How to unlock the genetic potential of wheat with regenerative agriculture

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the conversation we have on maximizing the potential of yield and profit in wheat. I'm going to have just a short presentation here and then we'll have a discussion at the end, questions and answers and also anything that you've learned in producing wheat. I would like for this to be a discussion where we all learn from each other because we have a very important mission as food producers to produce food that is high quality. Any questions or winning button at the bottom of the screen, Just put your questions in that Q and A section and we'll get to those at the end. We're going to get started because I believe you're as excited as I am to learn how we can unlock the potential of a world champion racehorse. Let's think about it. We need to have high quality feed. We need to have a trainer and a caretaker that exercises the horse daily and that watches that horse carefully. And that to have a very big protocol of how we care and develop this racehorse. But probably most importantly, above all, the exercise, nutritional supplements, feed quality, the rations, all of that is the importance of the genetics. So I'd like to share with you the story of a colt that was born. The sire and the dam were top bloodline's world champion class horses. And it was his goal and do whatever it takes to allow these genetics to express themselves. Unfortunately, this owner was in a very bad accident, had to sell all the horses and completely give up his vision of developing the next world champion racehorse. The owner that bought this colt understood the value or the potential of the genetics that this colt possessed. And he was going to develop that world champion, but he didn't have that first level of interest. Like he was a bit more distracted than the other. The feed quality dropped. There wasn't enough money to buy really good hay. And so they snuck some moldy hay into it. The exercise, well, there wasn't hardly time for it because he had to be working harder. Long story short is that this colt did not receive the optimum care and environment. And this horse, instead of being a world class horse, a world class racehorse, winning the championship, ended up being just a horse. Yes, we will get into some wheat discussion here in a bit, but the point that I want to make here, and I want to make it very, very clear, is that environment determines the ability for genetics to express themselves. What are the yields that you are harvesting today and how does that compare with the potential that that wheat actually has? Remember that colt, the potential it had when it was first born. All the genetics were There, whether it's going to be a champion or not be a champion depended what happened to that colt from that day. That shows genetic potential of wheat is 1000 or 500 or 600 or 200 bushels per acre, as in a laboratory research where we have controlled environment like we do with corn, where people have actually produced and seen the genetic potential of corn at 1100 bushels. What we do know is that a ye is 258 bushels per acre, as is recorded by the world records. So we know that wheat has at least the genetic potential of 258 bushels. And what if the yield potential is even greater? And we've just not realized that, which is where I want to go next. And what I really mean to say is that you can increase the yield potential, but it will take a couple generations of selection of nutritional and environmental finesse and really focus on increasing the genetic potential that's within that wheat seed. But the point I really want for you to take home here is that when you apply fertilizer, when you apply fungicide, insecticide, foia sprays, biological inoculation, whatever you do, and you harvest a higher yield, let's say you have a treatment and a control, and on the treatment you put out, you know, abcd, you have the protocol, you follow it with the yield increase is when we apply the products, we do not increase the yield, we simply keep the yield from being lost. Or are we increasing yield? It may be subtle, but I think it's very significant in how we think about increasing yield or increasing the number of bushels that we harvest per acre. And here's the reason why. The yield potential is at its greatest when we plant that seed. And if we have a lower yield, it's not because we increase the yield on one, but because we kept the yield from being lost. So when we apply whatever we apply, we need to start thinking about is this going to help yield from being lost or is this because it's not increasing the yield? So where are the points where we can be losing yield? We can lose yield at planting. If we don't create an environment where that young seedling is able to express the genetic potential that it needs at that point. It would be similar if in that colt, first few days it were forced to stand in a rainstorm or go through a hurricane for a young colt, that would be devastating. So at planting, a lot of yield can be lost. We can also lose yield at the boot stage. So we plant and the number of seedlings that germinate and how well they germinate. And the environment we create is going to determine how well it's going to tiller out and how many stems or stalks we have per acre. And then at the boot stage, we're determining how many potential wheat berries that we're going to have, how many kernels are going to be in each head. At the flowering stage, we can no longer determine how many plants we have per acre. We can no longer affect the number of flowers or potential berries that we're going to have. But what we can affect here, how many of those flowers are going to pollinate. And if at this point we have a stress factor, we will lose more yield. And at grain fill, the number of plants, the number of kernels per head, the number of pollinated kernels per head are all determined. The only thing we can affect now is how well they fill out. So where we want to focus on today, because I believe this is the most important and has the greatest effect on reducing the plant's ability to express its genetic potential, is planting it. If we go back to that analogy of the colt, it would be like we're buying that potential world champion colt. What environment will we put that colt in? Let's just use some hypothetical numbers, and let's say maybe I'm not even so interested in horses, but my son or my daughter is very interested in this horse that has the potential to be a world champion. And the price is like $130,000 for this world champion bloodline horse. And he's, you know, let's say maybe he's weaned and he's, you know, he's ready to be away from his mom, and he's, you're bringing him home. What's the environment that you. That you will bring this quality and level of a horse to? Are you going to bring him to an environment like this? And if you do, what is. What is the chances that he's going to thrive? And in an environment like this, I would expect that you would be much more likely to bring this colt into an environment like this. $100,000 world champion potential colt is not going to be an environment like this, but like this. So when we're talking about our crop, when we're putting that seed, at which point it has the highest potential, there's nothing's happened at this stage yet to reduce the plant's ability to express its full potential. So the environment that we put this seed into has huge repercussions on how much yield is going to be lost between the planting and the boot stage, as well as throughout the rest of this plant's life. So if you look at this picture, you see on the right, there's a wheat plant that has very good soil aggregation, lots of roots, and all of the roots are just covered and coated with soil aggregates. I use the terminology glutu, which is actually a microbial excretion agglomelan. So these bacteria that this plant is farming, that this plant is supporting, that are in symbiotic relationship with the plant, these bacteria are affecting the soil structure, which means they are affecting the nutrient availability, which means the plant is therefore going to have a very different diet than the plant on the left. So let's just compare these two pictures and imagine that we get 4 inches of rain in two hours. Which of these soils, plants do you think are going to benefit the most from 4 inches of rain? Or let's say we have lots of heat, drought. Which of these plants do you think will survive best or have the greatest chance to go through a dry period where the soil dries out and there's plant stress? Which of these do you think is going to be able to maintain the highest level genetic expression? So what we want to focus on here, and the point I really just want to put out here, and the focus for this conversation, is when plants start off right, they have a better chance to express their full genetic potential. And if a plant is started off.

Wrong.

You can't recover from that. If your yield potential. Let's take again, go back to the example of our colt. If this colt were put into a poor environment and it cut its tendon or something terrible like that happened because of the environment it was in. It doesn't matter how much you exercise that colt or how well you feed it. If a cold has a cut tendon or a hurt leg or whatever it might be, it will never be able to perform at the potential that it had before that happened. And in the same way, when plants, when the genetic potential or the plant's ability to express that potential has been reduced because of the environment that it's in, we can't regain that by just applying more and more and more material, whether that's fertilizer, insulin, insecticide, or fungicide, because we've dropped from, let's say 250 bushels to 100 bushels to 80 bushels, and regardless of what we apply, we won't be able to push it back up. So how do we do this and what are the steps to create that environment where that seedling is able to express genetic potential and where the least amount of genetic expression is suppressed. Here's what we do at advancing eco agriculture. We apply a microbial mycorrhizal fungi seed coat which is the biocoat gold. We apply a carbohydrate complex carbohydrate humic acid enzyme cofactor support package which is the rejuvenate. We apply nitrogen fixing bacteria along with other facultative anaerobes which is the spectrum, causes a reduced environment, fixes nitrogen, solubilizes phosphorus, etc. And then we support all that with seashield which is a combination of crab shell, shrimp shell and fish. And that's what happened on this, on the previous picture that I had showed you. That's the difference was that soil program was applied in the furrow. Actually this was even without the biocode gold. And we'll actually get to that slide here in a second. So here you can see the rates of each of those and here are some examples of how this works and what results we are getting from this. So you can see on the left picture you have the untreated and the treated. You can see the treated right, the untreated on the left, definitely a significant difference in the amount of berries and the size of the heads. And then also on the right side you can see the differences in the root. Just another shot of the differences in the roots. And then here's all the numbers where you can see how many more plants per square foot that we have, which is huge. So what we see is when we support, when we support these seedlings in the early stage, they're able to germinate more effectively and more of those seeds that we put out are going to survive, are going to come up and are going to produce at their full or at a greater height of their genetic potential. Here we are again. Just consider what is the environment. Consider the environment of both of these plants and how this environment is going to affect how well the these genetics will be able to express themselves. And here's a word from the grower that is growing these wheat plants. I'll just let him give you the details.

Our landlord's very conservative. He would just do nothing. Then he had some other practices he wanted us to do that were not good at all. And we were having disasters happening down there. At 12, we had the poteers back there, we had it even lower than that. But then we went with AEA and we're gonna finance it ourselves. But all we put on was the fall Primer, that's it. We had 40% an acre. And then this year again fall primer's always been on and we had 85 from 12 Brussels an acre to 40 Brussels an acre to 85 with 13% protein which says, which is a little unusual to have high yields and high profusion when your yields get up low. We've had a good year with rain, we've had good weather. So we've had a lot of good biology activity this year, more than usual. And together with biology based fertility responded real well.

So 12 bushels to 40 bushels to 85 bushels to express more of its genetic potential. And we could talk about what do we need to do at. I mean we also have opportunity to affect this plant's stress level or the nutrient availability at critical points of influence like boot stage like flag leaf, which is when we're affecting the pollination of the potential berries that are out there. And then a grain fill is also a very cool critical point of influence where we can make a big difference in the test weight and also in the protein. And I working with one grower this year that had a full year on some of his fields but not on the others because of timing and you know how farming can go. But here's, here's what happened. He had a market where he was able to get almost double the price of his wheat and where he had the foliar application which cost him roughly $20. So fairly low cost foil feed made the difference between the wheat going for milling or for flour or being seed quality wheat and that was the difference of almost twice the price. So huge differences. When we keep this plant, when we care for this plant and do everything in our ability to create an environment where this plant can express a greater level of its genetic potential. We're also, both of those examples were organic wheat. We're also working with quite a number of conventional wheat growers and we're running some, some trials where we're actually working on how much can we reduce the nitrogen in conventional programs and so forth. I'm not going to go into details of that trial at this point. They're very looking very positive and, and we've got a couple more years to go to finalize that data. But what I will say is that if you do Nothing else, apply BioCode Gold. If you do nothing else, BioCode Gold is like a no brainer. We've just been seeing it over and over and over again where the seed had biocode Gold germination, seedling vigor. It's way better. I will also say with this slide that if you have, if you have any interest in being part of doing field scale farm scale trials, certainly let us know. We are always looking for the right farm partners to do trials. So before we go into the questions, I would like to just say that you may be asking, well, what's it cost and what's the return on investment for this? And I didn't want to put out any numbers because depending where you're located in the country, it could be very different because of logistics, etc. So if you send an email to infovancingequatic.com which is on the screen here with your contact information and the number of acres you'd like to start with, we'll get you a quote that is specific for your area and for your number of acres and what you're starting with within, within the next day. So send us an email and we will get started with that. So any questions, any thoughts? Got a question from Steven. Thank you Stephen. Is it better to have seed treatment with the biocoat gold or better to have naked seed? We so the mycorrhizal inoculant needs to be on the seed or below the seed and what we find is that it is more economical and more consistent if we can put it on the seed. So the treatment that we recommend the biocoop gold for is to put it on the seed and that way you know, you've got it right there and there's no question on, you know, the volume, etc. Another question, question from Albert. You are not talking about soil preparation. Any suggestions to improve results? Excellent question. So soil preparation is absolutely, I say absolutely important and it is important because it's a part of that environment and it's a part of the gas exchange, the microbes ability to, to live, to thrive, etc. My suggestion is don't till the soil more than you have to to take care of compaction layers. But if you have to till it, make sure that your tillage is accomplishing the purpose of whatever you're doing. Like if you have a hard pan at 9 inches deep, do that and don't, don't till more than you have to would be my thought on that. The other thought I would add to that though is soil preparation. And how you prepare the soil, especially if you're like planting into tilt soil, is that it will make a big difference how much carbon you have in the soil, your level of organic matter and also the level of soil structure. And we've seen that very consistently that when we feed the plants and support the biology, the soil structure improves dramatically and so soil preparation is a lot less difficult. David, I have a question here from Jonathan in the Q and A section in an organic setting, what other factors could be addressed to influence yield, soil minerals, chicken litter, et cetera. Also, do you normally recommend foliar feeding sometime in the spring and at what stage? Excellent. So I mentioned the four different points of critical influence for a week where you have the planting and your boot stage is very important. One of the things that's very important at this food stage is to have to not have excessive levels of nitrate and potassium because those are vegetative growth energy. And they will, they will reduce the amount of berries. Your plants going to be more vegetative and thinking less about producing seed. So, so having adequate levels of manganese, which can be very difficult in the oxidized soils and the herbicides that are frequently used can have a great impact on the level of manganese, which is one of the strongest reproductive minerals. It is the strongest reproductive energy. So at the boot stage, you want to make sure that you have high levels of reproductive energy to influence the number of flowers or potential kernels that will come out. One of the things that I've learned is that a common cause for the lower berries not pollinating is a low level of copper. And if you listen to John's recent, or read John's blog, I think it was where he talked about copper and the lignification and the cell strength of copper that plays a key role in that flower and that pollen sac being burst and the pollen being spread and that seed being pollinated. So that's another critical point where just making sure that you have. It's really a balance of nutrients that you really need. But the critical points are the boot stage. And if you don't have enough tillering going on, you can also have an impact by putting on an early application, like when you still have the ability to influence the number of tillers that your plant will make, because that determines the number of stalks and potential fruit heads or grain heads that you can have. So that your energy is on the reproductive side at boot stage. And then at flight leave is another very important stage. And we often do SAP analysis at the, at the early green up stage. We do one SAP analysis and then we do a new leaf or a flag leaf and an oat leaf at the flag leaf stage and then again at grain fill and grain fill would be the last one. We got a question From James in the Q and A section. If biocoat is the first thing to do, then what are the second and third things to do on wheat in order of importance? Great question. So in order of importance, if you do the biocoat goat first thing, the next thing in order of importance would be rejuvenate. Because rejuvenate will. Will stimulate, support and feed the biology that is in the biocode goal as well as any existing biology that you have in the soil. So stimulating the existing biology in the soil is very important. And then spectrum would be the next one and seashell would be the last one in order of priority. Excellent question. There's a question from IDO here. Do you apply any fertilization before seeding? If you're referring to like nitrogen or potassium, again, the answer must start with it depends. Because if your soil is a soil that's historically had a lot of that fertilization, then you may need to have a period of weaning off where you're building soil structure, where you're building a viable biological system in order to wean off. If your soil is addicted to the high eclipse burst that it gets from, from that fertilizer. On these specific samples examples I was talking about, there was no, there was no, there was no fertilizer applied before this seeding. All right, there's a question from Murray. Did he use accelerate on wheat these particulars example. There was not. There was no, there was no Excel. Well, if you're referring to the, to the foliar that was made that affected the test weight, it wasn't exactly. It wasn't the actual branded accelerate in it. And that's simply because of volume of product that we had. We just put seashield. There were some manganese in there and some sea stem. So in essence, Murray, yes, we did use accelerate for that wheat foliar that I referred to. Another question from Albert. Of all the soil preparation options, which one is your favorite or have you seen the best results with no tillage? For example, roller crimper? I will just say that it depends a lot on what tools that the farmer has available as well as labor resources play a big role into what works best. And my favorite is the one that works best for that grower. I personally like to see as little tillage as possible, especially after we have established a microbial system. And there again, you know, there are so many variables that we need to take in consideration when we make the choices. And what works for a neighbor might not be the right thing for you. This you know at this time, but the least amount of tillage is better because you're not disturbing all of the biology and all of the bacteria, the fungi in that soil and they have to re establish. But now if you have a compaction, maybe you have a lot of rain and because of wet soils, you harvest it at a less than ideal condition and your soil is really compacted and tight. In fact, I had one experience like that just a couple weeks ago. I was on a farm and they were in the middle of the drought and the field that they had tilled the most, they had some compaction that was caused because of harvest. They had a lot of rain. And so the farmer decided that he was going to till a portion of the field. He was just going to make sure that there is no compaction anywhere. And the tillage was like 8 to 10 inches deep and just pulverized. Which, you know, in most situations we'd say, no, that's terrible. But in this scenario, it's actually going through the drought fairly well. And the corn right next to it, same field, same planting date, same everything is burning up. And when we dug at those roots, the roots where the soil was very loose went down 1012 inches. And there was no flat spots on those root, root balls. So if you take back to one of the slides that John has showed, five foot of roots where there was no difference in soil structure, I think there may be an effect where if we do some tillage, we're better off tilling deeper and tilling more. If we do no till, then there is no difference in that soil structure. So on that one, on tillage, we have a lot to learn. Hi, Joel, good to have you. On conventional practices would use nitrogen to increase tillering. Can we influence tillering without nitrogen? And the answer is yes, absolutely. So the tillering has a lot to do with how well your roots are going out and being established. And so the atmospheric gas has 78% nitrogen. And the key thing is to not think of how much nitrogen we need to put out. There's not a nitrogen for nitrogen ratio or equation, but when we develop the environment, when we create an environment that those roots can express themselves fully and that the gas can exchange a lot of nitrogen is fixed from the atmosphere. A question from Lloyd. What is the recommended plants per acre? I'm not sure if we know for sure because there are many variables. There's examples of people who have grown very high yields with very low plant population. And what's happening is those plants will express themselves even more each Plant will be much more expressive and will have many more tillers. And so each seed will actually spread out more and there will be, you'll probably end up with close to the equivalent amount of a higher population as far as stalks per acre is concerned. So I don't have a key number to say this is the best plant per acre, because we're talking to an audience here across the US and what may work in Kansas may not be ideal for Texas, may not be ideal for Arizona. So I would say the plants per acre and the more active or the more vibrant your soil is, the better it's structured. The more organic matter you have, the more microbial activity you have, the lower you can go in plant population, especially of wheat, and still get an equal or higher yield because those plants are expressing themselves more fully. And your next question on when would the SAP analysis provide the best information? The best information is when you are able to act upon it. And the earlier in a plant's life, and this holds true for any plants, the earlier in the plant's life that you're able to correct an environmental condition or anything that's negatively impacting the plant's ability to express its, its potential, the better it is. When you have six inches of growth in the spring and what that allows you to see, even though you don't have the young leaf oat leaf ratio to compare mobile elements, you're able to see if you're starting off with excessive levels of nitrate, say, or high potassium or, or not enough manganese or not enough calcium. And all those things are going to have a big impact on the disease susceptibility as well as the number of kernels the plant is going to set on and on and on. And at that stage, you're able to address it very quickly. So that stage and then also the flag leaf stage would be the two that I would consider the most important. Good question. Matt. Welcome to the call here. You're asking what would you do if you cannot put liquid in the furrow? Would you alter the recipe in any way and would you recommend spray nozzles or streaming it on? Excellent question. What I would do in that situation if I were the grower, I would set it up to put it in the furrow because that is where you can be sure that it's right with the seed, right where you're going to get your maximum response. If you're not able to do that, the next best option would be to spray it on the soil right ahead of the drill and plant right into that and that in fact, if you. If we go back to the image with the roots on the right, that looked really good and the ones on the left that was actually sprayed on ahead of the drill. So it does work. Absolutely does work in consistent results. When you can put it in furrow. And would I alter the recipe in any way? The only thing I would alter would be to potentially increase the rejuvenate to six quarts. Other than that, I don't think you need to. You would need to change anything to have the same response. One is the best calcium application on wheat. So the best timing for calcium application, if your soil is very low in available calcium and you know that going into the season, the best timing would be to apply a gypsum or a lime, make soil corrections of calcium pre plant. And then the greatest need for calcium is going to be at the cell division stage, which is, and we often talk about cell division stage, which is, you know, right after pollination. And that's important. So at flag leaf or just post pollination, an adequate amount of calcium is very important. Whether that means you need to apply it or not. I would look at SAP analysis to determine that. The other thing to consider is that cell division occurs at all times that your plant is growing. So it's very important to have sufficient levels of calcium at all times. And therefore, if you know that you really have low calcium, say early in the stage, like early when you do your first SAP sample, I would definitely address the calcium because a calcium application is going to affect how your sugars are moved throughout that plant. Question from Leslie. How important are available levels of soil trace elements such as copper, zinc, boron, cobalt to improve plant heterogeneous fungal attack? Very, very important. And for trace elements for your micronutrients, copper, zinc, boron, cobalt, manganese, I would put in there as well. And iron. Actually, manganese and iron would probably be on the top of the list. What I found is in that in most soils that have any amount of clay, there is a lot of those micronutrients out there and they just need to be available through microbial digestion. And so very seldom do I recommend to put out any applications of minerals sample like a sample and the trace minerals are low. I would not put out a micronutrient application. I will put out microbial or recommend microbial or micronutrient applications like inferral. Let's say I know that my iron in my soil is very, very deficient. If you put a chelated iron product in with the starter, which is what I would do. I would add zinc right in the furrow. If I know that there's that. I always have problems with these micronutrients early on. But then when you talk about grain fill, things like copper, zinc and manganese are very, very important for grain fill because the auxin production switches from the new growth and from the to the seed. So oxygens being produced in the seed determine how much of the sugar is moved into the seed. And therefore zinc and manganese especially, and all of the metalloids are important, but especially zinc and manganese are important for the synthesis of that auxin, which then determines how much of the carbohydrates are going to move into the soil, into the grain. Thank you all for being on. And I will just close by saying you can affect the environment, as in the way that John classifies or defines environment is that environment is climate, which is mediated by nutrition or plant health. So when we think about environment, we often think about sun, rain, and all of those things that we don't have control about. But what I really believe is true is that the environment, the climactic environmental components can very much be mediated or the plant is much more able to withstand drought or floods or high temperatures or cold temperatures. And we've seen all of those. When it has a higher level of nutrition, when it has a better microbial interaction, all of these things affect how the plant will be able to deal with climactic variations. And I will say, any seeds that you plant, we're focusing and talking about wheat, but it holds true for cover crops. Many of you are probably thinking about COVID crops. Don't miss the opportunity to very economically put on biocode Gold and get some biology out there. Like a grower in Iowa told me last year, he was like, I can't believe what I'm seeing where I put the biocode Gold. That is one product that needs to go on every acre, everywhere. Biocode Gold makes a huge difference. So create an environment that allows our plants to maximize their genetic potential and let's see if we're able to break the world record. It was good having this conversation with all of you. Thank you for joining us and I wish you a wonderful day and the rest of the week.