Microbial Communities for Carbon Sequestration with David Johnson

Hi, friends. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. This is Jon Kempf, and today I'm delighted to be here with Dr. David Johnson from New Mexico University and also Chico State University. Many of you over the last few years have heard about David Johnson and his wife's work with the compost bioreactors. I built a couple last year because I wanted some experience with them. And I've heard a number of really great reports from the field from growers who have developed compost using this method and have observed some very nice field results. So I wanted to have David here to have a conversation and to learn more about the work that he is doing and the impact that it can have on all of our operations. David, thank you for joining us, and thank you for being here for this conversation.

Well, thank you very much for inviting me, David.

The foundation of Regenerative Agriculture Ecosystems, of course, is really about regenerating soil health. It's about regenerating plant health and regenerating our planet's capacity to cool itself and to restore water cycles and so forth. And all of this really revolves around building organic matter, which is just a different way of saying sequestering carbon dioxide. Actually, I think the language around sequestering carbon dioxide is something that we might chose to think a bit more consciously about, because in reality, in an agricultural ecosystem, we don't want to sequester carbon. We want to cycle carbon, and we want to cycle large volumes of carbon and, of course, have a large sink and a large reserve to draw from in our soil profiles. I believe the pathway that you went down in developing your composting process was as a result of desire to sequester carbon and draw down carbon. What have you learned about the capacity of biology to sequester carbon and to build soil organic matter?

Well, first, I want to say you're exactly right about the cycling of this carbon. It's much like our monetary system. If we don't have a certain velocity of money in the system, it's a dead system. It's the same way with carbon in the soils that you need this cycling, that's the energy flow in the system. That's what makes this work. And the microbes, they form this planet. Everything that we enjoy today has come indirectly from the microbes in the soil, the microbes on this planet, how they've changed everything to make such a nice environment that we have today.

When we look at the atmosphere and the gas content, carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere, from a plant's perspective, it's my understanding that plants actually like higher levels of carbon dioxide because it increases their capacity for photosynthesis. We know that in the Earth's history, there were plants periods of time when there were significantly higher levels of carbon dioxide, as much as 7,000 parts per million. Why are these higher levels of carbon dioxide perceived to be such a significant problem from an agricultural perspective?

Well, I think it's more from the perspective of what it does to our climate, what it does to holding heat in. We actually see all these increases in the record heat in different areas. And a lot of this may potentially be due to carbon dioxide, may also have some influence by the atmospheric water content. The cloud formations, it gets very complex in a hurry. I mean, even to the point that the cloud formation is very much influenced by where we are in the spiral arm of the galaxy. As far as the gamma rays that penetrate our atmosphere, they determine what type of cloud formations we have, Whether we have the cumulonimbus, big fluffy ones, or we have high clouds. The cumulonimbus, they reflect the heat out, and the higher clouds, they hold the heat in. So there's a lot of dynamics as far as that. But CO2 is a necessary nutrient. It is in a very small concentration, 400 parts per million. Plants do like a higher CO2 content. It affects a few other things on this planet.

My understanding is that the key. If we want to support plants with carbon dioxide as a nutrient and get very strong and very healthy plant growth, then of course, we need that carbon dioxide to cycle. We need to release it from the soil. Before we can release it from the soil, we first need to have a large reserve in the soil. And I know there are many people today, well established science, if you will, is that carbon can be sequestered only very slowly, that organic matter can only be built very slowly. And yet I know we have experience in the field where we've observed organic matter gains as much as a half a percentage point per year, year after year, on farms that were well managed, even in very low moisture environments. From your perspective, what you've observed so far, what is really possible with carbon drawdown? How rapidly can we build organic matter?

Well, I've seen the exact same rates that you're talking about, a half a percent increase in soil carbon per year. In my field experiments, I've only gotten about a little over a quarter. The way I've been approaching this, I have not had the benefit of having the cattle or the grazers in my systems. I have been doing it solely with just the biology that I can implement in the soils. The animals are critical to seeing the kind of carbon increases that you're seeing, but it's very possible. I'm not sure why other scientists have not gotten on board and looked at this a little more in detail, but a half percent a year and that's a significant amount of carbon at the quarter percent. I'm talking 10 tons of carbon per hectare. So you're talking over 20 tons of carbon per hectare per year in soils.

Like you're talking about, even without livestock, even at 10 tons per hectare per year, A quarter percentage point of organic matter per acre per year. What are the conditions that are required in the field to produce those types of results? What needs to be in place to achieve that kind of performance of carbon sequestration and building organic matter in the soil profile?

Basically what I'm seeing is it's the microbial community to start with. This is the system that frees up the nutrients from the soil parent material. They cycle the carbon and the energy flow in the soils. They work with the plants indirectly and directly as far as exchanging nutrients for food substrates and also their ability to keep the soil respiration in check. We see with the right microbes the potential to quintuple. There'll be above ground net primary productivity or the biomass production on that soil if you have the right microbes in this system. We also see on the back end that if you have this microbial community functioning properly, we see a reduced respiration rate or a higher carbon use efficiency in the system. So you have more carbon being fixed through photosynthesis on the front end. With the right microbes and less CO2 respired on the back end, these two things start to stack together. That's why you can increase this soil carbon at such a fast rate. You have a healthy system. You don't have a system that's struggling to do photosynthetic processes. The carbon that we're putting into the soil is not an amorphous or a carbon without form or shape. It's a carbon that has function. It is a microbial community that's functioning for you.

David, you just mentioned three very big pieces that I think are important for us to unwrap a bit more deeply. You mentioned having the right microbes and then increasing photosynthesis and then reducing microbial respiration or increasing the efficiency of microbial respiration. Let's take each of those one at a time. When you say that soils needed to have the right microbes, what defines the right microbes? What's the needed microbial profile or population to achieve the types of carbon sequestration efficiency you're describing.

At this point, I have to give you what I've seen. There's still a lot of unknown on this, but I think at the very beginning, what we're seeing, the conventional management processes that we have used have destroyed the fungal community first, from the plowing to the biocides that we apply to the bear fallows, all of this. The first thing that went was the fungal community. And the fungal community is so important for logistics and communication. They transport nutrients down into the soil from the plant and feed the microbes, the bacteria that are there. And then the bacteria are there extracting the soil parent material, the nutrients, all the elements in it that the plant needs, or fixing nitrogen for that plant. It's a whole system that we have to have in there. But biggest thing I see in agriculture today is we've destroyed the fungal community. And I think that's why some of the inoculum that we put on these skills does have a higher fungal community. It has a lot of fungal spores in it is what I'm seeing. And that allows you to start rebuilding a system. There's no one microbe that does it. There's no one fungi that does it. Nature developed everything on this planet in systems. It's a system that we have to restore. The bacteria are just as important as the fungi for the functionality that they have as far as nitrogen fixation, carbon and nitrogen cycling, phosphorus solubilization, phytohormone production, or hormones the microbes produce that stimulate plant growth. There's a lot of things going on in the soil.

The entire ecosystem is very important to have functioning. And we have soils today that don't have the fungal populations, by and large, that would be optimal. I know that in our consulting work and growers that we've worked with, we've observed that as plant health improves and we get to a threshold point where we have plants that have a higher oil content, higher lipid content, and that also produces a soil that has a much more aggressive fungal population, because those lipid levels seem to really stimulate the fungal community in the soil profile. That leads me to ask the question, what is the interplay between. Between soil fungi and plants? I'm recalling a slide that you showed at some point in a presentation where you described how different fungal to bacterial biomass ratios result in different levels of photosynthes being moved around into different locations within the plant. Can you describe that for us a little bit? How do fungi affect the proportion of sugars that are moved into the soil versus that stay in plant biomass.

Well, the how part I'm still working on. But I did one experiment looking at the compost that we make in this bioreactor, just to look and see what its influence was on plant growth. As we went from a bacterial dominant system to a fungal dominant system. And in this, we had mixed different ratios of the compost and arroyo sand. Here in Las Cruces, we noticed the partitioning of the carbon was drastically different between the different treatments. In a bacterial dominant soil with low carbon, we only saw about 3% of the energy that planted captured as the carbon actually go into the plant, where 97% of the other energy went into the soil. And for a plant to devote 97% of the energy it captures and push it into the soil, there must be a reason why. But as we've changed from bacterial dominant to more fungal dominant through about six different series, we noticed that each time we increased the fungal mass, we saw an increase in the amount of carbon partitioned into the plant, either into the root or shoot or fruit of that plant. We got up to the point where we saw 55% of that energy captured actually go into the plant. Where we see that we are in agriculture today is we are about 11% of the total energy that plant captures go into the plant. So we were seeing the potential to increase productivity five times once we brought this out into the field. This is exactly what we saw over about a three year period that we started to see as we were changing our soils from bacterial dominant to fungal dominant, that there was an increase in the net primary productivity of these soils.

Okay, this is really important. I want to make sure that I understand this well and that our audience understands it well. So if I understood you correctly, mainstream production agriculture, 11% of the photosynthetic energy that the plant captures, the carbohydrates that it produces, 11% of those remain within the plant. And the remaining 89%, on average, are transmitted into the soil profile. Where they feed bacterial populations.

Yes, where it's trying to build it up. But a lot of our activities negate that. We're not pulling out. We're staying in a bacterial dominant system with a very low fungal population. And that's part of the problem that we have in our agricultural, the conventional agricultural systems where the regenerative is, we can bring these back.

And then as fungal populations increase at the upper levels, we can have the plant retaining as much as 55% of the captured photosynthetic energy, which means only 45% is going into the soil profile. And what does the fungal population need to look like for that to occur? In terms of fungal bacterial biomass, where.

We see the maximum productivity, the maximum carbon capture happens around a 1 to 1 fungal to bacterial ratio. And it's from that point on, as you are increasing it from 1 to 1 higher is when we start to see up to about 3, 3.5 to 1. That's where we see 55%. You attain maximum productivity, but it's how it's partitioned after that point. You're only capturing so much carbon at that point, that one to one fungal to bacterial ratio, but it's how that carbon is distributed. There's more that's going into the soil at that point to still build that soil up. And also a lot of this carbon is fixed to fuel the nitrogen fixation process. It's a very expensive process energetically, but you start to see less and less energy flowing into that nitrogen fixation and then more and more of that into the plant. You're moving up a continuum in the productivity. And it's how it's funneled. Whether it's funneled into the plant shoot, root or fruit carbon, or it's shuttled into soil carbon, or it's shuttled into respiration. You see a definite change in respiration through this process as well. The respiration goes down at a linear clip, we'll put it that way.

So plant respiration is also being reduced, and you also mentioned earlier the capacity to increase photosynthesis as well as.

Yes, soil respiration is what's dropping in this. It's starting to build that community up where it's starting to work effectively. You get all the players there. Everybody's at the factory that day doing the job they're supposed to do and the product gets out the door.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that as we have a higher fungal population, a higher fungal to bacterial biomass ratio, then we also have linearly less respiration from the soil microbial community, which means that there is less carbon loss as carbon dioxide from the soil profile as well. How much?

Oh, I'd have to go back to the chart to make sure. But it's also what we're seeing in that energy that goes to nitrogen fixation. That's a big component of this as well. It's something that I observed in this experiment that at that one to one fungal to bacterial ratio, and at that, I think we were at about 3% soil organic matter. Or 1.8 soil carbon. That's when we started to see the deflection in the curve where there was less and less energy going into nitrogen fixation. Less of the carbon going into the soil and being respired out, and more carbon going into the plant structure in the root, shoot and fruit.

Less energy going into nitrogen fixation and into microbial respiration as a percentage, but perhaps a still increased total in terms of actual quantity. This is really intriguing because I'm sitting here listening to this conversation, just doing the mental math and what you are describing is essentially that your carbon sequestration rate, the quantity of carbon, if you move from 11% plant retained carbon to 55%, essentially what I'm envisioning happening, what you describe, when you have increased efficiency of photosynthesis and you change the carbon partitioning, it seems to me as if though you are growing more physical biomass, but you are also at the same time actually sequestering a lot more carbon and building more organic matter at the same time as you're growing more crop biomass. Is that a correct assumption?

Yes.

I want to see this on a lot more acres.

We all do. And you know, it just comes out much better for the farmer. We see much happier farmers when they see this in their field, when they can witness it. It just makes farming fun again.

What you're describing is essentially if photosynthesis changes from 11% retained within the plant on average, or what is common and normal today to 45% being retained within the plant, then that represents an almost three times, actually four times increase in the plant energy, not necessarily in tonnage or total biomass, because it's not all represented in biomass, but four times more energy that can be harvested per acre. And let me just make it really simple to make sure that my thought process is working correctly. Basically this means that if your system were functioning correctly, if you had this correct bacterial fungal biomass, then that would result in increased plant biomass production year after year, even when you removed 100% of the crop. And it would result in increased nitrogen fixation year after year, even when you remove 100% of the crop biomass.

Well, what I observed in 100% removal, there's a certain percent that has to go back. There's what I'm seeing is kind of like what you see on grain production or corn production. Cotton, Chile, the amount of biomass above ground biomass that nature's going to let you have about 40%. All of those grain crops come out about 40% of that above ground biomass. Cotton, the same, chili, the same. And it's also what is allowed in the adaptive multi paddock grazing management, where you're pulling your cattle in, you're letting them only graze 40% and you're pulling them off, allowing that other 60% to go back to feed these microorganisms. I kind of almost got a golden ratio that nature allows, and that's the same thing I've observed here. If you want to build your carbon up, there's a certain amount of this carbon that has to be left to feed these organisms. And it's that 60%. The covers you use, you can leave them in place to cover that ground and feed those microbes. It's essential that they have this energy. Because I saw with pulling everything off, I did not see the carbon increase that I saw when I would leave 60% there. It's what you allow nature to rebuild with is how I'm seeing it right now.

There's a key question though, I think in what you just described, is that when you removed all of the above ground biomass, you didn't see the same degree of organic matter gain, but did you still see some organic matter gain.

Any organic matter gain at pulling everything off? I did not see an increase in the data that I took. I continued to see over a 3 1/2 year period increase, a 5 times increase in that above ground biomass production, both in small plots and a large field. But it's how much you, if you want to build that soil carbon up, from what I'm seeing, you have to leave a certain amount. And that seems to weigh out at about 60%. That seems to be how nature developed these grasslands on the Great Plains with the bison, how they would be herded by predators, kept in tight groups, moved along, they would deposit their dung, their saliva, the urine, and they would trample what other forage had grown on that. And then it was like an inoculation event. The dung that they would leave be rolled up into small balls by the dung beetles and placed underground and relative composted in place. It was just a big inoculation event every time the bison went over these prairies. That's how you started to build up this deep soil carbon.

There's a bit of a discrepancy between the 40% that is retained in crop biome mass or crop residue, I should say, between the broad acre crops that you mentioned, and the 60% that is needed for the continued organic matter gain. Am I understanding it correctly that there's that 20% gap? How can we make up that gap? Is that where Cover crops come in to play a role?

I believe so. The COVID crops are critical to this. It's not that you can bring the microbes in and they'll do it all for you. It's, it's having that energy flow. It all comes down to energy flow, that carbon flowing into the soil from the plant to feed these microorganisms. They will start building it up little by little. We're working with systems that are so broken photosynthetically, the efficiency is so low. That's one of the big issues. If you're talking about carbon sequestration, you have to fix that front end, you have to fix that photosynthetic rate. If you don't fix that front end and having that energy flow into the system, you're just never really going to bring it out. But once you start doing that and start feeding it, these things start to stack on each other. Stack enterprises where you're feeding the microbes well, they're there working for you. They're, they're extracting the nutrients needed for that photosynthetic process to go forward again. So if you have an efficient system where your microbes are supplying everything, they're supplying all the elemental nutrients that plant needs, all the nitrogen that plant needs, then the system builds on itself and it just becomes more and more efficient as you have more photosynthesis, more microbial community development, better carbon use efficiencies. It's a living system that you're restoring in these soils.

Much of our work at AEA has revolved around increasing a plant's capacity for photosynthesis, or I should say increasing the efficiency of the inherent capacity that plants already have. Because as Don huber and Michael McNeil and many others have pointed out, what we've come to accept as normal is plants which are photosynthesizing somewhere in the neighborhood of between 15 and 20% of their inherent photosynthetic capacity. Our approach to improving photosynthetic efficiency has been to manage mineral nutrition and to try to improve the plant's capacity for photosynthesis within the leaves. Is that what you are referring to as well? Or are you referring to the impact that biology in the soil can have on photosynthesis. How does that work?

It's not just the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that we add. There's so many elements, these systems use almost every element on the periodic table. There's no way that we can forecast what that plant is going to need. That's why nature developed this system where the microbes and the plant work together. I mean, there's a lot of molybdenum used in nitrogen fixation, selenium also, as far as the plant health, there's just so many micronutrients that are involved in the photosynthetic process in the structure of those proteins and the cofactors, the elemental cofactors in these proteins, for them to function properly. We have trouble enough with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Figured out what the right amount is to get out there. Not putting too much and not putting enough. And it's hard to envision that we'll ever be able to have everything there on time, the way nature can when she has the right biology.

You are absolutely correct. One of the trace minerals that is worth mentioning and that I often speak about is manganese. Because for photosynthesis to happen, the first step in the process with regards to water is for the water molecule to be split in water hydrolysis to H and oh. And that process is completely dependent on manganese. So that means you can have the perfect amount of water and sunlight and chlorophyll and carbon dioxide. But if you don't have enough manganese, photosynthesis is not going to happen.

The whole system shuts down. You lose that efficiency.

What are the tools that you use to improve photosynthetic efficiency? What is the approach that you advise growers to take to improve photosynthetic efficiency?

Well, it's the microbes. It's having this compost that when we put it out as inocular, we're seeing over 2,500 species of bacteria, 400 species of fungi, another host of archaea, which is your, the ancient bacteria that developed this planet, viruses as well. There's every organism like us. We depend on all of these organisms for our functioning as a living entity. If we don't have the bacterial component we need or the fungal component, the viral component, we don't function well as humans. These soils are exactly the same. If they don't have that full complement of biology, things go awry. And we see that in human health. Right now we're so influenced by our stomach microbiota that just a simple disturbance or dysbiosis of that community can affect our health dramatically. And yet they're finding when you bring microbial community from a healthy donor back into somebody with problems like Crohn's disease or ibs, we see that these people can, you know, they've suffered for decades with these diseases, and yet when you come in with the right biology, they can be healed within 24 hours. It's amazing to have the right biology there. And it's not a single microbe. It's a whole community structure that we're bringing back. And we're seeing the things that we can cure now with restoration of that stomach microbiota. We're seeing things like autism, things that we thought were genetic diseases, diabetes. There's just a whole host of diseases that we suffer because we've disrupted that community structure, that microbial community structure in our gut microbiota. And we've done the same thing in agriculture. And I think that's why we're seeing that as you come in with inoculating these soils with these microbes, you see such dramatic differences. We did a trial in Wilcox this last summer with corn looking at 256 pounds of nitrogen per acre in a control. We dropped that by 85% down to 15%, about 37 pounds of nitrogen per acre. And we brought in two pounds of the compost per acre as an inoculate that we would inject into the furrow when we planted. And then we also did a just the biology, only just that 2 pound rate of the compost per acre. We matched productivity at 218 bushels an acre on the corn with the conventional with the 85% reduction. And we only lost 6.6% productivity on just the biology alone. And this was our first year in this field. We only had about 40 pounds of nitrogen per acre available. But the biology in this systems, that 170 pounds of nitrogen came from somewhere because we pulled off about 261units of nitrogen off that field.

The nitrogen was there and was absorbed from the atmosphere. You just didn't buy it. That's the key piece, is that you didn't buy the nitrogen that was added.

It was $80 more an acre profit. For the farmer. The inocula cost him about 50 cents an acre.

In essence, what you're describing, I think this conversation about the capacity for nitrogen fixation and the 37,000 tons of nitrogen that's above every acre is not a new conversation for growers anymore. Realizing it and actually getting it to work in the field is something that isn't that commonly experienced, although it's becoming much more common. But I also want to go back, not just to focus on hydrogen, but on all these other minerals. We spoke a bit about manganese. You mentioned that there's all the elements on the periodic table that we'll eventually discover a need for within these plant enzyme systems. When I asked the question about how do we increase photosynthetic efficiency. Your answer was we need to get better biology. And if I'm understanding you correctly, if I'm connecting the dots correctly, what you're really saying is that when we have better biology in the soil, they have the capacity to release nutrients, the nutrients that the crop needs when it needs them in order to increase the photosynthetic efficiency. And that's how we're getting photosynthetic efficiency is by having the biology to deliver nutrition when needed.

That's how I see it now with the research I've done. It's, it's self assembling. It seems from what we've observed that these decisions are made for you. If you have the right microbial community in your farming system, it makes farming a lot easier. That's why I'm saying I see a lot happier farmers. You know, they don't have to think, well, did I put enough of this or did I not have enough of that? As they improve this biology, this gets to be a very forgiving system, a very resilient system, a system that can almost fix itself as to what it means.

I think it's very important for us as we consider developing agricultural systems for the future. We need to develop systems that are resilient to vagaries of the weather. Here in northeast Ohio, we've had eight days where it's snowed in late April, mid to late April. And we see these increasing weather inconsistencies. And of course managing water and water use efficiency is a really big deal. We've observed many cases where soils become more biologically active. And it seems that water no longer behaves the same as it has in the past, or perhaps I should say the crops water use efficiency changes, where all of a sudden it seems that an inch of rainfall goes much further than it has in the past. What have you observed with water use efficiency?

Watching the same thing. As you improve that photosynthetic capacity or efficiency, you're using that water more efficiently. You're getting more crop. For the amount of water you're putting out there on the front end, on the back end, you're changing the dynamics of that soil, how that water can infiltrate in the first place. The soil that we started with in Wilcox, it took 10 minutes for one inch of water to infiltrate into that soil. It was very compacted. But we're seeing as we bring this biology back, as they improve the tilth of the soil, they build their micro aggregates and this whole system starts to completely change. The water infiltration goes in faster. I Mean, you're talking seconds from one inch of water to get into the soil, the retention of that water. In our part of the country, we have very sandy soils. That water just goes straight through. It is not held in that upper profile where the root is. And yet, once you have the biology there with the carbon buildup, that water, we see the first 1% increase in soil carbon, a 5 times increase in the amount of water that soil can hold in that top foot. How important is that for you and your crop that you can hold that water instead of losing it? That's where all this efficiency comes from. We pretty much destroyed any water retention capacity of these soils from our application of the fertilizers and our consistent tilling. It's bringing the covers back in, bringing the biology back in. They bring the carbon in. The carbon changes the whole dynamic of how these soils work. You know, you've got nothing to lose by starting to look at agriculture this way. It will be the agricultural future. Because the way we're farming land right now, the amount of land that we have left is depleting, is declining dramatically for the number of people and water as well. I mean, we see people on the western or the eastern side of New Mexico, the Ogallala Aquifer, they got six years to fix this, and then they'll be dry land farmers. Because the Ogallala has decreased that much in that area. There's big issues that need to be fixed, but every one of them can be fixed. By bringing the biology back and having a significant amount of that carbon go back into the soil to start building that community structure up both the microbial community, the soil carbon, and the plant itself.

How much can water use efficiency be increased? How far can we make a gallon of water go?

I've seen a doubling of crop productivity in our area from the norm. Just by bringing this system back up and functioning. You could farm half the land and still get the same amount of crop doing this. It's significant. When we see that agriculture uses 70 to 80% of the fresh water on this planet, it's because we're doing it so poorly. We have such inefficient, broken systems that it's that way. It doesn't need to be that way. We can farm smarter.

David, as you've been on this pathway, developing this different composting methodology and looking at the results that it produces in the fields, what has been something that surprised you? What was unexpected?

All of this. I didn't go in looking for this. This just my research. I was Actually just trying to find a way to compost dairy manure and have a decent product because, you know, it was so saline, the dairy manure that you started with and the end product. The rest of this has been serendipity. It has just been side roads, you know, observations that, well, you know, that shouldn't be happening. And yet you would follow that side road and it would just keep going to another side road. That's how we discovered this. It's not because we're brilliant, it's because we're lucky.

I think that's true of all people who pay attention.

And unfortunately, yeah, 97% of the great discoveries are serendipity. Just accidental, but, you know, it's good timing. It seems to be a path forward when what we're seeing now in agriculture is so many brick walls that these farmers are running into. We hear, we get the letters from people and you can just feel the pain. And yet to have this as a potential to fix these problems and allow them to become profitable again and have farming, as I say, fun again instead of what it is right now, I think this is a good time. In that case. It's never been better that we know we have a path out of this.

David, with the interactions you've had, you've gotten to observe some of the challenges of mainstream agriculture, with the perspectives that you have gained. What do you believe to be true about modern agriculture that is different from the mainstream view?

That's a tough one. You know that cartoon back in the 60s, Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us. We are our biggest obstacle. It's our insistence on holding on to traditional methodologies. It's the change that needs to be made is we need to start observing, open up to alternate ideas. That's going to be the farming in the future. Because this is all about observation. This is the good start. It's like that adaptive multi paddock grazing. The adaptive part is the most important part because you're never going to hit the same thing twice. What was it? One person said they went up to a farmer. Farmer said he'd been farming about 40 years and the guy said, wow, you got 40 years experience? And he said, no, I've got 40 experiences. And that's what you're going to get in farming. You'll probably never figure this out completely. But observation is key, just simple things. I think one farmer we knew, they were out just disk in the corners of a circle and his dad cut across the field to get to the other corner and they noticed in their corn production, the exact path that his dad took across that field. They would drop 100 bushels an acre every time they went across it. So disturbance is a big problem in agriculture. The less we can do, the better off we're going to be.

What is a book or resource that you would recommend to growers and agronomists?

Oh gosh, you know, there's a lot of good ones coming out. But what they have right now that's best is like the blogs that you have where they can come in and watch what you have to say. Or go to Chico, go to their center for Regenerative Ag. They have a whole bunch of people that are talking about this. We're not caught up to this in science yet. The mainstream science in the universities is still in the old paradigm where there's a few places at a few universities that are getting it. Chico is one of them. To get more up to date knowledge. I think the blogs like you have on your site are very helpful. Gabe Brown, what he does. Ray Archuleta, what he does. Alan Williams, what he does. Will Harris in Georgia, what he does. You know, all of these. This is how you're going to get the most up to date information. And I don't know, I'd rather sit and watch a blog than read a book. Sometimes I get too much reading as it is.

David, what is something that you wish all farmers knew? If you had a piece of advice for people in general, what is something that a recommendation that you would make for them?

Consider biology, how it shaped this planet and what it has overcome and start to look at your soils as a biological, as a living organism. Treat that organism like you would a child. You know, if that child is thirsty, if that child needs food, you're going to be there. It's not an inanimate object, it's not a sponge anymore. But I would also reiterate observation. It's the observation that's going to get you out of this predicament that you're in. It's the moving away from the conventional and traditional agriculture into an agriculture that's regenerative, that's actually start to rebuild your souls. It's rebuilding your souls for your future progeny, the children that you have, having something there that you can give them in the future. It's building that soil up, which is something that we can do. There's enough people doing this, there's no doubt we can do it. I mean, I've seen one rancher in just south of us here in the Chihuahuan Desert change a desert setting to a grasslands in a decade just by grazing management. We've seen farmers do the same thing with the way they're approaching agriculture in a regenerative approach. It completely is possible. You just have to get out and observe it. As I say, it does make farming fun again.

Wonderful. David, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and insights, the observations and experiences that you've had.

Well, thank you for the opportunity as well.

You're very welcome. I think your knowledge is something that needs to become much more widely adopted and used by many people in all of agriculture. So thank you for sharing.

You're more than welcome.

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.