How farmers can get the most out of their soil analysis | Regenerative Agriculture with AEA

When you look at the picture of even just agriculture, even just the interactions between one plant and the soil and the interactions of biology, it's truly amazing and complex, and we could probably speak all day. So this is very much just an overview, what I'm going to give you now, just something for you to understand what we look at, what we consider and how we work as a company. And it's an invitation for you to connect with us and see if we would be a good fit for your operation to help solve whatever challenges you are looking at. So how do you get started? How would you begin this journey of regenerating your soils? And John touched on this, that healthy soils are needed to grow healthy plants. I think you heard Josh talk about it, you heard Adam talk about it. Healthy soils grow healthy plants. But interestingly, it's healthy plants that create healthy soils, and it's healthy plants that are more resistant to insects and diseases, which John touched on. And healthy plants produce higher yields, therefore higher profits, because we focus on quality rather than just on yield. So we focus on the health of the plant. And we can talk for a second about the health of a plant or what we talk. What are we talking about when we say healthy? And I think we can again use the human analogy when we consider what is a healthy human. Am I healthy if I take 10 different medications every morning and evening and, you know, I need oxygen to breathe? You know, I'm living, I'm alive. But am I? What does it mean to be healthy? I believe it means to be. To be healthy means to live a good life and to be able to function fully without support of band aids or medicines, if you want to put it that way. So I'd like to take a step back a little bit like we did with Adam. And I look at what were soils like back. Way back, and I found this in the 1918 USDA soil survey says under cultivation, this soil soon loses its organic matter unless the supply is constantly replenished. My question to all of you is, since 1918, how consistently have the growers, the food producers in Florida, been replenishing the organic matter? And so if that question is all the time, absolutely, then the conversation may be a little bit different. But what I found and what I see is there's a lot of fields that are fallow. There's a lot of fields that really don't have a lot of organic matter or carbon put back into the soil. And there's also probably. Well, as Adam mentioned, you know, we went from putting straw out to have the berries grow on, we're now using the plastic and straw would degrade and would be bringing in organic matter and carbon. In this situation, we're not doing that. And so for where we are today and as we consider how do we grow in the future, how do we go from having more new diseases and more new diseases, is it possible, is there a possibility that we could actually have less disease pressure and less insect pressure and have better soil health? And the answer is a confident yes, absolutely. So how does it start? Where does it start? What would be the first moves? Where would we focus on first? If you raised your hand, you said, you know, I'm kind of interested in starting with regenerative agriculture. I'd like to understand more about it. The first place to start is photosynthesis. And John mentioned this in his conversation. Where when you increase photosynthesis, which most plants only photosynthesizing at 15 to 20% of their potential. So increasing photosynthesis you have to have first of all sunshine, you have to have water. Sunshine you can't really control at all. Water you have, well, if it's dry, you can at least irrigate. If you have too much moisture, well then at least you have moisture there. And then you need carbon dioxide. And where do you get your carbon dioxide if you're organic matter level is not sufficient to supply the carbon dioxide? So that's one first red flag when we look at increasing photosynthesis is do we have enough organic matter? Do we have enough carbon? But then if we take it a step further, we also need to have five different elements for that photosynthesis to function well and efficiently. And if we are missing any of those elements, or sunshine or Water or CO2, we are not going to be photosynthesizing at maximum efficiency. So let's identify what is the limiting factor, what is keeping us from photosynthesizing at maximum efficiency and potential. And let's address that deficiency. Let's take that drag away. Now we have more photosynthesis. And what happens when we have more photosynthesis is more sugars go to the root system. And when we talk about sugars, we're talking about, yes, glucose, but then also other compounds. And what we've learned over the number of years that we've been consulting here, and there's lots of data on this, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that plants don't just send sugars, they actually send specific compounds that signal specific bacteria and fungi to be solubilizing certain minerals. So we're running out of phosphorus. We send a phosphorus signal and we get more phosphorus solubilizing bacteria or we get more reducing bacteria going to help release more manganese or more iron. But what if those bacteria are no longer there? What if, what if the players on the team are missing and they miss the signal? If that's the case, then we won't have this happening. If they are there, then more sugars and more food source is going to stimulate more biology. More biology means you have more nutrients being made available to the plant and those nutrients are going to be available to the plant. The plant can absorb it as microbial metabolites or nutrients that have been digested by bacteria, by fungi. And they're like pre built components that the plant then can, can very effectively, efficiently use to continue to grow and to increase photosynthesis. And then more sugars are produced and more biology and it just keeps on improving. And that's what we're talking about when we say that the growing crop is actually the fastest way to put organic matter into the soil. Now sometimes when systems are too eroded or too degraded, we might actually need to bring in some carbon to help get this process functioning. Thus that could be compost, that could be humates, that could be humic acids. Depending on the environment, depending on the situation, will determine what the best source of carbon is to make sure that we have what we need to complete this cycle and to increase the soil and the plant health. So we talked about the nutrients. Each of the, each of these nutrients is not only very important, but they're very important in what ratio they are. They interact with each other. This is a represent, or this is a, an old diagram of nutrient interaction. And you know, you look at that and you're like, wow, well that's a lot to. Let's see, this one goes here and this one goes there. And, and potassium is potassium and manganese, something interesting going on there. And potassium and iron. So what about manganese and iron? See, there's a lot of interactions which are very powerful and to my understanding and knowledge, this is actually a very accurate chart, but very, very difficult to comprehend and to understand. So John created a chart that is easier to understand and it's very helpful to look at this and to help us manage those nutrients so that we're not putting out excesses and creating deficiencies of something else. So what you're looking at here is on the top left hand you have a quadrant of the positively charged elements or cations. And these are all going to antagonize each Other, they're also arranged in their atomic weight. And so the calcium is going to be most important or most significant to get into balance. You get calcium into the right level or balance, the rest of it is going to be much easier to get in alignment. And then on the right side you have the anions. They will antagonize each other. Down below on this half of the quadrant, you have the micronutrients. If you look on the left half of the diagram, you have all of the cations. On the right hand of the diagram have all the anions or negatively charged elements. And these are going to be antagonizing each other as a whole. And a general rule of thumb now there's, there's some synergies that happen and they're not all just directly across, but you have a synergy between calcium and boron and silica. You have a synergy between molybdenum and nitrate. So there's, there's. The purpose for this diagram is give you understanding that if you put on nitrate and you have excessive levels of nitrate and chloride, well then don't be surprised if your phosphorus and, or your molybdenum or your iodine is very, very low because these are crowding it out. So it's about space. You have a finite amount of space and we need to manage that in such a way to create balance in order for the plant to be able to function efficiently and, and to get the results of quality and plant health that we're talking about. So how do we manage this? How do we look at the nutrients that we just looked at and how do we manage that in real life? I mean, it's 2021. Growing season's coming up and actually growing season keeps going. I'm amazed and I marvel with all of you producers in Florida. It's just amazing how you go from one crop right into the next and there's just very little break. And by the way, this might also be just a little segue, but I want to say kudos to anybody who produces food. Anybody. The influence that you have on the health of humanity is remarkable. You have more power to influence the health of this nation, this country, this world, than all doctors and hospitals combined. You can, by producing high quality food, food that is nutritious, food that is on the top tier of the pyramid, has vitamins and minerals and compounds that act as medicine for us. And thus you actually have more influence than doctors. Thank you. Let's look at how do we take this and move forward. We have all the nutrients we have, all the interactions. How do we manage that and balance that? So we have a couple different tools that we have. We have in our tool analysis, we can use plant tissue samples and we can use plant SAP analysis. Now, if you've listened to John very much at all, you've probably heard him say, you know, soil samples are worthless. And I'm going to, going to show you how they're not completely worthless, but almost worthless. And then the plant tissue samples versus the plant SAP analysis. And we'll talk just briefly about the differences there to help you understand what, why we have chosen plant SAP analysis over the plant tissue samples. So soil samples are a poor indicator of plant performance. And this is actually a soil sample, all of Adam's farm. And as you can see, we have 939 parts per million of calcium. We have 81 parts per million of potassium. Great. So what do we need to do? And our magnesium is really. That means we need to. Well, it says that calcium is very high and that magnesium is low and potassium is medium. Do you understand that? Does that make any sense to you? And I'm just going to draw your attention down to manganese is also very low. So that means we need to put on a lot of manganese in order to have sufficient levels of manganese in our plants. Right. Well, let me take it to another level for you. And we're looking at an ammonium acetate extraction here. Okay. So this is a slightly acidic extraction method that we're using now. We're looking at a saturated paste report. And this report, this, this analysis is done by mixing the soil with deionized water. So it has no minerals. There's no mineral interactions, there's no acidity, there's no alkalinity. And so it's just very. Just straight water. That's it. And what this tells us is the nutrients that are in solution, what's floating around in that soil solution that the plants can easily pick up. And so if you remember, we had 939 parts per million of calcium, but in the soil solution, we only have 19 parts per million. Is that enough to grow a strawberry crop? Is that enough to grow quality strawberries that are going to shift from Florida to New York or wherever your market is, That's a couple days away. That may be a week or two. I don't know how long it goes until, until you're consumer. But do you have enough calcium for cell division to allow that berry to make it? Let's look at some of the others. Take a look at manganese. It was very low on this test but it's non detect on the water soluble extraction. There are, there's no manganese available, there's no manganese in the solution. Now what are we going to do? Must be, we really need to pour on the manganese and we really, really need to pour on the calcium. Even though it's very high on this report, it's very low on this report. Obviously we don't want it as high on the saturated as we do on this report. But still, how are we going to get enough calcium in our plants if we only have 19 parts per million? Let me show you another level of this soil calcium. Whoa, wait, what are we looking at? Now? This is a total soil report. So this extraction is very acidic and will extract everything, basically all of the nutrients that are in the soil. So if you remember, we had 939 parts per million of calcium. Our soil sample and this soil sample that's showing 939 parts per million is your typical soil sample that your co op or whoever your crop scout is is going to bring to you. That's the typical soil sample you're looking at. So you know you need to add magnesium. It's very low. You don't need to add calcium because it's very high in the, in the total mineral extraction. All of the calcium that's out there, you have 1873 parts per million. Of that you have 939 parts per million that's somewhat available that will be fairly easily broken from the soil and mineral bond. But now just bringing back the saturated paste report, we have 19 parts per million. So do you see that if you're only looking at the standard report or the ammonium acetate extraction report, that you're only getting a very small part of the picture. And so your ability to make nutrient management decisions is very limited with one soil report. And that's why John says the soil report, soil samples are worthless. Soil samples are worthless or they're a tool. But without context, it's kind of like making financial decisions by looking at your savings account. If you have $10,000 in your savings account, you might say, well let's go, you know, let's go on a vacation. But if your cash flow just stopped last week when you, when you, I don't know what happened, but you don't have a job anymore and your cash flow stopped and you don't have any right, you're just renting, but you have $10,000 in savings so you're going on vacation. Do you see how just one component of measuring the soil here is going to give you. It's going to be misleading in how you're going to manage it. Let's go back to manganese here and look at our total extraction. If you remember, we had three parts per million on the other report and we had none detect manganese on the total saturated or on the saturated or water extraction report. But we have 23 parts per million in the soil. Now that's still on the low side and it is way lower. In fact, I would say all of these numbers are substantially lower than what we would say in a soil that's not, or that has a lower sand component or has higher clay component. I also want to draw your attention to the potassium here and I find this very interesting because you look at the calcium and we have 1800 parts per million of calcium here. We have 900 per million of calcium on the ammonium acetate extraction. When you look at potassium, we have 81 parts parts per million in the ammonium acetate. Or if you will, your savings account, if you wanted to use the financial analogy, and on your total asset report you have 86 part per million. So basically you're saying that your net worth is pretty much whatever you have in your savings account. Right. So this tells us, and this allows us, by looking at all three of these tools, it allows us to understand that we need to actually apply significant amounts potassium in order to have a buffer of potassium to grow a high quality crop. So that's the soil management piece, that's the piece that we look at to understand what we need to do in the soil to make sure we have the foundation there, that when we lay that plastic, when we put those plants in there, we at least have a foundation and something there for the plants to absorb. But then that is no indicator whatsoever that you are going to have those nutrients be available in the plant. This doesn't work that way. You got it in the soil, no guarantees you'll have it in the plant. And that's why we so strongly use plant SAP analysis. And on Adam's farm we actually do an analysis every week. And it's just been amazing to see the trends and the moves that are in that these plants go through. Some of it is application, timing, some of it is weather, all kinds of. But it's been really powerful to look back over time and look at where we put on applications at just the right time. We got the new levels up to the optimum and then what happened later at when we were harvesting that fruit. So I want to just make a very quick comparison of the SAP analysis to the tissue analysis so that you're all clear on why we use plant SAP analysis and not tissue analysis. And it's not saying that tissue samples is wrong, but it's just that. Well, let me say it this way. If you did a hair analysis, that's going to be reflective not of what you ate yesterday or the day before or what the supplements you've been taking the last month or two, the that's going to be reflective of what you have been doing over the last three, five years or I don't know how fast your hair is going to grow. So maybe that's not the best analogy. In fact, I actually like the arm analogy a lot better. But it's not as pretty. If you went to your nutritionist and your nutritionist was able to somehow analyze your whole forearm as a way to determine if you need more calcium. Guess what? He come back and he said, you have plenty of calcium because he measured all of the skin, he measured all of the bones, and there's lots of calcium in bones, right? So you may be having osteoporosis, your bones may be extremely brittle. But the doctor says, well, you've got enough calcium because the calcium levels are sufficient. So when you measure the SAP instead of the whole tissue, you're looking at what's happening today and what's probably happening in the future. So that's one of the primary differences is it gives you a much more in time reading. The way the SAP analysis work is we take a sample from the young leaf into one sample, and then we take oat leaf, put it into another sample as another sample. And so we're taking a young leaf sample and an oat leaf sample. And the reason that this is important is because some of the elements are mobile within the plant, meaning they can move into the leaves and out of the leaves, up the plant or down the plant, wherever the plant needs it. And I'm sure you've all seen plants where, you know, where does nitrogen deficiency show up? Does nitrogen deficiency on melons show up in the newest leaf or in the oldest leaf? If you've been observing at all, it's in the oldest leaf, not just sometimes, not just maybe, it's always for sure. Total confidence that nitrogen deficiency will first show up in the old leaf. And so if you're analyzing this leaf, then guess what? You won't be able to detect and understand that you have A nitrogen deficiency until too late. So you might be wise there and you can just say, well, I'll just sample the oat leaf. But guess what? Calcium is not mobile. Calcium can only go from into the leaf but not out of the leaf. And so if your calcium supply is waning and you don't have enough calcium to fill these leaves, then you're going to miss out on that. If you only sampled down here because if your plant had sufficient levels of calcium when these leaves were forming, the, the bottom leaves or the young, the oat leaves, when those were forming, you had sufficient levels of calcium, but now you don't have enough calcium, then you're not going to be able to identify that. So when you sample the new leaf and the oat leaf and you compare the two, you're able to get a very good picture of what your plants are needing on a weekly or bi weekly basis. So time, keep clicking on and I'm just going to run through a couple of, through a couple of growers we have worked with. And this is just simply to say, you know what, we have been able to do this. And like Adam said, strawberries, Florida, there's lots of new things, but we're partners with the growers and we work together and we accomplish amazing things. And so this is the result of working two years with a stone fruit producer in California. As you can see, we significantly changed the revenue and the great shifts. So huge quality improvements on this, on this operation. On another operation in Pacific Northwest, we worked with this grower starting in 2013, 2004 or 2014, 2015 and 16. We were running a side by side trial comparing his conventional and John mentioned bacterial canker. This, this grower had a block of cherries that he was going to rip out and it cost like $15,000 plus the lost production to replace a cherry orchard. But because of bacterial canker, he was going to have to do that. And now this was not something that we focused on. We were focusing on fruit size, fruit quality, which meant reducing his split by 15 to 20%, which we were able to accomplish. But interestingly, as we increase the nutrient levels and as we looked at balancing all of the nutrition within the leaves, the bacterial canker in year two was less and we started getting hopeful. And by year three it was gone. And it was not just on the block that it didn't happen just on that, on the trial block, but as we implemented this across the farm, he went from being completely paranoid about bacterial canger and spreading it to his orchard like he Used to only prune if there was no rain for a week. And he would paint every cut and he would have specialized cutting equipment that would crush and break to reduce the likelihood of bacterial canker infection. He was able to just go from being very, very paranoid about losing his whole orchard to being able to, well, as he said, have fun. He went from losing sleep to, you know what, my plants are able to resist a lot of these insects and diseases. And not only that, we, we were able to increase his yield on the infested block. His, his cherries got firmer. In fact, so firm that some people hardly believed it. But in his market, it made a huge difference on his bottom line because he was getting premiums for the higher quality cherries. Bringing things a little bit closer home. And we've heard from, from Adam Young, we work with Ennis Farms with jalapeno peppers, with eggplants, with strawberries. I just wanted to point out these peppers. You look at these leaves, a lot of pepper leaves are really bubbly and crinkly, which is a calcium deficiency. Look at some of these leaves down here on the, on the lower part of the plant. They're wide, they're thick, they're nice dark green and they have beautiful looking fruit and they're just loaded. This grower made the comment that the evenness of the peppers is just amazing. And he's. I don't want to go into all the details, but it's been amazing to watch this grower going from being dependent on pesticides, insecticides to he'll use them occasionally, not farming with them. He's focused on nutrition, he's doing SAP analysis and he's managing these plants very closely. It's been very, very fun, very exciting. Eggplants bumper yields last year, very happy with it. So I guess what I'm saying, encapsulating it all, bottom line, regenerative agriculture is the foundation of the AEA systems. We help farmers make more money with less risk and at the same time build that soil that's going to look different on different farms. It's going to. Different growers have different goals. So it's never just a cut and dry, same program. But the goal is always to not feed degrading soil, not be losing organic matter, but bring organic matter back into the system, foster biology, have a whole system that works together to increase not only your profitability, but the fun you have farming. And it'll also make those consumers happy. As Adam was saying, it's becoming important to the consumer as well. So thank you very much for being here. And, Jenna, I'll turn it back over to you.