Podcast Extra: John Kempf on Soil Biophysics, Plant Immunity & Foliars on the Permaculture...

Hey, pops, are you ready for today's episode?

I'm ready. I'm excited. I'm honored actually to have as a guest today John Kempf. And you know why I'm excited and honored? Because he's the one that actually I spend the most time listening to. When I listen to podcasts, his is the most listened to. I've probably 4 or 5 years I've listened to his podcasts and I've gone back because there is a lot of issues.. And I strongly encourage you to subscribe and listen to those because it's a gold mine. It really is. So I want to give you his, his, a brief bio. So John Kempf grew up on an Amish, Amish fruit and vegetable farm in Ohio where failing crops and heavy sprays nearly broke the family operation. It's a great story, his melon patch story. That crisis launched him on a quest to understand why plants resist or succumb to pests and disease. So in 2006, 20 years ago already, he founded Advancing Eco-Agriculture to share practical science-based systems that manage plant nutrition and biology for healthier crops, fewer inputs, higher profits, and real benefits. Today, as a consultant, educator, and host of the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. John helps growers worldwide, including orchardists, build resilient systems that regenerate soil, plants, and bottom lines. John Kempf, welcome to The POP.

Stéphane, thank you. Thank you for having me on. That's quite a compliment about the podcast. Thank you for that.

Well, it's true. Well, I can be honest with you, John.

We've had a couple guests here already on The POP, and you're definitely one that I've heard the name multiple times. So like he says, well, you know, I'm, I'm I'm a lifelong learner.

And when I discovered it was actually a neighbor vegetable grower who mentioned your podcast probably about 5 years ago or maybe even before COVID And I thought, huh, I didn't. So I looked it up and I started listening and I went, oh my goodness, what a goldmine. And you know what I love about your podcast is that it's cutting edge. I mean, if you find out something, you let us know about it. And it's like a continuous learning journey and the updates are incredible. And I will mention a few things that I've had quite a few real eyebrow raisers, like, what? You say what? And we'll discuss it at the end. But I had mentioned to Matt Powers, I loved your episode with Matt Powers. And I said to Matt, I said, hey, if ever you're in touch with with John Kempf, would you be interested in doing a duo, having the two of you? Because you really riffed off each other. You can go, you can get really nerdy on topics. And I enjoyed that. I found that was really like people who are learning about this. It's great to hear some of the real minute details about such things. It's like, wow, I mean, it's one thing quorum sensing, but it's like, how does this work? And all these different nerdy terms about soil and plant health. But actually, actually, we will get to soil and plants. But before this, I really want to dig into your brain, John Kempf, and your way of thinking, because it's unique and I enjoy learning how people excel. And I would say, like Solomon said, a man who is skilled in his work. You are skilled in your work. You put in the time, you put in the effort, you put in the learning. You didn't grow up with TV. You didn't grow up with the internet. You didn't grow up with social media.

And I probably wouldn't have been able to learn what I now know if that were the case.

Exactly. I like that because you have mentioned you're a voracious reader with a huge library. You're well-versed on the scientific literature as well as more regular literature like The Soil and Health by Sir Albert Howard. I'm sure you've read all that. Is that correct that you've really had—

Yeah, I had, you know, often there's this, there's interesting congruence of situations or scenarios that really gave me the permission or gave me the opportunity to, to have developed in this way. One of, one of those characteristics or one of those opportunities was parents that gave me permission to challenge, that gave me permission to question why, why are we doing this this way, and is there a better way of doing it. And which, coming from a quite traditional culture is perhaps not so common as a worldview or as a frame of reference. So that was— I owe them a big debt of gratitude for that opportunity to challenge and to look for different ideas and a different pathway. And then in conjunction with that, something that I didn't learn until years afterward, but when I started, when we had this experience on the farm, and I realized, we all collectively realized that we were on kind of a dead-end pathway, and there needed to be— we needed to find a different solution. The, the obvious question becomes, well, what is the solution? What is the alternative? And I was fortunate enough to, to grow up not very far from our local town of Middlefield, Ohio. And Middlefield had a relatively well-funded public library. That had incredible service. And they serviced the Amish community. Amish community came in and borrowed a lot of books. And I found out years afterward that that library has the highest per-person book lending rate of any library in the country.

Wow.

And I suspect that's perhaps in, at least to some degree, that is a contribution of the Amish community and not having television and entertainment, social media and so forth, technology, et cetera. And that library got me every book that I ever asked for through interlibrary loan from all over the world. So I started going down all of these rabbit holes. And I still remember this one book that I thought I would ask for it, but I didn't really expect them to get it. But it was one of Fritz Albert Popp's academic works on biophotonics and biophotonics in living systems and how all these various organisms and even things that we don't particularly consider to be alive, such as paramagnetic rock, emits light. They emit photons of light and how that influences biology. And so I asked them to source this academic book. It's like, I don't know, $300, $400 book. And it took them 6 months, but they got that through interlibrary loan from a library in Germany. So it was the combination of, of that, uh, environment that allowed me— and other factors as well— that really allowed me to dive deep into all of this research at a very young age. This was all happening in my mid to late teens.

Wow.

And actually, because I always like to know about backstory, so we've had a lot of guests that they didn't necessarily grow up in this domain or in the field. It sounds like you did. So at a young age, I have to know, I guess you kind of lean towards soil, but what really gravitated or what sparked that initial interest in that of all things? Because I'm going to be honest, that's kind of the last thing that a lot of people tend to think about.

Well, actually, my, my strongest connection is to plants and soil kind of came along with that, but Um, you know, like some people are the animal whisperers. They have this really strong connection to, to dogs or to cattle or to horses or something like that. And I have a similar connection to plants where I have this very strong intuitive connection. Uh, I would be able to work or to be out in a field, uh, within some of the crops that we were growing, and I would just know. I would just have this inherent knowing of how they were doing and what they were stressed about. And so it was that connection that really drove this and inspired this because it was, um, there were many occasions where I was responsible on the, on our vegetable farm for all the irrigation and all the spraying. There were many times when I would go out with a team of horses and a sprayer and spray several acres of a crop with a tank mix combination of fertilizers and fungicides and so forth. And I would be done. And I could sense that the crop was stressed, that it did not like what I had just applied, that it— I actually put the crop backward. And that it was, it was that connection that led me into all things related to plants, which led me to soil. And, you know, after a while, you start really studying the plant's microbiome and its interactions with soil. You really get into it. It starts becoming very difficult to tell where the plant begins and where the soil begins and where the plant ends, because those two are so integrally connected that there's really, from a physiology and a biochemistry perspective, it's almost difficult to separate the two when you think about them as an integrated living system.

We're talking about plants, talking about fruit trees, talking about orchards. I'm really excited to bring you this, the Permaculture Orchard Blueprint. This book summarizes fantastically the 3 key concepts that make up the permaculture orchard. So if you want to create your own, just go to permacultureorchardblueprint.com and we'll give you the ebook for free. Yeah. Hopefully we'll get on those. I mean, there's so many, like I said, eyebrow-raising moments that when you said, for example, that seeds contain millions of microorganisms. It was like, what? Seeds? So, and it makes total sense, like, as you go on explaining it, it's like, so a seed, it brings everything it needs. It's a moving, living system that has its ecosystem within it. And that was the, like, the what? Within it? Now, it kind of reveals so many truths that—

oh, that's how it's actually billions.

It's actually billions.

The best studied seed is corn seed because of course that's a major commercial crop. But the, um, the calculation for corn seed reports 9 billion microbes per seed. And so there's, there's a few important things that are— that, that reveals. One is we understand that each different plant has its own unique microbiome. And there's, of course, some varying degrees of overlap between different plant species and families. But that means we can start thinking about seeds as vectors of biology, as an inoculant. And you get very different types of inoculum from different types of seed. So that's one thing to consider. And the other thing to consider is the way that seed— the environment, the microbial environment that that seed was grown in. Is going to transfer. So where you source your seed, right, is something that Green Cover Seeds here in the Midwest US has done a lot of experimentation on. I had, had an experience here with a local farmer, a friend of mine several miles away, who— this is 2 years ago— he got enough buckwheat seed from Green Cover to plant about a 30-acre field. And he ended up— had a heavy seeding rate, ended up about an acre short and got buckwheat seed locally to finish. And it was— there were no treatments, no seed treatments, no microbial inoculants, just seeds that were both a year old from two different sources. And there were dramatic differences. And those differences in the crop development and height and those differences are still visible to this day. 2 years later in the following crops because one seed, the seed that Green Cover had sourced, was deliberately grown on a farm that had an incredibly rich soil microbiome and that got transferred through the seed as an inoculant. And the other seed was just conventional commodity-produced buckwheat with no particular consideration given to the microbiome. And that showed up when they were planted side by side in a remarkable way.

So as a newbie, the other question I would I want to ask, or want to know, is for the most part, a lot of people use all these chemicals. So as soon as those chemicals go on the crop or the seed, what then happens to all those billions of, uh, like, like, it must obviously have some kind of effect.

Yes, without question it has an effect. But the reality is we, we know so little and we have such a difficult time measuring And we haven't looked for the most part. So the people who have looked— I mean, Bob Kramer passed away just a couple of years ago. He was a professor at the University of Missouri. He had a large volume of work that ended up being unpublished before he passed away. I'm not sure if it ever will be published, but he did a lot of work on measuring how the applications of glyphosate and various fungicides influenced the microbiome. And they do influence the microbiome in varying ways. They— you'll get suppression of certain populations, of certain species and groups, and you'll get enhancement of other species and groups. And it's, it's a very murky picture because there's— I mean, there's just so much data, so many different species, and there's so much going on. But the short answer is that, yes, there is an influence. It is substantial. And, you know, when I use the word substantial and say the effect is substantial, in biological systems, there are many instances where slight changes in population density or population concentration have substantial influences on the overall health of the organism. So for example, in our digestive tract, We have a variety of different microorganisms of bacteria that they can be either beneficial or they can have negative health effects depending on concentration. I mean, E. coli exists in everyone's digestive tract. There are differences in strains, of course, but you can easily make a nonvirulent strain of bacteria of E. coli damaging to health simply by having it grow in population and become too large a proportion of the population. And those are all the same concept holds true in soils, and those things are all influenced with pesticide applications.

Yeah, we're getting a little bit off track. I just— I wanted to come back to your, your thinking and your— okay, so your library, you have a big library at home. Is there sections in your library that, say, your audience would not even know about, that you have areas of interest outside of soil, plants, and so on? Is there like a whole section you go, oh yeah, this, I love learning about this, but I don't talk about it?

Yes, there are. I have a number of biographies and I have, there's a number of related areas that I don't really talk about, like just the area we were talking about. I have a number of areas or a number of books about the decomposition of pesticides in the environment. But I'd say perhaps the areas that I speak about the least are the areas around biophysics and how biophysics and biochemistry, but particularly biophysics, ties into agriculture and agronomy and the whole conversation around living water and Gerald Pollack's work I've had Joel Pollack on the podcast, but there are, there are a number of areas that are living system, that they're important for understanding how living organisms actually work. And I think one of the foundational pieces that hasn't really entered the consciousness or the awareness of most in the farming community is that the, the biology that's used to describe plant function is now known to be outdated by probably 40 to 60 years. The newest research is not being incorporated from a practical application perspective, and so there's a substantial gulf there that I don't talk about very frequently just because there is too big of a bridge to gap for the most part.

Yeah, I, I remember in the beginning learning about your podcast and And thinking back, I went through in school, our textbook for soil, I had one soil course and it was Niles C. Brady's Soil Science, I think it was called anyway. And it was like, that book was really soil chemistry. And there was barely a mention of soil life and that importance. So it's like you've trained up a whole generation of people in soil science who honestly, it's like they're just mouthpieces for the ag input industry because they've dissolved or they've completely divorced the idea of the soil life and its importance.

So, I think they're passing along what they know and they're unaware of what they don't know. Yeah, it's just, yeah, a lot of people are simply unaware.

John, would you say that you're a speed reader?

Um, just, I haven't trained in speed reading, but by the sheer fact of the volume of reading I do, yes, I do read very rapidly. Um, I can read depending on the density of the content and how, how familiar I already am with it. It's, I don't know, 100 pages an hour or something like that.

Because I remember, Michael, I remember reading or hearing that you said you don't even listen to a podcast. If you think it's good, you'll have the transcript and read through because it's faster for you to read it than it is to listen. And I thought, here I am listening to all these episodes, but I don't read. I don't read at 100 pages an hour.

Work smarter, not harder. Yeah.

An hour. Yeah, that's pretty good. —How did you get to that speed? —Just practice, just reading a lot. But I mean, even to get through 100 pages an hour, which isn't in the speed reading, but it's— I mean, it's very fast. You can't read word by word. You're skimming or you're kind of—

Well, one of the things that happens if you read a lot and study a lot, then you develop a high degree of familiarity with many concepts and many ideas. And so you can skim fairly rapidly because many of the ideas that are presented or concepts are presented are already somewhat familiar to you. Right. So you already have kind of a mental map of where they belong and where these pieces belong. So yeah, you can move fairly rapidly if it's not because At that point, yes, there's constantly new and emerging information, but the new information becomes less of the total of what you're ingesting.

You said the right word when you said mental map, because the next thing is really, I'm curious, how do you retain? It's one thing to read. Yeah, that's my problem. But it's another thing to retain. So when you said mental, is that the way you hold on to so many facts is you have a mental map of say how plant nutrition works.

I suppose if you ask a fish, how do you swim? How does it know the answer? Yeah. Well, it's just, it's, it's been an, it's been an inherent gift and one that I'm very grateful for. But yes, there, there certainly is, um, there is this like this vast neural network of all these concepts that are interrelated and connected to each other. And when I think of one thing, then I can immediately think of the 50 different things that it's connected to.

Yeah, because what is it, 10% of what we read we retain? Obviously you're retaining a higher percentage of that, and that's kind of the— I'm always curious, how do you remember so much? I would say, are you— do you have a— do you find you have a photographic memory?

No, no, I don't have a photographic memory at all. But you know, I actually think there is a a psychological— perhaps it's right on the edge of calling it a metaphysical or perhaps even a spiritual component to memory. Um, for, for many people, you know, there's also— there certainly is a nutritional component. Um, how well we take care of ourselves and, and the food that we eat, the nutrition that we eat, and so forth, certainly has a very strong influence on our ability to recall, and just the, our overall health and well-being. Do we get enough sleep? Do we drink enough water? All those pieces play a factor. So there's, there's that foundational component, of course. But then there's also this spiritual component that we, to some degree, perhaps to a large degree, inflict it on ourselves. Words are powerful. We all know this. We know this from a spiritual perspective. Once you start getting, studying into the, uh, studying the biophysics, We know that our words affect us. And so when we say things like, "Oh, I have a hard time remembering things. I have a hard time remembering faces. I can't remember phone numbers. I have a hard time remembering what I read," we are speaking that into reality. We are creating that reality. And if we instead deliberately shifted our thinking and our words to say, I am becoming good at remembering faces, right? I'm becoming good at remembering. You know, the other, the other aspect of the consideration, there's this, um, this frequently expressed thought that, oh, I don't have room to remember everything anymore, like those files from 20 years ago are being forgotten. Well, it's, it's quite well established in, um, in the research that there are no limits to memory. There is, there is infinite space. You can remember, you should, you can remember everything in your life. Now, certainly things, uh, memory may need to be refreshed occasionally and reviewed occasionally, but, um, there is— so I, I think we have tremendous inherent potential within us that we unknowingly self-sabotage. So, right. I believe the— I was given a gift of having a keen memory from, from the very beginning, and it's something that I value and appreciate. And I'm also of the persuasion that I'm not extraordinary or unique, that many people— we all know that memory, memory is just like a muscle. It can be exercised and strengthened like any other muscle. And I'd say today in modern society Many people have become slobs about their mental health strength and their memory muscle strength, just like they have about the strength of other muscles and their fitness. Right.

And accelerating at a rapid pace as AI does so much of the remembering for us.

Uh, oh yeah, that's, I mean, you think about, you think about what happened, how many people, certainly some people were navigationally challenged, but you think about How many people had a very strong regional geographic memory of roads and the ability to navigate? And along came Google Maps and other electronic apps, and that just vanished. That's an analog for what could so easily happen with AI. We delegate knowledge and information. We don't need to remember things anymore. And that's how things get lost. Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah. I had a professor who used to talk about working with the Inuit up in the Arctic and above the Arctic. And he said, they didn't have maps. They didn't have GPS. They knew how to navigate using everything that was around them. They could look at snow and they knew that the snow was pointing in a certain direction. They would look at the stars, which 6 months of the year almost, or at least 4 months of the year, it's totally dark in a lot of the areas, and they could navigate with the stars. And it wasn't just, "Oh yeah, that's cool." No, their life, their and their family's life depended on them navigating in an often featureless environment. The ones who went to hunt on the ice, meaning on the Arctic Ocean. There was no landmarks. There was no, oh, the mountain. No, it's a completely featureless landscape. And yet their whole life relied on it and they thrived for thousands of years. When you were saying capacity, I was reminded of Methuselah. What was it? 900-some years. Humans haven't changed since that time. So the capacity, as you say, to remember. Oh, he was remembering things for 900 years. We're only expected to, what, 100, 120 perhaps? And so, as you say, we don't even know. And I want to get into that when I get into the plants, because it's that, what is the limit? We barely touched on the limit. Okay, so we looked at you learning and reading and retaining. Then the next one I wanted to know about is how do you synthesize all that you read? So it's one thing to read it, but it's another— do you have seasons of reading and then get insights, or do you have deliberate technique like starting with a question, um, can you read for insights? So when, for example, when you're working on products and you're starting and it's new, it's totally new, but you're looking for some kind of insight. For example, when you were working on Pinion, how did you get insights into how to stack this or how to build this product? That insight, was it starting with a question or was it basically just meditating on something and and re-chewing the facts that you knew to then come up with something completely new as an insight.

What happens— this, this leads back to the, the comments that we made a few minutes ago about AI. Once you have a large body of knowledge about a particular topic or a particular domain, the gaps become obvious when you sit and think about them. And an example of that is I read more papers and books than I care to think about trying to get a real grasp on the photosynthesis process. What actually is photosynthesis? What defines its variability in efficiency? And how does it really work And it wasn't until I couldn't say exactly, maybe 15 years ago, 12 years ago, somewhere in there, a paper was published describing the quantum— how photosynthesis is actually a quantum physics process, where a lot of things clicked and started making sense when we started looking at this old problem through a new perspective. But in that process, as I'm studying and trying to understand photosynthesis, And I'm struggling with it because there's a certain element of the conventional explanation doesn't fully make sense. It doesn't fully make sense. It doesn't fully describe the inherent variability. And one of the things that I pointed out is we have all of these— we have this one fundamental challenge. In the research on carbon deposition, how much carbon do plants put into the soil through their root exudates? You read that literature, you will find numbers in the peer-reviewed literature as low as 5% and as high as 95%. So why the variation? Why the variability? So people were reporting the variability, but they— the explanations for that are still emerging. We have— I have— I think I have a fairly good understanding of it. But one of the variables that was never measured in any of the research papers that I have ever read is we know and understand that plants have a variable rate of photosynthesis. Sometimes they're as little as 10 or 15% of their photosynthetic efficiency capacity genetically, and other times they're as high as 40 or 60%. Wouldn't you think that would be something important to measure when you're measuring carbon deposition? But nobody does. We have this— when you become— we have this foundational assumption that photosynthesis is a constant, right? Like we consider the speed of light, but it's not a constant. And so when you, when you become deeply familiar with a domain of knowledge, you start recognizing some of these inherent foundational gaps or flaws, such as the assumption that photosynthesis is a constant. And I've never bothered to sit down and write them all down, but I could probably, over the course of several days, I could put together a list of dozens of these foundational assumptions that are now known to be inherently inaccurate, but we still behave as if though they were true. And I don't know if I'm really, really answering your question. But so that's, that's one, that's one aspect is when you have deep domain knowledge, flaws just surface on their own. But then the other aspect is when I'm working on a new project, Yes, I enjoy researching. I research everything. Um, I research extensively which tractor I want to buy. Drives my wife crazy at times, but, um, I've, I've weighed all the— she's come to the realization that when I've made a choice about what I think is the appropriate decision, I've weighed all the pros and cons in, uh, in exhaustive detail. And so what happens when, um, when I'm when I'm researching a project, let's say you used, you used pinion as an example. I'm already familiar with the— it's kind of a merging of the two. I have deep domain knowledge. I'm very familiar with the various metabolic pathways within the plant, its physiology, the various immune pathways that can be triggered, the various compounds that can be utilized to do that. And then I start thinking about synergistic effects, right? How can we How can we synergize these different mechanisms and these different pathways to have the greatest compounding effect? Did that answer your question? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, one of the things I can see right out of the gate is we talk to a lot of people as well that are very passionate about a certain thing. I feel like just by listening to this, we kind of have the— without hyping you up too much, you seem like a very special, human being, because you're passionate about learning, you're passionate about all this thing, all these like agriculture or soil or whatever. By putting both of those passions together, um, I guess what I want to know is, were you, or do you remember what your first like big aha moment or discovery would have been in relation to both of those?

In relation to both of those topics? Well, the first was the concept that plants have an immune system. That one kind of, that was a very new thought. And relative to soil, I mean, I was always aware that soil is alive. It's something that we prioritize, that my father prioritized on the farm, even though we were applying pesticides, we were growing cover crops and trying to build earthworm populations and doing some of the fundamentals. Relative to soil, I suppose one of the things that really intrigued me, the first significant aha moment around soil was— and the soil microbiome was the realization that photosynthesis happens and occurs deep in the soil at a depth of 12 to 18 inches or more as a result of photons of light being emitted from rock, being emitted from bacteria, and being transmitted through the plant root system. And the plants are essentially waveguides channeling light down into the soil. And we have photosynthetic algae photosynthesizing in the soil at depths that we would consider to be dark. But it's not dark. It's slower, but it's not nothing. So there's— there were a few things that really caught my attention. And seems to me there was something else in your question I wanted to respond to, but it's escaped me right now.

That was a big eyebrow raiser for me when I first heard you mention that basically it's like fiber optic cables, you know, the tissue from the, from the leaf And I remember learning about trees that— and I always used it in my practice— was that if you had a certain branch showing damage, and people think, well, that branch is connected to the roots, and it's not. That branch is connected to that root. And most often, unless the tree spiraled, it's actually on the same side. So it was easier to diagnose Hey, that branch is dying. Why is it dying? And then I would say, hey, did you happen to change your walkway or do some digging? Oh, yeah, yeah, we widened the walk or the driveway. And oh, you probably— oh, yeah, we have to cut some root. Yeah. So that's why there was a proportional dieback in one branch. So, but it was, yeah, that was just how I would see it. I don't know why I got off on that. I had one more thing about just about your thinking. And it was how you think about something. And you mentioned first principles thinking. Can you give us an example of how you apply this to a problem or a project, really from first principles?

Stéphane, your question is triggering something. There was something important in response to Zach's question that I wanted to mention, and it escaped me. Zach, can you What was the question that you had asked me?

Well, I had just wanted to know, I guess, what like your big aha moments were for, for both the soil and, uh, because you obviously have a very curious mind. So I'm sure I always try and reverse engineer how that is because my mind doesn't work like yours. So I feel like you were very passionate about multiple things and it kind of seems like it melted into one big, uh, I guess very ended up being very beneficial for the niche, but like it takes a very kind of special person to kind of, I guess, become so curious, but that also has the knowledge or the brainpower to go and then experiment on that curiosity.

Yeah, yeah, I remembered. And thank you, thank you for that. And it ties in a little bit to first principles thinking as well. And, um, there's this one quote from Charlie Munger that made a deep impression on me. Because I encountered early on as I was talking about these, what I was learning publicly, particularly about plant immune systems in the, in the early days when I spoke about plant immune systems at farming conferences, there was frequently someone in the audience who had an objection to that, that would say plants don't have immune systems. And yet there were entire scientific journals being published that were dedicated to plant immunology. And there were, there was academic books being published on plant immune systems, but they hadn't made it into the farming world yet. Right. And this, this one quote from Charlie Munger really resonated very deeply with me. I'll paraphrase it a bit, but he said something to the effect of, you have no business having an opinion until you can articulate the opposing point of view better than the opposition. And, uh, he, he spoke about having a qualified opinion. You don't have a qualified opinion until you understand both sides of the argument in depth. And that's, I think, one of the— that's one of the foundational reasons why we have such a polarized world today from a political perspective, and people have such polarizing points of view, is because they haven't taken the time, right, to try to deeply understand the opposing point of view. And if we did that better, it would accelerate our learning and our development so rapidly, and we would rapidly have many fewer strong opinions because we would realize we don't, we don't have a qualified opinion about topic X, Y, or Z because we haven't. And that's so the way that I've tried to, to consciously remind myself of that in, in, uh, going through life is I use that phrase constantly. When people ask me a question that is an opinion-related question, if I don't know or if I don't have an opinion, I will say, "I don't have a qualified opinion about that. It's not something that I know about." And that serves as a reminder to myself to be very clear about what it is that I actually know and understand and what it is that I don't. So that's one aspect. And then, Stephan, back to your question about first principles. Thinking. It was something that I actually worked to incorporate into Field Ark when we put the, the paradigms together behind that. First principles thinking is related back to our photosynthesis conversation of understanding what are actually the variables that influence the photosynthesis process. And managing those to the degree that we are able. And because that is, that is the engine, that's the downstream engine, or I suppose you could say the wellspring that provides all the energy, all the energy in an ecosystem, in the soil and above the soil comes from the photosynthesis process. The more efficient our photosynthesis is, the more energy recapture, When you think about— when we think about solar panels, it's not difficult for us to recognize that the degree of solar radiation that we get is, is important, and different latitudes and cloud cover and all those things have an influence. But what if we should— we should add one more dimension. What if our solar panels could vary in efficiency from 10% to 60% efficiency variability? Based on their mineral composition. That's how we should think about plants. There can be tremendous variability in the efficiency of our solar panels. But we have kind of this default perspective that just because we have a solar panel out there, it's all going to be equally effective. It's not. So that's one example of first principles thinking of what are the— understanding the foundational drivers. And or maybe a different way of saying it is, What's the root cause behind the cause? Yeah.

I never thought about it like that, but yeah, that actually makes, that makes so much more sense if you break it down like that. Pun intended. Before we dig in anymore, John, we like to do something here that we call the Fast Five. So it's basically 5 different questions all over the place. It's called fast. You don't have to go fast. You can take your time. I would just love to I guess start off with question number 1 for you whenever you're ready. So what's one simple foliar tweak you wish every orchardist would try this season? Add sugar to your foliars. Okay. And any sugar in particular? We've heard what, molasses? We've heard Pepsi or Coke. We've heard— yes.

Um, certainly different forms of sugar. We've, we've done a lot of experimenting and playing around for years with different applications of dextrose and sorbitol and sucrose and molasses, and they all have different physiological effects. They are all generally beneficial, and it doesn't take much. It takes, um, it takes the equivalent of about a pound to 2 pounds of sugar per acre to make everything else in your foliar spray substantially more effective. I just recently had a podcast interview on our podcast with one of our team members, Jim Dunlop, who works with a lot of tree fruit out in the Pacific Northwest, and they're reporting that as a general rule of thumb, they've been able to cut the application rates of the nutrients they're putting into the spray tank in half by adding sugar to the spray tank.

And then adding the sugar, that basically, I guess, the energy and it wakes everything up.

It, it, yes, it essentially, it gives the plant extra energy. Okay. For a short period of time. So it has its own operational baseline. Let's say it's cruising along at a certain speed, if we use a speed metaphor, cruising along at 20 miles an hour, and all of a sudden you give it a shot of extra fuel and it just accelerates its metabolism for a short period of time, that improved metabolism for a short period allows it to absorb those nutrients much more effectively. And also it just, it supercharges the engine for a period of time.

That's, that's a high ROI. 1 pound of sugar, half the inputs. That, that, that changes the needle. The rocket fuel. Okay.

Question number 2 for you. What's your favorite underused plant or microbe for building resilience in cold climate orchards?

Uh, it's a right, it's a good question, but it needs reframed. Uh, we shouldn't think about it. In terms of one of the foundational failures that has gotten us to where we are is thinking about things in terms of single plants or single microbes. We need to think about them in terms of communities. So one of the things I've learned in the last 3 or 4 years from Christine Jones and kind of the integration of Christine Jones' work and Keith Burns at Green Cover Seed and James White, kind of all this merging around quorum sensing, is preferably— but this is just field experience now, no hard science around this— but our field experience indicates that when you have 8 different plant families, the entire soil microbial community changes dramatically, and they begin— all the plants in an ecosystem begin collaborating with each other instead of competing with each other. So that would be my answer, is make sure you have plants from 8 different plant families, not species, but families.

I actually experimented this when I found out about your 7 family things. I thought, hmm, where could I try this? Like the orchard is one, but a very visual one is the green. We have a little greenhouse. And I thought, you know what, instead of doing what I've always done, because that's just the way you do it, and weeding everything out, I thought, what if I integrate that idea of 7 families by letting all the weeds grow, but just clipping them. So I've been going through just with a pair of hand shears just so I could get really fine detailing. And I've been clipping around every tomato and pepper and every other plant we have in there. And it's kind of like, it's not taking away from the plant. In fact, they seem to be doing better, but also they're healthier. There's no disease problems on them. And it's like, is this— they're getting enough water. And now by clipping the other plants, they are getting enough sunlight. So it's not like they're light limiting. And it was like, hmm, this is—

Stefan, do you know if you have 7 different plant families?

Oh, at least, yeah. In all the weeds that are growing there, I mean, everything is kind of coming up. So there's, You know, your smartweed, Polygonaceae. There's the daisy family coming up. There are grasses because there's foxtail coming up. Clovers, hop clover coming up. I was trying to count them one day and I, oh, there's too many. Like we got dill coming up, then the tomato. So your Solanaceae. So it's like, yeah, there's more than 7 families in here. This is just a mix. Lamb's quarter, so kinopodiaceae. So it's like, yeah, there's all kinds of them and within a root zone of the plant. So it's like, hmm, then I was trying to kind of extrapolating, what would if instead of weeding and spraying all these herbicides, if we just mowed, have just simple little robotic or on an arm mowers going down the rows. So we're keeping the weeds down without eliminating them because once the corn or beans get up a certain height, they're gonna shade out. And I thought, wouldn't that be an interesting one? Anyway, I'm always willing to learn and try on my own situation before really applying it anywhere else.

You know, the commercial orchards that we work with out in Washington and Oregon, they noticed that, and this was kind of in parallel, or perhaps even before they were implementing an AEA nutritional protocol and nutritional management systems, they noticed that their organic apples had higher quality and better storability than their non-organic apples in terms of fruit quality characteristics. And they attributed that in large part to no longer having an herbicide band underneath the trees. And they had all of these plants, mostly grasses, growing underneath the trees and mowing them constantly. And that changed the physiological expression of the fruit tree.

Hmm. As you say, we just don't know, and we just haven't looked. It's going to be exciting the next 10, 20 years.

I have an interesting project that I'm working on right now as a whole, just in the process of establishing a personal homestead orchard here of, I don't know, roughly an acre, three-quarters of an acre to an acre. And I seeded in I don't have an exact count, between 30 and 40 different species from across, I think, 12 different families of perennials. And many of them relatively low growing. But the objective was to provide something that is low growing, grows only 1.5 to 2 feet tall at peak flowering, maybe a little bit taller, and that provides nectar and pollen for insects for the entire season from spring until fall so that we build up a large insect population. So that's a work in progress. I reseeded it for the second time this spring because I seeded it twice last year. The first time it drowned, the second time it dried up because you're planting these tiny little seeds. I mean, I included seeds like thyme, for example, winter thyme, which has 700,000 seeds per pound. And if it doesn't take this time, then, uh, the next step is to grow the seedlings in a greenhouse and transplant them out. So it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out.

Well, you got the Goldilocks thing going, so I'm sure the third time is gonna be just right. Um, question number 3, we already went over, you read a lot of books, so could you give us one book or mentor insight that still surprises you in its applicability? Hmm. That's a good one.

Good one. Yes. And this is very macro kind of life related, more so than specific agronomy related, but it is also connected to agronomy and to how do we care for our plants. This quote was popularized by Otto Scharmer at MIT, who's— who developed this concept called Theory U, Leading from the Emerging Future. And it's— the original coursework was around leading people. And leading people through, leading people into the future where the future is unknown, leading teams. It was around a corporate environment, but I've found that it is so true in real life. The quote was originally from Bill O'Brien, who was a very, very influential business leader. And the quote is, the outcome of an intervention has nothing to do with the skills or the knowledge of the intervener. It has everything to do with the place within from which the intervener comes. If you think about that, so many of our interactions with other people are an intervention of varying degrees. I try to change the mind of my 6-year-old daughter about which socks to wear. That's an intervention. And the same— so this is very true for people, but I'm persuaded it's also true for animals. It's also true for plants. The place that we come from within is perceived. It influences how we show up. And it's one of— one of my good friends made the comment to me when we were studying this, and I was describing a difficult situation I was dealing with, with some human interactions. He said, if you're coming from the right place within, the words you say don't matter. And I wanted to argue with that, but then I realized that if you come from the right place within, that will determine what words you say. So that, that quote is one that I come back to all the time, because there are many very brilliant people in the world, and often much of their knowledge doesn't get fully implemented, because for a whole variety of a whole range of different reasons. But that's— I remember that all the time. The outcome of an intervention has nothing to do with your knowledge or with your skills. It has everything to do with where you come from within. Yep.

Saying things with love and saying things with a confrontational, two very different approaches, but it's kind of the old adage for farmers that it's very easy to lead a cow where she wants to go. It's like the cow wants to go there.

There's this, in alignment with this quote, there is this frequently expressed sentiment by commercial farmers who've made the transition from trying to use fewer pesticides. They say that, um, I didn't realize how much my internal world would shift when I started changing my thinking from what do I need to kill today, yeah, to how can I manage the situation differently. It's— and so that's where you're coming from within. That's an expression of coming from within, coming from within of a place of killing something versus nurturing something completely changes your perspective and how you show up in an environment.

Yeah, I always say that one of my sayings is that if you take a step towards nature, nature will take 10 towards you. It's really a demonstration of grace. The more you look at it, the more you realize it's just grace personified. Nature is that. It's like after all we've done to beat down nature and abuse it and just rape, pillage, and destroy, it still wants to produce. It still wants to give us abundance. It's kind of like, that doesn't make sense. Like, make them starve. No, it's, it's— that's the place from which it comes from.

Well, why is that? If you have a biblical perspective, God transferred dominion and stewardship to us. Yeah, like we are the responsible party. We're the responsible agents. We are responsible for commanding the earth and, um, and for shaping the earth. And my goodness, we've squandered that responsibility. Um, but the, the reality is that is the design of creation. Design of creation is that we are to be the stewards, and creation is designed to respond to that. Yep.

And how often, as you were saying before, the whole point about what we say, and I know because I've done it a few times just to try it. I've killed trees just by speaking to them. It's like, you're not going to produce, then die, because that's enough taking care of you for years and you haven't. And yeah, come back the next year and like it's dried right to the roots. So we absolutely can both be a blessing and a curse to whatever, whatever surrounds us in, in, uh, in nature.

The next one we already, I don't know, maybe it's going to be sugar again, but I'd love to know what's one quick win for improving fruit flavor and storage life through nutrition.

Avoid excesses. Avoid nutrient excesses, particularly nitrogen and potassium. Most of the problems with fruit quality that most fruit crops experience are self-inflicted by the grower. Too much compost, too much fertilizer, too much manure. If you really care about high-quality, flavorful fruit, do not over-apply potassium and nitrogen. And on most fruit crops in most areas— there are soils that are exceptions, very sandy soils and so forth— but in most soils in most areas, That means none. Zero. Trees are not like vegetable crops. They're not like annuals. They do not need the fertility of those two elements.

Yeah, I love your— for the audience watching or listening, I love your plant pyramid idea with the four levels. And I've seen it in our orchard, how in the first years when we bought it as a conventional orchard, it was 11 years old, full production. But there were some serious pest issues. And I thought when I took over, I said, oh, I'm going to do this organic. So I started a 3-year organic transition. And I remember in the first year when in our shed, we still had a bag of 20-0-0. So, and I thought, I don't want to put this out for garbage. I'll, ah, one bag, it can't do any harm. So I spread it on one acre. I thought, ah, that's not a lot. That was just basically walk along and just do a little sprinkling here and there. And in that first year, that was the only place in the whole orchard where I saw aphids. And I thought, huh, aphids are solved in all the other blocks, but this one that I gave the 20 like one bag, 40 pounds or 50 pounds of nitrogen, it showed up with aphids. And so I thought, all right, yeah. And exactly what you're saying about excess. So even that was an excess and it triggered, you know, the pest disease are not the problem. They're pointing to the problem was always Sir Albert Howard's point. And it's like, okay, the problem here was the nitrogen, too much of. And in fact, I saw the same thing with scale. Scale just disappeared after 2 years or 3 years. The same thing with canker. We used to have all kinds of canker and just not putting some of these things. I didn't, in fact, to me, I thought it meant don't do anything, which was the other extreme wrong. So I didn't put anything. But it was interesting to see how problem after problem got resolved just by stopping the regimen of really excess because we're in beach sand soil. So they were pumping on basically hydroponic almost.

Um, yeah. Yeah. It takes soils and the trees a few years to recover from that. Yep. Well, that's a good point.

Cause yeah, even like a newbie perspective, it's like, oh, I'm buying this, I'm paying money for it. Let me load it up. So you get the best quality fruit or product, but okay.

And in some soils, uh, I think the one exception to this is One possible exception to this is in the establishment year. If you are planting a new seedling, then yes, you want to push it a little bit to develop a robust root system and to develop a frame. But that's it. No more after that.

Okay, so another quick little boost of rocket fuel and then you just, you let nature nature.

John Kempf, I want to— we touched on some of the plants.

We're still on question number 5 there. Look at this guy.

Oh, you still have 5.

I got one more for you, John Kempf. If you could ask growers one question to spark better results, what would it be?

If I could ask growers one question to get better results, um, well, often my conversations are with commercial growers, and if it's a crop that I'm unfamiliar with, I will ask the question, what are the value drivers in your crop? Like, what, what is the market really looking for? What are you— or what determines a marketable value? What determines marketable yield? Because particularly in tree fruit, in many cases, the answer is not more bins and bushels. It's not just more. It's not more of what comes off the tree. It's what makes it through the storage process. It's what fits certain sizing characteristics or quality flavor characteristics, firmness characteristics. And it's worth asking ourselves that question as well if we are growing for our home. So in my homestead orchard that I'm establishing in addition to the one that I already had, what drives value for me? It's very simple. I want peak nutrition and failure, uh, flavor, peak nutrition and flavor and quality. High brix, um, outstanding flavor. And all the characteristics that go with that high, high phytonutrient density. So all of— I've been proactive with planting perennial cover crops and amending the soil and treating the soil with trace minerals and everything else with the specific intent and purpose of producing the most nutritious and flavorful food possible. My math and my equation is different from commercial grower operations, and that, that is what will lead you to the answers of what it is you need to change in your operation.

That's a good one. I really encourage people to subscribe to your feeds, yours and AEA, just to know what is possible because those pictures that were posted from, I think it's called Valley View Orchards of Mike Omeg showing what a cherry branch can be are mind-blowing when you see it's basically a column of cherries with a few few leaves sticking out of it. It's like, how is that possible that a branch could support so much cherry? And to know that that's actually the second year in a row it's like that, where normally one year would just shut down the tree for the next year. But this is mind-blowing when you see what is possible. I think that's very useful.

Yeah, we call that roping cherries and it looks, I mean, it looks like a bunch of grapes. Yep. Cherries are that. I mean, yeah, absolutely. Everyone should go look at those photos, but so that's the second year for those types of year results. But also, uh, the other, it might've been a second post that they put up there, but, uh, you look at the glossiness of those, of those cherries and Mike talks about, uh, and they, they, they actually use the cherries as a mirror. They hold up this cluster and wave at the cherries and you can see the reflection of the cherries waving back at you. And I got some, some direct messages in response to one of those posts saying, what kind of cherries are these? Because sour cherries can have that characteristic a little bit more. But these are all sweet cherries and they are. Yeah, you'll have lengths of branches that are several feet in length that look like a grape cluster. And it's, oh my goodness, can you imagine the harvest efficiency? Yep.

I mean, it's stand there, prop up the branch first of all, because it's just absolutely bending right to the ground and just sit there and like one picker can fill, I don't know how many bunnets or—

Commercial pickers, of course, they're motivated by speed and they've got thousands of acres to harvest. So they have these harvest buckets in front of them and they will position the branch over the bucket and they'll just use their two hands and they'll just strip. They'll just like comb all the fruit right off the branch. Yeah. And it's, can you imagine how rapidly you can fill buckets like that?

Yeah. I saw, I was looking at another one, a video from somebody who was using your products and it was a blueberry grower and showing, it was like 2.5 feet branch, just the same thing, just blue with blueberries. And it's like, wait a minute. I've never seen blueberry like, I mean, I've seen some loaded bushes, But what I thought was loaded and seeing this, and this is why I'm saying people should follow just because once you get an image like that, how high is high? Like what? Like how many strawberries, how many cherries, how many apples is it possible? And the quality, as you say, because it's not just quantity. And that's the important thing when you say those mirror-like That's just the waxy fats deposit. And I mean, that's what makes storage. That cherry, you sit it in the fridge and come back, and I'm sure in a month, and those cherries are perfectly good to go still. Exactly. Yeah, because I mean, people spray different waxes on fruit to make them store, but the fruit can naturally build and develop that natural waxy coating. You know, the apples, it's like They're dirty. You just touch them and they shine up. So yeah, that's what you really want.

The point that you're making is a point that I've frequently reiterated is that most of us don't have a frame of reference anymore for what healthy plants actually look like. Right. We've never observed truly healthy plants. We've never experienced them. You know, years ago with Mike Omeg with Orchard View, when I first met Mike, I think it was one of our first half dozen meetings, he asked me what I believed the yield potential of, of cherries would be at their full genetic potential. I don't remember exactly what my answer was. I think if memory serves me correctly, I said 19,000 pounds an acre or something like that. And based on the— this was a math model that I had built, and Mike thought that I was nutty, to put it mildly. He didn't say that, but I saw it in his face. And about 3 or 4 years ago, he came back to me and he said, "You remember that number that you gave me?" He said, "I didn't believe it was anywhere possible, but we are there. We are there with year on year, year over year. It's not biennial bearing. It's not tapping out the tree." He said, "Our best blocks, we are there." And don't hold me to the exact 19, because I don't remember what the exact number was, but it was something like, it was over double of where they were at that point.

Yeah. I really want to talk about plants and crops, but I really wanted to get to this last part about your thinking, which is vision. So you think differently, you learn differently, and you're But you, I mean, as you said, it's just how high is high and you've done that. But vision for you, I was very curious to see that on AEA, which is Advancing Eco-Agriculture on the website, you're the Chief Vision Officer. And I was like, what? That's the first time I see that. What for you What's your end vision?

There's several different ways that I could answer that question. I could answer it in terms of the degree of implementation that I want to see of regenerative agriculture globally, which is something that really motivates me. But I'll answer the question a little bit differently from that. And my vision would be that collectively, as a, as a global collection of societies, we develop an appreciation for healthy stewardship and that the vision of agriculture, the model of agriculture becomes designed and developed for the express intention and purpose of regenerating ecosystems, regenerating public health, and recognizing that the ultimate purpose of agriculture and the, the reason we as a species pursue agriculture is for the betterment and the improvement of humans and of the ecology. It's both of those things. And so that would be my vision is I would have a vision of us being in alignment with natural systems, natural ecosystems, and accelerating them, improving them, regenerating them. This is all something doing this on a global scale is easily within our grasp collectively as a human species. We already know, we already have the collective knowledge of exactly how to do this. It simply needs to become important enough to enough people to facilitate significant change. So that is, that's the vision that I would have for all of us, is that we, we become more connected to what is real. In food and agriculture.

So on that, and that was, that was fantastic. That's absolutely, yes, amen. I agree to it. What's your vision then in one specific thing for agriculture?

My vision would be to have these types of systems implemented on 80% of all agricultural land in the next 20 years, right? 2040. And that, you asked me the question a year, 2 years ago, I would have said that's an easily accomplishable vision. There appear to be headwinds, substantial headwinds against that vision being realized. But at the same time, you know, there are many instances where one, the one characteristic of human nature is that collectively as societies, we tend to avoid change until we're right at the edge of the cliff, perhaps partially going over the edge of the cliff. And when that happens, substantial change is often very sudden and very rapid. And when we consider the sixth major extinction event that we're going through with all the species loss and biodiversity loss and all the things, I mean, it's not unreasonable to consider that we are approaching a cliff's edge and a threshold. Where all of a sudden we may very rapidly develop the collective desire and the collective will to facilitate rapid transformation. Yep.

So what's your vision for landscapes to go along? I would say more rural landscapes, say even just your community in Ohio.

I think one of the foundational pieces that we need to consider from a Um, from a community perspective is what does it take for us to have resilience and security in an increasingly insecure world? And I'll, I'll frame this particularly that you could look at this from a healthcare perspective. You could look at this from a food perspective, but how rapidly we have forgotten how food supply chains collapsed during COVID We have incredible collective amnesia. And here in the United States, the piece that I find so puzzling is that we don't behave as if though we had any cares about national food security. Many people don't realize this, but we import 65% of our fresh fruits and vegetables. How much sense does that make? Now, yes, you can't grow avocados and bananas and pineapples in the United States for the most part. But there is the quantity of our imports versus what we have domestic sovereignty over is a farce from a national food security perspective. So when we consider the inadequacies of that macro ecosystem, we need to consider what we can do in our local communities to develop local community resistance. Resilience. So I recently became partners in a local butcher shop that sources from the local community and supplies the local community with the express vision and purpose of helping to develop resilient local supply chains so that if there is a macro disruption, at least to some degree, we have built up a local supply chain that has resilience. So that's— now that's one aspect of an answer to that question.

Last one, your vision. Actually, I would have more, but I see time is—

I think we're gonna have to have him back because, uh, I could see Man's questions and he's got— he has a grocery list for you.

But I, I do—

I have time, I have time.

Keep going and slice it. Okay, well, the one vision part was people's health. And you've, you've talked about this on the podcast a few times, but—

Well, one of the things that I discovered about plant immune systems, plant immune systems in, in some ways, you could make the argument that they're even more robust than human immune systems because they don't have legs. They can't run away. Right. But the realization that plants can be, they can develop the immunity to practically all diseases and insects is. Kind of a stark wake-up call to think about how we've been managing them in recent history and how they actually could be managed. And similar concept for people. If we supported people with the right environment, getting enough sleep, not being exposed to all kinds of toxins, proper food, um, I'm of the persuasion— we, again, we were designed to be healthy. And what is happening today is most of us are— we are living too short and dying too long. We don't have quality of life at the end of life. And this is a problem that is in part a nutritional inadequacy problem. Now, that is not just exclusively the problem of agriculture. It's also the fact that we eat all kinds of ultra-processed foods and all kinds of junk and et cetera, et cetera. So it's food processing as a component of this conversation as well. But there is also a component of the conversation to say that Uh, many of our agricultural products that we produce foods from, or that are foods, don't have the nutritional integrity that is needed to support a robust and vibrant human immune system. And that's the piece that's so intriguing, I find, is when we have plants that have these robust immune systems, they transfer that immunity to the livestock and to the people who consume them as food. And so the reality is. We should, we should be thinking food and medicine should be aggregated. They should be one budget line item instead of being dissociated, both in our, in our personal lives and collectively as a nation. Because what happens, what I've experienced and heard reports innumerable times from people and families, is that as they spend more for food on quality characteristics, they have a proportionate or even greater reduction in medical expenses. So when you combine the two into a single line item, the cost in the budget is a wash, but they have much better quality of life. Right. And we should think about that same thing from a federal perspective as well.

I really like that. We live too short and die too long.

That, yeah. No, that absolutely, to me it's always, it's minerals, but not just any mineral, it's specific minerals. And depending which part of the country you're from, if you're from the West, usually the soils are higher in minerals just because there's less leaching while in the East it's a bit of a different story.

When you go back to first principles thinking, and what is the root cause behind the cause behind the cause, it essentially boils down to two foundational components: minerals and microbes. Right. That's it. And both need each other. There are synergy between the two. Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay. Last one on the vision. Your vision for your company. And AEA, or Advancing Eco-Agriculture, you have a unique approach for your products, and it's contrary to the inputs industry mantra. And I love this friend of mine told me this years ago. He said, "The best product is something that costs a dime to make, sells for a dollar, and leaves a habit behind." So that is basically the agricultural inputs saying, and it's like that for fertilizers, pesticides, fungicide, herbicide. It's like— Oh my goodness, I love that phrase. Yeah, it's, and it really boils that down, but your company, it's really not. So you're helping farmers get their soil in such fine order as to wean off of your products in time. And that sounds like bad for business, but in fact, it's great for business and it's a genius part of vision. So what is your vision for your product?

Well, there is no shortage of, of scale of problems that need solved. So it's absolutely true that we have— we've now been doing this work for 20 years and our knowledge has continued to grow over that time. But we have many growers who have worked with us for a period of time and their, their need for nutritional products, microbial products has declined to the point where it's minimal or none, depending on their context. And that is, that's kind of rewarding. But, you know, it's, it's, it's good for business, as you pointed out, in the sense that for every farmer that you help, there's 50 more that need help. And that's pretty outstanding word-of-mouth marketing. So that's, that's kind of the macro perspective approach. And then regarding to your, in response to your last question about what is our vision for our products, I'd say that there is one defining characteristic of our products that, um, is a substantial— it's a very much— it's, it's a distinct contrast from the mainstream. There's more products coming in the marketplace like this, but our products were specifically designed with the intention of having— the majority of our products are nutritional, there's also some microbial, but they were designed to be alive. They were designed to stimulate biology and not suppress it. So you can put on a liquid phosphorus starter, an infero starter on a large commercial grain operation, and our liquid phosphorus application will enhance biology, or a conventional phosphorus application will suppress it. And I still remember this one conversation where a farmer sat across me, across from me at a lunch table at a restaurant, and he almost came across the table. He said, John, your products are alive because he had a microscope and was culturing them and experimenting with them in his laboratory. And he was finding all these different microbes in our products, which we didn't necessarily add, by the way. They were just— they're inherent in the environment and in the manufacturing ecosystem. But our products were designed to not kill them. Right. And that's such a direct contrast to when you have fertilizers and so forth that don't sustain life. Yep.

I'd love to say, John, that I've been using your products for 3 years, but when I put in my order, there's, I think, 1 out of 6 that I could actually get. And it's just because of the whole, what do you call it, registration. Registration. Yeah. You can thank the Canadian government.

Yeah, I'm sure. Being based in California.

Yep. It's like, hey, this is going to disturb some other entrenched— anyway, yeah, that's a whole different story there. If I understand, John Kempf, your products, because I've kind of looked into these things and I'm very much, as my son would attest, I'm very much a do-it-yourselfer thing, you know. So your products put overall is basically targeted specific rock types, let's say for a certain product. It's a targeted rock type that then gets ground up probably in a roller mill to a very fine powder like 400 mesh, and then is combined with a humic acid. And in your area, I think you have, what is it, Leonardite that's added as a humate to basically chelate those— that primary mineral that you're after, and then combine that with your kind of cooking home, uh, your own recipe of polysaccharides, which is some form of a sugar, so that it doesn't precipitate, it doesn't float, it just keeps everything in a very easily flowable pattern. That's basically the except for your, your ones that are living. But do I kind of understand the gist of how your products are formulated? That's—

that is some of the foundational technology that we originally started with 20 years ago. But we've, we've certainly moved, moved beyond that. We still have several products that are formulated in that manner. Okay. Because we've found it to be so effective. But one of the things that's worth pointing out, because there are many citizen scientists and backyard chemists and so forth, people who really enjoy looking at our products and trying to replicate them, which, and that's to be expected. But something worth pointing out is that because of the regulatory environment that we live in, our, our products appear on the label to be very simplistic, like, oh, this contains magnesium and sulfur, molybdenum and boron. Well, yes, it does. And it probably contains 20 or 30 other things that were not permitted to put on the label. If it's— if you have a label for fertilizer, then you can't include ingredients that have a biostimulant effect or vice versa. So there's, there's a lot of inherent complexity in the jug that isn't revealed by the product labels itself. So that's something worth pointing out for people trying to do experimentation, because many people have— they've they've, they, they try to replicate something and they say, oh yeah, well, I got results, just not nearly as good as the results that I got with the product. Right. And that's, that's why it's because we have all those synergistic stacks in there that are really revealed.

Which— wait, sorry, where can people go to see all like a list of everything that you guys offer?

The kind of the home plate, home base where people should check is our website at advancingecoag.com.

The one point I was looking about the soil and plants is I was always curious, different soils, different situation, different problems. And do plants or animals transmutate elements? And if so, how? It's kind of like that alchemy stuff.

Oh, you really want to go for the really controversial questions. Yeah, um, so the idea of transmutation was first broadly presented by Louis Caron, um, in his, in his book. Um, the book was titled Biological Transmutations. And recently, when Acres USA changed hands, changed ownership, they discovered a ready-to-print PDF. I think it was in that format. They discovered a PDF of a follow-up book that Louis Caron had had written that was intended to be published by Acres USA many, many years ago and never got published for whatever reason. So there are those books. There's also in the book Soil Microorganisms and Higher Plants that was edited by N.A. Krasilnikov. It's one of the preeminent original microbiology books. They reported biology transmuting radioactive isotopes. This was back in the '60s and '70s. And there's also the anecdotal information. I don't know how well it's documented, but the Lübcke farm in Austria after Chernobyl and the radioactive— they were in the downstream plume, radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Crops on all the surrounding farms were condemned because of radioactive contamination. And they couldn't find any on their crops or in their soil weeks after exposure. This was not a period of months or years, but in a matter of a few weeks, they had such robust biology that it transmuted all of those radioactive isotopes into non-radioactivity. More recently, and I cannot cite the, the names of the authors off the top of my head right now, but there were There have been several papers published by two folks in academia, I think if memory serves me correctly, both out of Ukraine in the last four or five years that have clearly documented the biological transmutation of elements. They're saying there is no question that biology in certain conditions can transform certain elements into other elements. So this has been a very taboo topic, like you lost all academic credibility if you even suggested the notion that such a thing was possible. But there, there's, at least on the fringes, there's getting to be the recognition that actually there are things happening here. There is documentation for it. We don't perhaps fully understand how or why, but there is no question that it is happening. So the, the interesting part, I don't know how relevant this is in an agriculture or agronomy context. The one defining characteristic that I think is a prerequisite, as I understand it, with the very limited information that we have at this point, is that it requires very robust biology, right, with a lot of energy. You have to have a large microbial community and they have to be being fed with lots of root exudates, lots of sugars, and have a lot of energy in order for this to happen. It doesn't happen in poorly functioning soils.

Corn. And here's one just that I really raised my eyebrow when you once said, I'm sure maybe you probably said it several times, that corn could be a great soil builder. And it's like, what? Corn is probably the one that destroys the most soil in the way it's farmed. Can you elaborate a little bit about How corn could be an absolute soil builder.

What's fascinating, Stefan, is if you go back into the agronomy literature of the '50s and '60s and '70s, it was common knowledge. The, the agronomists of the day all recognized and understood that the fastest way to build soil was to grow corn. The fastest way to deplete soil is to grow a legume crop like alfalfa or soybeans. And it's now— we're now coming to this realization again, re-recognizing the old information that was lost. But the reason corn was considered to be so effective at building soil is because it is such an efficient photosynthesizer, right? It's a C4 photosynthetic pathway plant where many of our crops are C3s. And It's because of its efficiency in photosynthesis. It simply captures a lot more carbon dioxide and it produces a grain crop, of course, but it also can transmit a larger volume of sugars down out through the root system to feed soil biology. So when you, when you do the math about the, and you look at the pounds of carbohydrates that are contributed by a corn crop to the soil versus another crop such as a tomato crop, there's 4 to 5x difference or greater. Yeah.

Now I'll put you out a bit on a limb. You may have said this. I've never heard it, but you talked about the £19,000 per acre for cherries as a possibility, which has been achieved. What would you say is the theoretical limit for corn if you had irrigation? So water is not a limiting factor, basically, where you could even apply a foliar every day or at least 5 times a week, and where basically sunlight is the limiting factor throughout the season. What do you think corn could do?

I'll answer the question perhaps slightly differently. Um, in the late 1970s, '76, '77, '78, in that time period, there was a corn geneticist at the— actually, I shouldn't call him a corn geneticist. I'm not exactly sure what his specialty was, but there was a gentleman at the University of Iowa named Charles Tsai, T-S-A-I, and he was a collaborator with Don Huber and Bob Kramer and Michael McNeil and others of my mentors on this corn research trial where they wanted to determine the genetics that they had available at that point in time. What was the actual yield limit? And they asked Charles to look at the theoretical limit of what was the corn plant genetically capable of. And his number was 1,100 bushels per acre. That is what the corn plant was genetically capable of producing if it had an ideal environment. Now, in order to have an ideal environment, that essentially requires, from a, from a macro perspective, it requires ideal nutrition, which is actually probably the least, the least often limiting. It requires ideal sunlight, ideal temperatures, ideal water. None of those first 4 characteristics are a surprise, but then The fifth one is a surprise for many people, and it's where most people are left short. Most crops are left short. It needs adequate amounts of carbon dioxide. In many systems, carbon dioxide tends to be out of sight and out of mind. And if we're optimizing everything else— water, sunlight, nutrition, everything else— frequently carbon dioxide becomes the limiting factor for photosynthesis because there isn't enough organic matter. There's not enough microbes that are respiring and moving carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So, um, this, this was all related to me. Charles Tsai has passed away many years ago. I never got the chance to speak with him, but this story was related to me by multiple accounts of people who were there and had this conversation with him. And, um, I think what one of the— another data point— and there's now emerging technology that we actually— I'd like to refresh this information and get up-to-date information because This anecdote is now 30-some years old, maybe older, but it was reported or communicated to me that when you have a healthy green cornfield that's knee-high or a bit taller in early July, late June, early July, and it's growing rapidly, you have this background atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration of about 450 parts per million and a rapidly growing corn crop. Can deplete that down to less than 100 parts per million by 9 or 10:00 in the morning. So that means now for the rest of the day, it doesn't matter that you had perfect sunlight and perfect water and perfect nutrition from 10 a.m. until 8 p.m. The limiting factor was CO2.

That's pretty wild. Okay, well, we'll Yes, we'll schedule another one. Absolutely. Because we're just touching on the plant and soil aspects. Yeah, we'll definitely have to have him back. So John, knowing what you now know after these really 20 years plus in this adventure, if you had to start over again today, what would you do differently?

I don't know that I have a good answer for that. Certainly Certainly made mistakes, but along the pathway, I think at every point in time we made good decisions with the information that we had available. But when you consider agronomically, like from the— our, our growing and our understanding has certainly grown. We have, we have a much better understanding of how to deal with specific situations. But I suppose one of the things that I've come to understand is that the limitations in getting these systems more broadly adopted are actually not agronomic. They are psychological and system capture. Yeah. Um, when you have on a, on a commercial agricultural side, if you have a farmer who is, uh, in a financially challenged position, as most are, and has crop insurance, as most do. The crop insurance requires the compliance with, with certified agronomist recommendations for pest control. So fungicide and insecticide applications are required according to the recommendations that are being made. And the inputs company who is selling the fungicides and fertilizers is providing credit to the farmer that's in a difficult financial position and is financing those products for 180 days or even for an entire year in some instances, there is, there is a level of systemic capture there that is extremely difficult, almost impossible for farmers to break out of, even if they should desire to do so. And then In addition to that, so that's one aspect. There's the psychological aspect, which I could talk about at length, but we can speak perhaps to that in another conversation. And one aspect of that psychological conversation is that for the first 20— I mean, we released Pinion a year ago, 19 years after we launched the company. Pinion is our first product that is effectively a biocontrol that can— that is designed with the intent and express purpose of controlling a pest. All of the other products for the first 19 years were designed to address root causes and to prevent problems rather than treating problems. And oh my goodness, how powerful Band-Aids are to human psychology. We love silver bullets. It's magical to spray something out there and watch our problems evaporate. And that is to the point that you made about the Ideal Sales Process, something that leaves a habit behind. It is so addictive, right, to have a solution that we can have confidence. We press a button, we spray this product, and our problem is solved. And, um, and it's, it's, it's much easier to get buy-in to do that than it is to try to prevent a problem that might take matter of weeks or months, or in some cases, years to fully prevent.

And I love the way in that product you piggyback elements that basically do the other things, as you say, solve the problem at the core. And it's, it's a way of, if you get the mental or the psychological aspect where people do, as you say, it's hard to get them out of habits. That's basically it is they have a habit of spraying. To solve a problem, a band-aid. Now you do that, but on top of it, you're actually addressing the root causes at the same time. You're increasing photosynthetic ability, you're increasing the plant's immune. It's a, anyway, it's a genius way of approaching the problem. It's like not everybody's thinking of single, but it's not single. It's a combination of factors.

Well, we'll definitely have to have you back on, John. I just want to say thank you so much for your time today. Um, in the interim, where can people go to find your products, or you have a podcast? Where else can people reach out and deep dive into who you are?

There's many different channels. Um, I have a personal website at johnkempf.com. Uh, I'm on a lot of different social media platforms. But I'd say the website, subscribe to my blog, check out the podcast, the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. You know, the podcast is interesting because I started it. It was a challenge for me at first. I come from a culture that is quite uncomfortable with putting themselves forward culturally, and my personality was quite introverted. So being behind that microphone was— it was, it was stretched. But I felt this tremendous sense of responsibility to try to capture some of the knowledge from my mentors that I saw being lost when they passed away. And since then, it's become this quite fun project where I get to interview all these amazing people doing amazing things. You know what makes the— part of what makes the podcast so great, a large part of what makes the podcast so great is not the fact that I'm the host, but I get to have conversations with all these incredible people. Right. That have this amazing knowledge. And, um, I was surprised. What is it now, a year ago, something like that? Maybe, maybe it's two years. I forget the exact time frame, but I don't pay any attention to stats. I'm not doing it for the numbers. We don't have sponsorship. I don't— not doing any— doing it— I'm doing it because I think it's important. And one day my team, uh, sent me and said, hey, we hit number one in the charts on, uh, on Earth Sciences category in Apple Podcasts. And we've been— ever since then, we've been bouncing around between the number one and three spot for the last couple of years, which is Kind of interesting. Wasn't the purpose of the goal, but it turned out to be that way. So the podcast, social media platforms, personal website. And then also one of the— a lot of people often they have all kinds of questions. How can I solve this or that problem? I would— it would be remiss of me not to mention Field Lark. Right. So I developed Field Lark to be a trained AI tool to amalgamate and synthesize all of this information that I have read over the years and all the things that we've learned and be able to— and the protocols and the knowledge that we've developed at AEA and be able to guide people and give them responses to their questions. So you can also check out fieldlark.ai. It's an AI engine that is essentially trained to be a regenerative agriculture agronomist.

It's excellent, by the way. He has shown me. I've tried it on a few different crops and it's like, oh, I never thought about that. That was like, gosh, how did it know? And it's like, I could have run it through Grok or anything else, but it's because you've trained it on your dataset, which you have as measured. And that's a whole aspect. I mean, we absolutely There's so much. It's impossible to cover with you the depth and the breadth of all the work and the things you've been involved in. That's why I wanted to touch on those aspects first. But yeah, absolutely. And you'd be remiss as well to not mention Kind Harvest. Oh, yes.

I started Kind Harvest. You can check that out at, I think it's kindharvest.org.. But I started Kind Harvest. I had this interesting experience during COVID where I was participating in several online classes, and I observed the same groups of people interacting in Facebook groups, interacting in a private discussion chat forum, and the interactions were completely different. In, in the chat forum, there were these people would ask a question and they would get these thoughtful multi-paragraph answers. And they ask the same question on Facebook and they get these relatively rude one-liners. And I realized that each of these different platforms carries their— its own inherent ethos of what is considered to be acceptable behavior. And so, um, I started Kind Harvest as a social networking platform for people in agriculture to connect with each other and to ask thoughtful, insightful questions and to have a real dialogue. And we, we put together rules of engagement and designed it to be moderated and to be flagged if things went off the rails. You know how many times we've had to remove a comment? Zero in 5 years. Not one time. Because it's a different platform. It carries a different ethos. And it's just, it's a lot of fun to be there and be part of that conversation.

Well, it summarizes what you were saying earlier with the place from which you come, you know, that inner core, and it's great for that. I really would suggest people look at your blog if they wanna do some deep dives, 'cause you've really put, you're a great writer too, and you're very thoughtful of when you do things and how you write things, but that's also a great, great resource. Yeah, YouTube as well. I mean, your channel is the is the podcast episode on YouTube.

And yeah, I'll make sure that I put everything in the show notes. So until we get him back on that, until we get him back on the podcast, everybody go take a look at everything that John has going on.

Absolutely start listening to the podcast. It is— there's a reason it's the most—

well, yeah, because he's super passionate. He's well-versed. Like it's the culmination of everything that Just works. Yeah, it works.

It works really well. Thank you.

Thank you, Zach. Thank you, Stefan.

Thank you so much. And with that being said, good job, pops.

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.