Jesse Frost of Rough Draft Farmstead gives in-depth overview of no-till market gardening

Hi, friends. This is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. Welcome back. Or if you haven't heard it before, welcome here for the first time. And this podcast is where we talk about the agronomic science and the cultural management practices and the opportunities to regenerate plant health, soil health, and ultimately public health. This conversation I'm delighted to have as my guest Jesse Frost from the no Till Growers podcast. Jesse has done some fascinating work in looking at regenerative agriculture practices in the market gardening landscape. Jesse, I'm delighted to have you here. Thank you for joining me. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal story and context and the scope of the work that you're working on today, both in your farming life as well as in the work that you've been doing with the podcast and sharing all the content that you produce?

Absolutely, John, it's a pleasure to be here. Super excited to chat with you today. Uh, so my basic story is that I run a farm with my wife in central Kentucky. We are three quarters of an acre on a market garden. We just moved, so we're moving, we're getting the farm back up to three quarters of an acre, but that is our general production space. We've been farming since I started my first internship in 2010 on a small car farm in Southern Kentucky called Bug Tussle Farm. And this was a biodynamic. They are a biodynamic farm and they're really wonderful people. Just an amazing wealth of knowledge, these two. And Sharon Eric Smith. And we did a lot of different things on that farm. I learned about, you know, strategic tillage, proper tillage, you know, when to. When to time it to do the least amount of damage. A lot about COVID cropping. We did a lot of no till stuff with COVID crops. We. One of our best tomato crops was planted into a vetch and rye that we crimped down and then, and then mulched over top of then. The know, when my wife and I, I met my wife on that farm, she was one of the other interns. And when we broke off and decided to do our own farm, you know, we really wanted to keep diving into this idea of no tillage. And we came to a lot of different things, you know, through reading and. But there wasn't what we, what we kind of ultimately found, what, what would come up often is that we would find some. Something like the conservation agriculture approach of keep the soil planted as much as possible, keep it covered as much as possible, and disturb it as little as Possible. And then we would flip to the page that would tell you how to do that. And it was just like, you know, use cover crops. And it was kind of it like there wasn't a lot of detail on how to do that on a technical level. And we really longed for that. And we would, then we would read, you know, some of the smaller scale stuff like Ruth Stout and talking about, you know, using a lot of hay mulch or something like that. And we tried a bunch of different things and we couldn't find something that made sense for that 3/4 of an acre, an acre scale, because using that much hay mulch was quite, you know, labor intensive. And then, you know, using the COVID crops, we couldn't re. We didn't have like a big roller crimper and we just couldn't really figure out how to manage that side of it. So where, you know, the bigger scale, no till, which often as your listeners are going to know, you know, there's a lot of times talked about herbicide and those sorts of things or like the bigger scale organic, which we were, you know, we talk about roller crimping and that was, you know, crimp rye at the milk stage and that was kind of it. And then the smaller scale, they had lots of different techniques, a lot of permaculture stuff, a lot of, you know, lasagna gardening. But just that that scale, that sort of, you know, eighth of an acre all the way up to three or five acres was really missing for us. We just couldn't, we were struggling to find that information. And so a few years ago, I kind of, a little bit out of frustration and a little bit inspired by some of the stuff that had popped up. So Singing Frogs Farm and Brian o' Hara is another one. I was starting to see their stuff on YouTube and I heard a conversation with the late great Chris Blanchard with Singing Frogs Farms, a really great episode, talking about their method of no till. And then Charles Dowding a little later in Richard Perkins, some of these people that were using like deep layers of compost. And that really spoke to me this idea of having of using compost on that level to, to, you know, that was something I could seed into, which is a problem with mulches. And that was something that I could conceivably get a lot of here in Kentucky because we're in horse country. And so we started to, we just had this idea of starting to call for farmers and ask them how they did it. And this was, you know, inspired by all the stuff that we'd learned from people like Chris Blanchard and, you know, the work he was doing with Farmer to Farmer podcast. And so when he stopped, we felt that void and we, we really missed that and wanted to also just really dive into this idea of where's all the information for this, for this smaller scale no till farmer. So we started calling various farmers. And it's been three seasons now. We're still finding new farmers and new techniques. And we, you know, shortly after starting the podcast, started no Till Growers.com and that serves to aggregate as much of that information as possible. So I think we've done posts with your work, John, and trying to aggregate some of the stuff that's relevant to our scale or just interesting. You know, a lot of the people that are into it are into it for the same reasons we were, the ecology, the, the, you know, soil health, the health of their plants. I mean, we were seeing, you know, my wife and I, part of the reason that we really got into soil health. We were just seeing, you know, disease and pest issues. And we would read the books, and the books would say, well, do these things or don't till your soil. And then we would flip again, flip to the page where that tells you how to not till your soil. And it gave you no, no real information. So that was kind of where it started. And all of that sort of led into starting the podcast in notillgrowth.com and, and we use a lot of different practices on our farm, and I'm happy to talk about any and all of that.

Thanks for that introduction, Jesse. You've done a lot of interesting work, and I certainly want to get into the management practices that you have developed and that you've learned from other operations. But before we go there, I want to touch a little bit on the economic opportunities. So we have this situation in agriculture right now where we have an aging population of farmers, and according to the data, we're going to have in the neighborhood of 50 to 55% of all the agricultural land in the United States transfer ownership in the next 10 to 15 years, which would be the largest peacetime transfer of land ownership that has happened in recorded history. And at the same time, we have many younger farmers, people who grew up in agriculture, but who don't really see an opportunity to get started or to buy land or to get access to land. And in a recent podcast interview where I was a guest on another podcast, I made the suggestion that young farmers or people have a desire to get into farming should not think about an entry as requiring that the first step is that they need to buy land, but actually to lease and rent land and look at non commodity crops, don't get into commodities, but look at some specialty stuff. That with these market gardens and some of the other opportunities you can actually, you can, you can gain the experience and you can also earn your way into the opportunity and the connections to buy land and to grow your operation. So I'd love to talk a little bit about that. What have you observed with growers that you've interviewed and with your own three quarter acre farm? What is the economic opportunity in market gardening and how does that transfer across different parts of the country?

Yeah, I think you've made some great points in there. And one I want to start with is this idea of buying land. Well, I'll preface that by saying there are, there is an enormous amount of economic opportunity. But I do agree that one of the mistakes that, that, that young farmers make who are wanting to get into it is, is look for land first in terms of buying it. There's so many great leasing opportunities. And I also think that what we're, one of the things that we're headed towards is a more collaborative farming system. I think there's going to be a lot more collaborative farmers, co op cooperatives and that sort of thing. There's some really great ones popping up. Green Things Farm Collect up in Michigan, in Michigan, Dan Breezeball and his team up at Turnisol Farm. These are multiple families starting a farm together. And I think, you know, that's also another opportunity that I hope to, to see come more to fruition. The economic opportunities in small scale farming are enormous. There's an enormous amount of economic opportunity in small scale farming. And the reason that I say that is that when you're talking about commodity crops, we're talking about crops that often make 800 or $1,000 an acre. And that's gross. When you're talking about small scale intensive market gardening, you're talking about upwards of 50, 60, 70, $100,000 an acre. There are several farmers making upwards of multiple hundred thousand dollars an acre. And the reason is because you are focused on higher value crops. You're going direct to the consumer, you're cutting out the middleman. You are often know doing multiple crops out of the same bed in a year. So a lot of our beds see three or four crops in a season. And if each of those crops are making even a bare minimum of $400 a bed, you know, that really adds up. And you're talking about 50, 6070 beds. That amount of income potential is very large now to be clear, it's much more intensive. It's much, it can be very labor intensive but you are not moving around as much, you're not traveling as far, you're not spending a lot of time in a tractor, you're spending a lot of time on the ground in one small area and you're just focusing your efforts on and energy on that. And I've seen how farmers are able to keep year round employees, pay them well. There's, this is actually a compost farm. But the, the Jane Marner cynical at Earthcare farm was just telling me that they, they have 401k for their employees and they're starting to get to this point when it's when you know there are farms that are, have getting to the point when they can offer benefits to their employees, they're able to keep them around longer and they're able to make a living save for retirement. And this comes from leaning up their system, keeping it really lean, keeping it very small, keeping it very intensive, never growing more than they have to, more than they can take care of. There's a lot that goes into the sort of economic potential and some of the things that I think about with that is that you know, you have, you know, commodity crops. There's even potential there actually, which is something I want to talk about. I was just editing a podcast that'll be out probably before this one goes up with Nazarek Amen who's, who's a grower outside of Washington D.C. and he does rice and beans and that sort of stuff. And he was Talking about making $50,000 an acre gross, 20 to 30 net on rice production, dry land rice production. I think that part of the economic potential with that and with the smaller scale is that he's going straight to the consumer or he has maybe even just going to the co op and selling that way. So something that I think about with the younger generations who are maybe looking at bigger commodity crops is like the entry point looking at those smaller, more niche commodity crops as a possibility. Especially if they enjoy the tractor work and they're good with machinery which a lot of young people, people are not. But if you have that skill it's, it's great to be able to utilize it. That's a, that's a form of capital to be able to have that skill that you can work with the machinery but smaller scale. The other beauty there is that if you don't have that experience with machinery that you can Utilize smaller scale tractors. Like we don't even, we don't have a tractor. We have a BCS walk behind tractor and that's pretty much does all of our soil work, does all of our mowing. We don't need much more than that. And it's really easy to fix. This is just a small Honda motor and that pretty much does everything we need. And we use very little fuel and we spend very little time with the tractor. Like, like you said, we could probably get into some of our, our management techniques. But when you don't have a large tractor and you don't have the expenses of keeping up with it and you don't have that time suck, that is really valuable. I mean that's an economic, you know, benefit there as well. Just there. The upfront cost is really low. Whereas a large tractor may run you 10, $12,000 just for the tractor itself. For $12,000 you can get this small tractor and pretty much every implement you need done, it's ready to go brand new.

You've done a great job of describing the economic opportunity on a per acre basis. But what does the economic opportunity look like in the context of an individual or a farmer entrepreneur? You've mentioned that it's very labor intensive and I'm sure it's also very management intensive. So what really is the economic opportunity for one person or a couple working together who want to get into farming and eventually perhaps grow their way into a larger operation? What does that look like on a, on a net take home basis per year?

Part of that depends on how you're defining your net. And it depends on if you're pouring money back into the infrastructure and into the equipment. And if you're counting that. But if you're looking at like, you know, generally, let's say one couple in the first few years on our scale, three quarters of an acre, I mean 50, 60, $70,000 of vegetable production is not that crazy and that's gross. And then you're probably going to be bringing home 30 or 40 depending on if you have labor. Two people, though, young people without children, can net significantly more than that. If you're not worried about labor and you're willing to really put in those hours the first few years. And part of it comes down it is a business. This is the other part of it is that for a young couple, they do have to go into it as a business. All the soil work, all the biology, all the ecology. Ecology is all very important and very fun. But if it's not treated like A business, it's not going to be successful. So that's another part of it. And this is the other reason I think that the collaborative farming idea is going to be so important in the future is that people can gather together and tackle those. All the complexities of starting a farm together, especially the business side of things. But you know, it depends on the farm, it depends on the market. You know, if you're selling in a very saturated area, you may have to find niches that are not quite as high profit and figure out how to carve those out for your area. Depends on, you know, if you're leasing, what the lease costs are, where are you living, are you living on farm, are you living off farm, what's your rent, all those things. I mean all of that is gonna, is gonna factor in. But you will find, I think the leasing ideas is, is really interesting because you can find farmers who have a lot of land, who are willing, who maybe even have an extra farmhouse, who be who just want to see it worked and just want to see people on that land. It takes some work to find those people, but they're out there. Certainly some of them are probably listening to your podcast.

This is something that I would add yes to all of our. If you are an established farmer who has several hundred acres of land growing commodity crops or or have access to land, then this can be a great opportunity or great pathway for you to help other younger people get started in farming is to just give them access to a small amount of land. It doesn't take all that much to get people started and to give them the experience and the economic opportunity to grow into farming in a much bigger way. And that's something that many of us can contribute and should be contributing to our agricultural rural landscapes. Jesse, I'd love to get your take on the geography of opportunity. There has been this perception, true or false, over the last couple of decades that in order to make market gardening work, you need to go direct to consumer and you need to be in geographic proximity to your audience. And while I think there is still many successful farms have over the years have been built that way. Given how the landscape has changed over the last couple of years, particularly in the last year with COVID we now live in a world where people are used to buying food from Amazon and Uber Eats and a whole bunch of other online delivery platforms and so forth. And so is there an opportunity for young people to get started in market gardening or growing some of these types of non commodity crops in Oklahoma and Kansas and distance that is areas that are some distance from high consumer populations and ship. What's the opportunity to look like there?

Yeah, I think so. I think absolutely. You know, one of the areas that I think is the maybe under appreciated sort of geographical area in general is the suburbs. So not necessarily all that close to a city. Maybe you're, you know, we're about 30 minutes away from Lexington and, and that's a fairly sizable city in Kentucky. But we find a fair amount of, of interest right within 10 miles of our farm. And that's because a lot of the people commute to the, you know, commute 30 minutes or 40 minutes to their, to their office, work at the university. And you know, there I think the opportunity with rural farming, you know, farm stores, that sort of thing, farm stands. This is another thing that I kind of had on my mind that maybe we could talk about. But is, you know, I think there's a lot of value and a lot of potential there too for smaller scale farmers to do plant starts in the spring, to do certified organic plant starts for people in the country. They like that. There's a lot more interest in that than I think people realize doing plant starts and then doing some of those maybe less profitable items. But if you don't have to leave your farm and you're selling them out of a farm store, a lot of the cost of going to market and spending eight hours a day there go away. So maybe you're not making as much as a market farmer, but you're also not spending as much. And so there's, there's opportunities there with, with farm stores, the idea of shipping is a possibility with commodity crops. I mean produce can be really, you know, perishable. Produce is, it takes quite a bit of infrastructure. And as my buddy J.M. fortier said to me once, you know, don't try and compete with the wholesalers. They have scientists working for them and engineers and you're just never going to compete. Try and go straight to the consumer as much as you can. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. And that idea of not trying to go, trying to sell to some of the bigger places like your Kroger's, which we have out here, Winn Dixie, or any of those, any of the bigger retailers. But I think the economic opportunity of just trying to figure out a way to go directly to the consumer, even if it's not as super high profit as some of the, you know, some of the people that you, you will run into online when you're researching Market gardening. There's a lot of profitability in not leaving your house. One of the reason that we moved, in fact, was to get a farm store option. And so we, on our older farm, it was a little bit inaccessible, so we moved to a place that actually has a building that's pretty close to the road that we're going to be able to use as a farm store. And you know, a lot of farmers that I've spoken with say that that essentially replaces one whole market day in the course of a year. It's not as profitable every day, but it is less work, less management, you don't have to be there, you just kind of keep it stocked and that you have consistent customers coming. And I would point people to people who may be in your audience to a recent podcast, Diego Footer, he does the Farm Small Farm Smart podcast. He did one with a gentleman who does pumpkin stands. And he does several different pumpkin stands. And I want to say he's in British Columbia somewhere in Canada, but he does pumpkin stands for large scale sort of pumpkin production in the fall and makes something like $80,000 a year off those stands. So I think that's a, I mean there's so much potential out there for figuring out how to get directly to the consumer. Even if you just cut off, you know, a couple acres and do some pumpkins and put a stand outside of your farm, just see how it goes.

And I also, when I think about the potential for doing this in regions or in areas with that just have very limited population, very low population densities, I also think there is tremendous opportunity and potential for shipping higher quality, higher value food products around the country. When I look at the competitive landscape, there's one significant operation that I have some limited familiarity with called Chef's Garden, which is here in Huron, Ohio. And Chef's Garden sends hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high value, high quality fruit and vegetable products to top end chefs and restaurants all over the world every single day. They have several hundred employees. And so that tells me that that opportunity exists. If they can have such a large scale operation and sending products all over the country, then that is an opportunity that is equally accessible to someone in Kansas and Nebraska who is at some distance removed from their customers. Because Chef's Garden does not have physical proximity to any of their customer base. They are, they ship everything every day in large volumes. So it seems to me that that opportunity would exist for smaller scale growers as well.

That farm in particular is such an amazing, I mean the job that they've done. I've seen their catalogs and stuff and they just do an extraordina extraordinary job doing that. Yeah. I mean there's certainly if you can fill a niche that, that you. And you can compete on that scale. Absolutely. I think generally speaking that I would recommend to people get their chops selling as locally as possible and then sort of venture out into that realm, you know, as you get a little bit better at growing and you get a little bit better at the marketing side of things. Because those that can be a challenge and working with chefs, it would be hard to compete necessarily with them. But that farm is really extraordinary in that model.

So Jesse, thanks for your thoughts on economic opportunities for different areas. I want to shift gears a little bit and get into some of the management practices. So you've started the podcast and you've started putting all this content together for around the idea of doing no till market gardens. And we've talked a little bit about the scale ranging from half an acre, a quarter acre up to about 8 acres or so in size, perhaps a little bit bigger than that for some operations. What are some of the management practices that. And what does the typical management style look like? What are some of the common themes that are needed to have these scale of operations be successful that might be unfamiliar to people just coming in?

Yeah. So one of the things that I'll describe maybe a couple different styles, small scale, no till that will resonate. And so one I'm going to use is the. Is kind of the COVID crop approach, but on a small scale. So this would be using cover crops much like you would in any system. And you are usually staying with permanent beds. This is a very common thing. You either beds never really move, you're not plowing it every season, they're staying in the same place. And you sow those in the fall with a cover crop. And that could be done broadcasting or direct seeding or you know, overcasting into. Into like brassicas, something like that. So you're you planting your seeds in the fall, letting those grow through the winter. And either they're winter killing and leaving you kind of a fresh bed with a little bit of mulch on it in the spring that you can plant directly into or they're something like rye or in our region, crimson clover does really well and. And it will stay alive until the spring and then it will grow like you, you know, in any cover crop would and then you're terminating it. And there are a few different ways that we terminate on the scale there's one of the main ones is to crimp it down. You're going to press it down against the soil. You need it to be flat against the soil. And then you're going to cover that with a black plastic tarp or a clear plastic tarp and solarize or occultate it. The black plastic tarp, obviously these are very large. They're often 50 by 100ft or 100 by 100ft. I generally recommend staying in the 25 to 50 because they can get really heavy. But you're taking a big black plastic tarp and you're laying it on there for a few weeks. That helps to fully terminate that cover crop. Then you're pulling it off and this is probably June, July in our region that you're finally, it's off and then you're planting directly into that. So that would be one way the solarization is a little faster. Depends on the crop a little bit. We've found that, that it can sometimes encourage some of the weeds to grow because it heats up the soil, but it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't kind of keep the soil cool enough to keep those weeds suppressed. And maybe the mulch isn't strong enough. So sometimes solarization can be a little iffy and you don't want to leave it on. I think that the, the, the biological detriment starts at about seven days and after that, you know, you start to lose a little bit of, you start to lose some of the benefits of it. But it can be very fast. It can be a very fast way to terminate a cover crop. So those are a couple ways. We've also found some ways to do it with mowing, with mowing really tight, depending on the COVID crop. So, you know, whereas people like Gabe Brown and some of the people up north can use grazers or they use their cold, we in Kentucky get heat really well in June or July. So we can mow the rye at milk stage before it gets to where it's starting to seed up. And then a week later we mow it again. And generally at that point it's not going to come back. It depends on the density. You know, sometimes if you plant it too dense, then it's really, it'll just bog your mower down. But if you get the, if you can get your densities down, that takes practice. But essentially then you mow it twice and then we're able to plant into that and then maybe we have a little rye pop back up, but you can usually just pop it out like A weed and it's not a big deal. So that's an option. So that's like one style, right? So you have the sort of winter kill and then you also have the, the sort of longer term mulches. And this one, one person that's done really great work on this is Daniel Mays at Frith Farm. And I want to make sure that, to point people to him because he has a new book out that's really wonderful and talks a lot about his methods up there in Maine. Scarborough, Maine. So that's Frith Farm, Daniel Mays and the organic vegetable, the no till organic vegetable farm. That could be wrong.

I'll double check it and we'll, we'll link it in the show. Notes for everyone. Thank you.

Okay, yeah, great. And so then that's like, that's kind of one style that's a really, you know, we integrate a lot of COVID crops that way. That's really helped to. The TARP in general has been a really helpful way of terminating cover crops, but also controlling, helping to control weeds on a small scale. It's something that couldn't be done over acres and acres. And I would not obviously recommend using that much plastic. But these are large silage tarps that, that do basically heat the soil, germinate the weeds. The weeds run into the plastic, they lack the photosynthesis, they also get overheated and then they die. So that's a good way of, of ridding an area of, of a certain weed. And honestly, it works for perennial weeds if, if left on there for long enough. I have some issues with plastic, plastic tarps in general just, I worry about, you know, we can talk about defining tillage in a little while, but the microplastics I think should be something that's on people's minds in terms of, and it is, it is on everyone's mind in the small scale farming world is just starting to look at those plastics, how we're using them, the duration that they're on the soil and what those plastics could be doing to microbial life, to earthworms. Those, those are things that we can't ignore as ecological farmers. You know, it's a great tool and it should be used, you know, with very thoughtfully. So that's, you know, that's, that's one of the ways. But it did open up a lot of opportunities for small scale growers, such as killing cover crops without a giant crimper. And so that's kind of the one main, you know, first method I want to point Out. The second method is kind of what we call the deep compost mulch system. It can be anywhere from 2 to 6 inches of compost laid down on top of cleaned soil. So generally you put a tarp down or you plow or however you're going to, you know, get those beds started. And that usually depends on the crop ground. And you get the, you put down your beds at the, at the width and spacing that you would like, width and length, and then you're pretty much ready to go. And that acts both as a substrate or as a growing medium and also as a, you know, a mulch to the soil so it keeps the weeds suppressed and you can plant, you can plant plants right into it. And it is extremely effective. And in the same way that I worry about plastics, it's also really important to be considerate of the nutrient management there too because you're talking about really large amounts of compost. And there are elements of that that I am concerned with and I talk about that a little bit in my book. You know, just because we're organic farmers doesn't mean we can't pollute. And I think that's something that needs to be on people's minds. And we can talk about the four types of compost too, because I think that helps to understand how to approach it and to think about that. But what that does, you know, just the, the ability to basically clean your garden of weeds. Unless your compost has weeds, preferably it wouldn't. But you don't. You have a weed free garden that is instantly plantable, that doesn't get overly wet, that manages its water really well, that is easy to seed into, that is clean, is great for, you know, aesthetics, for having customers come to your farm. It looks nice, it's very straight, you know, very clean. And just with the black soil and the green vegetables, it pops. So it's really, it's really, you know, not just a great growing method, but it's also really statically pleasing and it's a great use of extraordinary amount of carbon that is wasted in our society. Wood chips that are just, they just go to the landfill or they just go to the back of a farm and they sit there or food waste. I believe that we've barely even tapped these resources considering how much is just going to waste and are and you know, going to landfills and basically just becoming carbon dioxide or polluting. And it's really sad to see that. So in some ways I do. I. There is a part of me that feels like the using a good amount of compost is very helpful for mitigating that problem.

So you just shifted a little bit. You started having a conversation about compost and compost mulching, and then you incorporated wood chips. Are you also using wood chips as a layer 2 to 6 inches deep for weed control in place of or in addition to compost?

No, and I'm glad you pointed that out. Generally, what I'm. What I was referring to there with wood chips is just the. What a great carbon source it can be to mix with your nitrogen sources and compost production. But we do use wood chips, and wood chips are commonly used in no till in the pathways. They're not much of a great garden mulch for reasons that people probably know about, that they do take up a lot of nitrogen. But they are great for, you know, layering in your. Your pathways to keep the weeds down there. I love to mix wood chips into my various compost productions and because they're just an amazing nutrient source and a source of good carbon dioxide, too, for your plants, you know, as they decompose. In terms of. I wouldn't recommend using it as a. As a straight mulch. As a straight, you know, like as a growing medium.

Let's say you had mentioned the four different types of compost, and I would like to dig into that a little bit. But before we go there, you had said that there are these two different styles. You described two very different styles of no till growing. Are there additional styles as well, or are those the two primary ones?

Those are the two you. You come across most often. But there's certainly hybrids. There's variations of people that are doing what I kind of consider the no till or the no mulch, no till, which is, you know, often doing very, very light surface tillage. And, you know, a lot of times that it is essentially really intensive vegetable production. So a lot of greens, baby greens production is a lot of is done a lot of this this way a lot of times. So, you know, you open up your soil, however you need to do that, then you have, you know, you, you make your beds. They're either raised or they're left at surface level, depending on where you are. Your context is really important there. You're not generally going to raise them in certain circumstances where you would in, you know, maybe in a colder climate where you want them to warm up. If you're in a warmer climate, you probably want them flat against the ground. But, you know, so then they're, you know, sewing crops into those beds without A mulch without a compost mulch or maybe even with sometimes with a very light compost mulch, just using it, just a super light compost mulch. But the. A lot of times yeah, just sewing straight into those beds and then precision cultivation techniques. So there's lots of great tools for that out now there's like a one that I think of as the two bad cats tine rake weeder and it's essentially a rake that you just drag across the soil and they have the, you know, they have rake weeders and on for large scale. But that's it. Just to a rake that you drag across the soil to break the weeds up in cotyledon stage. And that can be really effective. Some of the most productive farms in terms of economics that we've come across are using more of a no mulch, no till method because it can be very fast. It's very good for greens because the germination is really high. Yeah, there's a lot of benefits to. Tends to need a little bit more fertility management. But yeah, that's a, that's also like a really common technique.

So when you think about, you mentioned four different types of compost and you talk a little bit about the concerns of applying such high rates of compost from a nutrient pollution perspective and that immediately raises some question marks for me as well about. I think one of the things that we've observed with our use of SAP analysis on larger scale crops is that most commonly the most significant nutrient interactions are nutrient imbalances that cause most disease and pest problems are over applications of nutrients, particularly nitrogen and potassium, which this you would expect would contribute to. So I'm curious about what your parameters are for the different types of compost and whether you might be including any consideration for animal manure based compost versus plant based compost. So what, what does that look like for you?

Yeah, no, that's a, that's a great question because I think it's kind of the key and we share those concerns. We share those concerns of, you know, excessive nutrients and we're always trying to figure out ways to mitigate that. So I break down the types of compost as you know, because it is such an important part of our style of farming. It's important to break these down into different forms because they're used differently. So one, you know, goes inoculating compost, fertilizing compost, nutritional compost and mulching compost. Those are kind of the four different types and we break them down that way for several different reasons, but you wouldn't use any of these composts necessarily the same. So an inoculating compost would be something like something that you're using to add, you know, good biology to your soil to increase the biological capacity, but also maybe the biomass, the of actual biology like in vermicompost. This is a really good example because vermicompost is, you know, worm compost.

This is.

Tends to be very high in microbial life. It tends to be very well balanced. It's. It's really healthy for soil for a lot of different reasons. It increases the microbial biomass.

It.

It can have nematode effects on good beneficial effects on nematodes. There's, there's a lot of really good research out there for using vermicompost. But one thing I find really interesting about vermicompost is that there have been some studies and I don't know how this would necessarily bear out in every situation, but between 5 and 50% is beneficial, but then more than that actually has negative effects. So if you're adding 5 or 50%, 5 to 50% to your soil mix or to your garden beds, that would be a lot to a garden bed. But, you know, to, to whatever it is that you're planting, it can have enormously beneficial effects. But if you're adding much more than that, it can have negative effects. And so using, you know, another example would be the Korean natural farming. Does a lot of, you know, work with more microbially driven composts in specifically the imo, the indigenous microorganism production. So that's, that's a great. I mean, if you're interested in knf, I recommend the videos from Chris Trump. He does some. He's done some really great videos on that. The. Yeah. Biodynamic preps are another version of inoculating compost. So it's just not something you would add a lot of, but that you do want in your soil. And then you have things like fertilizing compost. This would be like chicken manures, any sort of poultry manure. And those are really tend to be high nitrogen. And it's also something that, you know, it does add a little bit of organic matter to your soil and it does have some, you know, some stable carbon that will release nitrogen slowly over time. However, you don't want to put a big thick layer of that on your soil and then plant your. Put your plants into it. It will kill them. That nitrogen would be far too much. So, you know, you would use that lightly. You Would use that to give plants a boost, especially in lower nitrogen situations. If your soil tests come back and say they're low nitrogen, it can be a great source of that. You know, nutritional is one that would be more like, you know, a balanced compost that actually takes into consideration some of the, you know, macro and micronutrients, like all the macro and micronutrients that you need for plant growth and also, you know, is a little bit more balanced, is not as concentrated in those nutrients as maybe has a more balanced carbon and nitrogen nitrogen ratio and is something that can be applied at a much, maybe a slightly greater rate than those other ones. And I think of nutritional compost, like if you're going to get it commercially, maybe something like raised bed mix or somebody that does like maybe a soil. I've heard of farmers using, kind of making their own soil mix, like using peat and combining that with really good compost and then applying their minerals. I know that Brian o' Hara I mentioned earlier, he mixes his mineral amendments and sprays and then sprays his compost piles and then applies that to the soil. So he's, he's kind of pre solubilizing it. And it's, that's a, I think that's a really interesting approach. So that would be something, you know, the nutritional compost would be something you could apply at a greater rate. And I want to be clear here that if you call a composting company and you say, I want one yard of fertilizing compost and one yard of nutritional, they will have no idea what you're talking about. You just have to know as a farmer what you're applying. You kind of, you know, there's ways to kind of figure out what it is that they're, that they're, you know, offering. But then the last one would be mulching compost. And this is, this is maybe what you were more talking about with like plant based. So, you know, the nutritional compost tend to have, would maybe be more likely to have something more animal manure. Certainly the fertilizing and inoculating could have that. They can all be plant based. I mean, you know, there's ways. If you just decomposed a bunch of alfalfa hay, then you'd probably get a really nice fertilizing compost. Honestly, it can have animal products or it doesn't necessarily have to. But the mulching compost that I think of are decomposed wood chips, decomposed hay, you know, decomposed straw, something that's maybe much higher in carbon and is not as high in nitrogen, something that you could apply it at much higher rates. That wouldn't add the, the nutrient excesses wouldn't come with as much of that as you would. As you would maybe if you were adding a higher nitrogen nutritional compost. And you know, the I. There's also kind of another one which would just be like a hybrid of adding maybe slightly more nitrogenous compost to something like you're adding that on top of maybe wood chips and letting it sit for a while. I just. There's a grower up in Canada who does. Who I just heard this is kind of an interesting one where they put wood chips down as a mulch really thick and then apply. Or maybe it's vice versa. I don't know in which order they do it. But then they apply chicken manure as well. So and then they let that sit for a really long time and let that decompose. So they've kind of created their own nutritional compost there. And I love the idea of adding carbonaceous materials to high to high nutrient composts that that may come with those nutrient excess that you'd be concerned with to sort of mitigate the issues there. So, yeah, that's kind of the general overview.

That's an interesting. So you're looking at these, these four different types of composts, perhaps looking at the differing ratios between carbon and nitrogen ratios at the overall nutrient content and also considering the, I'll use the term quality, the quality of the microbial activity. So when you think about these inoculating composts, I would add some of the things that I've seen that have been really interesting events from the Johnson HSU bioreactor compost that might fit into that category as well, of the inoculating composts.

Yeah, agreed.

What challenges have you observed or heard about from growers who have used large compost applications in the past? Are there any special considerations that people should be aware of? I think obviously you've defined these different types and using them differently very well. Have there been any challenges that come up frequently that people should be aware of?

There are two that kind of come to mind. Well, one that's really the biggest one is the potential for herbicide contamination. And there are some persistent herbicides, typically the pyrolids that will last for. Can last for a really long time in compost. And I have a friend who's got compost from three different composters and they all had contamination and he saw the effects in his plants and in his production. And obviously, when you're an organic grower, you know, you have this really strong relationship with your. With your customer base, and you want to be transparent with them and tell them in that, you know, it. It's shut down his business for the next year. And it's really so mitigating that as a, as a person interested in buying the compost is a conversation with your composter. What do you do, you know, asking them, like, what do you do to make sure that you're not taking in these, you know, are you doing testing? Are you. Are there certain things you don't take in? Like, having that conversation, I think is really important because if you get to the point when you're, you know, having crop loss, that's really. That's really bad, and that can, that can shut down your business.

What was the, what was the class of herbicides that you mentioned?

Pyrrolids. Then there's, you know, there's some other ones that will be persistent, but not. They're none that seem quite as persistent as those, and those are, you know, often I think they come in a lot on manure and on hay is. Is my understanding, is when they, when they enter the system, the most most likely way to enter the system. But we have composters who, you know, who make their. Whoever's bringing them the material sign a contract essentially, that says, I won't bring in anything if I know, you know, or if it. If I suspect it has any, Any herbicide on it. And that's the kind of composter you want. And that's honestly the kind of composter we need more of. Kind of what I, I went on that digression a little earlier, just about the amount of, you know, wasted carbon there is. The more demand we have for good composters, the more we can get people to, you know, we can, you know, sort of divert some of that wasted carbon into usable material for growers and also maybe, you know, discourage people from using those, those. Those chemicals on their, on their crops and on their. Just around their farms. And a lot of times some, some of that stuff comes in in really high concentrations from lawn care, resident home owners who maybe use a little bit of chemical and then they just dump the rest on their lawn clippings and they send it to the composter that, you know, can be an incredible concentration of. Of those chemicals that can be really detrimental to the composter and that can make its way through all of the compost and then suddenly you have a really large batch that makes it out to a bunch of farmers. And that's really. Yeah, that can be really bad.

Yeah. I think speaking to the issue of the need for quality compost, we have a group of growers we've been working with in southeastern Pennsylvania now for probably 15 years who have access to really premium quality compost. And it is remarkable to see how their soils and their farms have regenerated. They're obviously doing lots of other things as well. But the turnaround has been really remarkable and we would love to have access to that caliber and that quality of compost across the rest of the country for the growers that we work with. But it just simply doesn't exist or it doesn't exist in adequate volumes.

I think that's changing. I hope it's changing. I mean, I think that there are more people interested as the demand goes up. I think there are more people interested in doing the composting process that are interested in the biology and interested in the, you know, the getting, getting a microscope and actually looking at the biology and making sure that it's balanced. And yeah, I think that that's growing. There's some big hurdles. I mean, a lot of neighborhoods don't want composters. That's one. Another one is just some areas require giant million dollar slabs of concrete to start. And that's just prohibitive, cost prohibitive. So hopefully we can break through that a little bit.

When you think about no till growing and the large corners of compost, the COVID cropping techniques and styles that you've described and outlined, one of the comments that you made was the very limited weeding time. What does the labor distribution look like on one of these operations that is well managed and well run? How much time really should be expected to be spent in weed control versus harvesting and planting and so forth?

Yeah, it's a great question. And as farmers, we tend to think of. I, you know, and I used to be this way that we tend to think of farming as weeding. Right. A lot of people think of it as cultivation. That's what you do when you farm. But really what you do when you farm and what you should be doing is harvesting and planting. Those are the two most valuable things you can be doing. And so I can use our farm as a good example. When we, when we were more of a tillage based farm, our weeding and cultivation was multiple days a week, was at least like one and a half or two days a week, just depending on the time of year and the weather. So if we got a good rain and we had a giant flush of weeds, that was fully a day of work. And that's if we weren't behind, if we were behind, I mean it could take up an entire week of work to just recover. And we always stayed on our weeding. We were, we learned that from our mentors, but we, yeah, it was, it was a constant job.

Wow.

We spend I estimate about maybe an hour and a half to two hours every ten days sort of spot weeding. So it went from, you know, in the, in the middle and I'm talking in the middle of the growing season and it, and there are times when it gets worse. There are times when I make mistakes or, or maybe when like we have a heavy rain and it washes out some of our, our pathway mulches or something that, you know, we have a burst and that, that happens. But generally speaking, yeah, that's been, that's been about it. It's about maybe a morning every 10 days. Then we just go and spot weed, you know, and that's on a full three quarters of an acre. And yeah, it's life changing when you don't have to deal with weeds. It changes the entire makeup of what farming is. You know, I want to stress like the importance, we talked about the economic benefits, but I want to stress the importance of just the social, emotional and mental, you know, well, being of a farmer. When you're doing that much cultivation in the hot sun and you're doing it till six or seven o' clock at night and you don't really get to spend time with your family and you're not seeing your friends, you're. A lot of times you're doing it by yourself. It's already a lonely enough job that has a tax that's a, that that has an enormous cost and you can't possibly pay yourself for all of that. And but when you, you know, if you can remedy the weeds and you're also, the other thing you're doing is you're fighting with nature and nature's like, hey, this, there's a problem here. And you're saying, no, I. There, no there isn't. No there isn't. You know, you're just trying to get rid of it and in nature's just going to keep saying no, there's a problem here. The problem is that you're leaving the soil bare. You know, give me some mulch and we'll be good. You know, I think about that just that when you're spending all that time cultivating, you're just not, you're not spending time with your family. And that's super valuable to me and it should be super valuable to all of us. I, I talk about this all the time, but there's a study that was done at Harvard that has been going on for 80 years who's been following, you know, it's one of the longest studies in the world. And they've been following these sophomores from Harvard since the 1930s and their children. And they brought in a bunch of other people to this test, to this study. It's had four directors. And it's the thing that they found is that that's most important to people at the end of the life is their relationships. And if we don't learn to add that into the economic value of farming, I fear this is, it's, it's already an isolating job. You know, I fear that, you know, we're not, we're going to. A lot of us are going to be older and on our deathbeds or getting sick and realizing that, you know, like we don't have what we want, which is, you know, we spend too much time worrying about our acreage or cultivating weeds or. And not enough time with our family. I think that's a really important point to stress is just we should figure out ways to maximize our time. And now, you know, I'd say during the week, like in the middle of the growing season all works. I say five and a half days. I take one and a half days off a week. And that's in like peak growing season. And I stop every day at 5 and I go have my beer. That's like my thing, you know, when I go and I hang out with my family and I build Legos with my little boy. And you know, those are, those, those are the things that I'm, that I'm reaping. And I think that's really important.

When you say five and a half days is a day. Eight hours or 10 or 50. Well, not 50 obviously, but when does your day begin?

No, our day begins about 7:30 and I take an hour lunch break. I always take a nap. I have to have a nap. So yeah, it's like eight, eight and a half hours. I think that I figured Hannah and I were, you know, we didn't have an employee last year because of COVID and we just kind of cut back a little bit and we have these other projects. So, you know, we're okay financially and we still met our Budget, we actually probably netted more than we usually do. So we actually were working probably about 48 hours a week. The cumulative, the two of us probably at peak like 52. And that's two people together. All together, we were working 52 hours. So, yeah, I mean, that takes a while to get there. You gotta know what you're doing. And also, I should say, at the same time, I was running a podcast and we make videos and I was playing around with all sorts of stuff in the garden. So it freed up. That was mostly within that eight hours. So for that eight and a half hour day. So, yeah, I mean, I don't want to be too glib about it, because it's not that way for everybody and it can take a while to get to that point. And, you know, I think if you have a bunch of employees and you have all that stress on you, you know, then. Then maybe you're gonna end up working longer hours, especially in those first five to seven years. But, you know, that. That's been our experience, and I think it's been the experience of a lot of growers. I mean, when I first started the podcast, one of the recurring themes was I was surprised at how little weeding I have to do now. That was the theme. A lot of people just were. You know, they were like, I just wasn't expecting that, wasn't thinking about it.

I'm somewhat familiar with the Harvard study that you mentioned, and I think something important worth clarifying is that the research results were not just about quality of life at the end of life, but also throughout your life. What people found, really, the people who were the most fulfilled were the people who had deep quality relationships throughout their life. And so your point is absolutely very relevant, that it's not just about some future moment, but also for us right here in the now.

Yeah, I think that's a great clarification, and I hate to breeze through such an important study because I think it tells us. And like you said, they found out that people at 50, what your relationships were at age 50, had a big impact on what your health outcomes were at 80 in your mental health, your. Your brain capacity. Yeah, all of those things, exactly.

So when we think about quality of life and fulfillment, it occurs to me. And when you talk about the limited weeding and weed management time that is required using these types of growing approaches, there must surely be an aesthetic consideration as well. I mean, if you have such limited weed pressure and you're able to manage it that easily and with such a limited amount of time. I imagine the esthetics of these operations must look very different. They must feel very different from other farms who are constantly stroking with weeds.

When I go visit my tillage farmer friends, who I love dearly, they, you know, I see the weeds a lot, and it's one of the things that pops out to me is bare soil and weeds. And there is an aesthetic, you know, opportunity there. Some people treat it differently than others. Some people like everything crisp, clean, and some people like, you know, big, wild hedgerows and that sort of thing. And I think both of those are great because you have that opportunity if you're not fighting weeds. You can choose. You get to choose if you want it super clean and pretty and. Or you can choose if you want it to be kind of wild and, you know, have wild hedgerows and. And clover and stuff growing everywhere. And, you know, we've started incorporating more living pathways. We're doing more of a, you know, practice kind of playing more with a sort of strip no tillage approach with, you know, combining those sort of deep mulch beds with living pathways. And we've had some good success over a couple of years. And there's another grower, Jenny Love, who did the no Till Flowers podcast for her for us. She's amazing, and she talks a lot about living pathways, too, and essentially just mowing them every week and edging them to keep them out of the beds. But, you know, this is another thing about our. Our scale is that we're able to try things that you maybe wouldn't want to risk. 100 acres, 20 acres. You know, we're able to try things on small scale and see if it works and then slowly grow that. And also, if something goes wrong, we can just go out and fix it much easier than you can on a really large scale. So there is some benefit to just having even experimental plots that are small like ours.

Jesse, you've developed a very different perspective on what it means to farm. I mean, usually when people in the agriculture space have a conversation about farming and they're not imagining a scale that's three quarter acre or half acre or a couple acres in size, they're usually talking about hundreds of acres in size. So you've developed this very different perspective. And I'd love to get your take. What do you believe is true? What do you believe to be the case about agriculture that might be different from the mainstream view?

Oh, well, I. I have so many answers to that question. I feel like. I feel like the one that you were alluding to there is important, right, that small is not necessarily, you know, small. Small can be huge. I mean small can produce enormous amounts of food. Tens of thousands of pounds of food can come off of an acre every year. And I think that I would like to see more people doing, even dabbling in smaller, more high production crops. I know that things like hemp come along and people get excited and they do that for a while and you know, they see some profits from it or maybe they don't. But I think, you know, beans and rice and flowers different, you know, all sorts of all the ancient grains. There's so much potential there for commodity crops. But like, yeah, getting trying some small stuff. Dedicate an acre and see if you can make more on that acre than you can on 100 acres or make 50 acres or whatever it is, depending, you know, scale it to your size. But I think the other thing that maybe people don't realize, and I don't know if this directly answers your question, but I love talking about it, is how much valuable growing information there is sort of trapped in the gobbledygook that is scientific literature. There is so much great information for growers and specifically just good farming information that is absolutely wrapped up in this, in the jargon. And that's, that's not necessarily the fault of the scientists, right? That's how they've been trained and it is very precise language. But I sometimes will be reading through a scientific article and I just find these little bits of information that I think just completely blow me, blow me away. And who was going to tell me? Because a scientist isn't a farmer and a farmer is not a scientist. So there's, there's a lack of a connection. And I think you've done a great job of sort of connecting these two worlds, John. But this is something that I want to encourage more farmers to do is sort of look at science and see what's out there that they can, you know, that they can utilize that can. I wonder if I have any specific examples like oh, this is when I think about Rubisco, right. So this is going to get a little nerdy, but I promise to bring it around to something interesting. So Rubisco is ribulose 1,5 bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase, which is just, just gobbledygook. There's that, that's just a string of words, right? But this is the most important enzyme to, arguably the most important enzyme when it comes to photosynthesis. It's the most abundant enzyme on the planet. But it has these two words sort of just locked into it that the average person wouldn't catch. And that's carboxylase, oxygenase. And that what that means is that it is a sometimes carbon fixing, but sometimes oxygen fixing enzyme. And enzymes are just catalysts for the listener. So like, you know, you have this. They're sort of like matchmakers, but so you have this really important enzyme. It's critical to photosynthesis, critical to our jobs as growers. And it's got this ridiculous name. I mean, Rubisco is at least fun to say, but it doesn't tell you anything. So it has this ridiculous name. But it also in hidden in this name that scientists understand and you wouldn't know as a farmer is this fact that it can sometimes be an oxygen fixing enzyme. And that's really important because you don't want, generally speaking, your carbon fixing enzyme to be fixing oxygen because plants are carbon based. So when that happens is when a plant is stressed out, it can be from drought, it can be from, you know, let's say heat. Heat is another, is another reason that it often starts fixing. And this is C3 plants. This is important for vegetable growers. Like C4 plants obviously have a little bit of a different pathway. But with C3 plants, like, that's extraordinarily important information that I mean, I didn't know until I started studying photosynthesis and it would. And I just think like, if I'm going to wrap this up a little bit, this idea that I think sometimes farmers feel like science is a little bit off limits or it's a little bit too intimidating. But science is no more off limits to farmers than farming is off limits to scientists. I think both can be true. Like the farmer can't. Is allowed to and should be encouraged to dive into the science and ask questions and call scientists and have them clarify because there's. Once you start to get those little bits, those little tidbits, they add up and they can, they're just. The information can be incredible.

I really appreciate you bringing this out, Jesse, and I strongly agree with you because this is, I mean, ultimately that's what got me to the point where I'm at today was to really dig into the science and to have conversations with the scientists and to ask questions and to try to understand. And what was so incredible for me, what really struck me as I started down this pathway was the realization that we already, this is a bit of a generalization, but we've already figured out the answers to most of the problems I'm using the collective we within the scientific community, I was just struck by the sheer volume of information and the depth and the quality of the information on plant immune systems, for example, and how to manage nutrition and how to manage microbial communities in a way to grow crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects. There are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of peer reviewed published papers on this topic, but no one in agriculture has really been exposed to them or is really aware of them because there are no economic incentives for really anyone to really share and propagate this information. The economic incentives don't really exist for the scientists. They certainly don't exist for the industry, which would find that farmers no longer need their solutions in a jug. And so, and that's, that's one body of research. It just carries over into the fields and into the areas of soil microbiology and plant pathology. And the list kind of goes on and on. So I strongly agree with you that there is so much information out there. We have to develop the willingness and the appetite to dig in a little bit and try to understand the jargon and get past that and really dig into it and we'll find a lot of gems. Completely agree with you.

Yeah, I don't know that I have a great long answer for what that looks like, but I think encouraging people to feel a little bit more comfortable just reading through and also encouraging people to read those introductions to papers. The abstract can be kind of abrasive. It can they. They start, you know, when you read an abstract of a scientific paper, a lot of times those first, you know, those first few sentences can start. They immediately go into acronyms and using, you know, language that's not necessarily very friendly. But then you start into the introductions of those papers and there's a world of information that, that sort of reveals itself and it'll say, you know, no matter what the subject is, plant immunity or anything, and it'll start giving you like a historical background of all the studies that have been done on that particular subject and you'll learn all sorts of great stuff and you can go read those other studies and read the. And yeah, once you start just. It's a little bit dense, but once you start getting into it, you know, there's so much information reveals itself. I think it's just a really important point.

Jesse's. What do you see as opportunities? Where do you see big opportunities for growers both in market gardening and in agriculture in general, in the community, in the near future?

Yeah, I think you Know, we talked about direct to retailer, direct to consumer rather. And I think that that's a huge opportunity. I think that, you know, we're growing. You know, especially with COVID we kind of, you know, our customer base grew. We saw just the. I think most farmers on our scale and our style saw a. An enormous uptick in interest in what we're doing. And I hope, and I can safely assume so far, just based on the interest going into this next season, that I think that it's gonna stay. I think it's gonna stick around for a while, because people have spent a lot of time cooking, a lot more time cooking than they did maybe previously when there were, you know, more going out to restaurants. Now they're staying home more and having cooked more. And our. And our customers really appreciated what we were doing, and that was exciting to me. So there's. I think there's an enormous amount of opportunity there. I mentioned collaborative farming. I think there's an enormous amount of opportunity there. And I think that farmers. We talked kind of just about, you know, relationships and loneliness. And I think that one of the places I'd like to see grow is more farmers who have a lot. Who have a lot of land inviting other farmers to come onto their land and do different things. So more, you know, bringing on market gardeners, bringing on different animal producers. And thinking of that, the. The value of that as the community that you're bringing in and farming can be very isolating. But if you have thousands of acres and, you know, what's taking a few off and letting the, you know, these other farmers come in, I think, and I hope for a boom of small, you know, agricultural communities again, that was a big part of the, you know, United States not that long ago. And I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

When you think about all the opportunity that exists for people to collaborate and to develop a, hopefully a healthier agriculture for us in the future, what. What are some of the limiting factors that you perceive that limit farmers from experiencing the success that they're really capable of and really taking advantage of, taking advantage of the opportunities that they have in front of them?

I. Gosh, that's so. There's so many answers to that question. Part of it is just savoir faire, knowing how, you know, how to run a business. That's hugely important. Some of it is dogma. Some people get bogged down by what they think is the right way to do something. Then, you know, some of it is, you know, access to market, and there are Physical elements too, that, that limit people's ability to, to really thrive and you know, maybe an access to market. Maybe some people get into market gardening and realize they really don't like standing at a farmer's market, that they don't, that they don't engage well with customers, that that's not really their skill set. You know, in knowing your skill set, learning your skill set and then putting people in the position to do the things that you're not good at, I think that that takes a certain skill. I think being preemptive about things that are happening on your farm. If you look and you see, you know, an aphid or two, it's time to act or it's time to act before that happens. It's time to start thinking about like what, what did you do wrong? What is, what's what, what's with the soil. Or usually we get them in our plant starts more than our soil. But yeah, like what's, what's happening there? What can you do to, to mitigate those issues immediately before they start being preemptive about it? Yeah, I mean there's a, there's, there's, there's so many things that I think hold people back. And you know, I think the dogma one is, is subtle but it's important. We haven't really talked about what tillage is, but I think, you know, like, I think it often gets conflated with disturbance. And I think this is a, this is unfortunate because when we think about like soil, when we think about disturbance, disturbance is an essential part of soil. Soil is constantly being disturbed by earthworms, by microbial life, by plant roots. If you were to take a cross section and film that cross section over the course of 20 years and speed it up, it would look like it was churning aggregates just sort of bubbling around. And the reason is that so you know, soil life is constant. The soil is constantly moving. But there's this sort of dogma or this feeling about humans that we are only negative creatures, that our effect can only be, can only have negative long lasting effects. The world would be better off without humans. And certain only the Native Americans proved that's not true. When, when colonists showed up, the, the United States was rich with biodiversity and you know, thousand. We've lost thousands of plant species and thousands of animal species since that time. Not, you know, was the earth wasn't thriving despite humans. It was thriving because of the Native Americans of the indigenous people. And I mean you could argue that that was the original tillage removing them from the land. Same thing with microbial life. If you're killing your microbial life and you're killing mycorrhizal fungi, I mean obviously the, the removal of indigenous inhumane. But that, that was the original tillage that had long lasting effects that we still have, you know, a lot of responsibility to fix. But the, you know, I think that that idea that dogma of tillage as disturbance really hampers people and it gets people to not necessarily treat their soil the way it needs to be treated. You've talked about compaction and I think that if you don't address your compaction, you're really doing a disservice to your photosynthetic activity to your plants. For one example, if you, if you're not willing to go out there with a broad fork or a, you know, some sort of deep ripper and get the compaction broken up, then the plants aren't going to survive. I mean they're, they're not going to thrive at least.

So let's dig into tillage a little bit because I've made the comment that dogma serves no one, or at least it doesn't serve us in this regards. So what are, what are your perspectives on tillage? What do you think defines tillage and how do you think about tillage in the market gardening context?

You know, tillage throughout history has been a term that's basically just meant to prepare the ground for growing crops. And for a long time that's all it was, was the act of preparing the soil to grow crops. And that was done in many different ways by many different indigenous people from, you know, small, using bone hoes and plows to break up a little bit of soil. And then they would plant that and then they would grow in that for a few years and then they would, you know, allow that to go back to fallow for several years. And then they would maybe use Sweden agriculture and, and burn that and then replant it. And they had ways of doing that and that was, you know, it was, they'd open up the soil but then they would ultimately replenish it with, with other plants. And so there's, that's like, you know, your basic version of tillage for a really long time. And then, you know, as tools changed and as, you know, as things became more powerful, tractors entered the picture, larger plows, chemical herbicides over the, you know, throughout, you know, after the world wars that sort of increased the capacity for opening up soil. So suddenly like many wards do it the word tillage sort of started to bring on some of the negative impacts such as the Dust bowl, right. We have, you know, dust flying into the air all the way to New York and Washington D.C. and from the Great Plains. And then you have things like the, you know, water being polluted by phosphorus and nitrogen and you know, these are stored, these are effects of tillage. So when we talk about tillage now, the term has changed, like many change in English language. And that's to say that it went from being something that was relatively positive, that was very straightforward to being something that was very negative that has really, you know, long lasting, far reaching effects on the soil and the ecology. And that's important point too. It's just, it doesn't just affect what's underneath the ground. It affects the waterways and it affects the air and it affects, you know, the communities. So I think that when we are defining what tillage is, what I like to say is that tillage is anything that causes long term negative effects to soil and to the ecology. And that can be, doesn't necessarily have to be a tiller. In fact, sometimes it's not a tiller. I mean you could till with a shovel or a spoon if you wanted to. What it is is it's, it's not the tool, it's the, it's the user who makes the tillage. And I think that's a really important point because it really matters what your context is. It really matters like what kind of soil you're dealing with, what kind of compaction that you're dealing with, how you should break into it. And then it should matter for several years how you manage it. If it requires something like a broad fork, which is a kind of controversial tool in the no till world, if it requires something like a broad fork to keep it from getting compacted over the first few years, first few seasons, you know, you're, you're just slowly, A broad fork is just a big fork that you're just slowly kind of popping the soil open. The then you know, that's important. That's, that's important. That is not tillage. That is land stewardship. That's plant stewardship. You are getting, you are making sure that the, you know, that the plant, that the microbes can respire carbon dioxide out, that they have the oxygen they need, you know, the air, the movement, the space rather that they need to respire and that you're mitigating compaction which can cause so many issues. You know, that's not tillage. That's not the same thing. Or let's say you have really compacted soil that you need to open up and you use a tiller one time to inject good compost into the soil, for instance. That's not tillage. That's, you know, you're putting the soil in a place that it's going to be better off for many years to come. Tillage is using that tiller over and over and over again and fighting weeds with the tiller. And. And, you know, there's certainly a level of disturbance that's negative, but there's a level of everything that's negative. So, yeah, I mean, that's. That's kind of where I land on tillage.

I find it really interesting, if I recall correctly, early on in our conversation when you were talking about the use of silage tarps and sheets of plastic for terminating cover crops, you actually use the term that these practices can be a form of tillage. Can you expand a little bit on that?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm glad you brought that back up because that's. That's something that I think about all the time, is the. Any practice can be, you know, tillage. Any. Like I said, you could do it with a spoon or you can do it with a large sheet of plastic where you're leaving. So let's say that we leave that plastic on top of that cover crop for three months and we get heavy rains in that period and it slowly starts to compact the pathways and compact the beds because the tarps are very heavy. You're also cutting off photosynthesis. So, like, how long should we allow soil to not be photosynthesizing and not be, you know, trapping that carbon? You're also the microplastics. I'm definitely concerned with that. You know, these are tools that, when used excessively, are not any different than the tiller. It's not the tool. The tool doesn't make the tillage. To me, it's really about the user and the goal, the end goal. And also this all comes back to that dogma point. Just not focusing on this is what people call no till or called tillage. What does your soil need? What do the plants need? That's what's important. Don't worry about what I think tillage is or what anybody else thinks tillage is. What is your soil in your context? What does it need?

You just mentioned the keyword. What is your local context? Because every context, different soil types, different environmental climactic conditions are. Are all going to shift. What might be appropriate for your farm could Be very different from a farm a couple miles down the road. And certainly it's probably different from a farm in a different geography. One of the things that we haven't yet spoken about, but I believe you have some experience with and have spoken with other farmers about is the practice of intercropping. How are you using intercropping in these vegetable crops and fruit crops and some of these different crops that you're experimenting or working with in these no till market gardens?

Yeah, so intercropping has a lot of advantages. Some of them are economic, some of them are beneficial to the soil, Some of them are just beneficial to photosynthesis. So we can kind of talk about each of those. The, the economic one is. Let's take an example that you're, you have a bed of tomatoes and you have one row of tomatoes in that bed and you plant them. Let's just, let's just use like May. You plant them in May after derby. That's typical in our, in our region. Plant them in the field in May and you have one row in one bed. Tomatoes take, you know, probably two months really to get up to size when they're going to start producing. So you have all this space next to the tomatoes. It's not doing anything. It's just sitting there. It's not photosynthesizing. You're not maximizing that space, that growing space. So we almost always have lettuce, radishes, turnips or something growing next to the tomatoes while they're sizing up. Because at a certain point they're, they get pretty big and you can't really grow much underneath them. But we, we always are using crops in between in the row. So like tomatoes, let's say you're spacing them in the field maybe like 18 inches, 2ft or whatever it is. Some people go up to three feet, but let's say you're doing it at two feet. So every other foot, maybe you even put a plant like sweet alyssum. This is a great one for, for biological activity. This is one. I got a tip from Daniel Mays. It's a brassica, but it is a great, it's a great flower for bringing in beneficial brachanoid wasps that, that parasitizes the hornworm. So that's a really great option that you're planting that species in between your tomato plants right in the row. And then maybe you have lettuce on the outside of the row. So you're getting, maximizing that photosynthetic activity, but you're Also bringing in pollinators with the flowers. And you're getting that economic activity on the sides. In another example may be like, you know, the photosynthetic activity. You know, we think of a lot of the crops that were growing out in the middle of the field in this full sunshine were crops that evolved under shade, under a small amount of shade, under some amount of diffuse light. And you can think of diffuse light. Like if you were to just. It's going to be hard to do without a visual, but if you were to stack your hands on top of each other just about, you know, six inches apart and you were to just hold them out in the sunshine, you would notice that your bottom hand is totally blacked out, right? Because your top hand is shading that bottom hand. So that that same effect happens with leaves. If you don't, if you have a tomato plant out in the field and it doesn't have any light diffusion around it, or let's say you have a lettuce plant out in the field and doesn't have any light diffusion around it, then it's. Those bottom leaves are not, they're, they're capable of photosynthesizing, but they're not getting the sunlight to photosynthesize. So that diffuse light actually gives you more plant cover. So this is why plants often do really well in tunnels, is because they're getting such good in high tunnels, is because they' such good diffuse light. But in the field you, you also have to think about like, how could you diffuse a little bit of light. And one great way to do that is intercropping. So like, let's say we have a bed of lettuce that we want to grow in July and we grow a lot of summer lettuce. It can be very hard, but there are techniques for that. And having maybe a couple like a bed of corn nearby or right, planting right into a row of corn. You know, if you have the space, planting something like lettuce below something like sweet corn to just get a little bit of that light diffusion, a little bit of the cool air from the sh. All of those things kind of contribute to better photosynthetic activity. Those are really important factors when it comes to intercropping. But there's a lot of other ones. I mean, there's beneficial biology below the soil. There's root complementarity. So let's say you have a deep rooted crop, something like tomatoes, you have all this shallow root that you can, you know, there's, there's tomato roots in there but there's a lot of space that could be used, and they're not necessarily competing with each other. That's what root complementarity means. They're more complementary of each other than competitive. So you're. You're also bringing different microbes. You know, maybe the. Maybe the lettuce wants something different than this, than the tomato, and it's bringing in different nutrients and it's bringing in different types of microbes. And. Or let's say you have a plant like broccoli that's a brassica and it's non mycorrhizal, and you have something like. I've been using lettuce a lot as an example. What about green onions? So let's say you plant those green onions with the broccoli. And so those green onions keep the mycorrhizal fungi in that bed alive for the season while the broccoli is in there and it's not feeding the mycorrhizal fungi so that the next crop that comes in maybe has a better mycorrhizal fungi population to. To take advantage of. Yeah, I mean, the. Another example on the. Maybe on the economic side, and I know that Jason Mock has done some really good stuff on this, is relay cropping. It's a lot of relay cropping potential in. No, till two, in our. In our. In market gardening. In that. Like an example of that. There's a lot of different ways to use it. You know, an example of that could be. I use lettuce a lot because it's a great intercrop. But let's say that you have a bed of celery, and as that celery gets pretty close to maturity, usually in the middle of the summer, and you want to do a run of lettuce, you plant that lettuce directly into that celery bed while the celery is still in there. You give the celery, you know, another 10 days or so to mature. Then you cut the celery out. That lettuce has sat there and kind of slowly adapted to the soil and gotten a little bit used to that light. So you start cutting that celery out there. Then the lettuce immediately takes over. Not immediately, but over the course of the next couple weeks, takes over the bed. Then before that happens, this is one, this is a specific one that we've done in the past. We put in green onions. So we put green onions into the bed before the lettuce was fully mature. And so we let that grow up. We cut the lettuce out, green onions sort of began to keep taking over and keep growing. And then before that was out, we put the kale. We put kale in for the fall. So that's four crops out of one bed. And they kind of all went into the bed at the same time. And we're always leaving the crop roots in. So we never pull crop roots out, even on green onions. We'll pull it up slightly and we'll cut it with a knife. I have a technique for that. And it's. It's somewhat fast. It's maybe not as fast as just yanking them all, but it leaves that little bit of carbon in the roots and all the exudates that are left on there in there for the microbes to sort of. So that they can sort of, you know, meander over to the other crops. That's not something I would recommend anybody doing in their first year or two. It definitely takes understanding and knowing how those crops grow to be able to pull that off really well. But that tomato one, that tomato example with the lettuce, I think anybody can do that.

Those are some great thoughts on intercropping. You started the conversation by speaking a little bit about the use of sweet alyssum to attract insect predators for insect control. And I'd like to dig into that a little bit deeper. What, in addition to, obviously the economic benefits and the efficiency benefits that you described, are there other intercropping practices that you have used for pest control of perhaps pathogens or insects or whatever the case might be? What have you observed?

Yeah, so there's. There's some good research. This is one of those. When you start digging into the research, you find there's so much research around it. Marigolds in particular. There's been some good recent research from, I think from Newcastle University about marigolds. And I want to say parasitic nematodes. I forget what they're. What they found, but marigolds are often planted both their. For their root exudates and for their. For their smell, for their scent. They. They kind of mask the scent of the crop that they're planted near of. And that helps for deer also. I mean, that, you know, that. That helps to deter larger mammals as much as even the small insects and pests. The one that we really like is nasturtiums with cucumbers. Nasturtiums are a really flavorful and very fragrant flower that's great for. For chefs. Chefs really like the nasturtiums and a lot of the edible flowers and and they are very heavily scented and they. They seem to, for us, deter cucumber beetles. And again, this is like you're. If. If it's something you try on your property and it doesn't work, it could be contextual. It could just be something about our soil and something that the nasturtiums are able to gather or maybe some sort of complement between the. The nasturtiums and the cucumbers. But there's certainly flowers. I think flowers are underutilized, not just for the pollinators, but for the. Yeah, the miniature. All the different wasps and all the different native bees and. Yeah, and. And the parasite. The parasitic wasps and those sorts of things. I think those are fairly underutilized. And I'm trying to think if there's another one that we use really commonly. There's been a lot of work on alliums and in particular for strawberries and, you know, planting green garlic in the spring. I want to say it was with strawberries and they did they. It had a really profound effect on soil diseases. There's a little bit about that in my book, and I can't remember, I don't want to miss. Cite it, but there's a little bit about those. Some of those positive effects in my book. And I think there's a lot of potential there. I think it. Also, that's one thing that people maybe overblow sometimes, just the power of certain plants to necessarily defend other plants or using trap crops or that sort of thing. There's a lot of factors, I think that. I do believe that good, healthy soil will reduce your disease and pest pressure. I believe that. I also believe there are a lot. And I know there are a lot of factors in between getting a seed to a seedling stage and getting it into the field and making sure that all of those things go right to make sure that it's healthy going into the field. And that also when it gets in the field, there's no, you know, maybe the soil's a little bit too dry and it's. Or maybe it didn't have the microbial population you thought it did, or whatever it is. There's a lot of factors that lead to that. So I think it's important to be observant. And, you know, we. One thing that we do for the microbial factor and all that is we inoculate all of our plant starts with. I know I'm getting off on a tangent, but we inoculate all of our plant starts. We dip them in compost teas and Extracts before they go out into the field. That gives us a little insurance in terms of insurance. We also like birdhouses to help us with any, you know, advantageous moths if we can. It doesn't always work, but it does certainly helps. We. Yeah, we're. We're big fans of birds and any sort of. Any flowers. Just bring in as many pollinators and beneficials as you can. Just crowd the space. Crowd the space with biology. Crowd it with ecology, with good ecological activity.

Thanks, Jesse. What is something you wish all farmers knew?

I think we've covered some of what I would say for that answer. The one that I think I really want to stress is the idea that it isn't always all about money and it isn't about the, you know, the acreage that you own or the yield that you're getting. Those relationship elements and the idea of doing what you can to mitigate the isolating nature of farming is extraordinarily important and underappreciated. And it's worth just reiterating and reiterating and reiterating that. You know, we see the suicide rates of farmers. We see that in farm workers. I know personally, people who've been on the edge because. And they have thousands of acres and they're on the edge. And I really want people to think like, how could we create more communities, create more community for ourselves and spend less time weeding and more time with our family. And the soil doesn't want you weeding it either. It wants to work with you. It wants you to be a part of it. It, you know, it needs it. It could use your skills as a human. Like our hands, posable thumbs, Our. Our tools. All of the things that we have that we can steward the soil to life and keep it going, I think, are, you know, that's. That's what it wants. And so if we can meet. If we can meet that. If we can meet that need, that's just wildly powerful. And. And it'll also eliminate a lot of that extra work that keeps us from. Yeah. Spending time with our friends and family. And I just. I think that's what I would emphasize more than anything.

Jesse, I think that's such a great point, because when we think about the pressures that we face within farming and as growers, there are. There can be intense economic pressures. There can be the timing and sensitivity pressures that you alluded to, and just the responsibility, the tremendous responsibilities. And so I think there. There is an aspect of the. As you described, the need to develop relationships, the need to take the time and make the time to foster and to cultivate those relationships. And then there is also an element of taking a serious look at how we have allowed that reality to develop that consumes so much of us and to just perhaps take the position that I don't want to be in this position indefinitely and doing what we can to change the landscape, to change the context that we are operating in. Perhaps that might mean doing fewer acres, perhaps that might mean, I mean it can mean different things for different operations, but I think really taking ownership of that to the degree that we're able to and changing to the degree that we're able to, to put ourselves in a different situation, which is really what you have done.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, it's incredibly important. And I, I love getting your thoughts there, John, because I, I'm 100 in agreement. And I think that, you know, we spend a lot of time online and we spend a lot of time looking at other people's production and you know, everybody curates their pages and it looks really beautiful. And it could be when you're not feeling good and you're feeling alone or you're feeling isolated and you see that stuff, it's not helpful. And I think you develop spending some energy building it into the crop plan to build relationships. And I, I think is, is, you know, is key. I think that that's something that could really be developed and is really important.

You know, there's this quote from Otto Sharma that I've discussed many times. I've really come to appreciate it so much. The outcome of an intervention has nothing to do with the skills of the intervener. It has everything to do with the place within from which the intervener comes. And when we think about that quote, so many of our human interactions in life are an intervention on some level, even if it's very trivial, even if we're trying to persuade our four year old daughter that she has her shoes on the wrong foot, that's really an intervention. And the outcomes of these interventions, when we have conversations with other people and we try to guide them to a different place or even just having a conversation with them, the quality of that conversation isn't about how much we know and about how smart we are and the knowledge that we have. Instead, it's about the place that we come from within and the ability for other people to sense that and perceive that. Which is just a very elaborate way of saying our relationships. It all comes down to our relationships. Yeah.

And I think, think that note about intention Right. That, you know, they talk about this in biodynamic farming and we haven't talked about it. It's not as big in the picture anymore as it maybe used to be. But the intention's a big part of that. And the reasons that you do things, why you go, like what you're genuinely feeling when you're doing it, that those are extraordinarily important and they have effect. And I think it has effects on the soil and it has effects in conversation. Like you said, you know, if our intention was something that was, you know, I don't know, insincere, disingenuous, then it would come across that way. But yeah, I think when your intention is to really, when you really do care, when you really do want to make a difference or you really do want to see a different world for your children, I think it's reflected. It's impossible to hide that. It's as impossible to hide that as a lie. You know, it is.

We as human beings, we have an exceptional capacity to sense the intent and to sense where people are, where their hearts really are and where they're really coming from. Which is speaks again to Otto's quote. It's the place that we come from within. Somehow we know you just can't, you can't hide that.

I love that quote.

Yeah. Within this vein, Jesse, you have, you've been out there and shared lots of knowledge and information and your thoughts on the podcast and the different things that you've created. But what is, what is something that you would like to speak about but haven't yet very much or you've been hesitant to because you sense that people may not be ready to hear it.

Oh, I know what I, we haven't talked about, John, is I haven't got your thoughts. You mentioned this is I'm going to turn this question on you because I'm a podcaster and that's what we do. I. You mentioned that the, you know, some of the SAP analysis earlier on when we were talking about composting and I'm curious what your general thoughts are on nutrient excesses when it comes to using that much compost.

I don't have a lot of experience with such large volume compost applications, so I can't speak to that directly. What I can say is that agronomy and plant nutrition since pretty much since the green revolution has been framed almost exclusively around the law of the minimum, which is everyone's familiar with Justice Liebig's that the barrel with the broken off staves and the, the indication that it is the nutrient, which is at least supply, which is going to limit your crops development and going to limit your yields. And I find a couple of things about this explanation to be pretty interesting. First of all, I have yet to see one of those barrels that includes water and carbon dioxide as one of the staves. And yet they're fundamental. They're fundamental. But this perspective on agronomy has completely missed the other side of the coin. And the other side of the coin is what is described. It was described a few decades later by, I forget the original author, but it was described as the law of the maximum. And the law of the maximum goes something like. It is the nutrient which is in excess that creates deficiencies of other nutrients. That is the biggest limiting factor to plant yield and development and productivity. And since we started using SAP analysis in 2011 and have developed quite a database since then, and our conclusion has been that the majority of the time the nutrient imbalances that crops experience, which cost them yield and which produce disease and insect susceptibility are a result of the excesses of products that the grower applies, not deficiencies. And so I would suggest we need to completely rethink our approach to agronomy, that the excesses actually have a bigger influence than the deficiencies. And so when you think about what this means in actual practice, it is common for us to get a soil analysis back or a plant tissue analysis back. And this is perhaps on a bit larger scale than with the scale that you're talking about. Well, we get these laboratory tests back and the common response is you look at what's low and you add more. And what we're observing is that this is in fact the wrong approach, or at least the wrong initial approach. The correct approach is we need to look at the excesses and understand what deficiencies the excesses are causing and try to mitigate those excesses and bring them back into balance. And so I can't really speak to your question directly because I don't have a lot of experience with those large compost applications. But from a very practical perspective, we can look at it this way. Do we have challenges with diseases and insect problems because. And are we able to produce Hybrix plants? If we're able to do those things, then that's really all that we really care about. And that's, that is a, that's the ultimate signal of a soil biology and ecosystem really functioning healthily as it should. And I think perhaps one of the reasons why we haven't or I personally haven't heard more stories of market gardens that have really had challenges with these large compost applications is because of this kind of this summary trump card, if you will, which is that biology supersedes chemistry. So if you have really good biology, they can overcome an imbalance of nutrients and you can still grow really healthy crops. And so in the ecosystems that you're describing, the approach that you're describing is really an approach of cultivating biology in that topsoil. And when you have really vigorous biology, they can overcome a host of problems, including these fairly significant nutritional imbalances.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I also wonder if a factor in that is also. You're pulling so many nutrients out of these beds. You know, when you're, when we're talking about four crops in a season, three or four crops, I mean, that's a lot of, that's a lot of production. And I don't know the extent to the effect, like what the effect is there in terms of on those nutrients, but maybe the excesses are not as able to rear their heads all the time because you're literally pulling them out of the soil, you know, every few, every couple months. I don't know. What do you have? What do you think on that?

My guess is that those effects are perhaps a lot less limited than you might think, because when you do the math of the actual quantity of nutrient removal compared to the total nutrient reserves that are in the soil profile or that type of compost application, you're talking about removing at most, maybe, let's use phosphorus, an example, at most, maybe 50 to 75 pounds of phosphorus per acre, when with that type of post application, you're talking thousands of pounds of phosphorus per acre. So my guess is really, see, ultimately what it really comes down to is the capacity of the soil biology and the plant ecosystem to cycle carbon, not to sequester carbon, not to store carbon, that, that's a side effect. What we really care about is cycling carbon. And when we cycle large volumes of carbon through the soil biology, they will tie up and bind and prevent plants from absorbing excesses of these nutrients because they have the capacity to do that when they have abundant carbon. The moment you have carbon deficiencies and you don't have good carbon cycling, then the biology lacks the capacity. All of a sudden you start picking up excesses. So kind of my experienced guess, I guess, would be that I anticipate it's probably the reason we're getting good results in these ecosystems is probably because of really good biology and a rapid moving carbon cycle or I should say a large volume carbon cycle.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think that's great. I mean that's a great addition because a lot of times when you're in these worlds that you talk to a echo chamber of people who just say like, oh, this is the answer and this is right or this is wrong and don't always question it. And maybe this is another argument for people getting into the science is you see, you see that you have to be objective about these things because you see the little flaws even in the science. And the scientists will say a lot of times like the flaw in this paper is this, or you know, this characteristic could be, you know, we could change this one variable and that would maybe cause a different outcome. Yeah, I mean, I think that's important.

The majority of papers on agricultural topics have a concluding statement. Further research is needed.

Yep.

In this conversation you have alluded several times to the book that you're writing, but you haven't really told us very much about it. Tell us about the book and how it came into being, what it's all about and where we can find it.

Yeah. So it's called the Living Soil Handbook. Talks about much of the things that we've spoken about here with, with quite a bit of an addition. We go into a lot of interplanting. We go into everything from starting a garden to maintaining it in the sort of no till style that I've talked about. Unlike other farming books maybe that kind of bring you onto their farm and show you their techniques, which are great. I think those books are highly valuable. This book kind of attempts to be a choose your own adventure of sorts where I kind of introduce you to the soil biology and how photosynthesis works on a basic level and then we talk about practices to sort of encourage that. And in, you know, photosynthesis acts much the same in Montana that it does in Arkansas. So I wanted it to be something where your context wasn't as it wasn't going to make it impossible for you to get some, a lot out of this book. The book is published through Chelsea Green. It will come out in July. It is on pre order now@notillgrowers.com that's the best place to get it. We haven't talked about our business model, but our business model is we do certain things, fundraisers, sometimes we have a Patreon page and all of these things because we want to give away our information. We want to give away as much as possible. So the book I'm treating a little bit like a fundraiser where we're selling it@notailgrowers.com to raise money to create more content. All the proceeds that from that sale, I get like a royalty from the publisher. It's not very much, but that's where my money comes from for it. The. The sale at no till growers.com goes into us making more videos, more podcasts, et cetera, so. So notillgrowers.com that would be the place to get it. And like I said, it ships in July.

Thank you, Jesse. And then, of course, notilgrowers.com is also the place to go if listeners want to dig into your podcast and all the rest of the content you're producing as well. Is that the best place to go also for that?

Absolutely. It's the best place to find all of the content that we have.

This conversation has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed having you on and digging into these different topics. So thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom, and I look forward to having more conversations with you in the future.

Agreed. Thank you so much, John. This has been a blast.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test. We analyze, and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look forward to working with you.