How To Diagnose Hidden Hunger And Mineral Imbalances In Plants

Well, good afternoon, friends, and welcome to the webinar. The reason for having this webinar, for having this conversation. The purpose of this conversation is to talk about the idea that what we have come to accept as being common and what we've come to accept as being normal, or how plants look, might actually not be how really healthy plants look. There is what has emerged over the last several decades, let's say, based on what I've spoken about with other people, some of the mentors and podcast guests that I've had, it seems that there is a new normal of plant observation and plant health that has emerged. And there's been both a gradual process that has happened gradually over the last 70 to 80 years. Then there's also a much more pronounced, much more rapid process that has occurred in a shorter time frame, perhaps in the last 30 years, where crops today are behaving sometimes very differently from the way that they have behaved in the past. And we think that that is perfectly normal and that's okay. And an example of this, there's a number of examples, but I'm going to use corn comes to mind right now. So it used to be 20 plus years ago that it was considered normal, a really healthy corn crop, to be completely green and have all the leaves still be green at the top of the plant and many all the way down, close to the bottom of the plant, all the way right up until harvest, until it either got frozen off in the fall or until the crop was actually harvested. And today that's not true anymore. In fact, you can go back and look at some of the older agronomy handbooks. And in agronomy handbooks from the 70s and even into the 80s, the images of corn plants and corn crops at harvest were of corn crops that were still completely green. Today we've come to accept as normal that corn plants are going to die down and that the corn plants will be completely brown by the time we get to harvest. And we have an entire generation of younger farmers that doesn't even recognize that that may not be what a really healthy corn crop actually looks like. Another example from corn production is that today most corn crops have leaf striping where the section between the veins is substantially lighter colored than the actual veins themselves. And when you hold them up to the sunlight, you can see this striping pattern where you have alternating light colored and dark colored stripes. And this is also a phenomena that has become so widespread and so mainstream that it's considered to be perfectly normal. And that's just the way corn leaves are, when in fact, that's not normal at all. It's not at all what a really healthy corn plant actually looks like. So there are many phenomena like this in many different fruit and vegetable crops and in many grain crops and commodity crops, where what we have come to observe and to expect as being normal isn't actually what was normal many years ago. And so I wanted to have this webinar to talk about some of the more subtle signals, some of the more subtle clues that we can look for that we can use to diagnose the hidden hunger and the nutrient imbalances that aren't necessarily immediately obvious. When you're driving by a field and you see plants that are looking healthy and they're looking dark green, there can actually be a lot more to the story than that. And those are the pieces that I wanted to talk about. So the I'm going to start the screen share and jump into this. Actually, before I jump into this, one quick housekeeping comment is the for questions and answers, Q and A when I am because of the way the technology works, when I am doing a screen share and showing a slide deck, unfortunately I'm not able to actually see the questions as they come in. So I'm going to dedicate some time at the end to go through any questions that you guys may have. I'm expecting this, the presentation piece going through the slide deck to last approximately 20 or 25 minutes. And if you look at the bottom center of your screen, you can see a Q and a box which you can type on or click on and submit any questions that you have. And I'd love to hear those. There's many different directions that we can go in because there's a lot of room to cover here, more than I can cover in 20 to 25 minutes. And any questions that you have, I'd love to address in the Q and A. So I look forward to that. So I'm going to start the screen share and jump through this. All right, awesome. So I think the foundational premise, the piece that I would like to state right at the beginning, is that from our perspective, we should operate from the premise that all crops experience hidden hunger. If we just begin from that place, it's the exact opposite of a commonplace temperature today. Which is to say that many people believe that when a crop appears healthy, dark green and growing well, when you're driving by in a pickup truck, then the idea is that we believe the crop to be healthy and we should shift that paradigm and begin operating from the place that in fact, every plant that we look at has some type of hidden hunger that we have not identified yet. The moment we shift our frame of thinking and being, approaching that from a different perspective, we're going to be looking for things and be able to observe things that we won't if we're not looking for them. The reality is that as we've started using plant SAP analysis and working with many different crops in different environments, we've observed that most of the crops that farmers grow today in many regions, I would say in all the regions that we've worked in, much of north and South America, are deficient in a number of key trace elements and trace minerals, such as manganese and iron and molybdenum and cobalt and nickel, as well as, to some degree, depending on geography, we commonly see deficiencies of copper and boron. Those trace mineral deficiencies are very widespread. I can say with complete confidence that every crop we have ever tested when we first started working with a farm, had some or a number of trace mineral deficiencies. I have yet to begin working with a crop where all the trace minerals were in alignment and balanced where they needed to be. I have never seen it yet once. And this, to me, is a tremendous opportunity. It's an incredible opportunity because these trace minerals, even though they haven't been given a lot or as much consideration in the past as some of the macronutrients, they have a tremendous influence on overall yield and quality and plant health and vigor. And so we can have a great deal of influence on overall farm profitability and performance. When we start addressing and taking care of some of these trace minerals. We also need to begin thinking. One of the pieces that we believe to be true as well is that many soils today are unable to supply all the nutrients and trace minerals that plants need. And this, again, can be due to any number of different factors. Some soils simply don't have the geological base. They're not derived from the correct rock minerals that are needed to supply all the trace minerals that are necessary. And then as well, many soils that do have the geological base have a dysfunctional soil biology. They no longer have functional carbon, functional organic matter, and soil biology, as they may have had 40 or 60 years ago to be able to release those nutrients and make them available to plants. So manganese is a perfect example of this. It's the great majority of soils on the North American continent have an abundant supply of manganese that's locked up in the soil mineral matrix. And yet the majority of the crops that we're growing today are actually manganese deficient. The reason for this is because the biology that is present in the soils and our soil management practices have resulted in much of that manganese being locked up in an unavailable form and it not being released for the crop supply. So there is a component of some soil geological profiles don't have what is necessary and we may need to add it. And also that many may have the trace minerals which are needed, but they're simply an unavailable form and can be released through biology. We also believe that many mainstream agronomic practices can actually create historical hunger and can create nutrient imbalances with over applications of the incorrect products. And I put some careful thought into the terminology and using the words incorrect products because the reality is that many of the macronutrient applications, such as phosphorus applications using MAP or DAP, or various forms of orthophosphates or polyphosphate fertilizers, many nitrogen applications using liquid 32, liquid 28, anhydrous ammonia urea in general, the highly concentrated macronutrient nitrogen and phosphorus products, as well as potassium, particularly potassium as well, often actually create nutrient imbalances for these trace minerals because they create a biological environment in the soil profile that actually suppresses the release of trace minerals. And in many cases we find that the nutrients that growers are deficient in are a direct result of excesses of other products that they have applied that are creating the nutrient deficiencies. So we have this idea within agronomy and agronomic practice that we look at a soil analysis, we look at a tissue analysis or a SAP analysis, and we apply more of what is missing. And that in many cases can be very incomplete, where in fact what we need to do is we need to stop applying the excesses that are creating the deficiencies that we are observing. Another key element to be aware of is that nutrient imbalances will have a substantial yield suppressing effect before they are visually observable. So I'm just about to jump into speaking about some of the what are the pieces that we look for, what are some of the nutrient imbalances that we look for, and so forth. But what you need to be aware of, what we need to be thinking about, is the fact that once you can visually observe a very subtle hidden signal that the plant has that is signaling a nutrient imbalance, you've already impacted yield. You've already impacted yield substantially. In fact, again, going back to the idea of a new normal, We don't really know what a really healthy crop is. Capable of anymore. We don't really know what the plants that we are growing could truly do if they didn't have all these nutrient imbalances. And we can see, we know that we have genetic potential of many of the crops that we're planting that is a minimum of five times higher and many times as much as eight to ten times higher than the crop that we're actually harvesting. We know that the average yields for corn production throughout the Midwest are in the neighborhood of 150 to 180 bushels per acre. And we also know that the record yields are greater than 500. So there's obviously a lot of factors that play into that. But the bottom line is that many of the climactic factors, such as the environmental factors, such as rainfall and soil moisture, et cetera, all of those are mediated and buffered by having the correct nutrition and the correct trace mineral profiles. So addressing these trace mineral imbalances and addressing and observing the hidden hunger that is present can give us can begin. They open the door to a next generation of plant development and crop development that we haven't even begun to tap into. There is for the last number of decades, last 40, 50 years, much of agricultural progress and crop development progress has focused on improving genetics, developing new genetics for higher yields, better crop performance, etc. And without enough consideration given to the epigenetic expression and the realization and the awareness that we can in fact create with these great genetics that we have, we can create a much higher yield jump than we've been able to observe up to this point. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. There are a number of crops which have where the nutrition and nutrient management has been studied very closely and yields have made tremendous progress. An example of a more highly developed crop would be strawberries in California. Twenty years ago, the average strawberry yield in the state of California was 4,000 flats per acre. Today it's 10,000 flats per acre. It's a 250% average increase over the last 20 years. That came about not as a result of genetics, although there certainly were genetic improvements in that 20 year period. But it largely came about by a very close study understanding of plant nutrition management and spoon feeding nutrients throughout the growing season based on the plant's requirements. We haven't observed that similar yield jump yet on many of the crops that we're working with. We haven't observed it on most tree fruit, we haven't observed it on most of our commodity crops. And so I would suggest that there Is still a great deal of yield potential that we can tap into with nutrition based on the exceptional genetics that we have developed that we haven't fully tapped the genetic potential of yet. So I want to. One final thought before we jump into some of this is I've spoken a lot about the use of plant SAP analysis. And SAP analysis is an incredibly valuable, powerful, and very important tool because it is almost. It has the capacity to give us precognizance where we can actually identify nutrient imbalances before they can cause hidden hunger, before they cause even very subtle visual expression of nutrient imbalances. So this is a very powerful tool because it allows us really to get to the next level of nutrition management and plant epigenetic expression. So what I want to focus on is some of the key characteristics that we look for when we're looking at close visual observation of subtle plant signals. What are the very subtle signals that plants give us that we can look at to evaluate whether a plant is actually at a higher level of its epigenetic potential and its photosynthetic capacity? Are we really getting what that crop is capable of? And the reality is that we are. I'm working with the team at Advancing Eco Agriculture right now to create a series of online courses that will be published in the coming months. And we've just been working on actually creating and outlining a full online course for doing field evaluations for how we look at plant health and what's happening in the field. And I realized that I could. I mean, literally, we have been able to identify so many of these subtle signals that I could speak about this topic for four hours. And we'll be speaking about it probably for that length of time in the online course. So there's much more than I can cover in a brief webinar. But I wanted to speak about some of the most important pieces and give you an idea of some of the things that we look for. Then, of course, once that online course is released, then that will be available and accessible for everyone as well. So some of the pieces that we look for that we pay close attention to, One very important piece is internode length. So really healthy plants, this ties into looking at hormone balances, looking at vegetative versus reproductive growth energy. When you have a really healthy plant is always going to be root dominant. The root system needs to be dominant and needs to be stronger than the vegetative growth. As long as you have root system dominance, that also means you have reproductive dominance and you have the capacity to produce extremely high yields On a plant that has a dominant root system, in other words, it has more cytokine in production than it has auxin production. So for the plants on the left, when you have these really long internodes, that's going to indicate that you have a lower quality plant ecosystem overall, because you no longer have root system dominance, you now have auxin dominance, vegetative dominance, and that is going to result. Even though this plant has a lot of blossoms on it and looks nice and yellow, looks like it has the potential for a lot of fruit production, many of those blossoms are going to either not pollinate or they're going to abort and drop off because there isn't enough root system strength to actually fill all that fruit. Versus, when you look at the plants on the right, you have very short internodes, this tight, clipped canopy or hedge appearance of the canopy. That is a plant that still has root system dominance and has the potential to have really high yields and very strong reproduction. Something else that we look at is the leaf width to length ratio. Invariably we observe that when we're observing comparable genetics, like comparable species, when leaves are wider and in some crops they become shorter. But in some crops it's really the leaf width to length ratio that we're looking for. So in general, the wider a leaf is, the healthier the plant and the more abundant yield and plant growth that will be capable of producing. So we pay very close attention to the width to length ratio for leaves. And this is true. It doesn't matter if you're talking about corn or rice or soybeans or wheat or cherries or apples or tomatoes. The same rule applies across the board. The leaf width to length ratio is a very valuable indicator of the overall root system, energy and overall plant vitality. So here's another expression. These are much healthier leaves where we now have very strong leaf width, almond leaves on the left, and you can see that. And in fact, I would say depending on what plant we're talking about, this can be true for beans, dry beans, soybeans, tomatoes, almonds, etc. You can actually get to a point where leaves are wider than they are long. This almond leaf is beginning to approach that point. It's not quite there yet, and obviously that wouldn't be true for all leaves. Then we have a cherry leaf on the right where we can see, and I would also ask you to note and observe the leaf edges, the serration along the leaf edge. One of the things that we've observed is that the healthier plants become the sharper the Definition on the leaf edges where you get more pronounced leaf serrations, you get more serrations, more of them in terms of a larger number per millimeter of leaf edge or per inch of leaf edge. So the, the healthier the plant, the greater the definition of the leaf edges. And so here's actually a really important piece looking at leaf vein color as compared with the color of the leaf surface area between the veins. So when you, if you look at this very closely, these are both cherry leaves and the leaves on the left, you can see faintly, this is not a perfect picture, but you can still see that the veins are lighter colored than the area between the leaves between the veins. And you can also see that even when you look at the leaves overall, they still are slightly pale green. They're not as dark green as we would like to see them. They still have the capacity to have a lot more chlorophyll in them than is present at the moment. And yet the veins are actually lighter colored than the leaf. When you look at the leaves on the right, you see that you have much darker colored veins than the remainder of the leaf. Even though, like the leaves on the left, these leaves also don't have enough chlorophyll, they're also light green. So this is actually very powerful. Start paying attention to just this piece and you'll understand some of the comments that I made at the beginning about hidden hunger becoming the new normal. Leaves, like those present on the left with light colored veins on many crops, have become the new normal. Light colored veins are an expression of manganese deficiency. Whenever you have veins that are lightly colored lighter than the rest of the leaf, that's a signal, that's a symptom of a manganese deficiency. And when you walk out into a field today, that is, that is the new normal. Almost all weed species and many of the crops that we're producing have those light colored veins that are expressing a manganese deficiency, which is why I made the comment earlier, and I'm very comfortable making the comment that this characteristic has become almost universal. The majority of the crops that we observe and that we work with today, when we first start working with them, have manganese deficiency symptoms. And for any of you who have heard us talk in the past about the critical importance of manganese for photosynthesis, for disease and insect resistance, this is one of the most foundational, fundamental trace minerals that can have extraordinary impacts on yield that we haven't given, and I say we collectively in the agriculture arena haven't given enough consideration to in the past. Here's another, just another example of that. Not entirely sure. I think this might be hazelnuts on the left or filberts, where again, you can see this light colored leaf or light colored veins between the leaves. And on the right on the raspberries, you can see you have dark veins. Now, the raspberry leaf has a very interesting expression as well. You notice that I can just look at this leaf and say, okay, the serrations on the leaf edge are, they're not very pronounced. They're fairly subtle. And also the vein crinkling on raspberries that these plants are really known for. This, this leaf is nice and flat, but it doesn't have strong serrations around the leaf edge. And that to me is an indicator that this plant very probably has a surplus of nitrogen. So that's one of the pieces. This leaf is generally overall very healthy. It's much healthier than many crops are. It has adequate manganese, which is a notable distinction right from the get go. But I would suspect that this, this leaf is probably a bit on the, what I would call the soft side. It's a bit soft and this crop may have some insect susceptibilities as a result of that. Something else to look for is to compare the leaf size on the latest, on the newest fully emerged mature leaf and the oldest leaf on the plant. So it's very common for annual crops such as tomatoes for the older leaves to be much larger and the new leaves at the top of the plant to become progressively smaller. This is again an indication of gradual root system decline. Over the period of plant development. So we want to see the ideal again is to have the exact same leaf size or very comparable leaf size on the old leaves and on the new leaves. On perennial crops, we see on tree fruit, for example, you may see the opposite effect where the first leaves that emerge in the spring, spur leaves, are often the smallest leaf on the tree. And once you begin developing new shoot growth, those new shoot leaves are substantially larger than the spur leaves, sometimes orders multiple times larger. And again, the ideal on a really healthy tree will have identically sized leaves both on the spur leaves that first emerge in the spring, the very first new growth, new shoot growth leaves that emerge in the early fruit fill period, and then the latest. So the leaf size across an entire tree canopy should be largely uniform. You don't want to see large diversities of leaf size at different locations on the tree. Another factor to look for at the very beginning, I mentioned looking at internode length and in A parallel to that also need to look at petiole length. So looking at these tomato leaves, this is not the perfect definition of a petiole, since if you want to be technically correct, then this entire leaf stem is called a leaf, a single leaf for a tomato plant. But when you look at these leaves on the left versus the right, you can see that from the main stem, the leaves branching off, you have very long petioles that are reaching out to all of those leaves, whereas the plant on the right, you have leaves that don't have those long petioles, and they're connected almost directly to the main stem. So, again, I know that there are differences in the stage of plant development for these two crops, and I don't know this for certain, but I would suspect that there might also be genetic differences. But just for the purpose of illustration, similar to the internode length, the plant on the right where you have very short petioles is again going to be a plant that is cytokinin dominant, reproductive dominant, and has the potential to have really high yields. Something else that I observe when looking at these, comparing these two pictures. Look at the leaf definition, the serrations on the leaf edges on the left versus the right. Again, the plant on the right that has short petioles has much sharper leaf definition. There's something else. I can look at these leaves visually, and I can know instantly that these plants are zinc deficient. How do I know that? If you look at, and in fact both of these plants are zinc deficient, it's easier to observe on the plant on the left or the example on the left when you have zinc deficiencies, the bottom of the leaf, where the leaf attaches to the petiole is not uniform. It doesn't attach to the stem at the same point. So when you have adequate zinc, the two leaf edges will attach down to the petiole at exactly the same point. And when you have a zinc deficiency, they'll be offset. One will establish or attach to the stem lower than the other. And you can see when you look at these main leaves, these individual leaves on this example on the left, that we have many of the leaves that are attaching to the stem at a different point on the left and the right side. So that would be an example of a zinc deficiency. And we can see the same on the right. And so again, these are examples. These are very subtle signals. If you were to look at, just look at this leaf on the left, you would say, wow, that plant is doing really well. It has a Nice green color. It's got a very large leaf size. The leaves are relatively flat. There's not a lot of leaf discoloration. This is a plant that is doing really well, and that's what we consider to be normal today. But the reality is that that plant, as we can see, we can see that just looking at these leaves on the left, I know automatically that this plant has a zinc deficiency. We can see that it has a manganese deficiency. And there's a very good probability, based on the overall length of the main petiole, the main stem, that it also has a boron deficiency, because that stem is very, very long. We know plant is auxin dominant, is vegetative dominant, doesn't have enough root system growth because it doesn't have enough root system growth. We know that the plant isn't absorbing enough calcium, and it's probably. It's likely to be calcium deficient. There's this whole logic chain that we can follow. We can look at these leaves and say instantly in the field, we can say, oh, yeah, this plant looks like it's really healthy and normal. But in fact, there are additional yield advantages and yield edges that can be gained by addressing and managing some of these trace minerals. I also wanted to share an illustration of a trace mineral nutrient excess. This is a green bean crop that we worked with a number of years ago that got a treatment of boron on the seed or close to the seed at planting. It was very, very small treatment, 0.3 milligrams per acre, if I recall correctly, or excuse me, no, 3 milligrams per acre was a very incredibly small amount that you couldn't possibly imagine would create a boron excess. But there was a combination of environmental conditions. Very dry soils, very acidic pHs, very low calcium availability. All of those combined to produce this boron toxicity effect. So we worked with the grower and put on a foliar application immediately that contained two quarts per acre of holocal to provide some calcium to buffer out the excess boron. And the image on the right is of those exact same plants taken two weeks later. They snapped out of the excess boron very quickly and were growing very well. But what I wanted to point out is look at the leaf shape that is produced by high boron levels. So high levels of boron often tend to produce. They tend to move sugars and nutrients to the farthest tip and to the periphery of the plant. So they move nutrients and sugars upward and outward. So this, this expression that you're seeing where you're seeing these leaves that are very pointed and have a long, have an extended tip. That's an expression of plants that have a surplus of moron. And that expression remained on these plants throughout their entire life period. Something else to pay very close attention to on all the reproductive crops that we're harvesting fruit for is the reproductive parts of the plant themselves. So pay close attention to buds, pay close attention to blossoms and to fruit. So we can look, of course, at pollination percentage and uniformity. This image is a perfect example. A really healthy plant will have the flowers on a single cluster be completely uniform. It takes time to get to this stage of plant health. This is not something that occurs even on growers that we're working with at aea. This is something that often takes a couple of years to happen. And this is equally true of tree fruit, stone fruit, apples, etc. You can develop a tree that has such vibrant energy and vitality and vigor that you in effect, eliminate what is termed the king blossom. The king blossom position still exists, but it has the exact same size and opens and pollinates at the same stage as all the other blossoms on the cluster. So the position still exists, but there isn't any dominance of one bud leading the others. And so this is, this cluster of tomatoes is an example where you have some of the first tomatoes that have already pollinated and are starting to size. And some of the blossoms at the furthest tip of that cluster are just beginning to blossom and pollinate. There are many other pieces to look for as well. When we're looking at fruit and bud positioning, we can look at the calyx size and the stem strength. This particular image. These tomatoes have a relatively small diameter stem for the calyx. This is essentially your nutrient transport pipeline into the fruit. So the larger your nutrient transport pipeline, the larger your potential fruit can be. And there's many other pieces that you can look for. You can look at leaf shape, you can look at the shoulder shape on leaves on the stem end and see auxin versus cytokinon expression, how the fruit is shaping. You can observe pollination effects, etc. So there are many pieces that you can look for in fruit. And again, that's a very large topic that we could speak about more if you have any questions on that. Something else to look for is to look for trichomes on leaf surface, the leaf hair. So this is an image I took of a 300 Bushel Co corn crop, organic corn crop, with no applied nitrogen in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 2016. And you can notice a couple of things on this leaf. First of all, there is none of the light and dark leaf striping that I talked about as being common. You have a very nice uniform dark green color. You can still see where the veins are present, but there's on a distinct color color difference where the veins are versus where they're not. And you can also see these leaf hairs being very pronounced. So something that we've observed is that the healthier the plants become, the more pronounced and the larger number of leaf hairs become evident and they become a lot stronger. You can actually feel them as you brush your fingers across the leaf surface. They become much stronger and much more pronounced. Something else that I would like to point out specifically relevant to corn. Corn has this one characteristic. It's shared by a few of the other grass crops where corn is growing very rapidly during the framing stage. And sometimes on leaf edges, you will see this zippering effect. What I would refer to the zippering effect where the leaf will have a band that runs up and down the length of the leaf for the width of perhaps several veins width, where there's this rippling effect where the growth is not nice and flat, the leaf is not nice and flat. And that rippling effect is a signal of inadequate calcium. There isn't adequate. There wasn't adequate calcium present when those, when cell division was occurring at that stage. And so you get incomplete cell division and you end up with the zippering effect on the plant leaf. And this is true of a corn crop because of its very high speed of vegetative growth and the need, excuse me, and the need to have a constant supply of calcium every 24 hours throughout the growing period and the need to have good root absorption of calcium. So if one day there isn't an adequate calcium supply for that very rapid vegetative growth, that's the date that the cells that are being produced during that day are going to have that zippering effect showing up. Something else to look for and pay very close attention to on tree fruit and perennial plants, berries, blueberries, etc. Is to monitor the development of a terminal bud on the new shoots during the fruit filled period. So the idea is that we, during the fruit filled period, let's say on this is true of cherries and apples, and perhaps less true of some of the late season apples. But for many of the apple varieties, stone fruit, etc. We want the plant to have a surplus of energy and be able to fill fruit to the greatest degree possible throughout the entire fruit filled period. When a plant. So once we get into the fruit fill period, this is a moment where a plant is vegetative dominant. So there is a dominance of vegetative growth energy and auxin production. Because obviously you have auxin production in the seeds and the fruit, you have auxin production about the moment you get into the fruit filled period is also the moment where new shoot growth gets triggered. So you have auxin production in the new shoots and you have auxin production in the seeds. If a plant doesn't have enough sugars and doesn't have enough energy, starts running low on energy, it will stop new shoot growth before it will slow fruit fill, because its ultimate desire is to successfully reproduce and it will put as much energy as it can into the fruit. So what this means is the moment, if a plant doesn't have enough energy during the fruit fill period, the first thing that will happen is it will set the terminal bud on the new shoot, new shoot growth and say, oh, okay, I'm not going to keep growing this new shoot wood. Instead I'm going to put all of my energy into fruit. So we can look at the type of bud that is existing on the new shoots and see whether at the very tip of that shoot we have a terminal bud or not. And our goal is to not set the terminal bud until after harvest, until after the fruit fill period is complete, because that now is an indicator that we have had enough energy and abundance of energy to completely fill fruit and also to maintain new shoot growth throughout that entire fruit fill period on a corn crop. Something else that is important to look at and to think about. This is just something that I'll throw out there for some of you to research and do a bit more homework on timing of black layer development. So after a corn seed pollinates and we get to the grain and the kernel fill period, there are lots of sugars that are moving into each of these kernels. And there is a layer of cells right at the bottom of the kernel that connect the kernel to the cob, whose primary function as we understand it today, is to transport sugars and nutrients from the plant into the kernel. So they begin transporting very large quantities of sugars during the grain fill period. Then at some point, those cells begin collapsing. That layer of cells at the bottom of the kernel begins collapsing for a number of reasons. This is actually related to the node plugging that we can see on stalks where we have the development of brace roots. So this can actually be because of translocation of toxins in the plant, such as the incorrect Forms of iron, the presence of aluminum, also hydrocarbon compounds such as herbicide and pesticide residues in the soil profile, can all cause cell death in this zone. And there are other contributing factors, physiological factors, that can contribute to this as well. But what happens eventually is that we have this layer of cells that is responsible for carbohydrate transport that collapses and dies. And that cell collapse is what is referred to as the black layer. So when that black layer occurs, it's no longer possible to transport nutrients and you transport sugars into the kernel. So you are no longer filling kernels for the rest of the growing period. The longer you can delay that black layer from happening, the greater an impact. The more sugars you can move into the kernels, the larger the kernels are going to become, the greater test weight you're going to have, the higher protein content, the higher quality you're going to have, and ultimately higher yields. And so the development of black layer is directly, there's obviously a lot of pieces that tie into it. I mentioned some of them earlier. But it's also related to nitrogen management and the presence of strong photosynthesis. And very importantly, it's also related to the presence of calcium and trace minerals. Because obviously when you have strong calcium out of a general supply of calcium to form strong cell membranes and trace minerals to support the internal structures of that cell, that it's going to be a lot longer period until that black layer develops, until those cells collapse. One of my mentors and colleagues actually mentioned that every day that we can prevent black layer from occurring, we will achieve a minimum of an additional 5 bushel per acre yield gain. And in his experience, his observation, he was successful in delaying the development of black layer anywhere from 13 to 20 days by managing nutrition. So you think about delaying that by 20 days with a 5 bushel per acre yield gain. That's a tremendous, tremendous yield gain that can happen by understanding what is happening at this, at this kernel development period. So one final thought is that this visual observation and trying to reset the expectations of what is normal is a very necessary step and a very powerful tool. But I would still strongly encourage you to actually use SAP analysis to validate your observations in the field and also to give you an advantage. Because with SAP analysis, you can actually see and observe these nutrient imbalances before they show up visually and before they are giving you an impact crop development. So I'd love to ask you the question, when you look at these two pictures, this apple, these apple leaves, what do you see? What are you observing, you can see differences in leaf width to length ratio. We can see that on both these images they have more lightly colored veins. The leaves on the right, excuse me, the leaves on the left tend to have, from what I can see, it seems that they have more sharp definition of the leaf edges, more clear serrations. And we can see that the apple that's present in the top left center of the left leaf has a pollination challenge because of the fruit shape. There's many things that we can look at and can see when we're looking at these leaves in the field. So if you have any questions or you'd love to have a second opinion on what you're observing on your crop. We have some awesome technology today with smartphones. You can walk into a field, you can take pictures, or you can be on a video live. Feel free to reach out to the AEA team and we're happy to share our thoughts on what you're observing and what you're seeing and give you some input on how we would manage it and what we see happening and going on. I'd also invite you to if you haven't yet, you're really missing out. Listen to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast that I began hosting a couple of months ago, which you can find at the regenerative agriculture podcast.com having a lot of fun with the podcast. Literally every time that I begin a conversation with a new guest, I feel like a kid in a candy store or unwrap someone unwrapping a gift because we've had these incredible guests on the podcast who have so much knowledge and wisdom to share. And I never know where the conversation is going to go and what's going to come about. But in every single conversation so far, there have been these incredible insights that guests have shared, that people have shared, and we've received really great feedback. Lots of people are telling us that they're really enjoying the podcast. So if you haven't listened to the podcast yet, I would really encourage you to look it up. It's present on itunes, that's also on YouTube, it's on Google Play. You can find the podcast in many different places. But look it up and listen to what some of our guests have to say. You'll be amazed at the insights and the wisdom that they've had to share. I've personally enjoyed it tremendously and I'm certain that you will as well. So thank you very much for being here. For the webinar, I'm going to stop the screen share and switch to any questions that you might have. So this is your moment. If you have any questions, please type them in down below in the Q and A box. And I'd love to be happy to respond to those. We have one question that has popped through. Darren Petzer asked the question, on a tissue analysis and or a soil analysis, are there important trace minerals that are not usually tested for or presented which are important? Further, there are many different optimal mineral levels that seem to exist. How should we navigate that aspect of testing? Darren, this is an awesome question. A couple of questions. So first of all, trace minerals which are important that are not usually tested, those that are usually tested on many of the analysis that I see would be boron, zinc, manganese, copper and iron. So boron, zinc, manganese, copper, iron. Those are the six that seem to be commonly tested and those are all very important. What I'd say very briefly is this is a bit of a side topic, but let's just say that iron levels are almost universally going to show as being a surplus or excessive on soils and also generally on tissue and forage analysis, when in reality the crops are actually deficient because the iron is in the improper form. It's the incorrect oxidation state. And to some degree this can also hold true of manganese, particularly manganese. On a soil analysis, you'll often see soils that are high in manganese and crops that are deficient in manganese on the same soils. So in addition to those standard trace minerals that are analyzed, others, I mean, there are now, there's now 20 some other in total, I think, that are recognized as being beneficial or useful for plant development. But the, the others that I would say are critical are very important that are known to have a substantial impact on plant health and quality. Cobalt and nickel and selenium. Silicon is not particularly a trace mineral, but it also needs to be added to this list. So copicyl, selenium, molybdenum. Molybdenum, in fact, is probably more important than selenium and nickel. And there's one more at the fringe of my mind. I already talked about silicon. Those are the major ones. So the reality is that cobalt and molybdenum needs to be addressed on every crop. They're both very important enzyme cofactors. We see substantial yield and quality responses when we use them, and we manage that when we manage them. Well, those are those, by the way, those are tested. Cobalt and molybdenum are tested on a SAP analysis. So they don't show up on tissue and soil unless you specifically ask for them, but they do show up on the SAP analysis, selenium levels and nickel levels. And the other one that I couldn't think of at the moment was iodine. There are some soils in western part of North America that do have adequate levels of selenium. And from a geological perspective, and if you're in those areas, you will know that, but or can certainly find that information quite readily online. Molybdenum and iodine, it's very safe to say, are practically universally deficient. They are not present in many of our agricultural soils anymore. So those you can add very safely and get a very nice crop response. So to your second question, Darren, there are many different optimal mineral levels. How do we navigate that aspect of testing? The key is you have to understand the extraction methods. So you have Malik 3 extraction versus ammonium acetate extraction, which those seem to be the two predominant methods or types of soil extraction. And they will report very different desired values and very different levels. So that's getting into the details of that is kind of beyond the scope of this discussion, but I am working on, we are working on actually creating an online course for evaluating soil analysis reports and making recommendations. And we're going to be talking about all those pieces and that's another course that is going to be released in the next couple of months. Kenneth Peters asked question, how do you get the shoots to not develop a terminal bud during the growing season? So, Kenneth, the key to constantly maintaining vegetative growth throughout the growing season is to have a tree or plant that has a surplus of energy throughout the entire fruit field period. So if the, if the tree has so much energy that it can move all the energy into fruit and still have enough energy for vegetative growth, then you won't set the terminal bud. So the key to accomplishing that, of course, is to have very good photosynthesis and an abundance of sugar production during the photosynthesis process. So when you have that abundant photosynthetic energy, you won't get that terminal bud being set during the fruit fill period. That's a really great question. Darren Greenfield asked the question you mentioned cobalt as a deficiency. How does that show up? I don't know the answer to that question. I don't know how cobalt, obviously there can be very severe cobalt deficiencies that I'm sure would show up some way. I would suggest that based on our experience and observations so far. Well, a couple of points about cobalt. First of all, 90% of the cobalt that's present in a plant is present in the root system. Or maybe it's 80%, I forget the exact percentage. It's very high. The great majority of cobalt that's present is present in the root system. And because of that reason, and the reason it's in the root system is because cobalt is present in the growing root tips where it is a key enzyme cofactor that is needed for cytokinin synthesis. So what you'll see happen as an expression of low levels of cobalt is a crop that never has root system dominance. It never has cytokine and dominance because there isn't adequate cobalt present in the root system to form that really strong reproductive energy that is needed to have very high yielding crops. That's kind of the best answer that I have at the moment, and I'm sure there probably is a better answer than that. I just don't know what it is right now. Anthony Granatelli, you asked the question, what about vanadium? This is where we get into some of the fun stuff. The answer is there are, I don't have an exact count right now, but greater than 20, if I'm not mistaken, trace minerals that have been identified as being beneficial for plant development. They include vanadium, lanthanum, ruthenium, silver, tin, iodine. There's quite an exhaustive list. I forget exactly what all are on the list right now, but there are many of these trace minerals that are present that are beneficial because they are needed as enzyme cofactors for certain parts of the plant's metabolic machinery. That's a great question. Faith Reeves asked the question. Hi, Faith. Is leaf curl and rolling generally a copper deficiency is the same for annuals and perennials? I would say the answer is no. In fact, I would never diagnose a leaf curl leaf rolling as a copper deficiency. Perhaps there's something that I'm not aware of, but in general we see leaf curling when the outside edges of the leaf curl upwards. That is often an expression of high temperatures.