Increasing Biological Populations with Dr. Robert Kremer

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 EcoAgriculture 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 practical application of regenerative agriculture ecosystems, how to regenerate soil health, crop health and quality, and increase overall farm profitability. Our goal is to give you clear and easy to understand information and actionable information that you can actually implement on your operation. In this episode, I'm very excited to welcome Bob Kramer to the podcast. Robert has a lifetime of very rich experience in the agricultural space, working both for the USDA and for the University of Missouri in a variety of different areas related to plant sciences and soil microbiology. Looking at the interactions of soil microbiology and weeds, weed seeds, weed germination and a whole range of different topics that tie into looking at soil health and developing suppressive soils. So Robert, welcome to the podcast. We're very honored to have you.

Thank you, John. It's good to be here.

So, Robert, you've done a lot of very interesting work. What are some of your most memorable moments that led you to where you are today and some of the things that you worked on?

Oh, well, it's been several years to culminate to where I'm at today, I guess. But I think probably the first challenge was with the appointment with the USDA Agricultural Research Service when I was asked to look at possibilities of decomposing weed seeds in soil using microbiological approaches that really no one had really looked at doing before. Because at the time that I came into the agency in the early 80s, it was pretty much everything was chemical based as far as weed management and actually any sort of pest management. And so to have a challenge like that was pretty unique at the time. And really looking for native microorganisms that could essentially rot seeds and soil was a pretty challenging task. But that really kind of led things into really looking more at plant and soil microbial interactions and leading to natural ways of trying to control weeds using biological control approaches. And, and that, that was kind of started the way into looking at, well, you know, what, what do pesticides do when, when they're in the, in the management system. And that eventually led to my interest in soil quality, which was the big buzzword at the time that evolved into soil health. And you know, with soil health, folks are looking at management assessment approaches. And at the time the, we really got into it, that's when the genetically modified crop issue came into, into vogue or into wide practice. And then on top of that you add the whole roundup or glyphosate issue. And certainly no one was really looking at that as that being a factor that that was affecting soil health. And so, you know, we kind of diverged and look looked into that for a while as well. So, you know, I'd say I probably hit about a half a dozen highlights over the, over the career that I've had. And it always seemed like you turned the corner going to something else. And it was a very interesting challenge.

You've mentioned a number of very intriguing pieces that I want to follow up on, but let's perhaps begin at the beginning. When you described your early work in seeking to develop microbiological control of weed seeds and weed germination. Did you have any success in developing biological controls? And is there any, are There any tools available for farmers to use today?

Well, I would say that a lot of the work that we started, a lot of the research that we started eventually was served as a pattern for others to take that up and pursue that kind of development. You know, we had some. My main task was to try to look at controlling these weeds in annual row cropping situations. And it was almost, almost impossible because especially in, if you want to call it conventional or modern type input based agro ecosystems, so many weed seeds had been built up over the years, plus the fact that they were so diverse. You know, you had a number of weed seeds in the field that, you know, we, we were very, we run although we, we found some bacteria and fungi that could affect maybe two or three weed species. You know, we would still have in some situations seven or eight weed species in the field that, that were, that would still be problematic. So it, it came to the point that in a, in a midwestern situation with corn and soybeans, it was almost impossible to come up with something that was effective biologically within the framework that the practices that were in place. And you know, I'm talking about a short rotation of corn and soybean, no cover crops to build up the microbial diversity and continuous chemical application. So. But I will say that our work did kind of set the stage for others in other parts of the country that have developed these types of organisms. For instance, in the Pacific Northwest where cereal crops are the dominant production system and where there's only one or two weeds in the system, such as downy brome or jointed goat grass, they used this kind of approach. And there is some organisms available today that are under development for commercial application and those types of systems where it would work.

That is fascinating. I was going to ask you about other types of ecosystems where this be appropriate. Has there. Are you aware of any development work that has been done that would be relevant for fruit and vegetable production systems or where you have agriculture ecosystems that do have a longer crop rotation incorporating cover crops and so forth. Has there been any work done on those areas?

Well, there's been a little bit. You know, some of the, there's been some Canadian work, the Canadian Agri Food Canada has, has really supported this type of approach. And for instance, there was a specific pathogen they developed for a particular weed in horticultural crops such as strawberries. And that was particularly effective. It was against a, I think it was an annual weed, it was a mallow weed, it was in the cotton family and there are a few other examples. But they're really, you know, the, the effort that has put into this relative to the number of products that are.

Available.

Is very lopsided. I would say there's not that much out there and I would say that one of the problems is for development of such a product to go to market. There's a lot of companies out there that don't want to take that risk. Especially if the crop is not a high value, that's not going to bring a lot of profit back to them. That's always been an obstacle as well.

One of the pieces that you mentioned was the impact of pesticides on biological processes in the soil. Could you elaborate a little bit on what you've observed? The impact of various pesticides?

To be sure it's been somewhat variable. What we're finding is some pesticides will be, let's say detrimental or toxic to just a group of, of microorganisms in the overall soil community. And the same ones may stimulate other components of the microbial community. And then you would end up with this imbalance of the various microorganisms that are in the soil. Now a very good example of this was in the early late 70s, early 80s we had a lot of soil applied herbicides, fungicides and insecticides. And these were going on at very high rates. You know, some of them, such as you might recall Furadan as one of the insecticides and EPTC or Sutan herbicides, you know, they went on pounds per acre and what. And the other interesting issue with those were that they, their chemical structure had a, had a group in there that was very similar to what you find in proteins. The peptide bond, or they call it the carbamate bond. And these really stimulate, stimulated a lot of microorganisms that were able to use proteins. They just adapted and used those for metabolism. And the first thing you know, we had a lot of pesticide failures due to that. And then that's when we evolved into more post emergence type herbicides that everyone thought well that's going to take care of that issue. And well, and then, you know what happened after that. We got a lot of, we begin getting a lot of herbicide resistant weeds. And this was even before we had the Roundup, the roundup resistant weeds. You know, we had a lot of ALS inhibitor resistance and even atrazine resistance in the weeds. What was also happening at that same time was that with continuous application of these, of these same herbicides that was causing weed resistance, it was also altering the soil microbial community at the same time because you Know, what we, what we often forget, let's say, like in the case of glyphosate, is that even though we're applying it to take out all weeds in a genetically modified crop that is, that is tolerant to glyphosate, you know, only about 5% of what's applied is being. Is being taken up by the weed. You know, we have all this. The rest of it is taken up by the resistant plant, the resistant crop, and the other. And the remaining proportion is reaching the soil in some means or another. You add to that fact that being a systemic herbicide, that compound is released throughout the plant and it goes to the growing points, which includes the roots. So you have a lot of that compound being released into the soil, into the rhinosphere, where you have the most active and dominant communities of microorganisms, because that's where all the nutrients are being released by plants, and that's where you find most of your microorganisms. So, you know, we get, we get glyphosate in there. And I mean, I have to admit, over the last 20 years, that's the one herbicide I've worked with most. And, and we've documented that glyphosate will affect or is active in the root zone of genetically modified crops, just like it is in the root zones of weeds. It's released, it causes a lot of leakage of nutrients, the sugars, carbohydrates, and amino acids out of the roots. And this stimulates a certain segment of the community, in this case, a lot of Fusarium fungi and some of the other detrimental bacteria like agrobacterium and those that oxidize manganese, that makes it unavailable to the plant. So often the resistant plant, or the resistant croplets, say it's soybean or corn, will not be infected by these organisms because they're able to resist it. But, but they are setting up a shift in the microbes in the soil that can be detrimental to other plants, it can be detrimental to other microorganisms. And now what we're finding is that even though we've been told that glyphosate dissipates and is neutralized and is degraded, we're finding residual glyphosate in the soil now. And now that's where we're at. Now we don't know exactly what that residual glyphosate at whatever concentrations they are after the crop is gone, what they're doing to the whole soil ecosystem.

So this is fascinating. You've mentioned A number of interesting pieces. Let's perhaps begin with your last point of residual glyphosate. How long do you find that glyphosate residues are remaining in the soil profile after application?

Well, we really started looking at this in a, well, not even a systematic matter, but at least in a cursory MANNER beginning in 2014. And we were finding, and we were looking in field plots at the time because one of the projects was, can we come up with some treatment that might be able to overcome the effects of glyphosate on the soil function or microbial activity and function? So we had these soils analyzed, and half the plots had not received glyphosate for at least a year, and the other half had received glyphosate during the growing season. When we had that analyzed, we found that plots that had gone a year without roundup application, some of those plots had as high residual glyphosate as the plots that received glyphosate in the current year. So that, you know, that was amazing to us because that did show us we are seeing the carryover of the glyphosate. And yeah, and the other interesting thing was, is that it was, it was random. You know, we had, you know, how a field plot design is set up in a, in a very structured arrangement. You know, maybe one plot that received glyphosate might be over a thousand parts per billion, and then another pot that received the same treatment may only be at 350. So, you know, there's a lot of factors going on here that affect persistence of this particular active ingredient. And if I could just add one more thing. So that was the first year where we only detected glyphosate alone. In the last two years, we've been using a different lab that is able to separate glyphosate from its major breakdown product, which is amino methylphosphonic acid. That's the AMPA or AMPA that we talk a lot about. And that metabolite can be just as toxic as glyphosate itself. So we have those two compounds analyzed, the glyphosate and the AMPA. We find about anywhere from 10 to 50 times more AMPA than glyphosate, which, and you know, what that's, what that indicates is that glyphosate can be degraded by the microbes to one by one step. But then when it gets to ampa, the enzymes to further break that down is not there within that microbial community. And thus, you know, it's either they've been wiped out due to intensive farming or other herbicides or glyphosate itself. But it's, it's pretty interesting. And we're finding the AMPA to be carried over by more than a year or two as well.

What are the implications of high concentrations of AMPA in the soil profile? Do they have a similar effect on the soil biology as what you described for glyphosate?

Oh, yes, yeah. It's just, it has a very similar effect because you're the active group on, on in glyphosate and in AMPA is the same, it's that phosphonate group. So, you know, as far as, you know, you listen to Dr. Huber and them talk about chelation of micronutrients by glyphosate, well, AMPA will do the same thing because it has not been degraded to the point where it loses that characteristic. So it can, you know, it can sorb the soil, it can exchange with phosphorus in the soil, just like glyphosate.

So I have kind of two related questions. One, back at the beginning when we first started this conversation, you mentioned that you had done some work looking at soil quality and looking at soil health. So I have a question around that, which is, what defines soil quality? What defines soil health? How do you know that you have a healthy soil? And then the follow up question to that is based on the pieces that we've just been talking about around clay fist and ampa. What are the long term impacts of soil quality by these compounds?

Oh, okay. Yeah, so I'll go with the term soil health. Soil health is a little more holistic and it really emphasizes soil, soil biological function as well as the microbial component. Soil quality was originally proposed mainly to see how well your management is in terms of providing an acceptable agronomic production, you see, so. And they didn't really emphasize the environmental effects as much. So anyway, that might be a picky point, but I'll just go with soil health. So, you know, what makes a soil healthy is of course you have to look at in the context of, of similar soils within a given landscape. And there are several indicators that will suggest good soil health, but the two main ones is soil organic matter or soil organic carbon and the microbial diversity. Certainly we're getting to the point where we can quantify differences in soil health based on what I would call soil organic carbon quality, which is a fairly high proportion of the overall soil organic carbon or soil organic matter is in a pool called labile carbon or active carbon. And that's important because that is the portion of carbon that is, that supports the microbial community in the soil. Plus it can serve as a source of substrates or energy for growing plants as well as the activity of the microorganisms that are involved in all the nutrient cycling and plant growth protection. So you know, having a, having a soil with, with, with a good proportion of labile carbon is real important. Now I can't tell you, you know, what the proportion should be. You know, maybe it's 25 or upwards of 50%. That just kind of depends on, on the quality of organic matter that has been returned to the soil over the years. Gear certainly in an ecologically based farming system where you have a lot of diverse plant material and maybe compost additions and that active carbon is going to be quite a bit high and the quality is going to be as high as well. But then connected with that is this microbial diversity that primarily means that you have a diversity in the types of fungi and the types of bacteria as well as a good component of things like protozoa that, that kind of complete the food web and feeding on these fungone bacterial communities to kind of keep them in balance. But also recycles nitrogen, phosphorus through their decomposition of microbial biomass. Plus the diversity of these, let's say the bacteria is important because you need several different species in order to accomplish a function. In other words, an example would be if we have corn stover on the surface of the soil or just into the surface. One microorganism cannot break that vegetative material down to mineralize the carbon and nitrogen out of it and form organic matter. You have to have a successional group of microorganisms. Often we say they're consortia that work together to break all this material down and to get the beneficial effects out of that. Oftentimes we see this in soils that I would say are not as healthy soils that have been planted to, let's say genetically modified corn, for example, modified for, with, with Bt for Bt production and, and maybe Roundup Ready or glyphosate resistance. Sometimes we find corn stocks in these fields for, you know, three or four years after the, after the crop was, was harvested. And these things are just laying on the ground and not being decomposed. And I believe what's happening is that we have really caused an imbalance in the overall soil microbial community that just can't get the decomposition job done. So there are other things you can check with for soil health assessments. Such as rate of respiration or carbon dioxide evolution out of the soil, which indicates good microbial activity and enzyme activity and all that. And then with biological indicators, there should be some physical and chemical indicators as well. And these are fairly obvious things that we've already known about through soil testing, such as the amount of available phosphorus and ph. And then on the other hand, the bulk density, the aggregate stability, or the proportion of aggregates in the soil. We take all those things together, and I don't want to get into the technicality of it, but we are coming to the point where we can model all these indicators, that you can put these into a model and come up with a soil health index. And that's what's going to be important when we begin looking at, you know, comparing management systems, as well as using that information to come up to come up with guidelines that farmers can use to actually improve their management, to improve soil health. And I think that's where that's the most lacking piece of information right now, is that there's not a whole lot of guidelines out there for the guy who's out in the field. And, you know, we can, we can research all this as much as we want, but it's not going to do any good until we have something that is usable by the farmer.

So if I'm a farmer today, how would you advise me to begin measuring some of these pieces? Are there any lab reports or any laboratories that are doing this type of analysis at the moment that could. That I could begin establishing a baseline of where my soils are at the moment?

Yeah, that's right. There are a few around the country that will do this. Both commercial and extension type lab is. There's a lab out in Nebraska called LARS Lab. They do this kind of thing and they include a profile of your soil microbial communities. It tells you what the different main components are there and gives you an idea of also how much microbial biomass you have. And there's. Cornell University has a soil health lab that does similar things, and there's another one out east, and we have a soil Health Assessment center here at the University of Missouri. It's still kind of in the formative stages. It does real well with chemical analysis, and it does do one analysis for microbial diversity. So, you know, one can send soil samples to any of those labs and some have better reports on your results or interpretation than others. And that would be a good way to get started on assessing your soil health. Also, some states have incentives for farmers to do this. I know the natural Resource and Conservation Service here in Missouri will subsidize some of the testing for farmers to have this done because they have a program, I think NRCS nationwide has a soil health program where they're trying to improve soil health and maintain it, and they're trying to get farmers to get behind this and they are paying them to do that kind of assessment.

Coming back to the conversation around glyphosate and ampa, you've described a little bit what soil health means, and perhaps we have time to later explore the labile carbon, soluble carbon component or active carbon component. But I'd like to come back to the one question I asked, which was how does glyphosate and the accumulation of glyphosate and AMPA over extended periods impact the overall soil health?

Well, I can give you a little bit of information that at least we can see that there's some indirect effect of continuous use of glyphosate on soil health because we usually will measure a lot of biological parameters when we set up assessments such as this. We see there's some effects on some of the beneficial bacteria that are involved in plant growth promotion, such as producing plant growth regulators that stimulate root growth and other beneficial bacteria that will produce pathogen suppressive compounds. And what we're noticing is that glyphosate tends to suppress those beneficial groups of bacteria. So that has an effect on subsequent plant growth as well as. But we feel that there's a problem there. I briefly mentioned the effect on some of these microorganisms that are known to cause certain micronutrients to be immobilized and therefore not available for plant uptake. And one of these is manganese. And manganese, of course, is very important for activity of many enzymes that are involved in, in many of our metabolic pathways. And if that's tied up, you may have poor photosynthesis, you may have a poor amino acid formation because you don't have enough that micronutrient to satisfy the needs of the enzyme. So we have found, for example, the fusarium that will colonize the roots of plants that are treated with glyphosate. They are manganese oxidizers, so they immobilize manganese. If they're on the root system, they're not going to be taken up. And if they are built up in the soil, whether there is a genetically modified crop there or not, they're going to remain in the soil and they're going to continue to immobilize manganese. And so if you don't have a lot of available manganese that's going to affect the overall soil health as well. You get into a lot of other things, things such as glyphosate may exchange with phosphorus in the soil and then you have problems with either excess phosphorus or phosphorus being, if it's not being taken up by the plants, it can be an environmental problem. So you know, we mentioned the probability of effect of the quality of the organic matter because we're using basically just two crops that are source of the organic residues being returned to the soil. Certainly if, if we don't have the microbes there to decompose them or if there's a, there's not enough, there's not a diverse enough quantity of organic substances to help build up soil organic matter that will affect soil health as well. Because like, like I mentioned before, organic matter is one of the key indicators for good soil health.

In our experience working with many different farms, I it, I would say just off the top of my head that greater than 90% of the farms that we work with experience severe manganese deficiencies. And I have wondered about the long term effects. When you have glyphosate accumulation, you have this shift in the fuserium population and you have oxidizing organisms that are immobilizing manganese. What are the, what are the long term implications of that manganese immobility in the soil profile? How long does it take before that manganese might be released again and converted back into a form that the plants can actually utilize?

Yes, that is a concern. And that's, you know, I think there's several issues here. You know, you have the effect on the shift in the balance of the microbial diversity is, and if that's shifted towards a lot of manganese oxidizers that is causing manganese not to be available. You know, I think over time if one were to offer the management to include, let's say cover crops or at least different crops within the rotations and once you do that, you can stimulate other types of microorganisms that will help free that manganese or at least compete with those oxidizers to reduce their impact on that. So that would be, that would be one possibility. The other. And you know how long that will take? It's hard to say. It may take a couple of seasons or maybe less. That's something that really needs to be looked into. The other issue is something that we mentioned previously is that how much manganese can be immobilized or chelated by the residual glyphosate and residual ampa. That I think is a very serious issue, especially if we are in soils where the texture is such or the level of phosphorus in the soil is low, that you don't have any competition with the glyphosate and ampa. They will obviously chelate or immobilize manganese as well. Now, I don't think, you know, I don't think we have any real good information on how long that that can happen or what the extent that situation is as far as tying up manganese over the long term. But I think, you know, taking all that together, you know, with the shift in the microbes, the residual glyphosate and the AMPA and the basically continuous corn soybean rotation, if that continues, you know, the manganese problem may persist.

When you speak of growing crops in or bringing crops into a rotation to help reduce some of that manganese and increase its availability, what are some crops that are really effective at having a reducing effect and shifting the biology and the availability of manganese in the soil profile?

Well, I don't have any very specific ones, but certainly when you have a diversity of, let's say, cover crops in a mix, there will be some that will either support different microbial communities that are able to, let's say, mobilize these micronutrients, others that can actually plants that can mobilize the nutrients themselves. You know, the kind of a common example is the use of, let's say buckwheat that can, or some of the Brassica crops that can mobilize phosphorus or neutralize nitrate, those types of things. And then let's say you bring in something like sorghum into the rotations, grain sorghum or sweet sorghum, anything in that sorghum family. They, from my experience, they have a keen ability to host a lot of mycorrhizal fungi in the root system. Then of course, mycorrhizae are, are very adept at mobilizing many nutrients, not just phosphorus. And they, they're, they would be, you know, if you could break, put in a crop like that or, or other crops that, that can host mycorrhizae, that would be a very good way of maybe getting around the manganese problem and improving root growth as well as improving the overall diversity of microbial community.

One of the pieces you mentioned earlier was the impact of genetically modified plants themselves. Outside of glyphosate and AMPA, how do GMOs impact the soil's microbial community?

Well, there's, you know, there's not a lot of information, you know, we know that we found with soybean, for example, you have what happens during genetic modification. You can have some. What's called pleiotrophic effects, which are, in other words, indirect effects due to the genetic modification that is additional to the intended effect. In other words, in addition to the effect of making the plant resistant to glyphosate. And so there's things that can happen, and we've noticed in the root system with some of the early genetically modified soybean varieties anyway, that even without being treated with glyphosate, the roots seem to release a lot more quantities of carbohydrates or soluble carbon and amino acids. And so this is problematic because what that does, it attracts a lot of microbes that readily use this material, and many of those can be potential pathogens. So you have a potential problem with not only some root pathology, but also it's possible to build up these segments of the microbial population that can be covert, can be carried over from year to year. Another situation where we find these effects we noticed in corn, but not all corn varieties, but in many varieties that had been genetically modified to be resistant to insects using the BT gene, there would be a side effect where some of the corn stalks would have a lot more lignin in it than others. Lignin is very difficult to decompose. You know, that's one of the reasons why sometimes we see a lot of that residue being carried over for two or three years in the field, because so much lignin, it can't be decomposed very fast. And I think there. There are other situations that. That can. That can occur. I mean, there's. There's some. There may be some modification that we found. I had a Brazilian student there that looked at some of the nutrient composition, some of the. The omega fatty acid ratios were changed in soybean due. Due to the genetic modification and that kind of thing. Now, I can't say for sure if that has changed with some of the more recent cultivars, because I haven't really been looking at that too closely over the last few years. But as you know, in our commodity agriculture, these varieties change almost from year to year. And some of the varieties that we were using, let's say, 15 years ago, are not available anymore. So that's always another problem. You just don't know whether the effects of these newer varieties are any better or if they're any worse unless somebody has a research program that's addressing that.

Your first point is very intriguing though. In essence, what you're describing is that these crops and these plants may have the capacity to actually develop a disease enhancing soil profile, which is interesting when you consider the long term implications.

Right? Yeah, I mean, that was a complete unexpected result that we had. And, and we were, you know, we were comparing this to some of the old non GMO varieties like Williams 82 or Maverick and these kinds of things and they, you know, they had much lower soluble carbon and amino acid release. So it was, it was quite interesting to say the least.

What do you believe to be true about modern agriculture that many other people don't believe to be true?

Oh, well, it's, you know. Well, there are a lot of, lot of issues. You know, we can kind of go back to this whole organic matter issue. We're seeing a lot of soils under modern agriculture and we say that, you know, we talked about the intensive use of chemical inputs and the GM crops and all that. You know, we're seeing a depletion of soil organic matter content in these fields. I've been tracking some fields for 30 years or better and in soils at one time had, let's say 3%. Organic matter are now down to almost 1%. And I think a lot of folks will not kind of dismiss that like it isn't happening. But when you use intensive, let's say nitrogen inputs like anhydrous ammonia and all that, and you're not putting in more organic residues, whether it's from the crop or with COVID crops or organic amendments like manures and compost, that nitrogen has to be used. If it's not all used by the crop, the microbes are going to use it and they are going to use whatever carbons available in the soil. And I'm certain that's where a lot of that depletion in the organic matter is happening. And you know, there are some real good studies over at the University of Illinois that have shown this and even they were very much criticized by that people didn't want to believe it. And of course a lot of it, you know, it comes down to money. It comes down to what the fertilizer companies are trying to make money at. That if you tell them that some of their product is ruining soil, some of the soil properties, that's not going to make them very happy.

This idea of the soluble carbon component and the importance of the soluble carbon component has come up in conversation a number of times recently. And you've just expressed how we are losing that. How can we regenerate that in the soil profile.

Well, you know, again, it all goes back to having, having plants. And I think I've seen this on your website. You know, having, having a diversity of plants on the soil and having living roots in the soil for as long during the year as possible. You know, when you can do that and as, you know, harvest as much carbon dioxide and use the sunlight to produce, you know, the carbohydrates in the plant. And if you have a, if you have a good profile that is, that is inhabited by my roots, you will get that soluble or labile carbon back. And the reason that is is because most many plants, well, I should say all plants estimated depending on the plant, anywhere from 20 to maybe 50% of the carbon that is fixed through photosynthesis will be released through roots by the plant. And it's not because the plant is, is compromised like, like with a disease or anything. It just, it naturally does that. And that carbon, you know, supports, you know, the microbial communities in the soil. So, you know, I think something just as simple as, as, you know, mixing up that rotation. It's too bad that we don't grow as much wheat in the Midwest like we used to. That would be an excellent way of doing that. You know, you follow corn or soybeans with wheat. You have wheat going into the winter, you can frost seed clovers or lespedeza or whatever in with the wheat in the next spring, and you have a nice cover crop going into, going into the next planting season. What better way to really get your soil revitalized than doing something like that?

Certainly the farmers that we have observed who are developing strong cover crop systems, such as Gabe Brown and Dave Brandt and others, are regenerating their soil carbon and their soil organic matter very rapidly and producing some very nice crop results as well. So there's a lot of potential.

Yeah, exactly.

What, what is a book or resource that you recommend most often to growers to learn more information about any of these various systems that we've talked about?

Well, you know, there, there are, there are some around that that are useful and are not that technical. You know, the one on teaming with microbes is, is good. Yes, that one, I think is a good overview of what's going on in the soil and describes what these different organisms are. I know he's got one called teaming with fungi, but I don't know if that's much more informative than just the first one that he wrote on teaming with microbes. Another one that I found that is very interesting is one Called mycorrhizal Planet. Are you familiar with that one? I'm not familiar with that one. Pardon me.

That is a new one for me.

Yeah, yeah, it's. Well, you can get it from, from acres and, and it is, it's, it's really good. If you wanted to focus on the mycorrhizae and what they are, what they do and how to, how to have those established in the soil, I think that's about as good as a, let's say a. At the high school level, I'd say, you know, as far as understanding what's going on, I think it's, that's a good one to have and it's reasonably priced. So those are two that, you know, with the standpoint of having a microbial emphasis is good. And then there are some others about, oh, what does it save our soil? Or something like that that would be good from a soil standpoint. I just don't have those titles at hand right now. But certainly I could provide you a list of what, what I have later.

I would appreciate that. And I will attach that list to the episode.

Okay.

What is, what is the question you wish I would have asked?

Yeah, that's a good one. Well, I'm sure this, this is something that I'm sure you have encountered. I have also. One of the things that I, that I didn't mention, the many projects that I've had over the years is that I get asked to evaluate a lot of biological products. And now I'm, you know, I don't know if you, a lot of the folks that you work with have looked into these kinds of things, but some of those are very interesting and some of them, you know, I would not recommend at all. So, you know, that kind of question I thought maybe would come up.

So what of these various biological products? What are some of the ideas or the technologies that you're really excited about?

Okay, well, there are, there are some that I think. Okay, I think we got maybe, maybe back up a minute. There are a lot of different classifications of biological products and I don't think any, anybody has really settled on anything that is, you know, set in stone, so to speak, at this point. But, but there are things like, like biostimulants that help, that help with the microbial community activity as well as the plant, especially in terms of root growth and plant growth regulation. There are things that are called probiotic type biological products and these have the actual living organisms in them and they are supposed to be selected that help promote growth of plants and maybe help some of the soil functions such as cycling nitrogen and phosphorus and these kinds of things. Some claim to have nitrogen fixing bacteria in them, but, but I haven't had much luck in showing that that actually happens. And then there's another product, fast products known as prebiotics, and there are quite a few of these out there. What a prebiotic is, is a solution or a product that is made of the metabolites or the biochemical products of microorganisms, but do not contain living microorganisms. So you have that kind of thing. And they're supposed to, again, they not only stimulate growth of the plant because I've seen the chromatographic spectrum of one product and it shows there could be 300 different compounds of this thing. They don't even know what they all are or what they all do. But they do know that some of them stimulate plant growth. Some of them are plant growth regulators like cytokinin and gibberellins and all that. And some of them stimulate the microbes in the soil. So here's the issue with all this, is that most of these products are, you know, their, their effect or their efficacy is primarily based on, let's say, testimonials. You know, they haven't really been tested that by, you know, by unbiased parties, let's say. And some, you know then, but there are a few out there that have been tested like we've tested some and some have been tested by other either institutions or companies to show some effect. So I guess what I'm saying is that those that I've looked at that work really well, I'm impressed with some of them have these specific plant growth regulators that, that really help with root growth, it helps with plant vigor. And we, we find that they will also stimulate certain microbial groups in the, in the root zones or the rhizospheres of these, of these crops. And, and of course, here, here's the, here's the other caveat to all this. A lot of these companies will approach us and say they want to test their chemical to see if they can offset the effects of glyphosate, because they know there might be an angle there that might make their product a little more valuable to the farmer. Because if they can say, well, glyphosate has these detrimental effects that have these side effects, but our product can counteract that, well, that makes that product even more valuable. So in some cases we've been able to show that some of these products we tested for more than two or three or four years, we consistently see that there is an offset. But the biggest issue I've had is that some of these products will do all that will even actually help the soil health indicators and help plant growth. But then at the end of the day, at the end of the season, we don't see that much increase in yield. And I think that's the bottom line with these products is that if you're going to sell or buy these, you want to make, you want to have enough of a yield increase that will pay for the product. So. And you know, a few years ago when we had higher prices for corn, there are a lot of people using these things right now, not so much. But I do believe that some out there that are worth, you know, worth the money because I've seen how they work and I think that they not only help the current crop, the crop, but I think they help offset some of the detrimental effects that has happened to the overall soil community due to some of the modern agricultural techniques that we're using.

We use these various. We use a number of different biostimulants and probiotics, microbial inoculants in the crop programs that we put together. And as we have tested many different products from different companies over the years, one of the biggest challenges that we have observed is, and of course we're looking at things on a field scale and not always that they're not usually replicated to trials. One of the challenges that we've observed is the inconsistency of results where we might have a product that produces extraordinary results, perhaps let's say 30 or 40% of the time. So it works really well sometimes, but it doesn't work consistently. And it's, that's been a very interesting observation because it happens and has happened, has occurred with quite a number of products which has led me to ask a question or to wonder whether there is also an environmental component of what is happening in the soil profile, what's happening in that field and do we really have the right conditions where we're giving an inoculant or a probiotic the opportunity for success?

No, I think you're right onto something there, John, because that's what I try to indicate to the, to the manufacturers when, when we test, when we test these products here. Because, you know, we're seeing the same, the same deal. That's why I, I would, I wouldn't make any conclusions on what we've seen on, on just one year data. You know, we got to have at Least two or three years. And even, even at that sometimes we do have this inconsistency and seeing positive yields. And, and the very, very thing that you mentioned about the other factors that enter into this as far as the performance of these products, that point is well taken. And I say that because we're located in a part of the state that doesn't have the best soils for producing corn and soybeans. I mean, it has this clay pan and conditions have to be just perfect in order to get a very good acceptable harvest from year to year. So I think we're, we're testing some of these products under conditions from the standpoint of soils that that is, that is pretty rigorous. And you know, if we take this and do it say in some of the mollusdals or you know, the high organic or more fertile soils, wouldn't say necessarily high organic, more fertile soils in the upper Midwest, we might see something completely different. So you know, I think, you know, these, these companies, I know that they are, they are not as flush as some of the big ag chemical companies, but they really want to show how these products perform. They need to be doing this, that on a, you know, in different regions of the country or even internationally in order to really show them how these products perform. Absolutely.

What is the one action that you would recommend that growers need to take?

Growers. From the standpoint of your growers under any situation or any system. Yeah. In general. Well, here's the deal. I think, you know, we look at this, some of the principles of sustainable agriculture. You know, one of them is we got to keep the soil covered. And that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to have cover crops on it, but we've got to have after harvest, there needs to be that soil needs to be covered. Because if it's bare or if there's not much covered with the residue, it is exposed to the elements. There's hardly any restoration of moisture in there. If it's bare, I think that is a key. And then of course, keeping living plants on that soil is even, is even better. Even better yet because we get that organic matter built up, it will absorb more soil, you won't have a lot of erosion and infiltration will be more regulated. And I think now. So I think those are, those are keys. I had to say one thing, producer. There is one thing that if we have a little time, one thing that we didn't mention, and these are things, this is a practice that we used to do know, let's say 50, 40 years ago was, was to integrate livestock in with the cropping system. You know, I believe that if we could run livestock again out on the fields and I know it's not going to happen, but, but maybe up for, for family farmers it can, and we can have livestock out there that helps process the residues or even graze cover crops and recycle some of the organic matter, stimulate the root growth by grazing. I think that that's a, that's a great practice that, that we have pretty, pretty much forgotten about.

That is. That's a very interesting comment, Robert, because that's come up in a number of conversations recently about the, the impact that livestock can have on rebuilding soil organic matter and kind of rebuilding the entire ecosystem to a much higher plateau, much higher state of health and overall vitality and performance. So it's, I guess the question that I would have for you is that there's been some discussion that perhaps the economics of beef production. If we were to look, if we were to manage our livestock and more specifically if we were to manage forages with the same level of intensity that we manage some of our other crops, the economics may actually be there to out compete and to outperform current commodity crops, particularly with commodity crop prices such as corn prices being where they are right now. So do you have any insights to offer on that? What are the economic implications of managing grazing very closely and very carefully compared to current commodity crops?

Oh yeah, that's a good question. I don't have a whole lot of insight into that. But you know, just knowing, you know, in isolated situations where, well, you know, your example of Gabe Brown is perfect for this because you know, they've got the system where they integrate their grazing herds into their forages that is then rotated eventually into row crops as I understand it. So you know, that the economics I think would be there the. And of course this is a bias I believe, you know, the more exposure you have for livestock that are. That are grazing that are, that are not confined, that meat quality is going to be so much better than what you find on from a feeding floor. I think if one would push the pencil on that, I believe you would find that the overall profits in a system that would very much outweigh the way we are doing commodity crops currently. To me, commodity crops are just, you know, it's just emphasized a little bit too much. You know, we, it's, it's for, it's for the commodity market for exports, for biofuels and all that. Very little of it goes to feed, although a lot of soybean meal go to feed. But, but for livestock feed. But, you know, we've really gotten away from what an aggregate, what an agro ecosystem should be. And I think when the family farmer or the smaller scale farmer had livestock integrated into the system, the profitability was there. It's just that it's been hijacked by industry. I mean, I think that's the bottom line. Now, if there were a way to kind of turn that corner and bring some of that back, I believe a lot of folks would be surprised how profitable that would be. But unfortunately, I can't give you, I can't give you any solid figures at this point.

That's okay. Robert, it's been a tremendous honor to have you here on the podcast and sharing your thoughts. Thank you very much. And we look forward to having you back at some point in the future. Thank you for sharing.

All right, John, it's been my pleasure and I've, I've enjoyed visiting with you and I hope that this information will be useful to your listeners.

Thank you.

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