How Insect Pests Identify Unhealthy Plants with Dr. Tom Dykstra

Hi friends, I'm John Kemp, hosting this podcast. I am passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce fruit of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've discovered that there are many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems and how to develop regenerative agriculture systems. However, much of this knowledge and this information is scattered. It's found all over the place, some of it has been published in peer reviewed publications, but there are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that has not been published and that hasn't been shared with many people. I started Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agricultural systems become adopted globally and become the mainstream, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared. To help achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone while we have developed products at AEA that embody the principles of regenerative agriculture systems and make them easier for growers to apply this knowledge and these principles can be applied anywhere and when they are applied properly, they will always increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or ideas, topics that you would like for me to discuss, Please connect on LinkedIn or on Twitter where my username is visionbuilder7 or you can also email me at john kempf.com I would very much like to hear from you and to hear your feedback. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and thank you very much for listening. Enjoy the show.

Greetings friends and welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. On this podcast we explore the science and the practical application of regenerative agriculture ecosystems, how to regenerate soil health, crop health and quality and increase farm profitability. Our goal is to give you clear, easy to understand and actionable information that you can implement on your operation right away on this in this episode, I'm very excited to welcome Tom Dijkstra to our show. Tom is a good friend of mine and has done some extraordinary work in the area of entomology and plant insect communication systems that I'm very excited to discuss and to also hear your thoughts and feedback on. Tom, welcome to the show. We're very excited to have you here.

Happy to Be here, John, ready to divulge and talk. And thank you so much for the invitation and I hope that this is productive for you and for the listeners as well.

Tom, you've done some fascinating research over the years, both of your own and also some with your mentor, Philip Callahan. What are some of your most memorable moments that led you to where you are today?

Some of the most memorable moments for me were probably getting fired at the University of Florida, which led me to study under Phil Callahan. So that would probably rank near the top. Had that not happened, I certainly would not have been on the path that I am right now. So once that path began and I was looking at the time with flea larvae, I was playing with them. Seemingly uninteresting insect, or so I thought at the time. That led into my PhD project and allowed me to explore world of insect bioelectromagnetics, which then opened up a whole new world to me that I had never been exposed to, either in academia or very little in the literature and even less in books. So this has been an exciting journey for me. The reason why is because it's a new field and the only ones I know are even remotely in the field are in the military. So therefore from academia. It's kind of quiet on this front, but I do enjoy what I'm doing here and I'm happy that I had a chance to explore this fascinating area of insect bioelectromagnetics.

Insect bioelectromagnetics sounds fascinating. Can you describe for us what that is? What are you actually working on?

Not a clue. I couldn't tell you anything. I'm just making up the word. The word has to do with the electromagnetic waves and how they are influenced by organism, thus the name bio. So electromagnetic simply be involved in the pure waves. And bioelectromagnetics would be how these waves influence life. Now, these waves could be external to the organism, let's say environmental, or they could be internal so that you would have communication going on within the organism as to what information needs to pass from one organ to another, or simply one part of the body to another, or in some cases to actually amplify the message to make it more easily discernible to an insect or even any other animal. So the bioelectromagnetic field is relatively large because they have a journal out and there are many journal articles you can find. But the field specifically of insect bioelectromagnetics is not. That is a much, much, much smaller field. So for those who are involved in the insect side of it, you can see that they're few and far between. But the field itself is relatively small, which I guess gives me a certain amount of anonymity, which is required because I do run a research laboratory and we are not allowed to publish. And so all of the research that we do, most of the research that we do is kind of kept under wraps. And we have had some absolutely wonderful discoveries that I really hope that someday I will be able to divulge to the public.

When you speak of insect bioelectromagnetics, what is the impact or the potential impact of your work on agriculture? And how might, what might farmers be able to apply in the future?

That's a difficult question. Because when you get involved in the pure bioelectromagnetics, you're looking at these fields that really are not measurable and for the most part should not be measurable because the farmer is not going to be out there with the type of equipment in order to measure these fields. So in a direct sense, there would be very little impact. In the more general sense, there is a much larger impact. That is simply not something that most people are aware of. And that is the energy and how it is acquired by plants. So photosynthesis is certainly a well known phenomenon everyone is familiar with find in textbook after textbook, whether it be in biology or plant physiology. And so that's kind of a starting point in the field of bioelectromagnetics is the agriculture. If you can optimize photosynthesis, once you optimize photosynthesis, which has that electromagnetic component, biochemicals and organic chemistry and others as well. But once you optimize that, you then optimize brix level, because the relationship between photosynthesis, brix is about as linear as you can get. I mean, the more a plant photosynthesizes, the higher the brix reading is. And the higher the brix reading is, the healthier the plant. And when you have a healthy plant, this is where you bring it into agriculture. And it becomes very important to a farmer. Because when you're raising healthy plants, you don't have to bring in, for example, all of the pesticides that are being used today, whether it be herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, pneumaticides, it doesn't matter what side you're using, they're all doing the job of killing life. And you're trying to, as a farmer, what you're trying to do is you're trying to augment life. And this augmentation can take many different forms. So the sun and the energy that comes from it is certainly an obvious one. There are less obvious electromagnetic waves out there. The Schumann frequencies are relatively well known and have been studied by atmospheric sciences for a long time. Also would have their influence, too. And once you are surrounded by all these frequencies and be able to absorb the energy or to use this as a communication piece, then you now have healthy plants, healthy crops growing in a very healthy environment. And so understanding that and ways to optimize the electromagnetic component is only going to benefit the farmers. So if I were giving a talk, and I've given a few talks on energy and agriculture to help them understand these fields and how to optimize them and how to prevent the farmer from getting in the way or putting up any blockages to these frequencies, I would.

Love to hear more about your thoughts regarding photosynthesis. I mean, photosynthesis is so foundational that when you drive the. And you increase, you're able to increase photosynthesis, then you can, you have all these other benefits of increasing carbon sequestration, improving plant health, disease and insect resistance. This is something that we focus a lot of attention on and usually approach from a biochemistry perspective of thinking about how we can optimize photosynthesis. I have a couple of questions for you. One is, how much do you think it's possible to increase photosynthesis above what is common, perhaps, or normal, depending on how you chose to define that word. How much can it be increased? And looking at photosynthesis from a bioelectromagnetics perspective, what tools would you use to optimize it and to increase it, if possible?

Okay, well, your first question, and I'll probably forget your second question as I'm describing the answer to the first, but how much can you increase it? You can increase it substantially. And the reason why I know that is because most of the crops that I've had a chance to take a look at are between 4 and 8 brix. Now, once you get up to roughly right around 12, all serious insect damage stops. And once you get up to about 14, you have a genuinely healthy plant that is producing healthy food that can be consumed by a human being and will lead to a long life. But because we are so far below what we consider to be, let's say, optimal, optimal would be 14 and above 12 is kind of like the minimum so that you don't get the insect damage. But because we're right now between 4 and 8, I can tell you unequivocally that we can increase photosynthesis considerably simply because we Are we have many plants right now which are suffering, suffering in the sense that they're not working up to their potential. And so because they're not working up to the potential, I know that we absolutely, I mean, even getting to nine, which is still not a healthy plant, is an improvement over a lot of the plants which I've had a chance to look at. Whether it be plants out in someone's backyard or whether it be crop plants out on a farmer's field, they're all dealing with very low brix. And therefore the plants are compromised. And so really the only way you can only go is up because once you go down, plants die and there's really nothing which can, which can save them at that point. So you do have a range. And then if you want to maintain a plant at very low brix, let's say one or two, you have to feed it every day. There's no way around it. So anyone who has ever played the game of golf has walked on plants that are running about one or two. And if you go even one day without feeding that grass under your feet, it will suffer considerably because they have very little photosynthetic part above the ground. The root system has been absolutely compromised due to usually what is being applied. And so that's the extreme case where you can actually, in a very artificial way, keep a plant going by continually feeding it. It's a force feeding operation. And the same thing goes with the crop plants. Now, the crop plants, the farmer is not out there feeding them on a daily basis, such as you would find on the golf course. That would be obviously the extreme. But when you're dealing with a crop situation, the farmer is going to be feeding his crops. At the minimum, he's going to be doing it once or twice during the season, but probably more often than that, depending upon what type of plant it is, whether it's a perennial or not. And so it's a matter of getting the photosynthetic rate up. And this means certainly, as I kind of alluded to, is not putting up any of the blockages. Now, some of the blockages that I'm kind of alluding to, that I discussed a little bit before, are certainly absolutely pesticides. The reason why this is so is because pesticides are killing all of the microbes in the soil and the microbes can be selectively killed. So one herbicide is going to selectively kill certain microbes. An insecticide is going to kill a certain set of microbes as well. A fungicide will kill a certain Set of microbes and even a nematicide. We have nematicides down here in Florida. They're not as common in the rest of the country, but each one of these is doing its job to kill. Now, when these microbes are gone, they are no longer able to hold on to the energy that is in their body. And so you have now given up a massive energy source. And this is where the electromagnetics comes in, is that if you do not have those microbes in there, there is no energy in the soil. And so this sequestered energy, each microbe, just to give you an idea, is about half a volt. If you take all of the energy found in a microbe, little bacteria, it's about a half of a volt. Now, this does not mean that there is this massive amount of energy that we, that if you stepped on some ground with millions of microbes that would blow your foot off or catapult you into the air 15ft. What this means is that this is clean stored energy. It's found in the membranes, it's found in chloroplasts, endoplasmic reticulum. Everything that is inside the cell has a nice clean storage form of this energy. And that is then made available to the plant, either directly, because sometimes the plant can use the nutrients if the microbe dies, and microbes are dying all the time, and then some of the nutrients can be up because everything is bioavailable when a microbe dies. Or you can have a more indirect result when the microbe is actually releasing minerals to the plant. So these microbes can break down minerals far more efficiently than plants. And without these microbes, you're no longer able to get the minerals in. And these minerals are the constituents. These are the cofactors that are used to keep photosynthesis going hot and heavy, so to speak. So without these minerals, photosynthesis suffers and we see lower breath. And so the relationship how everything seems to be kind of connected together through the microbes, the energy, because the plants want to put their roots into a high energy soil, and if it's been sterilized, they don't have that. And so you then become incumbent in order to feed the plant, to force feed the plant. And this is not the way plants were designed to live, is to be force fed on a regular basis. So to kind of answer your question, and I'm trying to tie as many things together as possible so that you can see the importance of energy. And it's not just about that which is above the ground. The Leaves and photosynthesizing, but also getting those minerals from the soil so that you can assist photosynthesis going on in the leaves. They're all important and have a component in making sure that the energy system of plants are revved up and doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. And we can easily measure this with a very simple measurement of brix. There are many different ways of studying plant health. Brix is by far the easiest thing to do if you're a farmer. There's really, if you're going to be doing something on your own, it's probably one of the easiest things to do. There are other more. You can send things out to a laboratory, you can get tissue analysis, you can play all types of complex games and scientific laboratories can get involved. But if you need something that can be done right there on the spot, it will be brix. And so therefore, when talking to farmers, you need to get them in that mentality to understand that there's an easy way to tell whether their plant is healthy. It will also have an impact on their crop, which of course has to deal with their yield and money in the long run.

One of the pieces that we have been using a lot, and one of the tools that we've been using a lot in lieu of the refractometer or bricker is a SAP analysis because it actually measures the actual measured sugar content. And the refractometer is a very useful and valuable tool. But the challenge that many growers have with using it regularly is just the variability and the inconsistency that can occur based on moisture and sunlight levels and et cetera, et cetera. So it's something that we do use, but we actually use a lot of SAP analysis results as well to try to remove some of the variability. But I have a, I have a follow up question to what you just described regarding photosynthesis. So summary, my summary of understanding what you describe is essentially you are looking at plant growth from a biophysics perspective rather than from a biochemistry perspective. And you're saying that energy for plants doesn't just come from photosynthesis and sunlight. It actually comes from soil biology because of the voltage contained within microbial cells and soil profile. And that if you really want to increase that, the first step is do no harm and stop killing them. Is that a summary of what you're describing?

I think that would be a, probably the worst, the most worthwhile summary in order to say yes, that would be one of the first steps to do is to stop using the pesticides if we can help bit, there are some individuals who will need to wean themselves off over the course of one, two, maybe even three seasons. But to be honest with you, I'm not sure if I would be an advocate of three seasons. I think that weaning yourself off of it should be done as soon as possible, certainly within a season if you need to. But there are ways in order to speed the process up, in order to get the soil healthy again so that you can start farming the way that God intended.

What are some of those ways of speeding up the process? I think that's the question that I'm really trying to get to is obviously, obviously we can stop and discontinue or kind of, as we suggest, earn the right to discontinue the use of these pesticides. But then what can we do to increase the energy flow in the soil profile?

Okay, then what I usually ask a farmer is, for example, how many acres do you have? And let's just say they say a thousand. I have a thousand acres. So I would say, all right, how much are you willing to give up? How much can you afford not to produce on? Sometimes they come back with, I can't afford anything. But when you really press them and get them to the, to the point where you can say, how much can you afford to lose? They'll usually tell you something like 5 to 10 acres. And that would be an excellent starting point to work with. And I would say to allow the ground to go fallow for at least one season. And what you're going to do is you're going to allow the weeds to grow that want to grow on that soil because they're going to do their best to improve it. You want to discover the weeds into the ground because all that organic matter needs to go back into the soil, make sure it does not is not on the surface because it will get burned off in a slow oxidative process by the sun. So get that stuff into the ground. So every time the weeds get to be, you know, you consider to be bad, you would want to go out there and disk them back in. And the second thing that you would want to do is to put out about five pounds per acre of sugar as often as you can afford. As often as you can afford. That's different for every farmer. Why would you want to do something like that? The reason why is when you put sugar out, you increase the microbial content tremendously. And the fastest way to get rid of toxins in the soil is through microbes. Why because the microbes have the glutathione as transferase, they have the esterase, they have the P450s. They have all of the equipment necessary in order to break down those toxins. So you want to increase the level of the microbial activity tremendously, almost to an unhealthy degree, and get the microbes cleaning up the soil because they do not like to be in with all those pesticides. And they will do their part to clean it out. And the fastest way to do that is to throw massive amounts of sugar at the, at the ground. There are some other things that can be done. They're a little bit, sometimes more expensive. And if you have deep pockets, you can go that route. But this is usually the simplest and the cheapest thing in order to clean out your soil in as little as one season. Now, you can do it in less than one season, depending upon on how toxic ground is. Once you've started to clean things out and you're disking weeds back in, you can improve the ground tremendously in about one year. And you're going to be able to plant on that. So it's not like I'm destroying the farmer's livelihood. He's still going to be able to take care of his family. He's, let's say, got almost 1,000 acres left. He's only putting aside, let's say, five acres. But his production on that five acres will far exceed that which he is getting on the rest. And this is a process that needs to continue. That is done rather painlessly. There are some individuals who would like to switch over immediately. That's a little more painful. But if you want to do this a little bit slower, you can do so relatively inexpensively. And that is the best way to clean things out. So if you continue to use the pesticides because you feel you have to, then I would choose some high ground necessarily to start with the five acres. The reason why is because the runoff. I don't want any pesticides getting on that land that you just spent time cleaning up. Now, if you let the grant the ground go fallow for 10 years, in almost 100% of the cases, everything will be taken care of, almost 100%. So there have been studies been done on this, and it's relatively well documented. But no farmer wants to let his ground sit for 10 years. And that's why there are ways of cleaning things up quickly. And the fastest way, it's not through chemicals. There's no chemical you can get from Sigma Chemical or any other Place that's going to get rid and detoxify those chemicals better than microbes. And so by putting the sugar out, you increase the microbial content so high that you, you know, you probably wouldn't even want to be putting plants on there. But that's not the idea. The idea is to clean your soil up as quickly as possible. If you can put £5 down a week, that would be ideal because you will clean out the ground very quickly. Some farmers, they've tried to put it up 10 pounds. I don't usually advocate that because I don't want getting a little sticky and I don't want the nozzles getting all stick it up. But some people have compensated with a little bit more water to put out there. I mean, that's your choice. But if you're putting about five pounds of acid, you're going to be in good shape. So if you feel you can up it, your nozzles aren't getting all gunked up, you can go ahead and do that. And that will be the easiest and the fastest way of not only increasing the carbon content of the soil, but getting rid of those toxins. And you will have saved yourself many, many years of trouble because this is a process that would have happened over time, but you can speed up, considering that sugar goes for in my supermarkets, about a dollar a pound. So we're not talking about a lot of money here with that. So if you can afford to do $5 a week, then you've simply got the cost of going back and forth over your field that you have to contend with. And I don't think that there's anything faster than that right now. This does go along the line. Some people have suggested cover crops, and that's really very similar to what I am suggesting. The COVID crops is allowing things to grow. You can put some, sure, you can put some cover crops out and they can do their job too. And that's also fantastic as well. But the thing with COVID crops is there are many different cover crops out there. Some people like to, to do one, some people, you know, you've got compaction problems, so you want to use radishes. Down here, we use rye grass a lot because we don't have compaction problems. But sometimes there's the difficulty of choosing what cover crop you want to do, because the COVID crops will also do a very quick job of removing it, but not quite as fast as the sugar, because when you put up pure sugar, you will see a massive spike in the microbial content that you will never get from a plant and you will never get from a cover crop. What the plants do is they're releasing between 20 to 70 of their Photosynthate back into the soil, depending upon how healthy they are. And it's a slow process. It goes on 24 hours a day, especially at night. So they're introducing the sugar into the soil, but they may have some difficulty doing that as quickly as just giving it a massive dose. And so once the COVID crop has taken hold, if you wanted to back off of the sugar, then you're going to be in pretty good shape at that point. Make sure that that cover crop is dissed back into the soil because the mistake is made, essentially lawn mow it, so to speak. Peak where everything is laid out on the surface because they're thinking about soil erosion and things of that sort. But soil erosion will be taken care of. You can have bare soil and have very little soil erosion if you have a high microbial content, because the high microbial content leads to a high fungal content and the high fungal content brings in the glomula. I'm having a. What's the name of that glomalin? I was thinking glomeruli because I'm back in my insect laboratory here right now. But the glomerulan comes in there, will stick things together. And so you can really prevent soil erosion from occurring by having good healthy soil. Whereas if it's not cohesive and it's not bonded together through the glomerulan or some other things, yes, you can lose the soil quick. But honestly, erosion is not so much of a problem. In decades past, it has only recently become a huge issue because we have sterilized the soil. Nothing is holding it together, and anytime wind or water comes along, it is easily picked up.

And Tom, you've mentioned a number of pieces that I want to follow up on. You describe the differences a bit between cover crops and just applying sugar direct. And I think this is a fascinating conversation because it's. Many agronomists agree that it is very important to keep soil covered with green growing plants and preferably a diversity of green growing plants for an extended period, as much as the year, as much of the year as possible. When you look at, when you look at the mathematics of what you just described, if most plants are contributing 20 to 70% of their photosynthesis to the soil profile, isn't that a much larger quantity than 5 pounds of sugar per week? And why would cover crops not have a much bigger impact than the sugar.

Itself, the COVID crops take time in order to grow. So most of the individuals who are putting on the sugar have ground where nothing is growing. So the COVID crops, over time they will catch up. And you are correct, when you have a healthy amount of COVID crops, they're going to be putting more sugar, hopefully, assuming their brix levels are high enough, then they will be putting more sugar into the soil. But for those individuals, I'm sorry, I guess I probably should preface this with some of the farmers that I've had to deal with are dealing with dead soil. So there's very high electrical conductivity, high salt soils. Nothing is growing, not even, you know, foxtail and kochia. And so you've got a situation right now where we need in order to revitalize the soil. And taking care of the salt problem as well as the pesticide problem can quickly be taken care of because you've got bare ground, and that is by throwing sugar. So the sugar is usually a great way to start. If you are doing the COVID crop soon after, that should be able to catch up relatively quickly, especially depending upon the COVID crop. And if you've got a variety that's better than using one cover crop, there are some advantages to doing just one. And this has to do with machines. You know, it's easier to go over something if it's the same cover crop rather than having a variety. But if you've got the capabilities of take pretty much any of the COVID crops and throwing them back into the soil, whether it be through disking or some other means, then not only will you have the sugar being thrown into the plant by the COVID crops, but you will also have the organic matter, the carbon, under the soil too, which will be broken down by the microbes and will then add considerably to the carbon sequestration of the soil. So. Excellent point, excellent point. You're right. There are various situations that would call more for the COVID crops than they would the sugar. So I probably should have prefaced it with the type of soil that you might be dealing with if you were putting out sugar on a weekly basis.

Thanks for clarifying that. You mentioned that erosion was a much bigger challenge, has become a much bigger challenge recently as compared to historically. Why do you believe that is the case?

Well, I think I just mentioned it, and that's because the microbes are gone. So because the microbes are gone, you have fluffy soil that is easily washed away, whereas when the microbes are in there, they are dying all the time. So microbes are dying, and when they die, Their membrane breaks and you've got liquid goo comes out of their system. So you're having millions upon millions upon millions of microbes dying every second in your soil. And that in and of itself is a type of goo which helps keep the soil together. So if you sterilize the soil, I mean, just imagine putting it under a heat lamp and sterilizing it so that you've got nothing in there right now. It is very easy in order to wash that away, you're going to have no moisture, you're going to have no microbes. And you can blow on that type of, of soil or sand and it will easily get blown away, or you can put some water on it, it will easily get washed away. And this is a situation that was not as serious in decades past, that has become more serious because with the advent of the pesticides which have helped to deserilize the soil and make it far easier in order for soil to be picked up and deposited somewhere else.

Got it. What has been something that you puzzled over for a long time?

Time. Would this be agricultural for. I mean, am I talking to farmers right now or are we talking about science?

And we're talking about science. We're talking to. I should have perhaps clarified the beginning, but we're talking to agronomists and extremely and extremely knowledgeable farmers, citizen scientists.

Okay, okay. Okay. Yeah, I guess, I guess that would be my own research. We. I don't want to get too much into this because I might get off the beaten path, but we have puzzled for over 20 years how insects smell. And so this is. Which has been a big issue for me. We knew that they were smelling electromagnetically, but we did not know the process and how it was occurring. And so when I say puzzled over it, I mean, this is probably at least 10 years, pushing 15, where I was unable to put the pieces of the puzzle together. And so that that has been. This is really my bread and butter here in the laboratory, is to understand how insects smell. And even though we knew it was electromagnetic, process was not well worked out. So in consulting and understanding how photosynth, rhodopsin and some other proteins work about absorbing energy to understand how ultraviolet energy is absorbed by certain amino acids. And understanding how this process occurs, it has helped me to understand how insects are actually smelling. And as Of November of 2016, we were able to decipher the insect olfactory code. So as of a year and a half ago, we were finally able to figure out what the insects were doing to understand what frequencies were involved and how to determine something like this. And therefore new puzzlements have come. So even though we finally, after practically my entire professional life, is to figure out how they're doing that, now that we've got the system down, it's a matter of taking a look and going through and working out the details. In other words, understanding not just how insects smell carbon dioxide, but to explain to you why carbon dioxide is detected differently among culex mosquitoes, anopheles mosquitoes, aided mosquitoes, so on, so forth, why bed bugs smell carbon dioxide differently, why kissing bugs smell it differently, to understand why some lepidoptera, butterflies and moths do so. And it's really getting into the details right now of, yes, we understand how they're doing it, but now we understand that each insect is smelling differently, which has helped bring up new puzzlements, if I may use that word again in it. So that's. That's been the big one. That's been the big one. So we were happy to solve it, but it was a source of contention for a long time in our lab.

This is a fascinating piece, Tom. And I know that this is something that many growers are very interested in and would love to understand much better. Would you be willing and able to dig a little bit deeper?