Podcast Extra: Our Crops Aren’t Sick, They’re Dependent | Soil Talks Podcast

What if the presence of a pest isn't an attack, but a report card?

You know, soluble fertilizers for plants are like ultra-processed foods for people.

And for decades, modern agriculture has been locked in an arms race. We've been taught that to grow a crop, we must be at war—war with the weeds, war with the insects, and war with the soil itself. We've relied on rescue chemistry to keep plants on life support, while often ignoring the very biological systems that were designed to make them thrive. But what if we've been looking at the symptoms instead of the source? What if the presence of a pest isn't an attack but a report card? He's the man who codified us the current state of global agriculture and why it's a failing model.

Well, can you have a cancer patient become better and improve their health in the long term with chemo and radiation and cancer drugs? And we know that the short answer is no. Um, those can be valuable and necessary tools to halt the progression of a rapidly moving disease. But once the disease is halted, if you just stop there and you just maintain the status quo and you continue with the same level type of diet and lifestyle choices and everything else that led to cancer in the first place, then you're going to end up with the same type of result again. You're going to have a cancer relapse, you're going to have— or you're going to have something else, other types of degenerative illnesses. I think it's perhaps that framing that is at the foundation of how people are starting to think about agriculture differently and just realizing, you know, we don't get headaches because we have aspirin deficiencies, and our crops don't have these chronic diseases, and we don't have these systemic chronic problems in agriculture because we have fungicide deficiencies or we have pesticide deficiencies. And that we have agriculture collectively in this contemporary model. You know, this contemporary— it's sometimes when it's framed as organic or regenerative and people try to assign labels to it, then the label that gets assigned to what is modern agriculture is sometimes called conventional. But it really hasn't— it hasn't earned the right to be called conventional. The current model of thinking and the model of agronomy that is being used has really only been in widespread adoption for about 70 years. It hasn't and it doesn't have a particularly great track record of success. It has a great track record of success if you look at, look at it purely from a yield perspective of improving food production. But if you look at it from a sustainability perspective, true sustainability, long-term sustainability, it fails abysmally in multiple dimensions.

And poor crop health equals poor human health, correct?

Yeah, that's one of the contributing factors to why we have this epidemic of public health crisis and obesity and all these degenerative illnesses. But sure. So I, I chose to no longer call it conventional agriculture. I call it contemporary agriculture. And it's when we develop this perspective that, you know, contemporary agriculture is like a sick patient. Someone who has diabetes and obesity and heart disease and has this combination of all these degenerative illnesses. Yes, it's— then we want to— you know, I still remember, what was it, 15, 20 years ago when there's all these conversations about sustainability and sustainable innovations and sustainability in agriculture? That was the buzzword of the time. Yeah. Why would we desire to sustain such a poor level of health? Yes, we first need to have a conversation about regenerating health of soils and livestock and people. And once we've achieved a higher plateau of performance, I mean, people— Arden Anderson gave me this framing years ago that I still think about from time to time. He said that we tend to think of health as being binary. Either you're healthy or you're sick, but in reality, we should think of it as being on a spectrum. You are healthy and on one end of the spectrum, vibrantly healthy on one end of the spectrum, sick or diseased on the other end of the spectrum, and then you have this long spectrum in between. And at some point on the threshold, as you start moving from vibrantly healthy in the direction of a disease state, he said, you cross into this threshold where you're in this pre-disease state. So you aren't sick yet, but you are susceptible. And from a perspective of— yeah, from a perspective that's low immunity, it's nonfunctional immunity. So from a perspective of our health, we should try to spend as little time as possible in that pre-disease state and be in the vibrantly healthy state. And that's also the way that we should manage our agricultural production.

If we base it off of that, that the failing model, there's no more reliance on rescue chemistry, correct? It's gone.

Well, what happens is you have, uh, you have a greatly reduced need for the rescue chemistry. It's, it's like when you are in that vibrantly healthy state, all right, when you're in a pre-disease state, and we, we all observe this in the people around us every winter, when someone is in a pre-disease state, they become ill very easily. All the cold and flu bugs that come along, and then, yes, yeah, then they, they need to take some drugs to help them recover from the bugs that they're in, that they've become infected with. And other people who are not in that pre-disease state but who are in a vibrantly healthy state for whatever reasons, because of immune support or microbiome support and so forth, genetics, whatever the case might be, they need— they might occasionally need those treatments, but it's 1 year out of 3 or 1 year out of 5 or maybe never in 10 years. Sure. It's all about the individual terrain. So you have these dramatic differences in, in the health of individuals. And you have— you can have that same spectrum on our farms and our crops. And so it's possible to, to transition as we manage the health. If, if we have a farm that is constantly using fungicides and constantly using insecticides, as we improve the health of that ecosystem over time, over several year period, you can get to a point where you can greatly reduce the need for those pesticides, and you've essentially— you've removed your dependency from them. Now, they might still be valuable 1 year out of 7 or just like— they might still be valuable occasionally, but you're not dependent on them.

You follow up right after that, I'm sure, with biological treatments, things like that, correct? To rebuild the health of that crop as quick as possible.

I'm sure if you're on this pathway, then you're already doing many things to improve soil health and plant health anyway. And so, you obviously continue that. It's again, to use the analogy of our personal health, if for some reason you need to take an antibiotic, then it's becoming a common recommendation to follow that up with a probiotic to rebuild your gut microbiome.

Today isn't about necessarily organic versus conventional. It's really about the science of plant immunity and nutrient density. Correct.

What I, what I learned in the early days when I was starting down this pathway and what I've continued to learn and experience is that The foundation of plant immunity really rests on two pillars. You have the foundational requirements of nutritional integrity in terms of mineral nutrition, and you have microbiome integrity. And it's the same thing for plants, for livestock, for people, for soil microbes. You need those— those two fundamentals are, are universal fundamentals. And when you have those two fundamentals in place, you can develop these robust immune systems, whether that's in our bodies or livestock or in soils and plants. And what many people don't realize, uh, we've not, we've not really been trained to think in this way, but when there are epidemics or plagues or diseases of serious proportion, people and livestock have the ability to move around And there's— but plants do not have that capability. Plants are anchored in place. And what that has translated into is that plant, relatively speaking, relative to the diseases and the potential microbes and pathogens that they're exposed to, plants actually have a much more robust system, relatively speaking, than plant than humans or people than livestock do because they are anchored in place. And so they have to fight to survive. And so because of that, they have these very robust immune systems. And I, um, I started several years ago, oh, half a dozen or more years ago, I started making this, this comment publicly that I believe plants have the capacity to be 100% resistant to all diseases and all insects. Well, that is so contrary to most people's experience that they hear that comment with some measure of disbelief. And this is something like my personality, my nature is to be quite conservative. I don't really engage in hyperbole. And so it took a lot, there was a lot of thought and a lot of study put behind, am I really going to make this statement or not? But it's something, it's a big claim to make, it's a big mouthful, but it's one that I've become comfortable and confident making. Because it's not based on a— it's not a theory, it's not a hypothesis. This is something that we have done successfully on scale on tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions of acres, and across a broad variety of different crops. Every year for the last 20 years, growers have approached me with new diseases and new problems that I've not worked with before, and they've said we have, we have disease X. Um, there, there is— we have no effective treatment, we have no effective control for it, there is no effective treatment for it. Bacterial canker on stone fruit was one of the early ones that I worked on. And, um, we worked with these crops for a year or so, and I still remember the case on bacterial canker on cherries now that I mentioned it. Bacterial canker reversed. It disappeared. We had disease— we had orchard blocks that were severely infected with bacterial canker, and the bacterial canker reversed itself, which has never been known to happen. And well, people then love to ask the question, because we're all looking for a silver bullet, like, what did you do? Well, what did we do? The answer is we did everything. We pulled sap analysis, we pulled soil analysis, we balanced the microbiome, we balanced trace mineral nutrition, and bacterial canker went away. I can't point to one thing that we did. I could maybe point to a combination of half a dozen different things, and we've certainly— we've been able to replicate that result over and over again in different settings that were very different from the original. It all comes down to nutritional balance and microbiome balance. You balance those two things and these quote-unquote diseases start— they no longer express. And so my confidence in making that substantial claim of being able to, crops being able to be completely resistant to diseases and insects is because as of this point, this approach has never failed. It has never failed. No one has come to us with an incurable disease and we've taken this approach and failed to have success. And you do that enough times. We've done it usually several different disease and crop combinations every year for the last 20 years, and you develop some degree of confidence when everybody else— if every year you treat something that everyone else says is impossible and you consistently do the impossible, you soon get the idea that the impossible isn't so impossible after all.

The problem with soluble NPK, and I know you can jump all over this one, if you would explain why high saltwater soluble fertilizers often turn off a plant's natural immune system and relationship with soil biology. Both.

I could talk about both of those topics for an hour. So in short, plants have this very close symbiotic relationship with the soil biology and the soil microbial community, given the opportunity to do so. But this relationship is an exchange that the plant controls. The biology doesn't control it. The plant transmits the signals. The plant is required to engage, and it dictates the relationship. When the plant is given large amounts of free-soluble nutrients, then it tells the soil microbes, I don't need you. I don't, I don't need to invest sugar energy in facilitating a relationship with a biology that is going to bring me phosphorus and nitrogen and potassium and a whole host of other elements because I already have plenty. I live in a luxury environment. I don't need biology. That's what happens when you apply a Rose Starter solution at planting. And then of course, that luxury environment of those luxurious free nutrient ions, particularly in the case of phosphorus and potassium, starts to fade away and disappear over time. And nitrogen, of course, is often applied in abundant amounts to make sure that that doesn't happen. But so that is, that is kind of the, the one level, one level of the answer to your question. And then there is the other aspect, which is I frame this conversation. I've started just having this discussion in the context of electrolyte nutrition versus microbial nutrition. Um, if you want to shut down the soil microbial community, and if you want to shut down the plants' microbial interactions, not just within the soil environment but inside the plant itself— uh, this will make— maybe make a slight diversion here. We're now coming to understand that within our own bodies we have I forget the exact number, but something like 10 times more bacterial cells than we do human cells. The same concept also is true of plants. Plants are colonized by endophytes— bacteria, microalgae, fungi— that live throughout the entire plant structure. They live on the leaf surface. There is no location on or in the plant that is not colonized by these, uh, associated endophytes. Plants have the ability to signal to the microbial community I need more of X and less of Y, or they can selectively absorb— they can selectively absorb manganese and zinc and copper, and they can reject excessive levels of aluminum, for example, or sodium or chloride, as long as the plant system is not overloaded with excess electrolytes. The moment you give the plant excessive levels of electrolytes, it loses its ability to self-regulate. It loses its ability for homeostasis of nutrient absorption. And that means all of a sudden the plant starts absorbing excessive levels of certain nutrients and deficiencies of others. And so that is, this is really a signal. Like how many times do you walk out into the forest and you observe plants that have severe nutritional deficiencies? Not very often. And there's all kinds of, of arguments that people would like to make about the relative productivity or, um, nutrient removal of a forest versus agricultural soil. But the bottom line is the reason you don't see those nutrient deficiencies is because you have this very close plant and microbiome signaling, and the plants are able to maintain nutrients through this homeostasis process. They self-regulate up and down, just like we self-regulate our body temperature. Well, You destroy the plant's ability to self-regulate its nutritional integrity when you give it excessive electrolytes. Your common electrolytes in plants and soils, which can easily become excessive, are chloride, potassium, soluble magnesium, nitrogen. Um, did I miss one? I think those are the major ones. Oh, sodium, of course. Sodium is kind of the obvious one. Um, so when you think about what that means, if you give a plant large levels of— I'll use nitrogen as a, as a discussion point, although the other electrolytes are also, also be true for them. If you give a plant a large dose of electrolytes, two things happen. Several things happen. One is, um, it no longer needs the soil biology to deliver nitrogen, so it stops feeding soil biology. But secondly, you also have destroyed that plant's ability to self-regulate. So you've destroyed the— you shut down the communication system and you have destroyed the homeostasis capability. So now you have put that plant into a state of dependency for the rest of its lifespan, or for the rest of that season, where it is now dependent on an ongoing diet of soluble nutrients. So you could in many ways say that you have created a dependency on an ultra-processed foods diet, and then you wonder why the plant has obesity and diabetes and needs drug— drugs to recover. That's exactly right.

And at the end of the day, that's what's happening in so many situations, right? The NPK is dumped on, the crops are dependent on it. It's like a drug addict, you know, and they don't stop. The soils don't stop, the plants don't stop. Until you can reverse that, get it back to the way it should be. You know, healthy, thriving microbial communities in the soil that's self-regulating, mining the nutrition that's needed as the plants call for it.

Yeah, soluble, soluble ionic nutrients for fertilizer— excuse me, soluble fertilizers for plants are like ultra-processed foods for people.

Yeah, the passive versus active plant. Let's discuss the difference between a plant that is spoon-fed nutrients Right? So that would be again, going back to that soluble, right? Versus a plant that is actively mining the soil through root exudates. Let's talk about that a little bit, passive versus active plant.

Oh boy, this is, this is a fun one. So the concept of passive immunity versus active immunity is essentially a rethinking of the disease triangle. So most everyone's familiar with the disease triangle. You have the combination of a susceptible host, the appropriate environment, and the presence of a pathogen. And I would suggest that we haven't thought deeply enough about what it means to be a susceptible host and what is an appropriate environment. The usual thinking is that if you have a particular plant a crop, let's say you have an apple tree, um, and if you have a scab presence in the ecosystem, in the environment, the simple fact that the apple tree is an apple tree means that it isn't— is inherently susceptible. Um, that's usually as far as the thinking goes. Well, we know that that's not true, and it's not just because of genetics. You, you can have some resistant varieties, you can have susceptible varieties, but you also have susceptible varieties that have been provided with very good nutrition that are completely resistant. And so as we started looking at what was happening with plant physiology and how plants were interacting with their microbiome, we observed kind of two different states of immunity. Um, the, the one state of the passive immunity is simply a function of mineral nutritional balance. This is at the bottom of the plant health pyramid, the first two levels. And at these first two levels, these plants become, they become resistant to soil-borne diseases and they become resistant to some groups of insects simply as a result of changing the plant's internal nutritional state, changing the carbohydrate profile, changing the amino acid profile, changing the peptide profile. That change of the plant's internal state basically to no longer have excess of electrolytes removes that plant as a possible food source. So the plant isn't actively trying to kill powdery mildew or to kill scab or anything at this point. It's just simply no longer— it is no longer a susceptible host because its nutritional profile has changed. So that is passive immunity. That's, that's level 1 and level 2 of the plant health pyramid. But then the second half, level 3, level 4, the plant health pyramid, is when the plant switches to active immunity and In active immunity, there's some interesting things that happen here where plants now start getting the majority of their nutrition from microbes, from this— they're, they're absorbing live microbes from the soil, moving them into the plant. And in this process, the— these plants become very energy efficient, and the microbes themselves produce lots of these compounds that we call phytonutrients. These are phenolic compounds and terpenoids and bioflavonoids. In plain English, we call them essential oils. And these are the plant's co-evolutionary arms race, where this is, this is their biological warfare version of how they can't run away from diseases. So they develop all these compounds as plant protectants to protect themselves from ultraviolet radiation, from insect attack and disease attack, and from overgrazing and so forth. And I don't think it's not commonly realized. We're now starting to study the human health impact of these compounds. But many of these compounds have— they have the capacity to kill directly. They are antiviral, they're antifungal, they're antibacterial, and they inhibit the digestive processes of insects. So they're anti-herbivory. They have the capacity— this is now the plant shifting from a passive immunity to an active immunity state where it is actively resisting infection by a whole host, an array of different organisms. And you know, some of these compounds, or some of these, these plant essential oil combinations, are so potent. There was a couple of years ago, a study was published on cinnamon oil for the control or the treatment of antibiotic-resistant Staph aureus. So we now have Staph in hospital environments which is resistant to multiple types of antibiotics, different groups of antibiotics. They studied cinnamon oil extensively. They're now using cinnamon oil as a cleaning agent in some of these environments. Um, cinnamon oil— so each of these antibiotics has usually one specific mechanism or mode of action against Staph. Cinnamon oil has over 300. Do you think Staph aureus is ever going to become resistant to cinnamon oil? No way.

Highly doubt it.

You know, many compounds, too many different mechanisms, too many different modes of action. Cinnamon oil is just one that— what we do know that it is, that it is very potent, but it just happens to be much more studied and much better studied than many of these other compounds. The reality is a tomato plant or a corn plant also produces these exact same compounds.

Only when they're healthy though, correct? When it has the proper— Exactly. Yeah, when they have proper nutrient density. There are certain things that have to be there. Now, that's— and that's interesting. And that's— and that's really how they mine. They mine what they're needing, right? Those exudates in the soil are saying, "Hey, I need this. I need this nutritional piece to my diet. Please provide it to me," or whatever that may look like. But the reality is then those plants are uptaking that nutrition, building very, very healthy, healthy, healthy, you know, biosystems, not only in the soil but also plant defenses on the plant, all in one, you know, not to mention increasing brix levels, things like that. Correct. I mean, it's the whole gamut.

Well, the bottom line, the driver of this whole system is the plant's photosynthesis engine. The plant regulates what happens with the soil microbiome. The plant vectors its own microbiome inside the seed and hopefully on the seed if it hasn't been nuked with fungicides and insecticides and everything else. Yep. And, um, so there are all of these conversations about how we can regenerate soil health by adding compost and by adding different soil amendments and balancing soil mineral profiles and and all of those things can be beneficial. I'm certainly— I've made many recommendations for those types of amendments and those types of approaches in different contexts and settings. But I think what is underappreciated is the fastest way to regenerate soil and the fastest way to regenerate a microbiome is to have green plants that are photosynthesizing. When you do the arithmetic, you know, if you go back into the historical agronomic literature in the '50s and '60s and even through the '70s, If you ask the agronomists of the day the fastest way to build soil organic matter, the prevailing answer was the fastest way to build soil organic matter is to grow a corn crop. Today, somehow we've come to the expectation that the fastest way to lose organic matter is to grow a corn crop. So what's different? What's changed? Well, one of the significant things that has changed is the quantity of nitrogen that we use, but that's another conversation. But when you start looking at the math, The quantity of sugars in the roots and root exudates combined on a healthy corn crop is roughly double the quantity of sugars removed in the grain. And you look at that and you say, my goodness, we're moving— we're removing— I don't know, I'm making up numbers here. We're removing 5,000 pounds of sugars per acre. On a grain crop, that means we've got 10,000 pounds of sugars in the soil profile. Now, again, the caveat, right, qualifier here is that this is a healthy crop. Yep. Not all crops— and most crops today don't do this because they're not photosynthesizing well enough. But you look at that and you say, well, my goodness, you cannot economically afford to put on enough compost or carbon in any form to match with that. You can't. The best, the most economical way to regenerate soil is to regenerate soil while we are growing a crop or by growing cover crops. That is how you build carbon and build sugars in the soil in the most efficient and most effective and inexpensive way possible. Yes. You know, just a quick sidebar, but I know there have been several growers who we've worked with over the years who I've learned from They say that, and this is, this is one, one end of the spectrum was Chef's Garden in Sandusky, Ohio. On the other end of the spectrum is Brian McGuire from Nebraska, who's a mainstream crop farmer. And yeah, very, very challenged economics of corn and soybean production. They both have come to the same conclusion. The conclusion is that you must treat your cover crops like a cash crop. They fertilize their cover crops and they foliar feed their cover crops because if they, they have figured out that if they put, I don't know, I'm making up numbers here, but if they put $10 worth of nutrients and foliar applications into that cover crop, that will be returned 10 times to 20 times to 50 times over in the nutrients that are contained in that cover crop biomass and in the root exudates for the following crop. So their cover crops are an accelerator where they can put on, uh, 10 pounds of nitrogen on a cover crop and have that cover crop contain 60 pounds of nitrogen because they've accelerated its growth and its vegetative biomass to such a degree. And they've both figured out, and there's many other farmers that have figured this out as well, is that, uh, fertilizing cover crops is the least expensive way of adding fertilizer into the ecosystem because you get this disproportionately larger response in available nutrients for the following crop. Absolutely, absolutely.

And I think that's great that you say that, and that's it. And that's what's exciting about it, is if you can grow the, you know, a crop there, right, a cover crop, whatever that may be, and at the end of the day you're fixing— like you said, you got $10 of fertilizer costs and you, and you're putting $60 or $50 in your pocket because it's costing, you know, you're getting $60 out of it. I mean, think about it. At the end of the day, price-wise, not only that, poundage of nitrogen being put into the system, all of those things. Out where we're at, a lot of people have a hard time growing cover crops, John Kempf. I'm going to be honest with you.

Because of the moisture levels. Yep, I get it.

Yeah, you know, and so we run into a lot of furrow irrigation, things like that, you know, I mean, we're really, we're in a high desert. Let's be honest, right? But you're using furrow irrigation.

How much sense does that make?

It's hard. I know, and that's the way the system's designed at this point. That's the hardest part, right? It's fed out of the Gunnison Tunnel and a few other ways, a few other water tributaries. And I agree with you, it's really tough. So at the end of the day, if the guys that we're seeing that are actually planting cover crops on their soils, the regeneration portion happens at a much rapid pace, much more rapid pace at the end of the day.

You know, and helps you deal with irrigation water quality issues as well. I don't know if that's an issue for you, but if it is, that will help with that.

Well, that, and then not only that, but the guy that can take in more photosynthesis on their fields or the guy that's going to win, right? That's the farmer. That's the producer that who can capture more light energy over an acre of ground is going to be the guy that grows more, more production, healthier crops, all of those things.

Would you agree? Well, yes, I would agree. That's very true in the, in the long term. And we need to figure out— uh, I shouldn't say we need to figure it out because we've already— many people have already figured it out. But we need to describe how that is possible, not just in the long term but also in the short term. I mean, there's been far too many conversations, as far as I'm concerned, about this regenerative model of agriculture being, oh, we'll grow cover crops and we'll rebuild soil health, then we'll get better crop results in 5 years. Well, that doesn't work economically, particularly not in the current macroeconomic environment. And so what, what needs to happen is, and this is something we've obsessed over for the last two decades, is what are the agronomic recommendations that can start guiding us in a different direction, a state of less dependency, and that produce and deliver immediate economic crop response? Immediate as in current year, or in the case of COVID crops, subsequent season, subsequent year. There has to be an immediate ROI. And if it doesn't deliver an immediate ROI in the current marketplace, you can't expect people to adopt it. That's right.

They can't lose money. And there's only, you know, I mean, these farms, they can't. And that's the thing is they have loans, they have, you know, payments to make. You know, you do run into a few of those ranches and a few of those farms that at the end of the day, if you look at it, they might have other sources of income that they want to do this to their land. Correct. But you can't have that lag. You have to be able to show a return on investment immediately.

Yeah, the, the pieces that I would say depends a little bit on how you define immediately, but our experience has been that the single greatest ROI and most immediate ROI is seed treatments, microbial inoculant seed treatments. We have a product called BioCoat Gold that costs $4 an acre to apply on corn and soybeans. And the ROI, as you can imagine, the ROI threshold there is very small. And the crop, that response that it produces— what is interesting about BioCoat Gold is its consistency of response, that it responds consistently, it produces a yield response the majority of the time. It doesn't But there's lots of microbial inoculants that produce tremendous responses some of the time. But what we really need is, is product performance consistency. So the applications that we found to be consistent performers are seed treatments, well-designed foliar applications, and then in some settings, in some contexts, treating your cover crop as a cash crop in the— for the following crop also carries a substantial ROI. Isn't that how nature works? I ask the question sometimes because I want to really understand things from a first principles perspective. And I ask the question, how, how did we get to this place in agriculture? How did we arrive here? And because a lot of this knowledge of how to do things differently was prevailing knowledge, and it was— there were many pioneers and voices in the '40s and '50s and '60s who said, hey, we need to go down a different pathway. But we ended up not going down a different pathway than the one we've gone down. And then I tried to— I wanted to understand why. And I'm of the persuasion that the foundational reason why we've gone down this pathway that we have in agriculture is because of our intellectual property protection framework. You can patent a pesticide that has a specific mechanism or mode of action. You can patent a GMO. You can patent all types of different intellectual property. You can patent one particular bug, one particular microbe to treat one particular disease. You know what you can't patent? You cannot patent or you cannot protect the intellectual property of having a consortium of 20 or 30 different microbes that in concert with each other produce an interesting effect. And yet that's how natural ecosystems actually work. And so we have, we have all of these various products that are, you, you, there are developed specific mechanisms, specific modes of action or specific microbes for specific problems. But what we should be doing is we should be using broad spectrums. We should be using consortiums and groups of microbes because that is how natural ecosystems actually work. And I'm of the persuasion that if there were an intellectual property protection framework to protect that, we would be much— we would have gone down a much further— we would have gone down a very different pathway 60 years ago. We wouldn't have— if there were a, if there were a pathway for protecting crop genetic improvements other than GMOs, we probably wouldn't have GMOs.

So how do microbes act as the engine that pushes the plant up these levels? We're talking back again about your plant health pyramid.

Well, I'm trying to think of how to compress this long conversation down into a few minutes. The simple framework is that we have been taught in mainstream agronomy for the last half century or longer that plants primarily absorb nutrients as soluble ions from the soil solution, where we have calcium ions and magnesium and sodium and nitrogen ions in the soil solution, and plants absorb those. And we're now coming to understand that, well, first of all, it is true, plants do have the capacity to do that. Um, after all, that's how hydroponics works. And if we depend on that model of plant nutrition, that hydroponic model, for our agricultural nutrient delivery, then how much sense does that make, particularly in the environment that you're in, Brandon? In a dryland environment, why would you rely on a fundamentally hydroponic model for a dryland environment agriculture? It makes no sense. Because what happens when you either, A, have too much water, or B, you have too little water? Your water-soluble nutrients are either diluted or unavailable. And over the last, um, this has been knowledge that actually has been around a long time. There were pioneers who pointed in this direction, but the knowledge has really accelerated in the last 20 years. The realization that there is another model of plant nutrient absorption, and this model is based on plant absorbing— plants absorbing nutrition through biology, where we understand that This, this is going to be a rather crude oversimplification, but for the interest of time, I'll just oversimplify it to say— I'll frame it in terms of bacteria. Uh, we— yeah, but, um, we'll frame it in terms of bacteria are bags of nutrients. Bacteria are nutrient transporters. They are nutrient truckers. Bacteria are in the soil. They extract minerals from the soil mineral matrix. They incorporate them into their own cells. Then they migrate into the mycorrhizal fungi mycelial network or directly into plant roots. They have the capacity to do both, and they move rapidly through the mycorrhizal fungi mycelial network into the root system, and then they move up through the plant to wherever the plant needs them. They unload nutrients and they can go back into the soil and do the exact same thing over again. They're like a dump truck that's moving nutrients back and forth. Bacteria have the capacity to do that. So this is— there is this very different model of plant nutrition based on the pioneering work of Dr. James White and his colleagues that they call the rhizophagy cycle. And there's, there's been some other interesting complementary work to this as well. But the short version is that this model of biological delivery of plant nutrients, we are coming to understand, can also deliver the large majority of crop nutrients. Even in high-yielding agricultural environments. So this model, this model already, like, if you have an undomesticated ecosystem, if you have wild forest soil, the concentrations of soluble nutrient ions in that type of environment are very, very low. Your levels of nitrates and soluble potassium and phosphorus and so forth are going to be very, very low. So this process, this rhizophagy cycle, in that environment, in that ecosystem, delivers upwards of 90% of a plant's nutrient requirements. And one of the first questions that I asked Dr. White when I was discovering this process was, well, how does this transfer into an agriculture environment, and to what degree can we deliver a crop's nutritional requirements with this response? At the time I asked that question, half a dozen years ago, we didn't know the answer, but now based on a lot of field experience. It's obviously— it's difficult to measure this and prove this definitively, but you can look at the absence of free soil ions in the soil solution, and you can look at the quantity of nutrients that are being removed by the crop, and you can do some, some basic, some basic arithmetic. And, and it's becoming apparent that we can deliver the great majority of high-yielding crops and nutritional requirements through this microbial feeding process. And when that happens, these plants become very robust. They have very robust immune systems because, uh, I find this intriguing, you know, when you start really studying the plant and the plant microbiome, after a while it becomes difficult to tell where the plant ends and the microbiome begins. Um, we have all of these different compounds such as plant hormones. We call them phytohormones. And we have these plant secondary metabolites that we call phytonutrients. Oh, but as time goes on, one by one, we discover that perhaps in fact the biology is synthesizing the majority of each of those compounds. Perhaps it's biology that's synthesizing the majority of phytonutrients and not just the plants alone. Like, we know we have, we have this entire group of bacteria that we call PGPRs, plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria. Why? Because they synthesize phytohormones such as cytokinins and feed them to plants to change the plant's behavior and to change the plant's expression. Um, yeah, they're— it is the microbes that are synthesizing them, not just the plants alone.

You know, as you get these microbes built into plants, like you said, they're robust, they're energetic, they have just amazing health.

On this spectrum of vibrantly healthy versus pre-disease versus a disease state, they are now on the vibrantly healthy end of the spectrum. And the reality is, yeah, this is difficult to convey to people who've never observed it. Most of us Yes. Have never observed crops that were vibrantly healthy. I mean, my goodness, most of us have never observed crops that were resistant to disease. They weren't even in the pre-disease state. Most of us have never observed crops that were truly resistant to diseases and insects.

And I hate to say it, some farmers at the end of the day, they aren't even observant of any of their crops. And that's when disease and those things take over. Some of them, you know? What do you think about that?

Well, there's this Chinese proverb, something to the effect of, "The best fertilizer is the farmer's footsteps." Sure. And I think us being in the field and being observant, I don't work with many farmers who aren't out in their fields. I mean, the people that we work with are out there, they're paying attention. Yes. So I don't have the experience of the comment that you made, but the The reality is it is our presence and our observation in the field that is fundamental to determining our— or to influencing our degree of success in whatever pathway direction we're going down. It's our care and intention and stewardship that matters. Absolutely.

And that's going to take it into the long, long term. Let's walk into the next part of this, the valley of death. Let's think about this. Many growers fear yield drag when moving over, right, to a regenerative practice, John. We all know, you know, when we talked about this a little bit before, but if you would explain how to navigate the first 1 to 3 years of transition, if you could lay that out. I think that's the most important part, John, because I think that's what's holding some of these guys back.

The art and the science of regenerative agronomy that delivers an immediate ROI is figuring out how to navigate providing an on-ramp for biology and biological nutrition while simultaneously providing an off-ramp for electrolyte nutrition. That's it. That's the fundamental bottom line, is figuring out how you balance those two pieces. And I'll frame it in terms of nitrogen management on a corn crop because that's a common crop and a common scenario that people can easily relate to. You can adapt the information to all types of other contexts. Perfect. So traditional nitrogen management, let's just say for the sake of discussion that in a particular given region, soil type, crop, rainfall patterns, and so forth, that it's common to apply 200 units of nitrogen to a corn crop, the majority of that being preplant. Perhaps it's fall applied, perhaps it's spring applied, but it's all applied either at planting or before planting. That type of environment, you've shut down any opportunity for microbial collaboration with that plant because you have this abundance of free nutrients and free electrolytes in the soil solution. So the way to, the way to manage that and to produce a different response is to time the applications differently and to change the amounts to only match peak crop needs. When the— and peak crop demand when the crop actually needs it. So we change the applications in time and we change them in efficiency. So sure, here's, here's an example. I'll actually— I'll add one more thought, one more frame of reference, and that is depending on who you listen to, which university, which part of the country, the nitrogen requirement to grow a bushel of corn is anywhere from 1 to 1.3 pounds per bushel of corn. And yet there are many biological farmers who are using cover crops, or perhaps they're using manure compost applications. They're experimenting with different things. It's very common to get, uh, to only be able to account for 0.65 to 0.75 pounds of nitrogen per bushel of corn. And there are many growers who are pushing that envelope even further, and they're still producing, uh, average to better than regional average yields with only half a pound of of nitrogen per bushel of corn that they can account for. So there might be some coming from biological nutrition that they're not accounting for, but that's what they can account for in the system. So, um, the way that I'm— I'll just give an example of a type of recommendation that we would make in our consulting at AEA. When I'm running completely blind, I know nothing. I know nothing about the soil context, the crop context, the history, the irrigation. I'm just I'm just— this is, this is a starting point. This is a template and a starting point from which to adapt. Yeah, absolutely. Um, I would start with 40 units of nitrogen maximum at planting in the form of ammonium and nitrate. No urea, or limited urea, I should say. No urea, but I don't want 100% of it urea. And I'm making that caveat because everything else for the rest of the season I want as urea. And so there's some reasons for that. I won't go into the detail in the time that we have here. But yes, then I want to add— and that nitrogen is ideally applied at planting or before planting. Sure. And I want it off to the side of the seed, not in the furrow. Preferably it can be strip-tilled, it can be in a 2x2. I don't want it any closer than a 2x2. I would prefer it even be farther away than a 2x2. But That's the closest I want it to be. And I want that— we've, we've put together what we call a nitrogen efficiency program. People can find it online. But the short version is we combine that nitrogen with sulfate in some form, either ammonium sulfate or thiosulfate, whatever makes sense for the given application. We want a minimum of a 10:1 nitrogen to sulfur ratio. And then we also add humic substances, humic carb at 3% of the solution, and we add Rebound Molybdenum at a pint per acre. And the reason for those things is it drives and accelerates the conversion of the applied nitrogen into microbial nitrogen. So bacterial cells are now holding it, and that means that it is available but no longer water soluble. It doesn't leach. And so we're putting on a smaller dose. And my preference would be to put on less than 40 pounds. I would like to go down to as little as 10 to 20. But I'm not comfortable making that recommendation without more information and knowing what the history is and where the soil is coming from. That's perfect. Then the second application would be somewhere between V3 and V5, depending on soil context and continuity, an additional 40 pounds, side-dressed, fertigated, top-dressed, whatever fits the application or the farming context. And this 40 pounds is again combined with our nitrogen efficiency program. And I want a minimum in these two applications, I want a minimum of 25 pounds of sulfur per acre. Yeah. And we can, we know that we can, we can count the first 25 pounds of sulfur, you can count as the equivalent of a nitrogen unit in terms of the crop response that they get. So then we've now applied a total of 80 pounds. And then I want to come back and plan for 2 foliar applications. And this is, this is different from what lots of farms have been doing historically and extremely valuable. So I want 2 foliar applications, the first one around tasseling, the first one around R1. Those 2 foliar applications will each be 10 units of nitrogen as melted urea, as, as low biuret urea. There's, there have been a number of farmers that we've worked with, people who've done interesting work, documented their research quite well. Our rule of thumb is that at minimum, most conservatively, you can— every pound of nitrogen as applied, that is applied as a foliar, and in terms of foliar urea, will produce the same crop yield response as 4 pounds of nitrogen applied to the soil. At best, that's the most conservative. We've even had some crops go all the way up to 1:7 ratio. So now we're doing these two applications. And ideally, we also like to add some of this nitrogen efficiency program to these foliares as well. Yeah, now you think about what I just described, we did 40 units of N. Yep, 40 units of N, 10 and 10. We've got 100 units of N and 25 pounds of sulfur. With that application, you will get a greater crop yield and higher quality than you will with 200 pounds of nitrogen applied upfront. And your costs, if you figure in the application costs, and for additional further applications, you figure in the nitrogen efficiency program, your cost per acre is going to be roughly a wash, but you've applied half the quantity of N. Now that's, that's the first half of the coin, you now have an off-ramp for nutrition. For electrolyte nutrition. Now the next step is the on-ramp for biology. Now you add BioCoat Gold as a seed treatment. Uh, perhaps you add another microbial inoculant in the furrow with your starter, and that is the on-ramp for a biology piece. And then you do that year 1. Year 2, you come back based on what you've learned and you adapt. Instead of 40 units of N, maybe you're now down to 10 units of N in the starter and 30 units side dress.

But usually, like, if you're going to hone something in you're going to be taking soil samples, you know, throughout this.

What I'm, what I'm giving you is a template starting point. All of these starting point recommendations would be revised and adapted based on sap analysis or soil analysis results.

Absolutely. Perfect. All right, let's hear it. So keep on going, buddy. So we're on year 2 now. So year 2, you're looking at further reducing—

usually, okay, again, there's context dependent, but usually you're looking at further reducing the nitrogen applications at planting. And perhaps putting more in the side dress. And it's actually getting the nitrogen number as low as possible at planting is actually quite important. Sure. Don't— we don't want it at zero in most, in most cases. We want a touch of nitrate because nitrate really drives the synthesis of a whole range of different plant phytohormones, the cytokinins, the gibberellins, the auxins, etc. So if we want to develop this large root system and plant biomass very quickly, we want a small dose of nitrates. Sure. Keyword being small. Yeah, we want— like, you can do this with 2 pounds of nitrates per acre. It doesn't take much. Sure. Um, and then the, um, if you keep nitrogen levels low in those first couple of weeks after germination, you develop not— so not zero, small amounts of nitrates, but not an overabundance of nitrogen. The biology will drive the development of this extensive, robust root system, and you get this large root biomass, and you get very good microbial colonization. And now the plant has established that community. It hasn't— it hasn't been— you haven't created a drug dependency for the rest of its life. You've set it up. It's like a baby animal receiving colostrum. Yes. You've set it up where you have this microbial inoculant. It's now set up for success with this microbiome for the rest of its life. And this is why I would actually prefer to have smaller amounts of nitrogen at planting and larger amounts in the side dress, because it gives us that initial critical several-week window to set up the microbiome so that we have an opportunity for greater success for the rest of the season.

Yeah. What about year 3? Do you have one more step, or is that it? And then you're pretty well on your— you're pretty well on your way at that point, John?

At this point, you're well on your way, but also we make all these decisions going forward based on data. That's great. Like, what does the data tell us? How, how much can we reduce? How much can we reduce further? Like, what else is in the system? Are there nitrogen coming from COVID crops. There's, there's lots of variables in this, but you make— you just, you don't guess. Yeah, I think that's been one of the foundational aspects of our success in our consulting work at AEA is you do not guess about something that is possible to measure. It is possible to measure a soil's ability to contribute nitrogen. It's possible to measure a crop's nitrogen status. And so you don't guess. And it's because of that— this, you asked me, you started this question by asking me about the Valley of Death. I'm of the persuasion— there is this narrative that, um, you should expect to see yield losses and yield drag the first couple of years during a regenerative agriculture transition. I vehemently disagree. If you do, it is not the result of regenerative agriculture, it's the result of poor agronomic management decisions. I'd have to agree 100% with you on that.

Might take some time to set up the entire system, but the bottom line is the ROI is going to be back in your pocket and you're going to be making more money as a producer. And that's really where the money should be going, if you ask me. You know, at the end of the day, to farmers, to producers, to ranchers, the ROI starts going back in the right person's pocket.

Well, when you think about all the less money that you're spending on nitrogen, spending on nutrients. Yeah. Now, in the first couple of years, Uh, we— every, every farm and every context is unique. Um, but in the first couple of years, we often don't expect to see inputs go down significantly. They just go to different places. They're going to cover crop seed, or they're going to microbial inoculants, or they're going to more sulfur and less nitrogen. They're going to the nitrogen efficiency program. They're going in different places. But also, we do not expect to see yields go down. We expect pesticide applications to go down. And we expect profitability to go up. So that often that increased profitability comes from incremental yield advantages, and it comes from reduced pesticide requirements. And then over time, it comes from reduced inputs. We don't, we don't, we're not, I'm not particularly aligned with low inputs year one, that reducing— look, there is no other industry, there is no other place outside of agriculture and region of agriculture where you have this idea that you can save yourself successful. Don't save yourself successful. It's in how do you make the smart and wise investments, particularly in a transition period. And that's what all those are—

cover crops, biological inoculants. It's all an investment at the end of the day. These aren't things that are going to be here this year and then gone next, you know. I mean, when it comes down to it and you start to put inputs onto a farm— and that's one of the things we talk to, you know, you know, the growers we work with and the ranchers we work with— it's the same thing. Hey man, are you— if you're going to spend this money, are you going to put, like you said, cover crops on and gain 60? Or 50 pounds, right? What are you— what are you going to do? Correct. And at the end of the day, John Kempf, would you— I mean, you, you look at it and you think about it. And the amount of money that they're spending is just an investment. So where do you want to just put your money? You want to put it in investments or direct expenses?

Well, many farms, many farms today don't have the financial resources to put significantly to make any investments, even though there's an argument that can be made from a soil amendments perspective, if we I mean, we have so many agricultural soils now that are completely depleted of cobalt and molybdenum and selenium and all these important trace minerals that add a great deal of economic value. But regenerating the levels of those is an investment. It belongs on the CapEx side of the ledger, not in operating expenses. And so that's, that's, that's an interesting conversation that's worth digging into, but Let's get down to some closing and rapid fire.

What do you say?

Yep, go for it.

One piece of advice for a grower who only has the budget to change one thing this season. What should it be? The one thing, John Kempf.

Seed treatments and 10 books. 10 books? Yep, read good books. Hey, I like it.

All right, the Regen legacy. What does John Kempf want the landscape to look like? What do you want it to look like, John Kempf? In 20 years?

Well, in 20 years, my dream would be that there is no such thing as regenerative agriculture and conventional agriculture. It's just agriculture. It's the way we do it.

Where to follow you, if you would? Websites, social media, where to get your book? Uh, most anywhere.

I have a personal— I have a personal website at johnkempf.com. I have a blog there. I have the podcast of the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. You can find me on, on many of the mainstream social media platforms.

Well, John Kempf, no, I appreciate it for sure. You know, in our audience, you know, I just want to ask our audience, if you would follow us, you know, like this, share it with everybody. This right here is what agriculture is. It's not the future. We're not living in the future. It's now. And it was like this even years ago, but it just took time to, I feel like, blossom completely. But this is moving forward the way agriculture culture will be done. Talking to John about it, having him spill out his knowledge, we appreciate it, John. We appreciate that you've shared it with our audience and just taken the time to literally spend it with us and sharing this wisdom.

Yeah, glad to be here. Thanks for having me on, Brandon. I look forward to more conversation in the future. Absolutely. Happy growing season to everyone.

Yeah, same to you. Happy growing season to you, and we definitely appreciate you, John. Have a great day.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At AEA, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible, and since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At AEA, we don't guess. We test. We analyze. And we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit AdvancingEcoAg.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening, and we look forward to working with you.