they die prematurely. If you have a potato crop that has excessive levels of nitrate, that potato crop will become infected with verticillium, and it'll die down when the potatoes have.

Barely reached the mature stage of the final harvest or the final harvest size that you want to harvest. If they don't have excess of nitrates, they often will not contract verticillium, and.

They'Ll stay green and continue to grow.

Right up until frost.

So this is a difference between how plants will express themselves differently based on.

Whether they're absorbing nitrogen in the form of nitrate or other forms of nitrogen like urea and ammonium, or bacterial proteins.

And then I think many of you are also aware that when you have weak, watery cells, those are the foundation.

Of most fruit Storage problems.

So if you have storage problems with.

Or calcium deficiency problems like Blossom End Rot and Corking and Bitter Pit, those.

Are fundamentally weak water cells. And you think about those diseases I just mentioned. I named Blossom End Rot and Corking and Bitter Pit. Those are commonly thought of as being calcium deficiencies.

But think about this. What if the calcium deficiency is being caused by root absorption of nitrate, increasing rhizosphere ph and making it difficult for the plant to pick up calcium? What if the calcium deficiency isn't caused by calcium being low in the soil, but by nitrate being high in the soil?

This is a common phenomena.

It's one that we see all the time.

So now let's talk about the next point. Nitrogen creating an energy drain. Like, why would nitrogen drain energy from a plant? This is another citation. Actually, it might be from an earlier edition of Marschners Horse Martners Mineral Attrition of Higher Plants. I think it might have been on the second edition where I read that a citation that indicated when a corn crop absorbs 80% of its total nitrogen requirement in the form of nitrate, that will consume 16% of that plant's total photosynthetic energy just to convert nitrate to.

Proteins, or actually to say that correctly, just to convert nitrate to amine nitrogen.

That's a tremendous energy drain. 80% of nitrate absorption or 80% of total nitrogen as nitrate, which is very common.

That's most what happens in most production agriculture might even be greater than 80%. In many cases.

It takes 16% of a plant's total photosynthetic energy. Why does it drain that much energy from the plant? Because the energy requirement, the sugar energy.

The photosynthetic energy that is needed to convert nitrate to amine nitrogen, is really high.

So this. Here's a couple of citations and references. Again, these are direct quotes from the.

Book that I showed you just a moment ago.

So when we think of it in ATP equivalence, I was trying to find, I missed finding the math for sugar and carbohydrate requirements. But the energy requirement for the reduction of one molecule or one mole of.

Nitrate is 15 mol ATP, with an additional 5 moles for ammonium assimilation. And this reference, it was speaking specifically to when nitrate assimilation happens in the root system.

Ideally, nitrate assimilation should happen in the leaves, and when that happens, it will require less energy. Less energy is required to convert nitrate in the leaves than it is required.

To convert nitrate in the roots.

However, many agricultural crops under mainstream agronomic practices convert a lot of nitrate in the roots rather than the leaves.

Why? Because they get too much and the leaves can't keep up.

So, short version, bottom line is when there's this common phenomena, when growers switch to organic production or when they foliar apply nitrogen, it's commonly understood that when we put on a foliar application of urea versus a soil application of urea, we require a lot fewer pounds per.

Acre to produce the same crop response.

Or when a grower switches and becomes organically certified, they'll start using organic forms of nitrogen, such as liquid fish or.

Amino acids, corn, steep liquor, different types.

Of materials, and all of a sudden, instead of using a pound and a half or a pound and a quarter of nitrogen to grow a bushel of grain, they might be using 0.7 pounds.

Of nitrogen or 0.5 pounds of nitrogen to grow a bushel of grain.

And this has been observed, commonly, widely understood to occur for decades. And this is the difference. A unit of nitrogen is not the same from a plant response. When plants absorb amino acid nitrogen, it actually gives them energy. They gain energy from amino acids, they gain energy from bacterial protein. But when they absorb nitrate, it costs them energy. This is why you can have. Why different forms of nitrogen have different levels of efficiency. And it takes more. If the plant is getting all its nitrogen from nitrate, as it is in most of mainstream agronomy, it's going to take higher levels. It's going to take that one and a quarter, one and a half bushels.

Of nitrogen per bushel of grain.

But if it's getting amino acid or peptide or protein nitrogen, it takes a fraction of that because it's not depriving.

The plant of energy anyway. Yeah, I'm going to move on. There's, there's more that I could talk about here, but this is the key piece.

So I spoke earlier about the increased water requirement. This is just from field experience and observation. I can't point to a citation on this. And it varies based on crop species and local context.

The local context is important here, but.

What we've observed is that when plants get the majority of their nitrogen from.

Nitrate, it increases the plants water requirements.

We think somewhere between 20 and 30%.

Some crops more, other crops less.

And this is as compared to plants.

Who are getting the most of their nitrogen from the rhizophagy cycle.

So as I pointed out, this is because of two key drivers as well.

There's a couple of other drivers that we think are relevant as well, but.

The big ones are that there's no.

Water needed to convert nitrate or less water. I should say, and less water required because you have stronger cell membranes and you have less transpiration.

And another factor that happens, I described.

This in my webinar on the Plant Health Pyramid.

When you have plants absorbing most of.

Their nitrogen from microbes, from bacterial cells.

And they have this energy gain, that.

Energy gain expresses itself as this strong, waxy, oily coating on the leaf surface.

And that helps the plants cool a lot more efficiently. The short version is there's a number of different mechanisms.

We don't pretend to fully understand it, we think we have a handle on a couple of them.

But the bottom line is you can greatly increase a crops drought resilience and.

Reduce its water requirement by making sure that it gets nitrogen in forms other than nitrate. And of course, this is one of.

The reasons why in drought stressed years.

In dry years, in dry areas, the.

Farmers who are using cover crops or.

Who are supplying nitrogen in forms other than nitrate, whether that's from manure, compost.

Whatever the source might be, those crops.

Consistently perform better in drier conditions because they have less water requirements. And they can continue to some degree, in the case of the rhizophagy cycle, they can continue to access nutrients, even the absence of free soil moisture.

So this is a photo of a page that was shared from one of the colleagues that I've worked with, a farmer grower who's been on these webinars in the past. And this was a research that was assembled, this is a, a review of the literature that was done by an.

Agronomist at Calagri, if I recall correctly.

And he described that in his literature review he found that a foliar application.

Of a pound of nitrogen was the equivalent of 7 pounds of nitrogen applied to the soil.

And it's pretty remarkable when you think about this. We see this effect commonly now. There are many critiques of this type of approach to say, well, we've done.

The research and we haven't really been.

Able to see or to find these.

Equivalencies, observe these equivalencies in the field practice. And I've also, I've reviewed the reviewers, I've reviewed the critiques of those people who weren't able to find success. And it's blatantly obvious what they're getting wrong. It's timing.

You wouldn't consider putting on 50 units.

Of nitrogen foliar applied when you have a crop, when you have a corn crop that's at V3 or V4, V5, when the majority of the needs are later. But that's exactly what researchers are doing to try to discredit this. So it's really a question of optimal timing when we're looking at foliar applications.

I'm going to go through a few specific crop examples.

My the minutes keep ticking by pretty quickly here.

But I want to give you a few quick crop examples of how nitrogen creates yield drag. And actually, Well, I'll get to this.

Point on vegetation yet in a bit here.

So when we look at corn and the formation of black layer, we know that every day that we can delay the formation of black layer gives us an additional form bushels per acre yield. So if we can extend the grain fill period and delay black layer and push that back, that we can have.

A significant yield response really quickly.

And so the question is, what causes.

Black layer and what is black layer?

I had a conversation with Michael McNeil probably, I don't know, half a dozen.

Years, maybe a decade ago, where he.

Was describing that what causes the black layer, of course, is that we have.

Placental cells collapsing and blocking sugar transport into the kernel.

And black layer can also be caused by photosynthesis of the plant itself just slowing down or shutting down when you have defoliation.

Some of the research that has been.

Done around defoliation, basically what happens, anything that limits sugar movement into the kernel.

Is going to trigger the formation of black layer.

But one of the triggers that McNeil and colleagues identified a decade ago was when you have weak cell membranes, because those cells don't have enough calcium and.

Don'T have enough silicon, you will get early collapse of those placental cells.

And that abundant calcium and silicon attrition.

Will delay the collapse of those cell membranes, delay the black layer formation.

So when you think about what I said earlier about nitrate, it's quite common for plants who are absorbing nitrate to not do a good job of absorbing calcium, which leads to weak cells and.

Which leads to the early formation of black layer in corn.

This is one of several different mechanisms by which plants absorbing excessive levels of.

Nitrate will lead to premature senescence, premature development of black layer.

Here's one on mold and mycotoxins. This is a very simple trial that was run.

I don't know. It's also 10 or 12 years ago when we were doing product testing and.

Early research and development on our humacard product. So left here, left three leaves and corn ears were treated with humicarb.

The right was untreated.

It's pretty remarkable difference in the field.

And you can see the tip fill. And there's quite a difference Here in the ears as well.

But these samples were collected with the.

Intention of sending them to a laboratory.

This was pre harvest. They're still fairly high moisture content.

I want to say there are some in the neighborhood of 2022 to 23%.

And so the intention was to ship.

These ear samples off to a lab. Well, they ended up sitting on a desk for a week and this is what they looked like.

So the only difference was 3% humicarb applied in 3 gallons per acre.

10:34 oh in the furrow outplanting nitrogen.

Was side dressed later. But one of the effects that we know of from humicarb applications is that it's very effective at stimulating biology to.

Rapidly convert nitrogen applied nitrogen into bacterial proteins.

So I don't have the data for this slide deck, but one of the data points or some of the data points that we have on this trial indicate that the crop leaves had much.

Lower levels of nitrate. And of course we weren't able to check the grain for nitrate versus different forms of proteins or different nitrogen forms.

But the bottom line is that that reduction in nitrate had a significant reduction produced a significant reduction in molds on.

The year after when it was stored inside a plastic bag.

And we've observed this just over and.

Over again where we see reductions in molds and mycotoxins and aflatoxins. 2012 we had a major reduction in aflatoxins on the growers that working with over what they experienced in untreated fields.

When we look at lodging, short version is that plants that are absorbing nitrate do a poor job of absorbing copper and calcium. Copper in particular gives. So we have the effect of weak watery cells and weakened cell membranes and reduced copper levels, which reduces lignification. We very commonly when we have growers that where crops experience wind stress, we.

Have a lot less lodging when we.

Start managing nitrogen differently and nutrition management differently storability.

This is for potatoes and onions and apples. Any fruit or vegetable that spends an extended period of time in storage.

You know, profitability is not just about.

Yield so much as it is about marketable yield. And what defines marketable yield is the fruit or the vegetable that actually gets sent to the retail store shelf or to the end user, whatever that might be.

And we can easily mainstream agronomy can.

Fairly easily produce lots of yield per acre that doesn't store really well and particularly in regards to the way that nitrogen is managed.

So.

What happened might be missing. I'm missing a slide unfortunately.

But what happens is when you have well going back to my earlier comments around calcium absorption, we know that if you have purple blotch or ring spot.

Or any of this long list of disorders that can occur inside an onion.

Or inside potato, those are very frequently linked back to calcium nutrition. But we need to stop thinking about.

Calcium nutrition in isolation from potassium and nitrogen management.

When you have too much potassium and too much nitrate, it will greatly inhibit.

Plants ability to absorb calcium.

So.

Many of these challenges fundamentally come down to calcium and trace mineral nutrition. So.

Would be interesting to talk a bit about wheat because we know that it's fairly common for wheat to be compensated or to get premiums based on protein content. There's quite a bit of interesting research out there on protein, how protein content.

Responds to applications on nitrogen at different.

Stages of plant life, foliar applications at.

Later stages versus earlier stages.

But here's the interesting story around protein. Well, first of all, we can see there's lots of variation and it's generally true that there isn't much correlation between.

Nitrogen applications to the soil. I'm not talking about foliars here, but.

Nitrogen applications to the soil grain protein content. And there's a number of reasons for why that is. But the short version is that nitrogen applied to the soil often converts to nitrate, moves into the plants and isn't properly converted to storable proteins. So when you have because the and it's not converted to storable proteins because the plant doesn't have enough magnesium, magnesium.

Sulfur and molybdenum, it's those three elements.

In particular, there is a much closer correlation.

In fact, there's a very close correlation.

Between sufficiency of those three nutrients and protein content than there is between nitrogen.

In the leaf and protein content. And here's why.

When the plant absorbs nitrate during the vegetative growth stage, it will store that nitrate in the vacuoles inside the cells. And so you can pull a tissue.

Analysis or plant SAP analysis that shows you have high levels of nitrate and.

Therefore you don't need to apply more.

Nitrogen to have a high protein crop.

But the plant, as I understand it, will attempt to only transfer proteins into.

The grain, not nitrogen, not nitrate.

And for that reason, if you have abundant nitrate but not enough magnesium, sulfur.

Molybdenum, a lot of that nitrogen is.

Going to remain inside the leaf and.

Not move into the grain. Effectively.

Another consideration, I shouldn't say that it's.

Not going to move into the grain at all because it will to some degree.

Which brings us to another deception. This is another conversation. But when you send grain to a laboratory to be analyzed. They don't measure protein.

Many of you are aware of this, I'm sure.

But they measure nitrogen and they multiply.

It by mathematical factor, usually by 6.25, to extrapolate protein.

So it's a projected protein number.

It's not an actual real measured protein number. It's a measured nitrogen number.

You can inflate that artificially by just simply putting on a large application of.

Foliar nitrogen, like urea, late in the.

Growing season and have it immediately moved into the kernel and into the grain.

Before the plant can fully metabolize it.

So anyway, there's a whole bunch that we could unwrap and unravel there around.

Protein content in wheat, because it's measured there. But it holds true for all grain, generally across the board.

So the clock keeps ticking here.

Wow. Way too fast. I see we've got lots of questions.

I'm going to speed through a couple of these last really important points. I came up with this diagram to describe how I observed plant growth energy. So thinking about the energy inside the plant, you have two forms of energy. On the left side, you have vegetative energy, you have reproductive energy, and you want those two to constantly be balanced. And balance might mean something different than.

What we're used to seeing in the case of the watermelon crop that I described at the beginning of this webinar.

So when those two are balanced, you will get really strong reproduction and you don't have excessive vegetative growth. And then you have all these other factors that can contribute yield Dragon yield drag could be drought, stress.

It could be temperature, too hot temperatures or too cold temperatures.

And there's all kinds of things, external.

Influences that can contribute to yield drag.

But there's also many agronomic influences that.

Can contribute yield drag, like plant growth regulators, or like excessive nitrate or excess of chloride or excess of potassium.

I've described some of the mechanisms.

There's more. But I've described some of the mechanisms by which nitrate can create a yield drag.

So when we look at these nutrients, calcium, potassium, chloride and nitrate, as well.

As auxins, drive vegetative growth energy. And three out of the five can exhibit a yield drag effect when they're present in excess.

And I should maybe clarify that language when I say they are present in.

Excess.

What I mean is that they are present in amounts larger than are.

Required for optimal plant health and yields.

And this might surprise you, but if you base it on that definition, that includes greater than 90% of agricultural produced crops because we commonly apply too much nitrogen too early. And by the time the plant gets to the grain fill or fruit fill period, or the period of crop of the crop stage where we have peak nitrogen demand, the majority of the nitrogen.

Will usually have converted to nitrate in the soil profile. And I've described all the, or some of the mechanisms by which nitrogen creates yield drag.

So let's just elaborate or follow up on a few of these thoughts. Nitrate creates yield drag by one, creating excessive vegetative growth which corresponds to fewer buds, flowers, fruit, grain.

Two, it increases the plant's water requirements, which limits yields, particularly when the crop is challenged with moisture.

You know, it used to be throughout the grain belt in the Midwest, their soils and their crop, their corn production practices, they were quite comfortable going for.

A three week period without rain.

And I have this from Michael McNeil and Don Huber and many older, much.

More experienced and longer life experienced agronomists than I.

The standard rule of thumb was that.

They would be comfortable for three weeks without rain.

Today, the moment we go a week without an inch of rain, or longer than a week without an inch of rain, crops start experiencing moisture stress. What is different?

What's changed over the last 30 some years or longer? One of the changes that has happened is we put on a lot more nitrogen than we used to and we've lost a lot more soil carbon than we, than we used to have.

So there's a number of contributing factors. But there's no question in my mind that the increased water requirement as a.

Result of a lot of nitrogen application being converted to nitrate is one of the major contributing factors for the increased water requirement.

Photosynthetic energy, sugar energy needed for nitrate conversion. And that means that that energy, when you think about nitrates absorbing, converting nitrates absorbing 16% of a plant's total photosynthetic energy, and the fact that 100% of that 16% could be gained back by the plant absorbing microbial proteins. That means theoretically you've got a 16%.

Energy jump that can go directly into yield.

Will that translate to a 16% yield increase?

Based on our field experience, that's not unrealistic at all.

So there's the summary, vegetative growth, water requirements. Actually, I'm going to add two more pieces here that I missed. Reducing absorption of calcium and trace minerals and premature plant death. Premature plant death. This, this is the difference between die down and dry down a really healthy corn plant. I know I've been using corn as.

An example, but other crops as well.

A really healthy corn plant will have a high moisture stalk with a minimum of four green leaves below the ear and green all the way to the top, and an ear with the grain at 17 to 18% moisture content. That used to be normal. That's a definition of proper maturity and proper dry down. Today what we consider normal is plants who die down, they die prematurely. So you end up with a low moisture stalk, A plant that has moved all of its energy, sucked all the energy out of the leaves from both the top down and from the bottom up, and moved them together into the ear. And the plant is dying early. And you have a dry plant, dry stalk and leaves with a high moisture content ear, 25 to 30% moisture content.

Or 20 plus percent moisture content.

That's the difference between die down and dry down. But in addition to yield drag for a specific crop, we also have ecosystem.

Level long term yield drag.

And what happens with these elevated nitrogen applications is we prevent the soil from building soil carbon levels and we prevent soil from building microbial nitrogen reserves. We have an abundance of examples today and more than enough farms who have experienced this, who've been through this transition pathway where they now have soils that have high levels of nitrogen contained inside the bacterial population.

Nitrogen that doesn't leach, nitrogen that's available in a drought, they don't need to continue applying nitrogen. In fact, many of these farms are down to less than 20% of their historical nitrogen applications.

And you can't build nitrogen levels in.

Soil and hold it stable. As long as we continue to have these high nitrate application levels or high nitrogen application levels, it's self fulfilling destruction or creating a drug addict, whatever you want to call it.

So when we think about nitrogen timing, it's very important when we are taking, as we go down, as we start going through the transition, one of the easy, fundamental first steps is you apply nitrogen when the crop needs it, not.

Months in advance or weeks in advance.

Because when we apply nitrogen close to.

The root system, long before the crop needs it, it shuts down this rhizophagy process, it shuts down the bacterial populations and you in essence create a drug addict.

You make sure that the nitrogen cycling.

Process can't function in soils because you've created, you've added too much nitrogen from the very beginning.

And by the way, this can happen not just with, with quote unquote chemical.

Nitrogen like UAN or urea, but it can also come from over applications of manure, liquid manure in particular, but also from dry manure applications in large amounts.

Don't really see it happening from COVID.

Crops and cover crop incorporation because of the bacterial population that's already associated with those. But it can definitely come from manure applications.

So our approach to nitrogen management is pretty simple. Give plants what they need only when.

They need it, and we use soil.

Analysis and SAP analysis to determine that.

We do not guess.

And that's why, since we don't have.

To guess, we are able to produce consistent yields, higher yields than what are expected in the region and not fall on our face very frequently.

For foliar applications, we prefer amino acids.

Or low bi or at urea.

And for side dress, if we're in.

A situation where we do need to.

Side dress, our preference is urea. And include with the urea the nitrogen.

Efficiency program, which many of you have heard me talk about. The nitrogen efficiency program is essentially these.

Three pieces with sulfur. So we're using humicarb at 3% of.

The total solution, rejuvenate at 3% of the total nitrogen solution, plus rebound molybdenum at a pint per acre, and sulfur, usually using ammonium thiosulfate so that we achieve a 10 to 1 hydrogen to sulfur ratio for whatever source of nitrogen that we're applying.

We conducted our own in house research.

I think this was this last year, this most recent year, we found that a straight urea application lost 16% more nitrogen or not 16%, 16 times more nitrogen to leaching than when we combined the nitrogen efficiency program with the urea. That's pretty impressive. One of the goals that we've indicated that we've stated is that we want to have the nitrogen efficiency program. The purpose and the intent of that.

To stimulate bacterial population so that 100% of the applied nitrogen is immediately converted into and absorbed by bacteria, accumulated inside.

Bacterial cells and converted to bacterial proteins. Because then we save it. It doesn't leach. It's available in drought and the plants can still continue to absorb it.

So if you have any further questions.

Now is the time to type them.

Into the chat box.

Oh, my goodness. I see that we have 50 questions and we're already up on the hour.

I apologize for taking as much time as I have.

I knew there was a lot. I wanted to get through it quickly. But I am going to take the time to answer all the questions.

So I'll try to be concise, make.

It to the point and move quickly. But if you have questions, if you're willing to hang around, I'm sure the conversation is going to continue to be interesting.

And if you Want to learn more? If you want to talk specifics, I've spoken in very broad generalities. If you want to talk specifics about.

Your operation, our team would love to talk to you. Reach out to us, call us. I'm available on the phone as well.

As a backup if you have questions.

Our team doesn't know the answers to, which doesn't happen very often. But happy to connect with you. I really enjoy the interaction. Enjoy these conversations. First question is from John Warmerdam.

Hi John, you shared that nitrate is a vegetative nutrient and fruit fill is a vegetative process. Is there a place to apply nitrates.

After the cell division phase on tree crops?

It's an interesting question, John. You could do that if you're concerned about fruit being too small and not filling properly. But in most cases you're likely to get a better response from from an.

Amino acid or a peptide application or a protein application of some type than you would from a nitrate application would be my guess.

Question from justice why are AEA nitrogen.

Plant SAP analysis target values higher than NCC target values? Justin I don't know what crops you're referring to, so I can't say specifically, but in general I can say that we've optimized our values based on where we get the greatest level of disease and insect resistance combined with the highest yield. So what you're likely to find is.

That not only do we have total.

Nitrogen requirements that are higher for some crops, but those also correspond with higher levels of calcium, for example, or higher levels of silicon to balance that out.

A follow up question from Justice. Can you comment if total nitrogen in.

Plant SAP is twice as high as recommended? Do all other nutrients have to be doubled to reach optimal levels?

No, it's much safer and much wiser.

To try to bring the nitrogen levels down.

And the reason I say no is because if you just try to double.

All the cations and the anions, what's.

Going to end up happening is you end up with imbalanced pHs in the.

Plant SAP which is going to lead to disease susceptibility.

So you're likely you're better off to.

Try to balance mineral profiles at a lesser rate than double of whatever the optimals might need might be.

Question from Terry do you still use.

Nitrate soil test to modernize monitor nitrogen that is available for crop growth?

It's a great question Terry.

We use the Haney analysis usually through Ward labs or through Regen Ag labs that measures not just nitrate but measures different components and different fractions of nitrogen that are in the soil profile. I know there's other growers that are also experimenting with the Illinois nitrogen test that's been popularized by Richard Mulvaney, which.

Has many similarities, I would say, to the Haney analysis.

It's different in some ways, but you can listen to my podcast interview with Rick Mulvaney regarding that.

Next question from Melita if we use.

Molasses as a food source for microorganisms.

In order to create amino sugars, what.

Are the optimal doses without the plant becoming dependent?

The answer that is going to depend.

On how much nitrogen you've added to your system. So it could be as few as so first of all, I would say.

That the goal is not to add. You shouldn't strive to add enough sugar.

To balance out the carbon to nitrogen ratio. That's going to be prohibitively expensive and shouldn't be necessary in most soils.

Instead, the goal is just to add.

Enough sugar to jumpstart or to really accelerate the bacterial populations, which would usually be an application the neighborhood of a few pounds per acre. This is why we include Rejuvenate or one of the reasons why we include Rejuvenate in our nitrogen efficiency program. And it would add sugars at only rate of a pound or two per acre. But of course it has lots of other stuff in there as well.

Question from Terry Tissue or SAP tests.

What levels of nitrogen do you like to see in a corn plant? At V4 and R2? We no longer use tissue analysis. We exclusively use SAP analysis and we just completed actually not just recently, but it's been a bit ago that we completed our most recent.

Database analysis and.

Looking at where the highest crops were performing. So I can't answer that question for you right off the top of my head, Terry, but.