Podcast Extra: Ask Me Anything with John Kempf - April 14

Spring has sprung. Obviously we're at different places in different parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but I know that growers have been planting for the last couple of weeks already further south, southern part of the United States and so forth. And there's a lot of planting happening this week and a lot more will be happening over the course of the next couple of weeks. So it's the time for go season. Lots of activity, lots of things happening fast. And for ask me anything today, we're just gonna dive right into it and in our usual fashion, just go hardcore as rapidly as we have a whole bunch of questions already. Several questions were sent in in advance and I'm going to dive into those and we're just going to have a good time. Send me any questions and if there's anything that I missed that is important for us to connect on, please follow up with our team here at AEA as well. So all right, first question is from Jim Elizondo. Hi Jim. Jim was my most recent podcast guest where we talked about nutrition, grazing management, sugar flow and forages and so forth. Jim says you mentioned a solution to solve the problem of tall fescue toxicity, and specifically we talked about endophyte toxicity in cattle. Do you have a product we can use to remedy this or is it something that requires management? So, Jim, we have, we have a product that is in development. It is not currently registered and it's not for sale available for sale yet. It will be available at some point in the future. And as I think, as all of you know, we are quite transparent and straightforward about when ingredients serve similar purposes. For example, we don't have a liquid magnesium product or rebound magnesium, for example, because why would we? Because magnesium sulfate is effective and readily available. And so in this case, in the case of this product for endophyte toxicity in tall fescue in summer and dry conditions, this isn't something that I can easily tell people to just go add more calcium or to add a certain nutrient or I would do that. But there are specific nutrient ratios and combinations that aren't readily available in the marketplace, which is why we're working on developing a product of our own. Thanks, Jim. It's a good question. Question from Ken Hoover. I'd like some advice on PGRs. For those of you not familiar with a PGR stands for Plant Growth Regulator. I'm growing wheat and barley. Just trying a new European variety of barley this year that is supposed to have a lot more yield potential than traditional barley. However, the seed salesman assure me that it is imperative to put a plant growth regulator on the barley in order to keep it from falling over before harvest. Is this the best way? No, it's not the best way to keep wheat or barley standing, or is there a reliable way to do this nutritionally? All right, the short answer, Kenneth, is yes, there are reliable ways to do this nutritionally. I don't have experience with the specific barley variety or cultivar that you're asking about. Well, I don't even know specifically what it is, but we have a ton of experience with a broad range of different crops, ranging all the way from cotton and soybeans to tomatoes, to potatoes, to. To wheat and small grain crops as well, to manage nutrition, to give them, to prevent them from lodging, and to give them good standability. And so, in the interest of time, I'm going to give you kind of an abbreviated answer and ask that you connect with our team for the more expanded version. But the abbreviated answer is one, make the stems more flexible. You can do this by increasing lignin synthesis by ensuring the plant has adequate levels of copper. When they have good levels of copper, it gives the stem a lot more flexibility and strength so that it can bend over in the wind and stand back up again. So this helps a lot to prevent lodging. Second, you can manage stem length and stem extension. There obviously certainly is a genetic component here, but you can manage how those genetics express themselves with nutrition management. So ensuring that nitrogen and potassium is applied in limited amounts early on and then is applied in larger amounts later on as side dress applications once you need it for grain fill and head fill and so forth will give you much shorter and sturdier stems, much stronger stems as well. And the other aspect of that is getting more of your vegetative growth energy from calcium instead of from nitrogen and potassium. So that's kind of an abbreviated version. But to give you an idea of what's possible, when we first started working with cotton, it was common to put on 13 pix applications per year. That's 13 plant growth regulator applications in a growing season. And with many of our growers, we went to zero in the first year, and our plants were shorter, more compact, and had a heavier fruit load than those that had the PGR applications. If we can do that on cotton, we can surely do it on barley as well. Question here from Joel. How should we be thinking about paramagnetism in our crop fields? Would it be worth putting paramagnetic rock dust powders on our seeds or on the soil? The answer is maybe, possibly. But also Perhaps not So certainly the work that Philip Callahan did and the others have done has proven the merits of having a strong paramagnetic field in our soils. However, while you can add paramagnetic rock powders, many of which contain high iron levels, so they're actually ferromagnetic, but just being applied in very dilute quantities, the thing to keep in mind is that one of the most, one of the materials that contributes a lot of paramagnetism to soils is simply oxygen. So simply having soils that have good aeration, good gas exchange, that have good oxygen flow into the soil probe profile will already begin making a significant difference in a soil's paramagnetism. So that's, that's the first place I would suggest you take a look. Question from Brandon. We wide drop our corn with melted urea, molybdenum, boron, nickel, humic, and a few other things. If I add melted potash, Brandon, I wonder what you mean by melted potash. Perhaps potassium nitrate to that at a rate of 10 gallons per acre, would that be more beneficial to soil biology compared to broadcasting potash? We'd like to use SOP sulfate of potash in place of potassium chloride when we can. We still see benefits from applying K. All right, got it Brandon, Good question. So if you're thinking of using potassium sulfate, first of all, potassium sulfate, you can get technical tech grades of potassium sulfate, which are soluble in water but relatively poorly. It's difficult to get very much potassium sulfate dissolved in water. I forget what the numbers are, but the amount of potash that you can get into a gallon of water with potassium sulfate is actually quite low. So you might consider looking at potassium nitrate or something like that, particularly if you're going on with the nitrogen application as well. And to your question, would that be more beneficial to soil biology compared to broadcasting potash? Well, the way that I would say it is that I would expect you would see a greater crop response from such a potassium sidedress application than from a broadcast pre plant because you're going to have more rapid and more immediate availability and get a greater crop response more quickly. There's a question here from Jeff Hatfield. Hi Jeff, My question is regarding strategies to deal with clubroot. It has slowly crept in as a real challenge to Brassica production. So Jeff, I'm making some fairly broad comments here just based on a lot of experience and really knowing nothing about your situation or your scenario. But the, the literature says that clubroot shows up as a problem when you have low levels of calcium and boron, and that when you address calcium and boron, the incidence of clubroot disappears dramatically. There's also some suggestions of using brassicas, excuse me, not brassicas, mustards, as a cover crop and as a soil biofumigant to help with clubroot as well. The experience that I have, and clubroot also really shows up a lot on very compacted soil that is very saturated soil that has often is saturated for an extended period of time. I don't know if that is the case with you or not, but the first place that I would pay attention to is making sure the soil has generous calcium and boron levels and possibly supplementing with calcium and boron right at planting and transplanting. And I would expect that will already go quite the distance towards making a difference for you. Question here from Patrick Martin. You mentioned that high chloride levels relative to nitrogen increases disease pressure. Patrick, I just want to clarify here. Our experience is that high chloride levels relative to nitrogen increases insect pressure. Sure. It also has an influence on disease pressure. But what we see very strongly is increases to insect susceptibility more than to disease. What is the channel of effect here? In spite of never applying chloride based fertilizers and normal soil water levels, we have consistently seen very high chloride levels in SAP. What are some possible explanations for high chloride and how to reduce chloride? Good questions, Patrick. It's a question a lot of people have. So where is chloride coming from? Well, chloride can come from surprising places. For example, chloride can come from compost, particularly if you have animal manure based compound or based compost. If the animals are being fed salt, and we see this particularly on dairy cow, a based compost, we end up with surprisingly high levels of chloride in the compost. So that's one possibility. The other possibility is that if we have relatively low carbon levels in our soils, the reality is that it only takes a couple part per million chloride in the soil if you have in the neighborhood of as low as 5, if you have 5 part per million chloride in the soil. What is interesting is that chloride is very highly soluble and it's very readily absorbed by plant roots when you have low carbon levels, when you have low organic matter levels. So even though your chloride levels show up as being only 5 part per million on a soil test, or even less, though they can show up being 500 or 1500 part per million on a SAP analysis, because the plants are picking that chloride up so readily because of how soluble it is. And so the, the antidote for this is Making sure that you have good humic substance levels in your soil. Humicarb can help with this. Building organic matter will help with this in the long term. But in short, one of the things that the humic substances are known for is that they have a particularly high affinity to all the halogens. So chloride, chlorine, iodine, bromine, fluoride, etc. Are that particular group of elements is held very strongly on humic substances. So using humic substances such as humicarb in possibly an irrigation system or getting them soil applied in some way can be a very effective way of limiting the chloride absorption by the root. All right, Question from Tessa Crandall. You mentioned recently that selenium can have a beneficial yield effect in oil crops. Can you explain how this works? Hmm. Tessa, I don't remember the context in which I was having this conversation and I don't remember making that specific comment. I suppose it could be an extrapolation from we have all of the sulfur bearing amino acids such as cysteine and methionine and there is an association. Often the crops that have a higher oil content also have higher sulfur requirements. So there definitely is an association between sulfur requirement and oil content. And selenium can take the place of sulfur in those stop amino acids, those sulfur bearing amino acids of cysteine and methionine. So possibly I may have said something that may have led you to think that I indicated those high oil content crops would would benefit from higher selenium levels. I don't recall saying that specifically. I did. I have seen some research that indicates that having adequate selenium levels will change the profile of the polyunsaturated fatty acids. So it will change the omega 3 to omega 6 ratios. This research was specifically on forages where they were looking at livestock consumption and the impact that that had on the fatty acid profiles in livestock. So there is some research to indicate that when you have adequate selenium levels, it changes the fatty acid profile of plants. And you can really find that by doing a search on Google Scholar. But the I'm not aware. And in that context again, I've looked a lot at selenium levels and forages and there are indications of selenium levels, adequate selenium levels, increasing productivity and increasing yields of meat production and milk production per acre. So possibly in that context might have been where you've heard me making some of those comments. But I guess that wouldn't be specifically in relation to oil crops. So that's kind of the best non answer that I have for you at the moment, if you have additional clarification or can point me to some specific resources where you think you heard that would be happy to dig into that. Further. Question from Donald. We have consistently low potassium. How would you balance the need to manage calcium and potassium ratios before flowering and during cell division while maintaining a baseline of K? So Donald, the answer to your question is kind of inherent within the question. So you, you started by saying we have consistently low potassium and then you asked how do we manage potassium and calcium ratio? So the way to manage the ratio, if you have low potassium, certainly you need to elevate that to make sure you have adequate potassium levels. Amongst other things, it'll give you better freeze resistance for buds and flowers and blossoms in the spring and for buds overwintering. But it also means you just need to manage the ratio. So if you need to increase potassium levels, that's fine, go ahead and do that. And also let's raise calcium levels at the same time. So when you increase calcium and potassium in ratio to each other until you have the optimal ratio and the optimal levels is where you will have the best plant health and the best performance. And one of the two of the nutrients that help facilitate this and make it easier are of course making sure that plants have adequate levels of manganese and boron, which when they do that, when they do have adequate levels of manganese and boron, that will help them self regulate calcium and potassium homeostasis to a degree, given the opportunity to do so. Follow up question from Donald. In your interview with Rick Mulvaney, he talked about Saeed Khan's work on potash, suggesting that soil applied potash is generally meaningless because its availability is driven primarily by clay dynamics, in particular the wetting and drying cycles. Do you think that using a combination of short and long irrigation cycles could improve potash availability to keep the wetting clay from expanding and contracting? All right, a few things to unpack here. So their work was specifically not on all forms of potash, but specifically on potassium chloride. They specifically suggested that potassium chloride is generally meaningless because its availability is driven potash availability. It's driven more by clay dynamics. So that's an important distinction. They didn't say that about potassium sulfate or about other forms of potash. They were just doing a literature review of potassium chloride. Specifically to your second question, as I understand it, once a soil dries out, it's been a while since I read this research. I don't recall exactly what the timing is, but once a soil dries out A clay particularly, and that clay, those clay colloids hold on to potassium extremely strongly. There is, as I understand it, increased potassium availability is not just a function of moisture alone. It's a combination of moisture plus time. And I'm sure there's variation based on different clay types and so forth. But in short, what I'm saying is that when a clay soil dries out once, you cannot increase potassium availability by adding irrigation water tomorrow and expecting potassium availability to be high three days later, there is going to be a period of time before potassium availability comes back up again on most clay types. And as I understand it, and so the optimal way to think about it is to say we need to prevent clay soils from drying out in the first place. And this is where conversations about soil cover and so forth become really important. But also the other consideration, the other thing for us to think about is in Mulvaney and Kahn and their colleagues research, they were doing a literature review. And the literature review is looking at soil chemistry and nutrient interactions. It's not looking at soil biology, it's not taking biology into consideration. One of the things that we know is when we have very good microbial colonization and good mycorrhizal fungi networks, we will have continued potassium availability even in drier conditions, dry, dry clay conditions. So it's important for us to remember that when we utilize the rhizophagy cycle, we look at endophytes in the soil, in the plant root system, they can continue to access potassium that plant roots cannot directly access in dry conditions. Something very important for us to keep in mind. All right, question from Hunter. Hunter Sims. Hi Hunter. I'm located in central Florida. I have a 6 acre tropical fruit grove that I've been growing on for about eight years. Recently I've been foliar spraying with two products, Harold's Earth Max Organic and Harold's Seaweed A and E. I've noticed major improvements in the health of my plants. I just ordered some micropack to use in addition to these products. We've never used the micropack, so I'm just wondering if there's any additional information about this specific product. So Hunter, I'm not sure what information you have looked at on the micropack already and I'm not familiar. I'll just look at the names that you've provided. The Earth Mags Organic and Seaweed ae I would, I would expect, when I think about, you know, provide you some history and some context here for how I started when I first started AEA back in 2006. Then in 2009, we started doing product testing and development. And one of my mentors loved to razz me and give me a hard time. He was a strong advocate for using dry soil amendments, dry fertilizers. And in his context, it made sense because he was working with many farmers with sandier soils. And a lot of these sandier soils they did need, they did get the greatest crop responses from the addition of dry fertilizers, which is what those soils needed. And so he, he used to, in the conversation of foliar fertilizers, he would talk about, in his mind, being in the organic world. Foliar fertilizers were fish, seaweed, humic acid. It was those three ingredients. And to be fair, that was the majority of the marketplace back in that time period, 2006 and 8 and 9, those, those pieces were major contributors to the market in organic liquid fertilizers. And so the. I gave a presentation at Acres USA a couple of years ago where I made the comment. We had some interesting conversations after this. But I made the comment that the problem with liquid fish and with liquid seaweed is that they are good products. And this seems counterintuitive, but what I meant by that statement is that they are good products. They deliver some decent crop responses, particularly when using the right context in the right way, they can deliver some very effective crop responses. But looking at how the landscape has evolved over the last two decades, we have many products available today, not just at aea, but many products, the marketplace that are much higher horsepower. We have many great products available in the marketplace today that we didn't have available 20 years ago. And so when you think about micropak versus seaweed seaweed, I'm sure there's many different brands and different variations in performance. So I'm speaking very broadly. But seaweed products generally are good products. Liquid fish products generally are good products. But if you want to elevate and go to the next level of performance, the next level up is products that include specific mineral nutrients, that perhaps include very specific plant growth. I call them, calling them plant growth regulators, but specific phytohormones that contain very specific biostimulants. And so there is another level, another tier, or you could call it another league forward from these materials that more closely approximates and in fact, in many cases even supersedes the products that are available in the mainstream agricultural marketplace. So that's the next step forward. That's the way that I think about comparing micro pack versus a seaweed product or A fish product or something like that. Question here from Bing. I'm starting a regenerative food forest in the first one or two seasons of establishing the seedlings, when there aren't really enough leaves to take leaf samples. What monitoring methods do you recommend that could give me the most timely and accurate information? Would it be useful at all to test the leaf samples from the ground cover plants around the seedlings? So the answer to your second question is no, it's unlikely. Well, I shouldn't say that it's not going to be useful, but different plant species and from different plant families have radically different nutritional requirements and nutritional profiles. In fact, there is almost, I shouldn't say there is no overlap, but the relative ratios of, let's say, calcium to potassium or these various elements in even some cases between particular varieties, but for certain, between different species is going to be radically different. And we've done some of these interesting experiments. A couple of years ago, David Miller was working with a wheat farmer in, I think, Kansas, if I remember correctly, whose fields were just being dominated by tansy, Tansy mustard. And so they decided to run a SAP analysis to see why the tansy mustard was proliferating. And as it turned out, if I remember the story correctly, this soil had decent calcium levels but had very poor calcium availability. So the calcium was there, but it just wasn't being absorbed by the crop very well. So on a SAP analysis, the wheat crop showed 800 parts per million calcium. The tansy mustard growing right in amongst the wheat showed 8,000 parts per million calcium. There was a 10x difference in the calcium level. And so that is a reflection of. The tansy was a reflection of, of nature's desire to heal that soil and adjust the mineral balance to a more optimal, healthy state, where this mustard was actually bioaccumulating calcium and then increasing its availability over a cycle of generations or multiple plant generations. And so, and similarly, even, even when we look within the same plant family, if you consider peppers versus tomatoes, they have wildly different potassium to calcium ratios. So that's the long answer to your second question, to your first question. I would suggest not pulling samples or perhaps pulling samples from other indicator species. Certainly using soil analysis and measuring what's happening and what's going on in soil and just evaluating and observing overall plant health and vigor. The reality is that, I mean, my goodness, we've been able to grow cherry seedlings from a seedling the size of a pencil to a bush that's three or four feet tall in a single growing season. And that is A densely shaped dome full of branches and leaves. So the reality is, in a single year with good nutrition management on most species, you should be able to have enough vegetation to use SAP analysis or plant analysis of some type if you want to. So that would be my answer for that question. All right. Question from Carl Thompson. Are you planning to make some of your products available in smaller quantities that would be available for gardeners and small homesteads? Carl, the answer is yes. We are already doing that. Have been doing that for some time. You can find them on our website@advancingecoag.com we have our products available in smaller containers that you can just purchase online on our website and we will ship them directly to you. So we're already doing that, have been doing that for the last couple of years, but particularly the last year, we've really upgraded our website experience and made that a lot easier to accomplish. So please check it out. All right, Question from John Pierce. Hi John, how would we best replace planter solution using macro pack and micropack and rejuvenate? John, you're causing me to puzzle a little bit trying to remember the details of how plantar solution and so forth was formulated. If I remember correctly, I think macro pack and micro pack alone packs a big enough punch to replace plantar solution and you don't necessarily need to include rejuvenate unless you really want to accelerate soil biology in that soil in a significant way. I think just macro pack and micro pack alone as a combination is enough to replace plant or solution. Question of economics from Aaron Lacey. Do you see more farms successfully transitioning to regenerative practices that inherited their land rather than farmers who have to buy their land or rent? I have a relative who thinks regen only works for people who inherited their land because they have more flexibility in their budgets. Aaron, just doing a quick rundown of examples and scenarios and the many people that we work with, I think the opposite is the case. We have more farmers transitioning who are buying their land or renting it rather than inheriting it. And it's often because they are, what's the word that I'm looking for, not the most vulnerable. But they are the most cost conscious, they're the most profitability conscious. They have to be profitable. They can't consume their equity, they can't live on assets, so to speak. And because of that, they have an even greater aversion to risk. And they are often the ones that are the most innovative. They are often the ones that are the first to try regen ag practices. And approaches. And when they use our nutrition management approaches and they see their costs reducing while their performance is increasing, their profitability goes up, that usually, I mean, that changes the conversation very quickly. And so I think this is, this is the foundation of our. One of the foundations of our success as a company is just prioritizing and making sure that the recommendations and the approaches and the products that we recommend deliver strong economic results in the first year. And that's. I mean, that's more necessary this year in the, in the current macroeconomic environment and the environment that we've had the last couple of years than it's ever been. And that is why we have so much interest, I think, from. From growers who are renting or leasing or who are buying their own land because they don't have the asset reserves that other farms do to just continue and maintain with the status quo. Question from Noah. What causes bitterness in celery stalks? Is the stalk supposed to be bitter? No, it's not. What causes bitterness in celery stalks, or really in any plant, is usually too high levels of nitrate and potassium in ratio to other elements. Both of those. Both of those elements contribute a taste of bitterness, which is why in a grazing situation, if you see livestock out on pasture, cows don't eat around their cow patties, for example, because that manure dropping. If you are in an environment where you don't have good biology, if you have really good biology, dung beetles and microbial digestion and mycorrhizal fungi networks will absorb those nutrients and disperse them outwards. They won't be concentrated. So we see this very commonly. Once you have very healthy, biologically active soils on systems that are being rotationally grazed, there is no longer nutrient concentration locally from a manure patty. It gets spread out and distributed in a matter of weeks. But when that doesn't exist, when you don't have these microorganisms contributing this nutrient dispersion effect, you get this local concentration of very rich, lush, green grass. And we look at it visually and say, well, the cows should eat there first, but they don't. They avoid it because of the high nitrate and potassium levels that are being contributed by the manure. The same thing can happen in lettuce or celery or spinach or any other vegetative green crop. Lots of new questions that have come through here. Question from Zach, new to regenerative farming, was wondering if there's any solutions to dealing with the dingy cutworm and corn without the use of insecticide. Yes, Zach, there is. Check out our work on the Plant Health Pyramid. And if you get to level two of the Plant Health Pyramid, you can easily, I'm very confident suggesting you can put on a full year application of four or five minerals and shift plant nutritional profiles to the point where they're not susceptible to that. Larvae be packaged in our packaging or photo mag as well would be the nutrient combination that you're looking for. Question from Jim Elizondo. Hi, Jim. For the six tons of beef gain per acre, what type of fertilizer program did they use? I could try it on my farm in the tropics with irrigation. Common Bermuda grass. Jim, I'd love to connect with you and work on that. They didn't specify what they did. They didn't indicate that they used any fertilizer in the sense of NPK fertilization. It was just the livestock manure that was watered in through sprinkler irrigation. But they did indicate that they used soil analysis and that they balanced the soil mineral profile with the Albrecht approach ahead of time before they planted the crop. Well, I've. I've happened to uncover some of the other work that C.J. fenzow did, and his work was based on William Albrecht's work, but it was based on. He made some modifications, I think that we've also adopted. One of them is that he looked not just at calcium to magnesium ratios and balances, but also at minimal thresholds. So one of the things that we've identified is that, for example, you need a minimum threshold of 1,000 parts per million calcium for things to perform really well. And if you have sandy soils that are less than, I think around 8 or 9 CEC or maybe even 10. But if they are less than that, you can have soils that show it has a 70 to 75% base saturation calcium, but still only contain 5 to 600 parts per million calcium, that's not enough. So in those situations, we actually need to continue adding calcium up to the threshold of a thousand part per million. And what is interesting when you do that is your percent base saturation levels don't change as much as you would expect because the contribution of calcium and the contribution of the other elements that come with that, as the soil evolves, actually increase the overall soil's exchange holding capacity. It's pretty fascinating to observe. And of course, we have to remember that the exchange capacity on a soil analysis in a lab is a calculated number. It's not a measured number. They're not measuring exchange capacity. They are looking at the ratios and the content of calcium and magnesium and potassium on their basis and correlating that to ph and calculating a CEC number. And so in many sandy soils, we're actually falling short in calcium content in order to get these types of results. Question from Daniel Brown. Hi Dan, what would you recommend to control root boring larvae in hazelnuts? The first thing I would take a look at magnesium salt from aluminum levels and boron levels. And I would make sure that those hazelnuts have generous levels of boron as well as these other elements. And I would expect, I would expect those larvae to greatly decline in pressure. Question from Josh Thurman. Hi Josh. If we look at earthworms as biological remediation, if that's the framework, then is it reasonable to assume the closer to the surface we find them, the lesser the degree of soil health? And to the converse, the deeper we find them, the higher the degree of soil health? And how do slugs align to this paradigm? All right, Josh. I think it might possibly be related to soil structure more than soil health. Although I suppose you could argue that soil health or soil structure is a major component of soil health. This spring I've been super excited. We moved to the home where we currently live four years ago. Actually it's four years ago today to this exact date. And this spring for the first time, we have night crawlers. We have had red worms to obscene levels to the point where the way our house is designed, we didn't build it, we bought it and moved here. We have a walkout bump out basement that has this walkout area that's you walk down into it with a concrete stairs and it's completely enclosed by brick. And we have so many redworms that if we get a heavy rainfall heavy enough to, to temporarily saturate the soil, we will have redworms aggregate in one corner of that walkout to the point where you have a large double handful that looks like a hamburger of red worms that are all just formed into a ball. It's, it's a ball that's the equivalent of about four or five pounds of hamburger from a single rainfall. So we have tremendous levels of redworms, but we didn't see any earthworms until this spring. I've seen four earthworms in the last two weeks and I've been pretty excited about that. I was getting to the point where I was ready to go buy some fishing worms and, and inoculate them. And I think the reason for that is it was not, as the red worms indicate, it was not a Lack of an environment. But it was a lack of an environment for the earthworms because they have, where the redworms have a horizontal feeding pattern, the earthworms have a vertical BURROW that goes 2, 3, 4ft deep. Well, certainly not 2ft, usually 3 to 4ft deep. And our local geological context is that we have very, very heavy clay subsoil that is usually very saturated. We have a high water table. And I think the combination of that high water table plus that very heavy clay subsoil had created an environment where that soil was usually too saturated to provide an environment conducive to night crawlers. So now that we have have more plants, we don't just have a lot of green, green grass anymore, but we have more plants with deeper root systems and we have more better soil aeration deeper. We are starting to see the earthworm start showing up. So I would suggest it is more a reflection of, of a soil's ability to move air down deeper and clay context and water, clay content and water table that is going to have an impact on nightcrawler populations. Yeah, there's a couple of fascinating little books. There's one titled Earthworm the Farmer's Friend and I forget the name of the other one. But there's. It's worth digging into understanding earthworm populations because you have very different types of the horizontal feeders versus the, the vertical burrows. Question from Sue Patrick. Would it be possible to use any of your products to aid tree establishment in an agroforestry silvopastoral system? Yes, it would. The best place to use biostimulants and nutritional products when planting perennials is as a root dip or as a drench right after planting. That's where you produce the greatest plant response, the most economical plant response. You can also follow up with foliar sprays. That can also be very effective. Question from Paul Erickson. What is the best way to condition Water with 8 plus grains Total hardness for foliar feeding? Not using reverse osmosis or rainwater. Boy, Paul, you like to give me a challenge. You know, I could answer that question by saying get in a reverse osmosis machine, which I really do think is, is the best recommendation. The best recommendation of all is to get an RO machine because the economics are there to, to pay for it. If you're, if you have hard water and also ask the question why could you not collect rainwater? But you say you can't do either of those things. So depending on what it is that you are I don't know if you're looking at organic applications, non organic applications. If you're looking at conventional mainstream applications, you could look at ammonium sulfate. You could consider using phosphoric acid. If you're looking for an organic solution, probably the best solution is going to be citric acid. You could also use vinegar. You could use phosphoric acid stabilized fish, but it's most likely going to be citric acid is going to produce the greatest plant response for you. Let me see if there's any questions that I've missed here. Here's a question, a follow up from Jim. My soil is heavy clay. Oh, that's awesome. I'm not used to thinking, maybe you're not thinking of the Florida context, but I'm not used to thinking of Florida as having heavy clay soils. Montmorelo, very high CEC, around 56, high calcium, high magnesium, with irrigation water being high in calcium sulfate and poor internal drainage. That sounds like an ideal, an almost ideal scenario when you have such heavy soils. Sounds like an ideal scenario to be able to produce a very large grazing response because you have large nutrient reserves that plant roots can tap into and can really produce, can produce some very strongly. So Jim, I'm looking forward to having a follow up conversation with you and seeing how we can dig into that and produce that. A modern version. It's now what is it? That was 1976. It's 50 years later to produce a modern version of 6,000 pounds of beef per acre. Question from Zachariah. In a small scale growing environment, would it be more beneficial to charge biochar with MAP to increase the soil's phosphorus and hydrogen? Or would it be more beneficial to inoculate the biochar with compost tea? I would be in favor of using the compost tea, but it's not necessarily a replacement for phosphorus if your soil environment requires requires it. Question from Adam. Will seed flare still have a positive effect on sunflower seeds even though they have an outer shell? I also wonder about application procedure when growing stone fruit from seed. Ha. Adam. I love that question. So that's a great question on. On sunflower. I know that we still get a response on peanuts which is also growing through a shell, but it's not quite as thick as a sunflower shell. I don't think so. We do get a response on peanuts. I don't have experience on sunflowers, but it is worth noting that the seed flare is specifically designed to penetrate through the outer seed coat and actually get into the seed. So how effective will that be with sunflower? I don't know. It's a great question. Something to experiment with. And let me see, things just bounced around here on me. What was your second question? Oh, on stone fruit? Yeah, it's. I'm hesitant to speculate. I mean, remember, I would expect that seed flare would struggle to deliver a strong response on stone fruit, but I don't, again, I don't know, be worth experimenting with. But remember that seed flare is designed to be colostrum for the seed and to be a replacement to provide nutrients for the seed when the parent generation that the seed was grown from did not have good nutritional quality. The ideal is still. The ideal is to not use seed flare. The ideal is to grow seed that has such nutritional integrity from the parent generation from when that seed was grown that there are no benefits to seed flare. And so perhaps it's in that environment. In the environment, if we're growing sunflower or stone fruit, where that becomes the primary objective and not the. The secondary one. And we could also have a conversation about an experiment with. All right. Do we compensate for a shell by putting on higher application rates and giving it more soaking time and allowing it to fully penetrate? Maybe, Perhaps. I don't know. Something that we would need to test. Question from Zachariah. Is it possible to make a compost tea fed with carbohydrates, then add minerals and kelp, then let the microbes chelate them in their own cells and use that as a foliar? It depends, Zachariah. Possibly, yes. It's going to depend a bit on which minerals you're talking about and the nutrient concentration that you're talking about. And also if you do that, you should no longer consider it. I mean, it effectively no longer becomes a diverse compost tea. The reason for that is because when you are doing a brew instead of just an extract, as I'm sure you well know, that brew will favor the development of some species at the expense of others. And that effect becomes amplified even further when you start adding specific and various feedstocks to it. And the other piece to remember is that there are some of these minerals which in concentrated form, not in a diluted form once they're distributed out across an acre, but in a concentrated form in a tank, actually have a biocidal effect. So boron, for example, or copper, or even to some extent manganese, if you add them to a tank, that you will directly inhibit the microbial development, microbial growth processes. So those would be some things to keep in mind. Conceptually, your idea is sound, but there's all kinds of caveats that it's going to have to be done carefully and in the right way to get the results that you're looking for. Let me see. Question from Sean. How would you address a clay layer in the subsoil and pastures where moisture and gas exchange is severely inhibited in deeper soil layers? Sean, this is a good question and the I'm in favor. You know, a couple of months ago I wrote an article, I think it's been published in Acres and no Till magazine and a couple of different places at this point I wrote an article titled Deliberate Disturbance. And my reason for writing it is because I do not subscribe to the idea that soil disturbance is universally a bad thing. There are some cases in some contexts, there are some cases in some context where disturbance is very valuable and very beneficial. And so the situation that you're describing, and again, I'm missing a lot of context here, but if you have a heavy clay subsoil, often that is associated with not having a lot of rocks, particularly if it's river bottom land or something like that, I would suggest you look at a subsoilar that is designed in the spirit of a yeoman plow, where you get an effect of lifting the soil but without disturbing the soil surface. So you're not disturbing the root systems, you're not disturbing the grasses populations. Obviously you're having an effect on them by moving the soil, but you're not destroying that population and you're actually lifting and aerating the soil. There are situations and contexts where it is very valuable to have that direct disturbance and speeding up and accelerating a soil's transition. Because then once you have that initial aeration now you can have root systems move down into it, you can have earthworms move down into it. And doing that very deliberately and very intentionally can really accelerate a soil's development. Question from Joe what are some strategies for improving rooting in broad acre annual crops and which nutrients are most important to manage? We want the biggest root systems possible, don't we ever. Joe It's a good question. I would suggest two things. One, be sure to inoculate with mycorrhizal fungi at planting because they definitely have an impact on soil root development or plant root development. Also with obviously we use biocoat gold because it also contains a number of of microorganisms that are considered PGPRs, plant growth promoting rhizobacteria. They will have an impact on root system development from a nutritional management perspective. I would suggest not just looking at phosphorus, but paying particular attention to magnesium, amongst other things. So this is why we've adjusted our micro pack macro pack formulation to make sure that we have generous magnesium levels when we're applying that at planting. All right, I missed a question back here. I've missed a couple of questions, but this, this software keeps bouncing things around on me. There's a question here from Curtis Fisher. How do you do an effective SAP analysis on cover crops to get the plant to increase root sugars? Do you take the percentage in the SAP test to be the percentage of the different species in the COVID crop? That's a great question, Curtis. That is one approach. You can take representative plant samples or representative numbers of plants to match your relative plant population. But another possible pathway is to use indicator species. So if you have, if you have one species that represents 70% or 50% of your plant population, you can just optimize the nutrition for that particular species and the rest kind of just go along for the ride. So those are both possible approaches that you can take. All right, and I've got time for one more question, Which. Well, there's two questions here that are both interesting. One is which nutrient deficiencies cause more male flowers than female flowers? So sorry about that, my 4 year old is having a bit of a meltdown in the background. Alright, so which nutrient deficiencies cause more male flowers than female flowers? So the question is really a question about reproductive versus vegetative growth, balance, nutrients. I think I've given this presentation in some detail in one of our webinars that you can find on YouTube. But the short answer is that there are four nutrients which drive strong vegetative growth. They are calcium, potassium nitrate and chloride. And of those four, the three which have a particularly marked effect on increasing male flowers are potassium nitrate and chloride. So those are the first three places that I would look to see if those are being applied in excess. And if we lower those three, how does that change how the plants are expressing themselves? Follow up question on Biocoat Gold. How do you apply Biocoat gold? Does it have to be coated on a seed or can you apply it in the furrow with the seed? You can do infer with seed. We prefer to see it as a seed treatment, but we also do have growers that are applying it in the seed or, excuse me, in the furrow with the seed. All right, and one last question. Could you help explain the benefits of applying fulvic acids after broadcasting Lyme or Gypsum? Foundationally, the benefits of applying humic substances are that they, they enhance soil biological activity. So that is the, that's the way that I think about them. They are best applied in combination with other nutrients rather than as individually, but they can also have nice responses when applied alone. All right, my daughter needs me, so I'm going to sign off. Thank you all for being here. Hope you have an awesome, productive growing season. Please reach out to our team at AEA with any more detailed questions or follow up. Hope to talk to you all soon. Have an awesome growing season. Thank you.