How farmers can reduce inputs through regenerative agriculture | David Miller, Director of Education

Good afternoon, friends. Hi everyone. Welcome to our webinar today where we will be talking about how to effectively reduce inputs. And here's the important caveat. Reducing inputs while maintaining or increasing yields. One of the narratives around regenerative agriculture for some time has been that it's possible to reduce inputs and to harness soil biology to deliver nutrients and make them available for the growing crop out of the existing soil reserves of everything that has been there historically from a geological profile over however many centuries or millennia, as well as tapping into the products that we have applied in recent decades that the crop plants have not utilized. And while this is an interesting narrative, the common expectation has been that we'll put on well, we're going to go through this transition period where we discontinue or reduce the use of inputs and we're going to get this drop off in yields and crop performance until soil biology starts kicking in. That need not be the case. In fact, if that is the case, I would suggest it's only as a result of us making uninformed management decisions because our experience has been that when you manage it well, you can at the very least maintain yields. And it's very possible to also increase yields while reducing inputs at the same time. This is a very important conversation in today's world. The expectation for some time has been that if we try to use or to adopt regenerative agriculture practices or organic agriculture practices and continue the use of inputs, then our input costs are going to go up and we're going to spend more money per acre than when we were buying nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium fertilizer. Of course, everything is context dependent. Different farms are different. That may have been true for some farms in the past, but it's rapidly becoming less true. In fact, in many cases it hasn't been true historically and today it is not true on most operations as a result of the rapidly increasing input costs. Because of the challenges with input supply and input costs, I think this is a very timely conversation for us to really think about how we can reduce inputs wisely while maintaining and increasing yields. On our webinar today we have David Miller. David has been a part of the a leader in the advancing eco agriculture consulting team for the last decade. Plus he has, he's an invaluable member of our team and has observed and experienced a lot of these management transitions on many different farms. So David is going to be giving us a presentation on what he has observed and what he has learned. And if at any point in the conversation or in the presentation. You have any questions, feel free to type them into the Q and A box and then David will respond to those and I'll be here as well at the end of the presentation. So thank you for being here. I'm sure you're going to find this a really enjoyable conversation. Thank you. David, turn it over to you.

It's good to be with you again and to talk about regenerative agriculture, which has been what's kept us both going the last 10 years, plus. So it's good to be continuing to learn and I look forward to sharing some thoughts on reducing inputs through regenerative agriculture. This, this was inspired by a question that came from one of John's earlier webinars on how to reduce inputs, especially fertilizers in sandy soils. And so this presentation and this conversation, which I'm hoping to have a conversation, I'll just give you an outline here of some thoughts on reducing inputs, especially fertilizer inputs, and then we'll look forward to a conversation at the end. So I'm going to start with a question here. If you could reduce your inputs by 35% and maintain yields, would you do it? And now that 35% could be any number there, 50%, or maybe it's 20% and maintain yields, or increase yields, as John said, would you do it? And I don't think I know of anybody who would say that they would not reduce their inputs if they could do so and maintain yields. So let's take a look at those inputs and I just want to take your thoughts to your operation. Let's just pause for a second and ask ourselves the question, what are the inputs that I am using today? What are the inputs that I used in 2021 to produce the crops that I produced? How much nitrogen was applied? How much phosphorus was applied? What was the timing of those applications? Did the fields where I put on more yield more? Did they yield less? What were the correlations that I saw with what I applied and what the end result was? Are there any applications that you applied that you're not sure if they were affected or that you only applied because someone said it worked on their farm? Was there a purpose and a reason for each of the applications and for the timing at which you put them out? So in the conversation about reducing inputs, which obviously, and it's been a theme or a thrust and a part of the conversation for organic agriculture and now regenerative agriculture, this also comes up is it'll allow you to reduce inputs, it will allow you to reduce inputs and my question following this is, if the inputs that you're using, if those inputs are doing something for your crop, if they are doing something for your soil, if they're doing something to improve profitability, why do we want to reduce them? And thus the heart of this conversation is, let's consider the inputs that we're using. Let's consider the short term and the long term value, the long term and the short term challenges that can come from whatever those inputs are. And we could talk about insecticide, we could talk about fungicide, we could talk about water, we could talk about, you know, there's a lot of inputs that go into the production of a crop, but today we're specifically going to be talking about inputs on the fertility side, fertilizers, the nutrition part of producing a crop. And with that, I wanted to just take a quick look at the history of agriculture and of the fertilizer. And I found this gem of a book titled Soils and Men. It's the yearbook of Agriculture from 1938. And it's a bit more comprehensive than most of the yearbooks of agriculture that USDA put together. But on one of the very first pages, I found these paragraphs of a man who had a fine horse. He was very proud of the horse. He was, it was a great horse. And one morning he came to the barn and the horse was stolen. And he was grieving about and just asking himself the question, why had he not spent a couple dollars and put a lock on the barn and saved the horse? And he resolved that he would give better protection to the next horse that he had, but he knew that he would never get one as good as the one he had lost. The United States. The second paragraph has been like that about its soil. Within a comparatively short time, water and wind have flayed the skin off the unprotected earth, causing widespread destruction. And we have been forced to realize that this is the result of decades of neglect. The effort to relieve economic depression for farmers has also forced attention to the soil. In the old Roman Empire, all roads led to Rome. In agriculture, all roads lead back to the soil from which farmers make their livelihood. So as early as 1938, the people putting this book together, which was written by many different authors, in the preface, it noted that there was more authors and more input from across all of us than any previous agriculture yearbook. So on the history of agriculture, realize that there's been challenges for a long time, but let's look at the history of fertilizer and especially from the aspect of what has happened since. We've started using fertilizers. So in 1828, Carl Sprengel made his first recommendations and realized that he would get a growth response from ammonium and nitrate as fertilizers. In 1910, the Haber Bosch method was developed to synthesize ammonia. So people were now, from 1828 to 1910, people really weren't able to. It wasn't commercially available. In 1910, it became available, but there was a very little applied commercially until after World War II, when lots of infrastructure was put into place for this manufacturing. And then after, after the war is when lots of nitrogen fertilizer especially, and other soluble fertilizers.