Podcast Extra: Market Differentiation Through Regenerative Agriculture - John Kempf Keynote

So, Ivo, thank you for your very warm hospitality, for opening your location to hosting us, and thank you all for all of you being here. You know, there's a part of me that I recognize that there's an almost complete certainty that every person in this room knows more about wine grape production than I do. So why am I up here? So there are a number of pieces. We've had a lot of fun working with Ivo, working with Greg Pennyroyal and others here in the room as well. Over the last half a dozen years or more, we've really enjoyed working with wine grape producers because we were just having a conversation here a little bit before we got started. And I made the comment that in our experience, there are three groups of growers who have a more sophisticated understanding of plant physiology and plant management than anyone else that we get to work with. Those are the wine grape growers, the giant pumpkin growers, and the cannabis growers. Those three groups dig deeply into understanding plant physiology, and I'm sure that the possibilities of addiction have nothing to do with any of those three. But the, you know, wine grapes are one of the very few crops that actually gets paid for producing quality. And they're also one of the very few crops that has, I shouldn't say the few crops, but wine grape production has one of the most direct analogs, or the direct, most direct transfers between the integrity of the microbiome that is in the soil and the final harvest, the quality of the final harvest itself. There are very few crops who have that direct of a connection. It's intriguing to think about what has happened with agriculture and agronomy over the last seven or eight decades is, as we well know, agronomy and contemporary agricultural practices have completely divorced plant production from biology. We've taken a very chemistry centric perspective to growing crops and we've thought about plant nutrition in terms of nitrogen and phosphorus and calcium and manganese and so forth without considering biology. And yet it is that exact biology. We now are understanding very clearly that it is that biology that delivers terroir, that delivers quality, that delivers flavor and complexity. But the challenge, the foundational challenge of regenerative agriculture and this approach to taking a biology centric approach, if we had to compress it all down to one challenge, it's simply this. How do we grow plants and provide nutrition with biology? Let me see if I can rephrase this or reframe this. How can we provide adequate nutrition without suppressing biology? Because mainstream agricultural approaches are about supplying nutrition in the forms of fertilizers. And soil oxidation with tillage and so forth. And they all have the effect of suppressing soil biology. The exact thing that we desire to optimize this is the nucleus. The foundation bottom line is, how do we develop an agronomic approach that provides plants with all the nutrition they need and enhances biology at the same time? That's the foundational essence we can figure that piece out. Everything else flows from there all on its own. One of the experiences that really caused me to question what I was learning about plant nutrition Was watching observing tree growth at a park that's about 10 or 15 miles from where I grew up. We're not far from the border, the glaciation border, about 15 miles or so from where I grew up. We have a small local park that's called Nelson Ledges State Park. Nelson Ledges, the glaciers drop this large sheet of rock that's about 15 to 18ft thick, and it covers about 10 to 15 acres. There's just a single sheet of rock. And now, of course, as the sheet of rock was dropped, it cracked and broke up. And there's fissures and cracks and crannies where young boys can jump across and go crawl in between and have all kinds of fun with. Luckily, our mothers never got to see. But what was fascinating to me is here we have this flat, this bare sheet of rock. There is no topsoil. There never has been topsoil. And we have trees growing out the surface of the rock and on the edges. And there's these tree roots going all down along the edge of the rocks. And these trees are solidly attached. And there are oak trees and hickory trees and maple trees, your typical eastern hardwood forest. The trees are anywhere from 12 to 24 inches in diameter. These are not. These are not small trees, and they do not look to be deprived of nutrients. They have very large leaves, very healthy canopy. And I had always imagined that these trees must be getting relatively poor nutrition and not growing very rapidly. There were several trees that were right on the edge of the rock sheet that were growing at an angle. And we used to walk out or climb out those tree trunks and drop down the 10 to 12ft. Well, the park didn't consider that to be a safe activity. So their solution was to cut those tree trunks off. I started looking at the tree trunks. There are tree trunks that are 12, 16 inches in diameter, and their growth rings are every bit as large as the growth rings in the forest or where the trees are growing in soil that, as you might imagine, I started asking lots of questions. Where are these trees getting their nutrients from? Where's the calcium and the magnesium and the phosphorus and the potassium coming from to grow trees of this size and at this rate of growth? Because supposedly these trees should be nutritionally deficient. And since that observation, this is now 25 years ago, I've observed trees in many different locations throughout Canada, throughout the Rockies. We have many instances of substantial tree growth where there is no topsoil and there has never been topsoil. Well, that leads to a few interesting observations. One of them is the realization that when we measure dry matter of a plant greater than 90% of it, in many cases 95% of it comes from the atmosphere. It doesn't come from the soil. This cellulose, this wood fiber is carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. There's very minute mineral content. But we understand that the mineral content, the nutrient content is the catalyst that drives the creation of everything. El these trees still have to get nutrition from somewhere. And that led there was here in California back in the, I want to say, in the 40s and 50s. This lady's name is escaping me right now. Bargilia Retaver wrote a fascinating book with her husband titled the Organic Soil Primer. And they described observing under the microscope. They described observing plant cells absorb entire bacterial cells in the 1940s. And that research was buried. Nobody talked about it, but she was describing this process. It was known to occur in animal cells. This process that was termed endocytosis. Plants capturing and encapsulating entire bacterial cells and using them as a source of nutrients. Well, that was then ignored and disregarded in our approach to nutrition management over the following decades. But I was fascinated by that observation and then also learning about how biology, fungi, lichens, algae, and a variety of different organisms could etch minerals out of rock and provide them to plants as long as those microbes were supplied with adequate amounts of energy, with adequate amounts of sugar. So that we had some interesting experiences in the farm at home. I've talked about those enough. I'm not going to go into more detail on the shifts that happened there. But I want to talk about this realization that came up in the last half a dozen years from James White's work at Rutgers University. How many of you have not heard of the rise of Fagi cycle? Oh, yes, this is my type of people. Almost everyone has. This is awesome. So I am going to talk about it again, even if you've heard it before, because we've learned some new things about the rise of Fiji cycle just in the last year that our understanding of what is happening here is continuing to improve. Now, almost two decades ago, a team of folks in academia, led by James White at Rutgers University, started studying and trying to understand how plants were absorbing, how undomesticated plants were getting nutrition, because they had a parallel. James had had a parallel observation in mind that there were many cases in these wild ecosystems where the volume of plant growth seemed entirely disproportionate to the amount of nutrients that were readily available in soil. They identified that as a plant root tip is growing through the soil, that open root tip is actually quite porous. It can absorb. We now understand that it can absorb cells from at least three different types of organisms. It can absorb bacterial cells, it can absorb microalgae, and it can absorb fungi as well. Those three can directly penetrate and be absorbed in this porous growing root tip. And then as these microbial cells move back from the growing root tip, they're transported through the plant. A couple of things can happen. One of the things that happens is plants. There's a zone within the first couple inches of the growing root tip that is a very highly oxidized zone where the plant releases nitrous oxide and reactive oxygen species to strip the cell membranes from some of these bacteria, mostly bacterial cells. So they strip the cell membranes. They both utilize the cell membranes directly as a nutrient energy source, but they also then utilize the components of these now naked cells. But this only happens for a fraction of the cells. It happens for a large proportion, but not for all of them. We now have some of these bacterial cells. I'm going to actually, let me finish part of this journey here. So what happens with the majority of the cells is whether they are now naked, missing a cell membrane, or whether they still have their cell membrane. They now move throughout the entire plant's vascular tissue. They move. There is no location within the plant that they do not go. They go into seeds, into fruits, into leaves, into plant cells. These bacteria are transported. I'm using bacteria for the sake of discussion, but it also holds true for microalgae cells and for fungal species as well, as they move throughout the entire plant structure. And this is extremely important because I haven't included. If I talked about all the benefits and the effects that these microbes had within plants, that could be an entire day's conversation in and of itself. We want to talk about drought resilience and heat resilience and stress resilience. All of the significant resilience factors are contributed by this biology that lives inside the plant not in the root system, not associated with the root system, but inside the plant itself. So some of this is quite well documented in the case of forage pasture species. One very well known case that people understand quite succinctly is forage pasture grass, fescue. So throughout the southeast United States, we have what is called endophyte infected fescue. Endophyte infected fescue. We have to be cautious when we're feeding livestock because it can induce endophyte toxicity. Well, what is actually happening is all of these organisms that live inside the plant are just categorically described as endophytes. Endophyte simply means that it lives within the plant's vascular tissue, it lives within the plant structure. Now, what we've discovered in the last year, prior to a year ago, my understanding was that these bacteria move throughout the entire plant. They exist in the crevices or the corners in between plant cells. We understand quite clearly, we know that all of our other of us in our bodies, we have, I forget what the number is, but we have like 10 times more microbial cells than we have human cells in our body. We now understand that the same concept is also true of plants. Plants have 10 to 15 times more microbial cells than they have plant cells within the plant structure. And that that is a complete necessity for that plant to thrive and to reach its ultimate health and ultimate immune system function. Now, my understanding had been up to a year ago that these bacteria would, they would mostly remain on the outside of the plant cells and that if they were internalized into the plant cell, the plant cell absorbs them through this endocytosis process that the plant cell then takes them apart, it takes apart the bacterial cell membranes, it takes apart the various organelles, and it uses them as an energy source. Well, now coming to discover that that isn't exactly what happens. And this is such a beautiful interaction because what is actually happening is these microbes, bacteria in the soil are loaded up with nutrients that they have extracted and they're also loaded up with lipids. There is a specific lipid form called sphingolipids that they build these nutrient bearing rafts inside a bacterial cell. And this bacterial cell is absorbed from the soil, migrates up through the plant into the aerial parts of the plant, goes into a plant cell, and once it's inside the plant cell, it releases these sphingolipid rafts that are loaded with nutrients and then goes back out the plant cell and migrates back down into the soil and does the exact same process over again. Isn't that incredible? These microbes are behaving as nutrient transporters, as truckers, if you will, moving nutrients into the plant. And in this process, to add one last piece that Dr. White and his colleagues described, the exit pathway for a lot of this biology that is coming down from the upper parts of the plant is created as this plant root, or as this root tip, grows through the soil profile. About 2 inches back from the root tip, we have the initial development of root hairs. The plant is constantly producing these root hairs. Dr. Hoyt and his colleagues have described the mechanisms by which these are triggered. But in short, one of the ways that I'm interpreting this or understanding this is that the plant is constantly trying to release microbes back into the soil as close to that growing root tip as possible. So what happens is these microbes now come down from the upper parts of the plant. They migrate out of the root system through these root hairs. And in that process, there is both chemical signaling and electrical signaling that transfers to the rest of the microbial community exactly what that plant's nutritional requirements are. It is saying, hey, I need more manganese. The plant is communicating, I need more manganese, or I need more phosphorus, or I need more zinc. Then the soil microbial community will selectively go after those nutrients that are the soil mineral matrix, extract them out, and the next microbes that the plant absorbs, in as little as four to six hours, that next group of microbes the plant is absorbing will have higher concentrations of those selective nutrients that the plant requires. Isn't that incredible? It's pretty amazing. But there's something else that is required for this to work. Quorum sensing. I should get Greg up here to talk about quorum sensing. The obvious question that needs to be asked, if this is the way that soil biology and plants truly interact, then why don't we see more of it? Why do we see nutrient deficiencies showing up in crops? Why do we see nutritional imbalances showing up? The short answer is this process that I'm describing frequently fails to function as designed because it doesn't have enough energy. The overall energy state is too low for it to really thrive. I want to describe this process that occurs in microbes called quorum sensing. If you're not familiar with the language, Then you're certainly familiar with the concept. Quorum sensing is when a large group of organisms begins behaving collectively as one superorganism. The classical example that everyone understands is a honeybee colony. A honeybee colony is comprised of tens or hundreds of thousands of individual honeybees, but they all behave collectively as one. The same also holds true in the soil microbiome. My understanding of quorum sensing today is that there are two different levels of quorum sensing that happens in the soil microbiome, or in our own microbiome, or in any collective microbial group. The first level of quorum sensing is when is single species. When you have, let's say that we develop a bacterial infection like bacterial pneumonia in the initial stages. I don't know exactly where the threshold is. Let's call it 1000 cells for the sake of discussion. In the initial stages, each one of those individual bacterial cells behaves as an individual entity. Each individual cell is completely responsible for protection, for self defense. It's responsible for finding a food source, it's responsible for reproduction. Then as that population builds, it reaches a critical threshold. Once it reaches a critical threshold, a large enough population, they begin grouping together and they start behaving as a superorganism. Once they've established this superorganism effect, where there's this constant communication happening across all of these individual bacterial cells. Now each individual cell, two things happen. First of all, they become very specialized. They take on specialized purposes instead of being general purpose. So now one cell only has one job. Its only job is self defense, or its only job is reproduction. And so at that stage, the behavior of bacterial pneumonia starts to change. Now you start the production of mucus and biofilms for protection of that entire community. And along with taking on a very specialized purpose and function, they also become very energy efficient. So the energy costs of the overall organism actually go down, which allows them to proliferate and grow even further. They establish larger community even faster because they're more energy efficient. What I've come to realize, and this is to be clear, this is just based on experience and observation. I do not have a bunch of white papers to support this. But this is just what we are observing in the field, is that there is a threshold change that occurs. The soil microbiome starts behaving completely differently. Similar to my bacterial pneumonia example. When you have two things happening. The first is you have to have a critical threshold. You have to have a certain volume of biological activity happening. You have to have a certain amount of energy from photosynthes and sugars going down, out through the root system to feed soil biology. Once you achieve this critical threshold, that's the first piece that is a requirement. Then the second piece that is a requirement is we need to have a Large enough microbial species diversity as a function of plant diversity. You need to have both of those things. If you have just one, but not the second, you shouldn't expect to achieve quorum sensing. The piece that is really fascinating is that when we achieve this quorum sensing of the entire microbial community, it's not confined to just the microbial community alone. It also includes the plants that are growing there. The plants. It becomes really difficult to identify where the soil microbiome ends and plants begin. They start fusing together into one whole organism, one superorganism. One of the stories that I've described, and there are now several other instances, but I think this one is particularly appropriate for the environment that we're in. There is at the Menoken farm in North Dakota. This was 2012, 2012 and 2013. They had a major drought stress. In 2011, at the no Till on the Plains conference, there was a presenter who spoke about the value that they were seeing from diverse cover crops that were blended together and combined together. Jay Fear from the Menoken farm decided to run an experiment. They did seven small test plots of individual cover crop species, and then the eighth test plot with all seven species combined. In the 2012 growing season, major drought conditions, those test plots of seven individual species turned into toast, literally. They grew 12 to 16 inches tall, and they turn into hay. The eighth plot that had all seven species together, there was limited growth. Those plants only grew. And also similar to the rest, they also only grew 12 to 16 inches tall, but they stayed green all season long. And that experience was duplicated in the 2013 drought season that they had so two successive years in a row. That is an expression, as I'm coming to understand it, that is an expression of having. There's several different things happening there. There are plants there that have complementary nutritional needs. There's plants there that have complementary water requirements. All of those pieces are contributing factors. But the foundational factor that allowed those plants to be completely drought resistant, drought resilient, to have adequate water supply was that there was a quorum sensing microbial community that allowed those plants to effectively communicate with each other what their nutritional requirements were and what their water requirements were. And instead of competing with each other, here's the important part. When you have a superorganism, that the plants are a part of a superorganism. We have had this idea for the last half a dozen decades or more. We've been trained to think that plants are constantly competing with each other for water and nutrients. We don't like weeds, because weeds are competing with other plants for water and nutrients. But in fact. And that can be true. That is true if there isn't enough diversity and if there isn't quorum sensing. But when you have a vibrant plant population with a diversity of plant species and a diversity of the microbiome, plants don't compete with each other. They start collaborating with each other. All of you have an incredible opportunity to put this into place because you don't have soils and crop types that require tillage every year. Now, you may have gotten into the habit of tilling every year, but that's a different topic entirely. So what I've come to realize is that when we have a diverse enough microbiome as a function of diversity of plant species, the soil microbial population changes its behavior and the plant population changes its behavior. Once we establish this, I asked the question here at the beginning. Just a little bit ago, I asked the question, if quorum sensing is effective and this rhizophagy cycle process that Dr. White and his colleagues described as effective, then we would never have nutrient deficiencies theoretically, because this should provide all of the plants nutritional requirements. What we're coming to understand is that it is absolutely possible for plants and for the soil microbiome to have such a level of health and vigor and overall activity that it can supply 100% of a crop's nutritional requirements. Elaine Ingham talked about this years ago. I think she still talks about it. She used to describe how if you simply have, if you fix soil biology, then soil biology can supply 100% of a plant's nutritional requirements. This was a recurring refrain, something that she was quite adamant about. She received a lot of antagonism or pushback on this concept because many people tried it and failed. They did not see the results and did not see the success. I'm of the persuasion that, that there are a few caveats, that there is a requirement. Obviously in order for biology to extract nutrients and make nutrients available to the plant, they have to be present in the soil in the first place. That's something that we have to take into consideration. But also I'm of the persuasion that the reason many people didn't see the results that Elaine was describing, she obviously saw those results in the laboratory. So she believed it was possible because she was seeing those results in the laboratory, but the results didn't replicate into the field because in the field most soils didn't have enough energy, enough sugar energy to drive the microbiome to the degree that she was able to propagate it to in the lab. Any questions on what I've talked about so far? This is foundational because this drives everything. Yes.

As valuable as all this is that number one item. I've had more fun teasing my vegetarian friends with that quote that plants are not vegetarians. Thank you for that.

Plants. Once I started really understanding this, two things are happening. One is it is true that plants are consuming and utilizing bacteria, but it's also true that bacteria are vectors of nutrients, that they're just cycling them and moving them through. You know, it's been intriguing to learn more about and to better understand the degree to which plants support each other. I'd like to just elaborate on this a little bit more. I forget the author's name, but several years ago, there was a fascinating book published by a researcher from Canada, Finding the Mother Tree where they Were. Have you heard of this book? Has anyone read it? Okay, a few of you have. So Finding the Mother Tree. I forget the author's name, but she in. I think it was in the book. It might also have been in one of her papers. She described how when a seed lands and germinates on the soil, you even at some distance from the tree that produced that seed. Those two, the mother tree will identify that this is her daughter tree, even though there is not even not a direct or a traceable direct connection, it can be hundreds of yards away. And if that daughter tree is in a very difficult environment, let's say it's in very rocky soil, or it's shaded by other trees and it doesn't get a lot of sunlight, that mother tree will support the daughter tree and provide it with sugar for years to sustain it and to keep it growing. And that sugar gets transmitted from the mother through this domino chain of being passed from tree to tree to tree through their mother mycorrhizal mycelial connections, it'll be transferred from one tree to the next to the next. And she documented sugar being transferred through six intermediary links from mother to daughter with no loss of quantity. None of the trees in the chain took any sugar for themselves. They passed all the sugar along to the daughter. Isn't that incredible? How do they know? They know. All of a sudden you realize that plants are living beings with as much sentience and awareness. You know, I have this talk that I gave a number of years ago on plant intelligence that was based on a lot of Stephen Herrod Buhner's work. And Buhner was the one that first, he has this incredible trilogy of three books. The third in the series is just titled Plant Intelligence, and it will give you. All three of the books are quite incredible. But third, one in particular will give you a very different perspective on plants. He describes how plants have this. So when we think of intelligence, intelligence being defined as informed decision making, conscious decision making, evaluating choices, deciding which pathway to go down, the ability for computation, and so forth, we think of it in terms of brains. But if you take a slightly more macro view, the accurate way of describing it would be to describe it in terms of neural networks. We know that we have neural networks in our gut that's associated with the health and integrity of our microbiome. We have a small neural network around our heart. When we talk about making a gut decision or having a gut feeling, we have the capacity for decision making and analysis, not just in our heads. Buhner pulled together all of this research work describing how plants also have neural networks. They use. The neural networks that plants have are precisely identical to our own. They have the same neurotransmitters, they have the same neuron structure. Everything is identical, with one exception. When you have a large established perennial plant, such as an oak tree or a grapevine, their neural network is significantly larger than our own. They have more computational capacity, and according to the classical definition of intelligence, they have more intelligence than we do. So that gives you a different perspective about plants, doesn't it? All right, so now the question is, how do we get to this stage if we want to have a microbially, if we want to have the rhizophagy cycle working and effectively delivering nutrition to our crops, how do we get there without compromising yields, without compromising overall plant health and performance? And I would suggest we need to start thinking, we need to start managing our soil as if, though it were a petriditional laboratory that we want to propagate biology on? We understand if we're trying to propagate biology in a laboratory, we wanted to give it an ideal environment in terms of ideal moisture conditions, ideal temperature conditions, optimal food source, and of course, the absence of toxins. We should try to do the same things in our soil. One of the. I think there are lots of smaller contributing factors that really suppress soil biology of our management practices. There are things that we do, like irrigating with poor water quality and so forth. So there are a number of things that we do that suppress soil biology from a management perspective, but there are three that supersede all the others in terms of their impact. As I understand it. The first of all These, in no particular order, but one of the three is having bare soil that's exposed to the sun. Bare soil exposed to the sun. We know that when we have all of these microbial processes in the soil require enzymes to function. Enzymes become denatured at 110 degrees Fahrenheit. We know that if we have bare soil that's exposed to the sun, the soil surface on a warm sunny day will reach about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and you'll easily reach 110 degrees, down to a depth of about 3 to 4 inches. I've measured that many times. That means that upper horizon of soil, the top four inches where we should have the most biological activity is an effect where we have none because we've fried it by exposure to the sun. I mean, look, there's this. What is the old saying that sunlight is nature's best medicine? If you have wounds to expose them to the sun, because it's a very effective antiseptic, it's very effective at cleaning and sterilizing. The second significant factor is application of high electrolyte content fertilizers. So I'm using very specific language here. Very high salt index fertilizers or very high salt content. Anytime you have a material that has a high salt index or high electrolyte content, it's actually, it's very. It's quite simple. If you have a cut in your finger and you get salt into it, or you get fertilizers into it, that cut, cut will burn. And that burning is cellular oxidation. That's what you're feeling is cellular oxidation. And those fertilizers will do the exact same thing to microbes when they're applied to soil. They will oxidize microbial cells and shut down microbial cells. It's kind of funny when you stop to think about it. You can appropriately say that adding fertilizer to soil and the fertilizer being defined as urea and map and dap and potassium nitrate, calcium nitrate. And so you can appropriately say that applying those fertilizers to soil is salting the land. It's the same thing. Then the third significant negative impact on soil biology is fungicide applications. Fungicide applications are more impactful and more detrimental than all the other pesticides, herbicides, insecticides. Grouped together, they have a marked. Well, I think, again, this is just a lot of experience and a lot of observation. I don't have hard data to back this up, but observationally, I would say that fungicides are more damaging to soil biology than fertilizer applications. And they are more damaging to soil biology than tillage. And they're more damaging to biology than bare soil exposed to the sun because they reach deeper. Sunlight damages the top 4 to 6 inches. Fungicides, I don't know what the limitations are of how deep they go down, but they reach deep and they have a significant negative effect that is long lasting and difficult to recover from. So fungicide applications, and I'm referring specifically, I'm not referring to sulfur and copper applications, I'm referring specifically to synthetic fungicide applications, they will have a long term detrimental effect on soil fungal populations. Any questions on this piece or what we've talked about?

Yes, when you say remove biocides, so are you kind of anti brassicas as far as.

No, not at all. No, not at all. That when I say biocides, I'm most specifically referring to fungicides. Their impact is disproportionately larger than everything else. The key difference between a synthetic fungicide and let's say a mustard, for example, is that those naturally occurring compounds are degraded by the soil biology. In a matter of days or weeks, they're gone. And they have very specific targeted influences. And then the whole microbiome tends to recover. They'll guide the microbiome in a certain direction, but the whole thing recovers very, very well. Yes, Craig.

So, John, when you're talking about fungicides, look, we're grape growers, right? If you want to prove that what we're doing doesn't work, don't stay on top of your powdery mildew program and you'll get really good obvious results that this isn't working.

Can you. Hang on, hang on. Can you just expand on that thought?

Yeah. So powdery mildew is pretty consistent. Even some of the best vineyards are often susceptible to powdery mildew. I think it's a combination of genetics. It's a combination of the transition of going from a system that's not functioning to a nutrient distance system that is, and our blocks that are in transition. We notice we use less fungicide, but I still have to use them. I still need to get a clean crop to my winemaker. The question I have is when you talk about fungicides, are you specifically talking about more of the synthetics like toxin or Rowley or those versus things like stylet oil, Psilostibulus or some of the others?

Yeah, correct. Absolutely correct. It's an important clarification. I'm talking specifically about the synthetic chemistry. The synthetic chemistry that. What Happens with, say, stylet oil or these bacterial inoculants or those types of materials. When they reach the soil, they're applied to the plant, some of it reaches the soil. Eventually all of it reaches the soil, the other soil microbes and the whole community will take those molecules apart and in a matter of days or weeks, they're gone. But the synthetic fungicides have a long term, very detrimental effect, particularly on the soil fungal community. There is this. And again, this is one of the things that I don't understand or don't have a good explanation for. One of our most popular products that gets used on disproportionately, by far the largest number of acres is biocoat gold. So Biocote Gold is a seed treatment that is a combination of mycorrhizal fungi and a couple dozen different species of bacteria and some other things that we don't talk about. Biokoat Gold gets applied to fungicide treated corn seed and fungicide treated soybean seed all the time. And growers ask, well, how does it work? How can you get mycorrhizal fungi inoculation on fungicide treated seed? The answer is, I don't know. I don't have an explanation. It does. We clearly have the evidence. We've measured it. We can do treated and untreated, and we can measure the mycorrhizal colonization. And there is a substantial measurable difference in mycorrhizal colonization. But. So I'm of the persuasion that there is, again, there is this synergistic community effect when you have bacteria and fungi and various organisms work together in concert, where you apply a naturally occurring compound such as sulfur to a community that is a blend of bacteria and fungi and they rapidly take it apart, the synthetic fungicides. Now, you might be thinking I might just be disproving my own story, and maybe I am. But on a seed treatment we're applying, fungicides are applied as a seed treatment at a rate of a few ounces per acre at most. You're applying over the course of the season, you're applying 100x that amount in a vineyard. And that's where the significant difference comes in. Yeah. Yes.

Would this also be the time to talk about pinyon, your approach to that, why it's different?

Let me see what the next slide is. Let's just skip down a few here. What happened to the pinyon slides? There it is. Yes. So, Greg, you're talking today, right? Are you going to talk about pinyon? Yeah, I'll mention it all Right. So, yes, this is the time to talk about Pinyon. This is literally one of the most exciting. There's about three or four really exciting things that I've worked on the last half a dozen years. One of them is field arc. One of them is croptics, which is this infield handheld sensor that's going to replace SAP analysis that's going to have a beta launch next spring. I'm pretty excited about that. But in terms of agronomic products, I'm more excited about this than I've been anything I'd have worked on in a long time. So Pinyon is. As of this point, we're now a year and a half into testing it in the field. And as of this point, we have tried it on close to three dozen different disease and crop combinations, both bacterial diseases and fungal diseases, in various contexts. Some of them we had untreated controls, but most of them we had treated controls. Comparing it with a conventional fungicide application, and so far, it has matched or exceeded the performance of every conventional fungicide it's been compared against on every different disease it's been compared against. And it's a completely naturally occurring material. It's a class. It's called a class 25B biocontrol. Just having a conversation with Pedro this morning. It is available here in California. It is NOP compliant. CDFA has reviewed it and approved it for one grower. So they've paved the way for others. So what is Pinyon? What does it do exactly? I'm just going to. Well, maybe people think differently about. Okay. For me, I want to understand how a product, what it does, and then I can tell you how it works and the effect that it has. So what Pinion does does a few things. First, if you're familiar with Olivier Houson's work on redox and changing the redox environment of plants, Pinyin changes the redox environment on the leaf surface and inside the leaf, both at the same time. Now, that effect, that redox shift, is temporary because plants desire homeostasis, and so they will shift back. But that effect of shifting the redox environment on the leaf surface and inside the leaf will last for about 24 to 48 hours, up to as much as 72 hours. But 24 to 48 hours, this is why we've had a number of people who've tried it. And when they have an infection, a powdery mildew infection that is already present, they put it on, and immediately, 24 hours later, they see a difference. This is the mechanism that has that this is the only mechanism that I'm aware of inside Pinyon that responds that rapidly has that rapid of an effect. The second influence that it has is because of changing the redox environment, in part and in part because of some of the microbial metabolites that it contains. It changes the microbiome composition on the leaf and within the leaf, and it specifically upregulates. There is this broad group of microbes that are referred to as this is the regulatory framework in Europe is what they refer to as phytosanitary bacteria. Phytosanitary bacteria, in plain and simple English simply are organisms that are very effective at disease suppression. They suppress and clean up a number of different diseases. Then the third effect is, and this is where we have some preliminary documentation, but there's such a diversity of plant species. There's a lot more homework that we need to do here. But our understanding, when we measure MRNA expression with and without a pinion application, it appears that pinyin is activating, as far as we've been able to identify at this very preliminary stage, at least 17 different immune pathways within the plant. So it is changing the plant's epigenetic expression, it's changing the plant's microbiome and it's changing the redox environment. And because of this effect. So this first effect, as I described, changing redox environment is a very rapid effect that will produce a disease response of suppressing disease in a matter of a day or two. But the other two effects take days to weeks to have peak response. So this is a type of material that while many growers are using it effectively as a treatment, it's going to be most effective as a preventative. Does that match your experience with it?

Greg we did it later in the season, so we had an infestation of powdery mildew in Muscat. We compared it to pristine and it was comparable. But it was later in the season, we didn't get a chance to do this yet.

What we've observed, and again there's, as you can tell from the various mechanisms, the modes of action, there is a degree of environmental dependency here. The degree of plant health and plant vigor is going to and the degree of the microbiome, the microbiome that already exists has the ability to influence the product's effectiveness. But we have a number of growers who have put on an application, one application having a six to an eight week effect as compared to three to four fungicide applications. But that also hasn't always been the case. There have been some Environments where it didn't have that six to eight week effect. And I'm with the persuasion it was because of the microbiome and because of the environment that they put it in. So I'm more than a little bit excited about pinyin.

John, another thought. If it's stimulating a genetic response, how much of an effect do you think where you are in sort of the plant health pyramid? I mean if we're at level one, right. Are we going to get as good a response or how dependent is it like do you need to be at least at level two so you're starting to get that ASR, smr, you know, response?

I think it depends more. As I understand what is happening within plants. And with this product, the major variable dependent on plant health is going to be time of effectiveness. So you might have opinion application, be very effective for five to seven days on a stress plant and then shut off. Whereas on a plant that has abundant levels of energy, that same degree, those same resistance mechanisms will now last for five to six to eight weeks. So I think it's a question of the longevity of the effect. Yeah. Are you using it as a preventative or is this a reactionary? We're using it in both ways. Most of the experience that we have so far as Greg's experience is using it reactionary, but we have some limited experience with it as a preventative. We had two treatments on strawberries at the beginning of the season. Effectively replace eight fungicide applications later. Yeah. Yes.

If it's having an immune boosting effect and a genetic effect, is it a contact based efficacy or would it be considered?

It is somewhat systemic, but I don't know to what degree it is somewhat systemic and I'm certain this is the case because we actually did some experimentation where we isolated leaves or isolated branches and there is a systemic effect and that it does transfer. We found limited transfer from branch to branch on fruit trees, but we did find transfer from leaf to leaf on the same branch. So there is some degree of systemic activity that goes on, but I don't know yet fully to what degree. So that's good news. Perfect coverage isn't required as a resistance mechanism. Now if you're doing it as a treatment, then I would expect that to be the case. Any other questions on Pinyon? I wonder how many of you are not going to try it this next year. Yes. There is no pre harvest interval. There is no pre harvest interval like this. This is being recorded. So I'm not going to say that you can drink it, but I'D happily drink it. I know how it's made. Yes.

For a product that has this complicated of an effect, what was the kind of igniting idea to even go down this mode of action? Like, where did it come from?

Why are you laughing, Greg?

It's the parallel universe reality, Greg. You know, a lot of us live in a very different reality. I mean, not to answer for Tom, but I think the difference is we see the world for what it really is. And a lot of the rest of the world sees the world for what they wish it was, which is a very simple linear system.

It's not.

It's a complex biological system. And when you understand this, this kind of approach makes sense. I mean, they've done that with some of the others, like Japonica and there's others that have gone down this path.

The short version, you know, I try to understand first cause mechanisms and first principles. I've used that same type of thinking to try to understand why have we adopted this particular approach to agronomy over the last 60 to 80 years? Why has our agricultural system evolved? Why is genetically modified roundup ready corn, 90% of the corn production? I'm of the persuasion that one of the foundational reasons why we have this particular model of agriculture is protectable, patentable intellectual property. When we view product development through that lens of how mainstream products are developed, it describes why we have GMOs, it describes why we have single mode of action, fungicides and pesticides more generally. But that's not the way biological systems actually work. And this is one of the reasons why so many biocontrol products fail in the long term is because if you want to have protectable intellectual property, they try to identify, and I'm just going to oversimplify the whole conversation here a little bit, but they try to identify a specific organism that can suppress one specific other organism. They try to find a bug that will treat powdery mildew. But the reality is that's not how biological ecosystems actually work. You have a community effect, you have a consortium effect where you have dozens of different microbes across a number of different species that have a collective effect on powdery mildew. It's that type of thinking. To come back and to answer your question, I briefly described biocoat gold. That biocoat gold is a combination of bacterial inoculant mycorrhizal fungi, inoculant other fungi, other species that don't fall into those two groups, specific nutritional supports and phytohormonal supports for both plants and Microbes, there's this complexity I've described in some of my presentations. This idea of synergistic stacking. What we found in biological systems over and over again is that if you can accurately identify which species or which groups or which products synergize with each other, there is this non linear effect. So much of agriculture we've developed this very linear perspective that one plus one equals two and that this very mechanistic perspective. And with biology, if you combine a synergistic stack, let's say you're putting together a foliar application and you include a plant biostimulant and a microbial biostimulant and a source of plant nutrition and a plant immune accelerator and a bacterial inoculant and a fungal inoculant. You can put together these products from these very different categories. And sometimes, if you get it right, one plus one doesn't equal two, it equals 11. And that's a lot of fun when that happens. That's kind of the same thinking behind the development of pinyin is how do we develop a synergistic stack of modes of actions and mechanisms that is so integrated and it integrates the plant's entire microbial community, the microbiome, and the plant resistance mechanisms in itself as well. So when you combine all of those together, you get this much greater effect than when you just do one or two things on its own. That's how the biological community was really designed to work. How many of you have not heard me talk about the plant health pyramid? All right, Almost everyone has. I've only Talked about it 1001 times. I'm not going to go into much detail here on the plant health pyramid, other than to say this conversation that we were just having. What happens, what I've observed is in order to get. I've made this distinction in the past. Level 1 and Level 2 is based on good balanced chemistry. You can do this with SAP analysis and foliar applications in a very straightforward manner. But level three, I used to say that level three and level four is based on very vigorous soil biology. If I had to restate this today, I would say that getting to level three occurs in conjunction with getting to quorum sensing. There's some degree of quorum sensing that needs to happen in order to get to level three. It's also to the point that these gentlemen were making earlier. Once you get to level three of plant health. There's a comment that I made when I was talking about the rhizophagy cycle and I want to go back and just re. Emphasize it again. I used to describe what is happening at level three is that soil biology is delivering nutrition in a more efficient form. So plants are getting nutrients more efficiently. And. And because they're getting nutrients more efficiently, they are capturing and storing extra energy in the form of fats. That is still true, but my present understanding is that that is actually a minority of where the fat in plants comes from. The majority of the fat that shows up in plants, these lipids, comes from soil biology, and it comes from these sphingolipids that are coming from bacteria moving up into the plant and depositing lipids into plant cells and then going back down for more. So if we want to talk about having very high energy content, plants that have a very high oil content, very high wax content, and have exceptional degrees of disease resistance and insect resistance, it's coming from soil biology, delivering those fats into the plant, not just from increased photosynthesis. Yes.

So during the rhizophagy cycle, when the microbes are dropping off the nutrients by the lipid goes, I assume they're bringing back carbohydrates and other stuff to the soil. How are they making that transfer? Are they bringing lipids for that as well?

Are you asking, are microbes transporting lipids back down into the soil? Yeah. Or. Or sugars?

Yeah. Sugars, I would assume, is what the microbes want in soil.

That's a good question. My understanding right now is that it's actually plants and flor. It's the. The microbes themselves are not responsible for transporting carbohydrates down. There is not a direct mechanism there. The plant itself wants to stimulate that microbial community and feed that microbial community because it is in the plant's interest. So the plant actually is moving a lot of. Is the primary driver and the engine of moving sugars out into the root system. As I understand, microbes are an empty truck going back. Yes, microbes are an empty truck going back. This is such a different perspective on plant nutrition. So powerful. All right. There are so many different pieces that I could speak about here, but I'll just speak a bit to what is happening here at level four, Level three and four combined, when we have increased phytonutrients, this is where we start growing wine on plants that resemble grapes, not grapes that are translated into wine. I wanted to talk about this bell curve. This is just a fictitious bell curve that I made to illustrate a concept about what we see happening. Implants more generally, not just wine grapes, but Also in others, the historical perception. I used this index as plant biomass as an analog for photosynthetic efficiency. There's been this idea in the production of a number of different medicinal herbs all the way from sage production. I could get give a long list, but there's been this general idea that if we want to produce plants that have high phytonutrient concentrations, that have exceptional flavor and aroma characteristics, then we need to stress those plants and we need to reduce their biomass production. We stress them either with water deprivation or with nitrogen deprivation or phosphorus deprivation. Different nutrients are used in different crops in different contexts, and the result is, by inducing plant stress, we limit the number of plant biomass here at this end, we limit the amount of plant biomass, but we have higher concentrations of phytonutrients. That is accurate, that is effective. Then the historical narrative has been that as you remove water deprivation or nitrogen or phosphorus deprivation, you get this increase in photosynthesis, you get this increase in plant biomass, and you get this rapid reduction in phytonutrient concentrations. That is also accurate. But that is where the story ended. And that's as far as the story has gone for mainstream agronomy. What we've come to understand is that there is this plateau. So let's say that this describes about a plant that is about 10 to 15%. Actually, if this plant is stressed, this is about somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 10% photosynthetic efficiency. You add water or phosphorus or nitrogen, you get much higher levels of plant biomass, and now you're going to be the neighborhood of 15 to 20% photosynthetic efficiency here. This is what most of agriculture is familiar with, is plants that are photosynthetically efficient. The neighborhood of 15 to 20%. But then if you work with nutrition to have better photosynthesis, higher quality photosynthesis, and you have a highly functional microbiome, your photosynthetic efficiency will go up even further. It'll go up to 35 to 40%. Here's the piece that many people have missed. When you have a plant that has these high degrees of photosynthetic efficiency, you also have much higher concentrations of these phytonutrients, these phenolic and aromatic compounds that will be at even higher levels than they are here. This idea that we need to stress plants to produce high levels of phytonutrients. Actually, it's very simple. Just try to persuade any cannabis grower anywhere that they should stress their plants. You will not get to square one. The same concept can also be applied to wine grape production. But we have to balance that. If you only get to. If you only use mainstream agronomic approaches and you only get to 15 to 20% photosynthetic efficiency, then, yes, you will have reduced quality, you'll have reduced phytonutrient content. We have to use these biological approaches to push past that threshold and get to this point. And then what can happen is you can have more grapes on a plant and have better flavor production, higher concentrations of flavor and quality, and phenolic compounds in those grapes. So the last thought. Well, there's a few things yet that I'd like to speak to, but when we had these conversations about regenerative agriculture and around biology, there are discussions about incorporating cover crops, having diverse cover crop species, incorporating livestock. There are. We can make it sound really complex and really challenging. Challenging from an execution perspective and from a management perspective. And I'm not suggesting that those things are not valuable. In fact, I think, particularly in the case of COVID crops, I think they're absolutely necessary. I think livestock are also very valuable. But many of our soils and many of our conditions that we're growing plants in have degraded to such a degree that there are many things we can do that will have a significant impact. Before getting to that point earlier, I described the three biggest things that have the most damaging effect on soil biology and soil health. Being bare exposed soil, fertilizer applications, and fungicide accumulation. None of those things involve livestock. None of those things. So getting soil covered is probably going to include cover crops. But my point is only that it's easy to get overwhelmed and to just get the idea that there is so much involved. This is so complex and so difficult not to do anything at all. We're all familiar with the Pareto principle, the 8020 principle. It's often 80% of the results come from 20% of the things that you do. I'm of the persuasion that adding livestock is valuable and beneficial, but it's probably not in the first 80% of what people need to tackle. There are some very simple, straightforward things of simply replacing salty fertilizers with nutrient sources that don't have a detrimental effect on soil biology. Keeping our soil covered with COVID crop residue, adding microbial inoculants, and doing some of these practices that are much easier to implement that will get us a long distance down the road of where we want to go. And of course, you see there, you have to replace fungicides with pinion to get there. All right, I'll Speak just a bit yet about photosynthesis and then I'm going to pause for a break. Ultimately, in order to get this system to work, we have to have two things. One is we have to have a diversity, diverse microbial population of soil. And second, we need to get large volumes of sugars down to the soil. Yes. You have a question? I just wanted to ask a question.

Before we get too far along, kind of the last slide, as far as monitoring the positive impacts you have on soil biology by assessing the community itself. Do you have recommendations on who to use if there are labs out there? I see Dan here with the growing. I think monitoring respiration is a great kind of macro indicator.

I would agree in terms of actually.

Trying to tailor the community the direction that you want to base my soil and the outcome you're trying to achieve. Are there labs at this point are specific enough to give you guidance? And do you think you can actually collect soil samples in a way that's accurate enough to make decisions based on due to the dynamic nature of microbial population?

It's an outstanding question. There are emerging technologies that I think are going to get us there. Dr. Laura Kavanaugh, who's now running not trace genomics, but genomic insights or genome insights. I'm very intrigued and impressed with her DNA sequencing work. I've been quite frustrated over the years with PLFA analysis and all these various types of soil microbiome analysis. And maybe it's been a failure on my part, but I haven't understood how to translate those lab results into practical recommendations. Okay, I have this information. What do I do with it differently from what I've been doing before? So I believe there is technology coming that will get us to that point. We don't yet have the depth of experience with it to be able to say that with certainty. But what I can say kind of broadly, generally, is I've come to the conclusion that a diversity of plant species solves most problems, prevents most problems. Actually, it's worth speaking about this just a bit because I didn't expand on it earlier. Christine Jones from Australia gave us the idea that we need to have plants from eight different plant families. The basis for that is there's two thoughts here. One is recognizing that each seed, we should start thinking about our seeds as microbial inoculants, because every seed is a vector for a microbial community. A corn seed has 9 billion microorganisms in it, according to Dr. White. And we understand that each plant species has its own associated microbiome that it prefers to have a relationship with and that it carries along from one generation to the next. So when you have eight different plant families, not within family, but at least eight different plant families. And again, this is just. There is not a hard science or anything that's published around this. It's just based on experience and observation that when you have eight different plant families, you get these synergistic quorum sensing effects that start showing up. I've observed these quorum sensing effects showing up with as little as six plant families. I don't know if there was anything unique about that particular combination. It can occur with less than 8. But 8 is the confidence threshold that we have. When we have eight different plant families, this whole microbial interaction starts changing. There is an element of if we have enough microbial diversity and plant species diversity. Look, the reality is, even with very detailed DNA sequencing and even with deep learning and AI, I don't think we will ever begin to fully understand the sheer complexity of what happens in the soil microbial community. And there's also an element of we don't need to. You get to an overall level of effectiveness and performance. And it was designed to work. We just need to give it the nutrients and the energy that it needs to work and get out of the way. So that's my answer to your question. From a crop and plant perspective, do you have a crop that's resistant, has increasing resistance to disease and insects? I mean, there's so many indicators, just practical, real world indicators of the direction that we're going in. So on this last thought of photosynthesis, this is the foundational fuel that drives the entire ecosystem. It would be worthwhile to speak about this in some detail. You mentioned that agrology is here and that we have the ability to measure CO2 flux in the atmosphere. I'm of the persuasion that CO2 is a limiting factor for crops with at least as often, if not more often as water not having enough water. What we need for optimal photosynthesis is we need good carbon dioxide availability, we need water, we need chlorophyll production and then those five elements. And I'm actually, I'm going to separate out manganese for just a bit. I find that in many instances if we have plants that have generous levels of chlorophyll, they have generous levels of water and carbon dioxide, but they're still. That the energy production is not where it needs to be. Let me say it this way. I'm persuaded that when plants and crops are stuck at level one and level two of the plant health pyramid and they struggle to get to level three. It's because of two nutrients not being in adequate supply. They're manganese and boron. The reason for those two is because I'm persuaded that in many crops manganese is the bottleneck. It's the gating mechanism that is gating photosynthesis and overall sugar production. So even if you have perfect conditions with perfect temperature and lighting and dark green plants with chlorophyll and adequate levels of water and carbon dioxide, if they don't have generous levels of manganese, manganese becomes the gating mechanism that limits overall photosynthesis and sugar production. And then when you do have a plant that has high levels of sugar production, boron is required to translocate it down to the roots and to translocate it into the berries or the fruit or the grain. I'm of the persuasion that if we addressed those two and we made sure that plants had generous levels of those two, it'd be much easier to get to level three on plant health pyramid for many growers.