Podcast Episode #7: Regenerating Our Capacity For Stewardship with John Kempf

All right, well, welcome to the Green Cover podcast, where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top farmers and experts in the regenerative agriculture world. Join us as we learn together how to regenerate God's creation for future generations. Now, we're all familiar with the principles of soil health, but don't think that those are the same principles as regenerative agriculture, because they're not. And my guest today has a lot to say on that topic. I want to welcome in our friend, John Kemp. John is well known by many people across the country within this regenerative world. John, welcome to our podcast.

Oh, thanks for having me on here, Keith. I've been looking forward to this conversation. I hardly. Yeah, my father used to tell me that an expert, X means former, and a spurt is a drop of water under pressure. So never aspire to being an expert.

Well, if you don't want to be the expert, you can be a farmer, because we're doing both. But, you know, and the great thing is, is even though you're a farmer and an expert, I count it a blessing to call you friend as well. And that's the great thing about this movement, is it's so open and sharing with each other. So thank you for being part of our podcast, and I want to jump in and talk about these principles of regenerative agriculture. But before we go there, for maybe the three or four people listening that don't know who you are, go ahead and just give us a little bit of background, you know, your, you know, what you've gone through to get to where you're at now. Because, you know, John is the founder and chief visionary officer for Advancing Eco Agriculture. But it's, it's been a process getting there. And so, John, just tell us a little bit about your background.

Well, thanks, Keith. I'm going to keep it brief because I've shared the story 100,000 times, it feels like, and people can find it lots of other places. But, you know, I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm, and we came right to the cliff's edge of losing the farm to very intense disease and insect pressure in spite of using intense pesticide applications. And in the middle of the hurricane, the eye of the storm was experiencing some fields that were very resistant to diseases in insects with changes in soil and changes in soil biology, and realizing kind of coming to the realization and the discovery that plants actually have the capacity to be resistant to diseases and insects if they're supported with the right microbiome and with the Proper nutrition. And that then led to the founding of Advancing Eco Agriculture as a consulting company. And flash forward to today, it's a team of 80 people and working on 4 to 5 million acres across the countryside. And I have the joy of hosting the Regenerative Agriculture podcast, which is. Has become so much fun and I really get to enjoy the innovative conversation. Just today I interviewed someone and I learned that nematodes, not just fungi, not just bacteria, but nematodes, can be pathogenic or symbiotic, depending on the soil environment. And so I keep learning all this fun stuff that stretches the boundaries of what we thought we knew. And yeah, there's Keith. The stuff we're working on today, I'm so excited about. There's so much innovation happening around technology, around AI and large language models, but really around having large sets of good data, which we have at aea, that there's going to be innovations in how managing microbiomes has largely been an art over the last half a dozen decades and. And it's shifting to becoming a science because we have better management tools and we're standing at a new frontier. There is so much to discover in some ways. One of the farmers that we work with made a comment recently, I forget who to credit it to, but he said something to the effect of, we need to get back to being as good a farmer as my grandfather was before the use of herbicides and pesticides and so forth. And the good news is, I think in the next decade or two, we're going to be able to greatly exceed that, because while we've lost a lot of wisdom, we have a pathway to rediscovering it and also to deeply understanding the why in ways that they weren't fully able to. So it's an exciting time. It's an exciting time to be in this space.

Yeah, it is. And you guys are doing great work there. And one of the fun things, you know, Green Cover and aea, you know, roughly, you know, similar ages of companies. You know, we both kind of started from, you know, just very little and have grown up to, you know, managing lots and lots of people, but having really good people around us to help us do that. So it's just been in fun to kind of see how the two companies have, you know, grown along somewhat parallel tracks. Well, Keith, one of the.

I've really appreciated, Keith, I've really appreciated our shared values and the way that we show up in the world, the way that, you know, you meet some people in life that you just, you resonate with you just click with and others that you don't. Some, as the saying goes, some people you meet for a reason, some for a season, and some for a lifetime. And it's those people where you have deeply shared core values of that, of how you show up in the world. The core values of integrity and of giving and sharing information and value with other people. And I think we are actually very parallel and very similar companies in that regard. And I really appreciate that now.

We appreciate that too. And I think that's a great segue into. What I really want to kind of take a dive into here on this episode of the podcast is that we often talk about the principles of soil health. Keep the soil covered and maximize diversity. And those are pretty well known and, well, maybe not as well known as we'd like them to be, but I think that most people get those and they're fairly familiar with it. But sometimes I've heard people say those are the principles of regenerative agriculture. And that's. That's not true because regenerative agriculture is much more than just soil health. So talk a little bit about, you know, what are some of the common misconceptions that you see when it comes to how people are looking at and defining regenerative agriculture?

If I remember correctly, I gave kind of a pitch or a talk on this at one of your Regen Nexus events a couple of years ago that was completely spontaneous and off the cuff. And I thought it went really well. And I don't remember much of what I said back then.

Well, I remember that I've had it in my mind ever since then, and I really appreciated that and I wanted to dive a little more into that. So.

Well, I think the foundation. I've thought about regeneration quite a lot from, for us as a company and for myself as an individual and as a family, as a community, what does it really mean not just to do regenerative, but to be regenerative? How do we, how do we bake that right into the DNA of the company as an organization? And what does it mean to. To have to regenerate entire communities? So one of the foundational pieces, if possible, I try to really break things down and understand them from a kind of a first principles, foundational perspective. As I was thinking about regeneration, trying to understand, okay, first of all, if you have regeneration, if we're talking about the need to regenerate something, well, what's the opposite of a regenerative dynamic? Two pieces kind of emerged from those questions. For me, one of them Was that the foundation of regeneration is all about relationships. It's about regenerating relationships between soil microbes and plants, between livestock and the landscape, between humans and the landscape, between human organizations. It's at all levels of the chain of life, if you will. And all of those ideally should be regenerated. So if you come from that assumption, well, you ask the question, well, what should they be regenerated from? And how do we know that they're not currently regenerated? What defines the point that you're coming from and that you're going to. And so I started thinking about, well, what does a degraded relationship look like? And a degraded relationship is a relationship that is extractive, that is selfish, that one party to the relationship is not contributing back equally. They are pulling out. And so it's very self serving. So it's not a symbiotic relationship, it's a very extractive relationship. And then the point that you're going to is a regenerative relationship. And we have so many examples in living ecosystems of this is we have relationships that are really symbiotic, that are collaborative, where there's this mutual exchange of organisms really supporting each other. I think when we look at regenerative agriculture at its most foundational level, we can talk about regenerating landscapes and being good stewards, but none of that really works on scale unless you first regenerate the capacity for stewardship. What I mean by that is that there is something, there will be different numbers in different ecosystems, but somewhere there is a heart to acres ratio. Like to be a loving, caring steward and to be closely embedded in the landscape and to have a close relationship with the landscape. There's only so much that one human can really care for. And so we need more people. I would argue we need more people in landscapes, we need more people in rural communities. We need more people to have loving, nurturing relationships with, with farmland and doing an awesome job. And so in order to regenerate, so that's. I call that the capacity for stewardship. How much capacity do we have? We don't have enough. We need more, we need more people in rural landscapes. So that aspect needs to be regenerated. How do you do that? Well, the pathway to accomplishing that is you need to regenerate the economics of agriculture and get more money flowing back into rural communities. And so right now one of the fundamental pieces that is broken is, is we have this extractive relationship between farmers and both the people that they are buying from and the people that they're Selling to whether the farmers are being extracted from both directions, the farmers are being farmed. And so if this is something that's so important. And anyway, the bottom line is, I believe that farmers need to. If we want to regenerate the capacity for stewardship, we need to get farmers in a position where they have this symbiotic, collaborative, regenerative relationship with both their input suppliers and their offtake, the people that they're selling to. And this is something. It's very meaningful for me, and it's something that I think about as a company. We are an input supplier, we are a consulting service. We do both of those things. And how do we engage in a relationship that is not extractive? And so we have to be certain that we deliver more value than what we are getting in exchange. Constantly, I'm asking people the question, how can we provide the most value for you? How can we support you the best?

I really like that. And I've often thought about and talked about it in terms of regenerative living is giving more than what you're taking back, which, like what you're saying, it's not extractive, but so many relationships are, and so much of the way that we've been farming is. And so it's really encouraging to think about that and to know that there's companies out there thinking about that as well. So do you think that, you know, in order to regenerate that profitability and to get more people back on the landscape, I mean, to me, the answer is we need more people growing food and less people just growing strictly growing commodities because, you know, no farmers getting rich, you know, growing, you know, $3.60 corn. And so, you know, we need some of those acres switched over growing food that people will actually pay good money for. And do you see a trend going that direction of people switching over to growing more food? Do you think it's possible to convince current farmers to do that? Or is that going to have to be a new generation, the farmers with the right mindset to come in and do that?

Well, you know, there's this very human tendency that we. There are exceptions, but most people tend to find change quite painful. And they tend to only change when the pain of not changing becomes greater than the perceived pain of changing. And so there are some individuals who are not like that who are inspired and motivated by opportunity. They're inspired by their imagination and the vision that they see of what is possible. And so there is so much opportunity in agriculture today. There's such abundant opportunity. I Grew up on a fruit and vegetable farm and we were growing higher value crops with higher margin, higher profitability potential. And we did not have any attachment to a particular crop or to particular ecosystem. I mean, there were two different stages of the farm. When my brother started running it and then when my father started running it as a quasi retirement. He's now growing a lot of black raspberries where the crop mix of the farm changed dramatically. Like it changed entirely. So and even in our production, we would change crops from year to year based on what we saw happening in the marketplace. And so I see farmers have this idea of being locked in because of capital investments, because of infrastructure, because of lack of processing. And I, I try to empathize with that. I try to understand it. And at the same time I really struggle with that because I will always. I grew up in an environment where you were so fluid and so adaptable. And so I had this perspective. There's so much opportunity. I mean, right now, right in the Midwest, we have an organization called the Midwest Elderberry Growers Co Op. I spoke with the founder of that organization. This is now a couple year old conversation. At that moment in time, he told me that we import 160,000 acres worth of elderberries into the country, if my memory serves me correctly. And it's a crop that has a net revenue potential. He was willing to contract for thousands of acres at $4 a pound for an average yield of 4 to 5,000 pound per acre. Average yield. That's a $16,000 per acre revenue crop. And you think about, well, that's just 160,000 acres. How are you going to replace millions of acres of corn and soybeans with that? Well, you're not. But elderberries aren't the only crop. They're one of hundreds of crops that we import into the country. There's tremendous revenue and profitability potential. But you don't harvest elderberries from the seed of a tractor. You have to go out there and do the work. And there's, you know, there's a farm in north central Iowa that I'm good friends with. 1000 acres of corn and soybeans, commodity crops, and 20 acres of strawberries. The 20 acres of strawberries generate more profit every year than the rest of the farm enterprise does. And we need to, I think we need to adapt the mental flexibility to not have the. We have to stop playing victims and pretend that we are. There is this, there is this very inspiring and intimidating perspective which is that I am completely responsible. Forget weather, forget government, Policy, forget programs. I am 100% responsible for what happens in my life. On one hand, that's very intimidating. On the other hand, it's incredibly empowering, and it gives you the wherewithal to develop a fresh perspective. So to come back, to answer your question, Charles Walters said, many years ago, people leave their senses as a group and they come to their senses one at a time. I no longer try to convince people to change, but I want to be there for the people who are coming to their senses.

I like that. I like that. You know, this past weekend, I was looking through. We had it. Well, I guess it was. We had a blizzard. So I was snowed in at home for a couple days there, and I started looking through. My mom had put together these family history books of our family. And so I was looking through there and looking at these pictures of our ancestors that, you know, settled, you know, you know, while they were in Illinois and then they moved here to Nebraska.

But.

But looking at those pictures and reading those stories and thinking how hard that was, it got me thinking, have we almost completely lost that pioneer spirit, that pioneer mindset that you do whatever it took to make it work and you were willing to take huge risks and work long hours? Do you think we've lost some of that? And is that part of the reason why we. We don't see people willing to do the hard work of growing elderberries or some of these other things or. I mean, do you think that's part of it?

Well, I. Yes, I do think it is a part of it. We no longer have the appetite for risk that we used to culturally. And I think there are a variety of contributing factors to that. And one of them might be our community safety nets or our. Yeah, I'm going to call it that, our community safety nets. You know, historically, you don't have to go back that far. When we used to live in a very high trust society, children could go out and play in the neighborhood. They could spend the entire day in town away from home. Parents didn't even know where they were. They would come back from home or if something happened to them. We were completely as a society, we had a high trust society. And as a part of a high trust society, that meant we looked out for each other, we cared for each other. And I've gotten to live some of this in our community here as an Amish community. And so I get a little bit of a perspective. But there was also the safety net, the community safety net of caring for each other when things went wrong. When there was a disaster, when there was a medical emergency, when there were high hospital bills, communities used to show up for each other and support each other. And the farming community as much as any community has still preserved and kept some of that. But I would argue also a lot of that has been lost from what it was historically. And I think just culturally we've lost a lot of that high trust society safety net and being able to really depend on each other. And that means we have less of an appetite for risk because we have to establish our own personal security and we don't depend on each other for community security.

And I think so much reliance upon, well, the government will be there to bail us out type mindset too hasn't helped. We were having this conversation with my oldest daughter yesterday too and it, and she made the point that, you know, you know, because she's in her, you know, early 30s and they've got, you know, five kids and she says, you know, our generation, you know, talking about her generation of parents raising children are, you know, they're very safety conscious, you know, don't let their kids, you know, go out, you know, like people used to, and ride bikes alone and you know, walk, you know, downtown alone. So all these things they're very safety conscious about. But yet so many parents will just hand their kid a phone or a laptop or computer and trust the entire Internet. That probably has nothing to do with this conversation. But I think it's interesting that those trust levels have changed. And you're right, we no longer depend. Our churches aren't nearly the community that they used to be. And, and yeah, I think that all needs to be rebuilt and regenerated as part of this. And you know, the regenerative agriculture mindset and system can help bring that back.

Yeah, we need to, we need to regenerate our communities. We need to regenerate that high trust society. And I'm trying to remember, I think it was Thomas Sowell in some of his work. He now I could be mistaken. Thomas Sowell or one of his colleagues pointed out that from, from a high quality governance and a high trust society perspective, the government should not be in charity work. It should not be. The government should not be responsible for supporting and sustaining homeless people or people with medical challenges like that work should all be left to churches and communities because to the degree that government steps forward is the exact degree that church and community doesn't. And we have such an abundance of money available today in non profit organizations and so forth. It's like the job would get done. The money would simply flow in a different direction, but it would flow in a direction that would engage people, it would engage the community. It becomes a community effort. And that's the expression. The reason I have so much confidence in that hypothesis being correct is because I live it every day. In the Amish community, we don't have health insurance, we don't take government handouts, and so we have to support each other with medical bills and so forth. And it's like every Friday night, our social gatherings. Every Friday night during the year, there are multiple benefits and a benefit auction, a benefit dinner, is a social event for us where we get together to support each other and help each other out. And so, yes, that does absolutely flow and support. We support each other. We take care of our own.

Yeah. And unfortunately, fortunately, you know, the Amish community has maintained much of that, and there are other similar communities that have done that as well. But for much of us, that has been lost. And yeah, I think. I think part of our challenge is to, you know, what, how can we regain that? You know, it probably will never be like it used to be. It doesn't necessarily have to be, but how can we restore and regenerate, you know, some of those key parts? And I think a lot of that just starts with, you know, being willing to reach out. You know, some of us, you know, I know for myself, I get myself so busy, so over scheduled that I just feel like I don't have time for other people. I barely have time for my own family. And so I have scheduled myself so tight, there's no margin for other people. And that's not right. That's part of the problem.

Yeah, I used to do that when I was single. And my wife has taken corrective action to make sure that I don't continue doing that.

One's of many benefits being married.

Right. Um, she certainly has been the. The moderating influence there. Um, but there's actually something that I've done for myself recently that I was. I was definitely the. The social outlier during my teenage years, in my early 20s, within the community. Well, throughout my 20s, I was the quiet guy back in the corner that nobody really knew much about. Nobody really knew what I was up to and what I was doing, and I was perfectly okay with that. But what I realized is later on in my 20s, is that I hadn't really built a lot of friendships. I hadn't built many relationships that would last for a lifetime within the local community. And, you know, you only get out of things what you put into them. I realized that if I wanted to establish some of those relationships, I would have to put in effort. So one of the things that I've done, and I'd like to do more similar type things, is we invited a group of friends to come hang out one evening. And there were, I think initially there were four or five guys and families and couples. And we had a great evening around a campfire that happened three or four times. And then the group kind of gradually started going in different directions. Except three of us, three of us couples succeeded in forging a deep, deep relationship. Like we were really connected with each other on a multiple spiritual values perspective and a community perspective. And those have gone on. This is now two years old. And the last two years we have established relationships that last for a lifetime. Like we can talk about anything with each other. That required effort, but that has been so rewarding and so meaningful. And we, for the three of us guys, we occasionally get together in the evening as families. But for the three of us, our lives are all busy and full. We're all professionals and we schedule time, we get together once a month for three or four hours on a Friday morning to just get together and connect and talk. We make the time to make that happen. And that's been very rewarding. And I want to do more of that.

And you have to be intentional. That's not going to just happen by.

Itself, not in today's world. Not the way we schedule ourselves to be busy and full. You know, all of this technology was supposed to give us more time.

What happened?

It's turning into the devil's tool to make us busier and busier until we don't have time for our relationships with each other anymore.

Yeah, yeah. And that's exactly right. Yeah. Satan doesn't have to make you fall if he can just keep you distracted.

That's exactly. Very well said.

Yeah. I want to, you know, at the ADA event that we just did in Covington not too long ago, you and Rick Clark and myself, there were a couple guys there from Illinois, good customers of ours. There's three of them that have kind of formed a little informal form farming cooperative. And I just, I want to just lift this up as a great little example. They're. They're jointly owning the larger pieces of equipment so they can afford to get, you know, you know, like a henniker interceder. So they're interceding all of their corn. So they each have their separate farming operations, but they're sharing in the purchase of these big equipment, and they literally run their own harvest crews and planting crews. So they're doing. You know, they have their own operations, but they're sharing labor, sharing equipment.

I love that.

And it's just a great. That's just a great model, and I wish more people would do that. And I was just curious if you've seen other people within regenerative agriculture moving more towards that type of cooperating model. And these guys are all neighbors, you know, and typically around here, you know, it's pretty competitive. You don't see a lot of that happen.

Boy, that's. That's such a great example, Keith. I love that story. You know, I grew up in a community. This has changed a lot now, while our community is. The demographics have changed significantly. But I remember the days when everyone was part of a threshing ring. We had a threshing ring of eight to 10 farmers that all used to get together and thresh small grains together, same way with filling silo. There was all this cooperative shared energy. And for. In the case of the threshing ring, one guy owned the tractor, another guy owned the threshing machine, another guy on the silo filler, and they all shared equipment and moved it around to their farms. They all shared labor.

That's what these guys are doing.

Yeah, yeah. And so. And in the case of our community, that's actually being lost right now. We're kind of. We're on the back end of the curve. But to answer your question, I'm reminded of a story that I read years ago. I think it was an Australian group of 10 or 12 farmers that were working together a bit more closely than what you described just a little bit ago. There was. There was one. So they. They each had their own land, and they had their own. They made their own autonomous decisions, but they had a grazing enterprise, and they put all of their livestock into one herd. So they had one large mob that they were moving around across a much larger landscape. And what that allowed them to do is, you know, typically, if you're a livestock operator, getting a vacation is kind of a tough deal. You just don't take a vacation here. They were able to share labor and exchange. A family could take a month off without any problems whatsoever for the rest of the operators, because everyone pitched in and contributed. And if we did more of that, how would that regenerate our communities and regenerate our relationships? That's incredible. Exactly what we need more of.

Yeah, it's unfortunate, you know, because I know in our area, in Many areas are probably like this. Farmers will really pull together and support each other when there's a tragic accident or when somebody dies. And that's great to see that level of community involvement. But why does it take a tragedy to make that happen? Why can't we do that during good times and not just the tragedies? And that is sad that that's been lost. And I think that, you know, with the regenerative mindset, we see more people open and willing to do some of those things.

Well, yeah, as you develop a renewed appreciation in relation. You know, I talk about the Harvard study and I should go look at the, what it's actually called. But if you just do a search for the Harvard study on longevity, I'm sure it will come up. But there was this study, it's now been ongoing for, I'm not sure the exact time period. 120, 130 years. They originally started with a graduating group of 400 young men from Harvard that ended up including four presidents, if I recall correctly, lots of famous influential people. As the study expanded, they eventually also included a group from inner city New York, very challenged environment. And they were trying to identify for this group of 400 young men, at the original founding of the study, they were trying to identify what are the factors that contribute longevity and health and a long fulfilling life. And each of these men committed to an intensive three hour interview every year for the rest of their life. So that initial cohort has now all passed away, but the study is ongoing. There is one factor, and only one factor that contributes to people having a very successful life. And successful is not defined purely in financial terms, but in their happiness, their joy, their fulfillment, their enthusiasm with life and the things they're working on. And that one factor is the quality of their relationship with their spouse and immediate family. And that this is some pretty fascinating science at this point. It's that many of the ways that we think about success in life all comes back to the quality of relationships. And that just gave me an even deeper appreciation for how important it is to cultivate relationships very consciously.

It's almost like it was designed to work that way or something. You think, well, it certainly seems that way. Maybe kind of on that thought or on that topic. I think I read in your Quality Agriculture book. I wrote this quote down because I really liked it. You said more than even its economic benefits. Regenerative growing methods are vital because they return joy to our work. Farming becomes fun again when we work with natural systems instead of working against them. Can you expand on that just a little bit? You know, and how that maybe plays into, you know, what you just said there with, you know, having those relationships with, you know, your, your immediate family and, and immediate co workers.

At some point a couple years down the road, as I was on this journey, I realized that there is a deep internal dissonance within most farmers. And it took me quite a few years to try to describe that and to put it into words. And what I realized over time is that farming is inherently quite a challenging profession. The reality is it's hard work, it's long hours, it's low pay. I mean, there's. We could easily find much more financially rewarding tasks. And yet people are. There is this deep desire, this heart desire to be involved in agriculture. Why is that? What is it? Where does that spring from? And we could take a scriptural perspective, and I think there's a lot of merit to that perspective, that this is how we were designed. We were mandated or mandated to be stewards. And so there is something deep within our soul that is that we have a desire to be connected to life and to living systems. And that we find this deep satisfaction in watching seeds germinate from the soil in the spring and watching the joy of a newborn animal and listening to the birds sing, as this being, this integral part of life and living systems speaks to us at a very deep soul level. And yet, here's the interesting part, and it's particularly interesting because as cultural society in the United States context, the majority of our agricultural community has a very strong Christian background. And yet, having this very strong Christian background and recognizing this stewardship connection and this soul level connection, we have somehow arrived in this spot where we've adopted a model of agriculture that is the direct antithesis of that soul level connection, where instead of fostering life, we have adopted this paradigm, a warfare based paradigm of search and destroy. Identify a specific pest, identify a specific pathogen, and figure out how you can kill it. And if the first weapon of choice is not successful, you get a bigger bomb, get a stronger pesticide. And so we have these two ways of being in the world, these two paradigms that are in inherent conflict with each other. And I remember this one particular story. We were working with a farm in Florida that was growing sweet corn for Disney. And this was such a deep part of this farm's identity and how they describe themselves, every conversation you had with them. When you. When I walked onto the farm for the first time, in the first 90 minutes, I must have heard half a dozen times how important it is for them to grow high quality, healthy, sweet corn for the kids at Disneyland. That mantra got repeated over and over and over. And oh, by the way, Disneyland has zero tolerance for corn earworm. So during the green seal period, they're spraying with toxic insecticides every 48 hours. Like that is the ultimate expression of this internal dissonance we talk about as farmers. We've adopted this mantra that has been indoctrinated into us by agribusiness of feeding the world, and yet we go out and spray toxins on our food that are. On the crops that we're producing that are well known to have very detrimental effects if we're only willing to go look and be intellectually honest about the exercise. And so I think one of the pieces that I see on as, as farmers start going down this journey, this region of agriculture journey, and they start getting into a different relationship and trying to support and enhance life rather than figuring out what they can kill, is it brings so much joy and soul satisfaction back into their life. Like, there is no longer the same degree of internal dissonance. There is the recognition that, okay, yeah, sometimes I need to use poisons. I really don't want to use them. I want to figure out a pathway out of using them in the future. They're the right tool that I have right now. But there is. There's this recognition that I'm on a pathway to a better future. So there is this deep soul satisfaction that I am being a good steward, that I am following that stewardship mandate. And you think, ask yourself the question, why do we have such severe, such high suicide rates, mental health challenges? There's a lot of contributing factors. I'm not suggesting this is the only one. Economic challenges and so forth are all major contributors. But there is something very deep. Like, I think it's. It's not Viktor Frankl, I forget who the quote is attributed to. But someone who understands why can figure out or tolerate any how. And if we understand that we are on a pathway to a better future and we have that hope and that optimism that gives us the ability to thrive and to tolerate a great deal of stress and duress. But if we don't have that, if the future is dark and bleak and we see no pathway to reconciling this desire that we have within our hearts and souls and the reality that we're faced with every day, that's a pretty hopeless picture. And what do you do when you have no hope?

Yeah, yeah. You turn to desperate measures.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, and I think, yeah, I think that the, you know, regenerative agriculture can bring a lot of hope. It's certainly not a silver bullet. It's certainly not without its ups and downs and barriers and obstacles and all of that. But. But it does bring back that joy and bring back some of that hope. And I was, I was thinking that maybe during this podcast we might be able to get into, you know, a tangent on that, you know, regenerating nutrient density and public health and all that. But I think, I think that deserves this whole own episode because I, I know how deeply we could go into that topic. So I'm going to, I'm going to reserve you for another episode down to talk about that. But, you know, as, as we kind of bring this to a close, John, I want to give you the opportunity. I know that AEA is launching a really big event this Fall, this September. Are you ready to talk about that at all? Do you want to give a little teaser on that? Because I saw an email, a little email teaser come out and just didn't know. Do you wanted to talk much about that or not?

Yeah, I don't know if I've been given permission to talk about it, so I guess I'll talk about it anyway. That's the way I usually behave. And the marketing team wants to pull my hair out and theirs as well.

Yeah.

So the inspiration is that there's multiple sources of inspiration for this idea as this space has developed. The kind of the soil health, the regenerative agriculture space, whatever you want to call it. If you go back in time 20 years or so, there were relatively few conferences and relatively few places to go to meet people. There was no Till on the Plains. There was the Acres USA conference. There was Eco Farm Moses conference, what is now Marbleseed. There was certainly a number around, but they were all relatively small. And then those grew. And as they grew, they. I was about to say they fractured, but it's not that they fracture, but there was a need for more events. And what has emerged is we now have dozens of smaller regional events, which is really awesome. But what is absent yet is that within each of those many dozens of smaller regional events, there are always people who are the innovators. They are the cutting edge. They are the leaders in their region, in their community. And often those people desire to be connected with people who are on their wavelength, who are similarly innovators in different regions. And what has not emerged yet is a national platform for people to get together. So we, we've been Wanting to do this for several years, there will always other bigger priorities. But September 11th and twelf. You want to save the dates. September 11th and 12th, we are hosting a festival style event. It will be intense on a farm with demonstrations with some of the, an incredible lineup of presenters. This is not going to be an event that you want to miss. We expect thousands of people to show up. It's going to be an incredible couple of days. So check in with us. We're going to have multiple sponsors like you, Keith, that we're, that we're going to be working with the news about what will be happening. What we'll be doing will be coming from multiple places. AEA is driving it, but we're developing lots of great partnerships to help develop this event. And yeah, I fully expect this to become the premier event of the year for regenerative farmers. Like mainstream farmers, certain groups would not even dream of missing Commodity Classic. Think of this as being the regenerative version of Commodity Classic. Not in the sense that it'll be similar event, but that it will have that same you don't miss it perspective. Yeah.

So it'll be, it'll be like the Woodstock of regenerative agriculture. You can feel free to share your pictures with family. You're free to use that in your marketing, by the way. Yeah.

So definitely save the dates. And it's going to be held in the upper Midwest. I'm not going to reveal the location right at this point, so I don't step on too many toes. But yeah, it's intended to be a national scope event with leading innovative farmers and consultants of all types from all across the country.

Well, we're very excited to be part of it. Got it on my calendar and as more details come out, I think there's going to be lots and lots of people excited about it. So, John, thank you so much for taking time out of your super busy schedule to be part of our podcast. And we wish you the best of luck with AEA and with all of the events and with regenerating your own community as well. So, and best of luck to all of those who are listening. Go forth and regenerate your own little space that God has given you to work in.

Thank you, Keith. Thanks for doing this.

You bet. My brother and I started green cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska, but we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix, we also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we built green cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes, along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.