Podcast Extra: Rethinking Fertility Inputs | Soil Strategies Podcast

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of Soil Strategies. Today's guest really doesn't need much of an introduction in the soil health space, but we're honored to have John Kempf with us, founder of Advancing Eco-Agriculture. John is an agronomist, entrepreneur, sought-after speaker, and the founder of Advancing Eco-Agriculture, or AEA, where they work with farmers globally to improve crop performance through balanced nutrition, plant physiology, and biological soil function. He is also the host of the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. With fertilizer prices remaining volatile, more producers are reevaluating how to think about nutrient management. John Kempf has helped growers around the world rethink how plant nutrition actually works, moving beyond strictly NPK mindset toward understanding how biological function and nutrient balance influence crop performance. Often that shift in perspective doesn't just change how much fertilizer is applied, it changes how efficiently the crop is able to use what's already there. Today we're going to explore nutrient management and discuss how excess or imbalanced fertility can sometimes even create a yield drag. John, welcome to Soil Strategies.

Hey, Roy, thanks for having me on. You're going to pack a lot into this conversation, aren't you?

Only if we can. When we, when we get you on the, on on the phone. We are excited to, uh, to dive into some of these big topics. So in setting the stage, many of us were taught that yield is primarily driven by the synthetic amendments, the N, P, and K. And I think I speak for many producers when you basically just tell the co-op what you want for a yield goal and they proceed to give you your recommendations. Uh, it's sometimes real tough to be profitable, uh, when prices go where they have just like the spring. Um, what would you say was the point when you began to see things differently and realizing that the paradigm of N, P, and K, uh, more on approach, if you will, um, was incomplete?

Well, we had this interesting experience on the family farm where I grew up where, um, it was specifically related to initially to pesticide applications. The more intense pesticide applications became— this was, we were on a fruit and vegetable farm, we were putting on fungicides every 5 days and it seemed the, the disease pressure was constantly getting worse. The more product we applied, the worse the problems became year over year. And we were on a similar trend with fertilizer applications. Of course, fruit and vegetable operation, drip irrigation. When we first started, it was common to apply 3 to 5 pounds of a water-soluble triple 20 through the irrigation system every week. 10 years in, we're at 20 to 25 pounds to get the same results. Wow, that's just a microcosm of the exact same things that we see happening in production agriculture. And it was just, um, the, the entire model is based on completely disregarding plant health and the contributions of soil biology, which arguably we didn't understand the details of historically as well as we do today, but we also didn't care to look because the vested interests, the economic interests were aligned with, with the use of fertilizers and pesticides and so forth. So anyway, it's, uh, it's been an interesting pathway, but the conclusion that I've come to, the realization that I've come to, is there's a completely different model of agronomy and plant nutrition. It's now very well established scientifically. It hasn't yet broadly migrated from the scientific domain into production-scale agriculture because it's a different operating system. It's like It's not like asking someone who's using a computer or a phone to add an additional app on their phone. It's like switching from Android to iOS, or even more fundamentally, switching from Windows to macOS. It's a completely different operating system. There's different applications, there's different ways of thinking. And my, my operating system analogy is quite crude because there are still a lot of parallels between those two operating systems, whereas when you start when you transition from— what you use in an agronomy framework, when you can transition from electrolyte agronomy to biological agronomy, there is very little overlap between the two in, in the, in the way the operating system works. So it really is, um, it's a very different approach and one that is beginning to be quite well understood both scientifically and also how to implement it practically. Um, but there's going to probably have to be more pain yet from a fertilizer economics perspective before this becomes more broadly adopted.

Yeah, and I like what you said there. I think pain is actually— unfortunately, that's what we need to experience before we start asking questions. And go ahead.

Well, there's, there's interesting aspect of human psychology that for most people There are exceptions, but broadly speaking, the majority of us are averse to change, and we imagine the perceived pain of changing in most cases to be greater than it actually is. So we only become open to change when the actual pain of not changing becomes greater than the perceived pain of changing. And so unfortunate reality for most of us is we have to experience a fairly substantial amount of pain to be motivated to change.

Yeah, absolutely. That is so true. And I know that's the case in my life. I mean, I, I felt the same way. I didn't start asking those questions until financial pain became a very real thing. And, and my human health story goes right along with that too. I had to experience my health plummeting before I started asking questions about the nutritional side of of what I was putting in my body. And it, it goes so much along with the soil health journey because health really does begin in the soil. And, uh, uh, just— I'm gonna jump way ahead on my questions. I'm just— since I'm on that topic, how does true soil health impact nutrient density of our food and, and of the crop that's being grown?

Well, nutrient density can be thought of in different ways. Sometimes nutrient density particularly historically has been described or associated with mineral density of what is the density of cobalt and selenium and iodine and nickel and boron and zinc and manganese and copper, etc. And that's certainly important. And the concentration of those— many of those elements has certainly reduced, in some cases substantially over the last decades and centuries. But then there is another aspect of nutrient density, which is phytonutrient density, and that is the concentrations of these plant immune compounds, uh, such that are just broadly called phytonutrients, such as resveratrol and anthocyanins and so forth, that are foundational to many different plants' immune systems and also enhance our own immune systems. And also within those categories, you can have you can have compounds that are the— that have the opposite of nutritional value. They can be considered anti-nutrients, such as phytates in beans, or— right now I'm blind, my mind is blanking out— but tannins in oak. And there's an all number of these different compounds that are there as digestion inhibitors to limit the quantity of those foods, grains, seeds, forages that are consumed by livestock and people. Then of course we think we're really smart and we process those foods and, and just consume more of them, which we're learning is quite detrimental to our health. But the bottom line is that the concentrations of those phytonutrients and their composition can vary substantially based on genetics, based on environment. But in large part, I would say the majority of the variability can be described by changes in the microbiome. The healthier the microbiome, the more robust, the more diverse the microbiome, the more optimal the phytonutrient composition and concentration becomes for human consumption or animal consumption. And you get more of the phytonutrients. This, this— I'm speaking of course very broadly, categorically, and there's lots of nuance here, but generally you get more of the phytonutrients that enhance our health and livestock health, and you get less of the phytonutrients that are detrimental to our health when you change the microbiome profile so that the plant itself is healthier.

That's fantastic. And when the microbiome of the plant is healthier, that makes the entire plant healthier? For instance, disease pressure. When the plant is healthier, you don't seem to have all the disease pressure, correct?

Well, you can— that's a question that would— that really would deserve a 10-minute answer. But the short version is, let me give you an analogy of our human bodies. We've come to understand that our bodies contain something like 10, 9 or 10 times more bacterial cells than they do human cells. And when you think about that in terms of genetic information, that's a different way of saying that our microbiome contains essentially an order of magnitude more genetic information than our human DNA does for disease resistance. Insect— obviously we're not insect resistance, speaking about us, but the same concept also holds true for plants. Plants also contain close to 10 times more bacterial cells and, and just— I'll just broadly say microbial cells inside and on the plant and throughout the plant's entire vascular tissue than there are plant cells. So there is this incredible genetic capacity and capability for disease resistance and for insect resistance if it is allowed to express itself. And so the short version We actually— this is one of the, the mechanisms, the pathways that we harnessed with Pinion, which is a product we released. We've been testing it for the last couple of years. We released it yet last year. But Pinion, at— as of this point, Pinion has been tested on over, uh, I think we're at this point we're approaching 4 dozen different disease and crop combinations, and it is outperforming conventional fungicides in every test situation at this point.

Wow.

And it's incredibly broad spectrum, but it's not— and what gives it that broad spectrum benefit is that it's not a single ingredient approach. It's not a single mechanism or mode of action. Instead, what it's designed to do is supercharge that plant's native microbiome genetic expression and allow that microbiome to express its greatest degree of disease resistance. So that means the challenge with a product of that approach is that your mileage will vary. One grower will have a different experience from another grower. But the fact that we're outperforming conventional fungicides on every treatment at this point is, uh, is better than I expected, to be honest. That's a pretty remarkable result.

Absolutely. And there's, there's probably benefits that you're not even understanding are coming from that product because the microbiome takes care of such a broad spectrum protection. I mean, it might not even be a fungal issue, but it might be a healthier plant all the way around. So therefore you're not getting some of the other pressures that it might be coming in contact with because it's just got that much better of an immune system.

It absolutely is. We've been able to measure this on several different crops. But you know what's, what's so intriguing is— uh, let me see, I just lost my train of thought. Where was I going to go with this?

Yeah, well, no, that's no problem. The microbiome of the plant is such an important part, just like for us, that is where 90% or 80% of our immune system is housed. So how can we best take care if, if we start thinking of, of the plant as not just being, uh, or the soil even, as just being a growing medium, but yet, uh, having an interaction with the growing plant How can we best start caring? What are some practical steps to start caring about the health of our plants beyond just thinking of doing a fungicide pass or an insecticide pass or putting on enough N, P, and K?

There's this really interesting phenomenon or observation that emerges when you begin studying the plant microbiome very closely. After a little while, it starts becoming very difficult to determine where the plant ends and the microbiome begins. And you begin realizing that in fact they, uh, there is no separation, there's no distinction between them. And in fact, uh, James White at Rutgers University has clearly pointed out that without their microbiome, um, plants lack many fundamental abilities. They even lack the ability to send their root systems down. A growing, a growing root tip will turn brown and die without its associated bacteria inside, uh, inside. So it's, it's many of the very fundamental things that we have thought were plant-determined are actually determined by their microbiome.

Wow.

And they, you know, we have all of these different compounds that we referred to as phytohormones, such as cytokinins and gibberellins and abscisic acid, on and on the list goes. And it becomes really intriguing when you start paying attention to to the microbiome, all of a sudden you start realizing we have, we have this broad group of microbes that we call PGPRs, plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria. And the reason they're, they're given that moniker is that they synthesize these quote-unquote phytohormones and contribute them to the plant. And similarly to what I was describing a bit ago when you asked me about nutrient density, I was describing phytonutrients. And you start— the question emerges of how much of these phytonutrients and phytohormones are actually synthesized inside plant cells and how— what proportion of them are synthesized by the microbiome. And it becomes apparent that in ecosystems where the microbiome is thriving, it appears that the majority is being contributed by the microbiome, which becomes really fascinating because it means all of a sudden you can change a plant's genetic expression based on the microbiome that it is associated with. You can have a plant that is cytokinin dominant and has short node spacing and turn a tall, leggy soybean into something that compares a dwarf soybean. Well, just based on the microbiome that it's associated with. And I'm, of course, I'm giving extreme examples, but there certainly are there are changes in plant expression, a plant— what we would call phenotype expression or epigenetic expression— based on the microbiome that a plant is associated with. So it becomes, becomes really interesting to, to wonder and to think about, okay, where are the boundaries really? What are the differences between the microbiome and the plant? So to come back and to answer your question, how do we manage the microbiome better? Well, the, the first, you know, the first rule of medicine is first of all, do no harm. —and it's pretty straightforward. We've got to stop killing them. Yeah. Forget about trying to add inoculants and do compost teas and do all these various things if you're constantly going to destroy them. So I would say the things that have the most negative effect, um, on the microbiome broadly and its ability to function are: one is bare soil that's exposed to the sun. You, you get enzymatic degradation and shut down at 110°F, and you can have that to a depth of 4 to 5 inches in most soils when they're— you have bare soil exposed to the sun in the middle of the summer. The second is fungicide applications specifically, and the third is excessive levels of electrolytes. When you have high levels of electrolytes— and I'm using that word specifically instead of fertilizers because not all fertilizers are electrolytes, But it is the electrolytes specifically that interrupt the electrical signaling that, that occurs within the plants, between cells, between plant cells, and between plants and microbes. And when you short-circuit that signaling by having excessive electrolytes, that essentially— it's not inaccurate to say that that prevents this microbiome and plant signaling interaction from happening. So your, your most common electrolytes in, in inside plants. Magnesium can also be an electrolyte. It is less common, so, in, in soils. But other than that, the, um, the common electrolytes in plants and in soils are sodium, chloride, potassium, and nitrate. And if you have high levels of potassium and nitrate, or sodium or chloride, inside a plant, or in its root system, then you are absolutely going to sabotage the ability of the microbiome to support that plant.

And is that what draws us to put more on? Because that is exactly what we're relying on to create— so we put nitrogen on and the field greens up, it gets darker green. Uh, is that just because of the nitrogen or what is happening? Because when we see a result from nitrogen, what's actually happening there?

Well, there's a number of things that are happening. I guess you are getting a nitrogen response where you're getting increasing chlorophyll content as a result of higher nitrogen levels. You're also getting, um, in, in many cases you're getting a flush of CO2 release because the, the nitrogen, particularly if it's in the form of nitrate, is oxidizing organic matter that's in the soil and you're getting this CO2 flush. So you're getting a response from both of those in conjunction. But I think the, the question that you're getting at is what happens when you do that is, you know, you create a dependency, particularly if you— if this happens early on in the plant's life. Um, if you— if when we apply, um, very— a high concentration of electrolytes, water-soluble fertilizer, or high salt index fertilizer in close proximity to the root system, you prevent effective microbial colonization of that root system. And what happens is the root system starts getting established, starts growing and expanding in size. And if there is a 10 to 14 day delay in establishing microbiome colonization of that root system, which is very common with, with high salt index fertilizers, the microbiome never quite catches up for the rest of the growing season, no matter how fast it proliferates. The root system is always one step ahead. The root system is expanding faster than the microbiome is expanding. And so you create— you've essentially created this dependency for the rest of the plant's life. And, you know, many years ago, back in the 1930s and '40s, William Albrecht at the University of Missouri had this famous quote. He said, the, the science of fertilizer placement is about the art of placing water-soluble nutrients so that plant roots can avoid them. And it made me laugh. He was in some ways, he was, uh, he was 100 years ahead of his time. Wow. Years ahead of his time in recognizing the impact that that had. Another quote of his was that plant nutrients, or nutrients, should be available but not soluble. Wow. And if we had followed that direction that he gave us, those insights that he provided, we would be in a very different space today because it is absolutely possible to provide nitrogen and potassium and other elements in forms that are plant available but that are not electrolytes. Sure, sure.

That's fascinating. That is really fascinating. And so if we can start breaking away from that, what's a good place to begin testing whether or not we have been overapplying, or how can we start backing away on some of those inputs that are causing this problem?

Oh, that's, uh, now you start getting into a question of, of data and measurement, but also a question of what makes sense. Um, essentially the, the conceptual framework is if, if you have soils that have, as in the soils in the farm that I was managing when I was in my teens, uh, we had this increasing trend where we needed to increase the applications of fertilizers just to maintain results, not to get better results, but just to maintain results. So we had created a state of dependency. If you want to transition away from a state of dependency, and that means providing an off-ramp for electrolyte-based nutrition while simultaneously providing an on-ramp for biological nutrition, and depending on your scenario and soil context and so forth, that might mean In one situation, it might mean reducing your electrolytes by 10% in the first year and increasing biology to fill that gap. In another scenario, it might mean reducing electrolytes by 40% or 50% in the first year and using biology to fill in that gap. But the level of exchangeable carbon that you have, the level of biological activity, there's lots of pieces that contribute to your ability to provide that on-ramp while you're providing the off-ramp. And I think, uh, one of the most important aspects that— there are two kind of foundational pieces that facilitate an off-ramp from electrolytes, and those are: number one, spacing out applications, not doing everything front-loaded, spacing things out over the course of the season as much as possible. Making, planning for 2 or 3 applications. And because that does a number of things. One is obviously it reduces the concentration of electrolytes at any one given window in time. And the second aspect is, to the degree that it makes sense, making some of those applications as foliar applications instead of soil applications, because you get so much greater efficiency and crop response from a smaller quantity of applied nutrients. And again, you are not applying electrolytes to the soil and near the same concentrations. Plus you're harnessing the photosynthetic engine, which has all kinds of efficiency gains. Yeah. So there's those, I think, are the foundational two pieces. And then of course, using laboratory data to actually measure what's happening and what's going on. I think one of the foundational pieces, you know, we've been pretty successful as a company. We've worked on— we work on a lot of acres. And one of the foundational aspects of that success is We never guess about something when it's possible to measure. And so there is this ongoing kind of ideological conversation from people who have different points of view who say that, well, if you transition to regenerative agriculture or biological agriculture, whatever nickname you want to give it, you would expect to have a yield drag or a yield loss and the world is going to starve. Well, that's a whole other ideological conversation in and of itself. But if you have a yield reduction, it is not because regenerative agronomy or biological agronomy doesn't work. It's because you messed up somehow. It's just— it's straightforward. It is bad agronomy. Our, our expectation, the growers that we do not expect to see a yield drag. Yeah, we expect yields to maintain at a constant rate or increase. While we are simultaneously reducing inputs. It's a very common experience for us and for the growers that we work with, and it's because we don't make recommendations for dramatic reductions in fertilizer applications without having the data to know and to support that the soil can actually deliver.

Very good. That's, that's exactly— sounds to me that's exactly your heart behind starting AEA in the first place. Is to give farmers an opportunity to get away from the electrolytes, get onto a biological system, and keep their farm viable and more resilient, build resiliency. Well, the reality is I grew up on a farm.

My father was a farmer. Both of my grandparents were farmers. I'm in the Amish community. We have this incredibly rich and strong agriculturalist tradition and culture. And we very clearly got the sense that we were the, we were the ones being farmed. And I think that's very true today. It's becoming more obvious to people. Sometimes a comment that I shared with Jason Mauck on his podcast years ago, it is the people who are farming the farmers who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Um, and you know, many, many producers today feel stuck. They feel trapped because there's a recognition they're trapped for whole lots of reasons, economic reasons, and the recognition that there's— this is a very different mental model. This is a very different approach. It requires different knowledge, different information. It is more knowledge-intensive. It's more management-intensive. And so there seem to be lots of challenges and hurdles within that. But therein also lies the opportunity. Therein lies the opportunity for independence from the people who very deliberately and gradually over the course of 6 or 7 decades have gotten the entire farming community into the position of being feudal serfs. Yeah. It's like if the farmers are the ones being farmed, they are captured. And so if, and this capture is a result or part of the capture mechanisms is the high input expenses. So if you want to continue using those, recognize that you are voluntarily signing up to remain captured.

Yeah, right, that's exactly right. And I know I've seen that firsthand too. It's so easy, uh, depending on where you're going for with your soil tests and your recommendations, it's so easy to be convinced that we need to do this amount of, of pounds per acre of, uh, N, P, and K. And that is, it is so true, it's tough to be profitable when you're constantly chasing that.

Yeah, soil tests have historically been used primarily as fertilizer sales tools. That's the reality. And I mean, we can look at the past history dispassionately and we can also recognize that part of the reason— there are a number of foundational contributing factors to why agriculture has gone down the pathway it has, agriculture in general, agronomy in particular, economic reasons, intellectual property protection reasons and so forth. But the bottom line is, if you dig into the data, if you dig into the research that didn't get popularized, it got published but not popularized, the data for fertilizer applications doesn't look all that good. And I still remember the— it's been quite a— it's been several years ago now, but I had Rick Mulvaney from the University of Illinois here on my podcast. And he and his colleagues published several relatively incendiary and inflammatory papers. One of them was titled The Potassium Paradox. And so they did an exhaustive literature review of all of the peer-reviewed published papers on potassium chloride applications, marita potash applications. And it's been a few years since I read this and had this conversation. So, uh, but if my, if my memory serves me correctly, there were something like 900, uh, 900 studies that they put together into this review paper, uh, everything they were able to find. Potassium chloride showed a positive yield response 16% of the time. Oh my goodness, 16%. Across— as you can imagine, across 900 papers, there is a tremendous diversity of soil types and cropping scenarios involved in that scenario. A 16% positive yield response. And yet it's the most popular potassium fertilizer that's out there. And there, there are many listeners to the podcast who told me that that was one of the most important podcast interviews that they had ever listened to, because you realize that the published literature itself does not support the widespread application of commercial potash. Yeah, and yet everybody does it, right? Right. And it does—

it's about the same. Maybe the, the literature maybe wouldn't back it up as much for phosphorus, but phosphates are kind of in the same line, aren't they?

Uh, they're in a very similar line. I mean, it's— the literature also suggests, um, depending on if you're applying— I mean, the most common applied form of phosphorus is DAP, and then there's also orthophosphates, various more expensive liquid phosphorus forms, but Um, the majority of commercial applied phosphorus depends a bit on your soil pH and the form of phosphate that you're applying, but DAP has a pH of 9. You apply it onto most acidic soils or into most soil conditions, and that phosphorus is going to be complexed in as little as 3 to 5 days to as much as 3 to 5 weeks. It's 90— it can be greater than 90% can be complexed and tied up and is no longer available. And at that point, once that happens and it happens in a very short period of time in most soils, it is in the exact same form as the 6,000 to 9,000 pounds of phosphorus reserves that you already have in your soil. Right. So it is no more available than what you already had an abundance of.

All you have is a— you have a disconnect in there and the biology needs to be cycling it, correct?

The biology needs to release what you applied in exactly the same way as it needs to release, what was already out there. And then if you put on a high dose of soluble electrolytes in close proximity to the root system, that's not going to happen very well.

Yeah, right. That's— that is something that I think if we as farmers really could wrap our minds around, uh, we could see a tremendous increase in profitability simply by not even completely cutting out— if you need to prove it to yourself first— but starting to cut back on some of these synthetics.

You know, years ago, um, I'd heard this phrase before several times, but it was something about the way Ben Taylor Davis said it to me when I interviewed him on the podcast. He said farming is about optimizing the utilization of three free things: water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide. Wow. Those three things we get for free, and if we can optimize the utilization of those three free things, that's how we produce the highest the least expensively. And he just— he nailed it. He hit that on the head so hard because when you start thinking about it in that way— earlier in our conversation, I spoke about the benefits of foliar applications in optimizing the photosynthetic engine. I learned something by accident many years ago when we started having these, these situations where putting on well-designed foliar applications produce completely disproportionate responses. We would put on a foliar application of, uh, I'm just making up a scenario here, but a few ounces per acre of actual ingredient of, let's say, zinc and manganese and copper and magnesium combinations, and I still remember this, this one crop in— it was an alfalfa crop in Pennsylvania. It's a couple hours east of where I live. That we, in a single cutting, we doubled the plant biomass per acre, doubled the dry matter per acre. And you looked at the nutrient levels, the nutrient levels were higher on a dry matter percentage, on a percentage basis, but they were more than double because when you combine the dry matter increase with the percentage increase, it was a substantial increase in in nutrition that we had not applied. There was no calcium in our foliar application, but the quantity of calcium that was absorbed from the soil was 3 times greater where we had put on the foliar application. Wow. How do you explain that? Right. And the explanation is that when you get the foliar design right when you get it correct relative to what the crop actually needs. Now, what produces a growth response? Not necessarily nitrogen, phosphorus, whatever. It's not something that produces a visual growth response, but you— when you optimize it to increase the plant's photosynthesis, all of a sudden the plant sugar production can go up dramatically. What we've measured this extensively, and anyone can measure it, these— the, the licor instruments, the instrumentation to measure plant photosynthesis are readily available. They're expensive, but they're available. You can increase a plant's rate of photosynthesis by 3 to 4x. Wow. Pretty easily with a well-designed foliar application. So now that means on an acre of alfalfa, instead of producing, let's say, 50 pounds of sugar per day, you've just increased it to 150 to 200 pounds of sugar per day. So not only does that reflect itself in a plant growth and dry matter increase, but a disproportionate amount of that sugar is going to go out into the root system and feed soil biology. And all of the extra minerals that were absorbed by that plant were contributed by biology that was now being fed from the plant root exudates. So I came to realize— and again, we were putting on ounces per acre of, of product. And I came to realize that when we design foliar applications well, we harness the plant's photosynthetic engine and we get this disproportionately larger response. We put on a small amount of material and we get a much larger response out than we would otherwise expect. And that's, that's because of harnessing that engine. So, um, that, that is where I see significant opportunity. And I forget exactly how we got into this conversation originally, but I think the understanding foliar applications and harnessing them well is you buffer. What is interesting, essentially, we started talking about this, about harnessing 3 free things. Yes, you harvest, you harness, or you do a better job of utilizing those 3 free things with better photosynthesis. Sure. And most of the time that does not mean more nitrogen. Most of the time nitrogen is not the limiting factor to better photosynthesis. It's iron or magnesium or manganese or something else. It's very seldom nitrogen in commercial production agriculture because nitrogen gets consistently overapplied relative to everything else. Yeah.

Yeah, that's— that is so fascinating. And what you just mentioned, the free things, I think of atmospheric nitrogen and what does it take for a plant to cycle atmospheric nitrogen? And how much atmospheric nitrogen is above every acre of land?

Well, something like 78,000 pounds above every acre or something like that. But the way to think about it— your question is appropriate, but the way to think about it is what actually captures atmospheric nitrogen, N2, and makes it available to plants again is the microbiome. Yeah, we think of the moment we start having a conversation about nitrogen fixation, everyone's thoughts go to Rhizobium and legumes and the, the association that they have with Rhizobium. But the reality is Rhizobium is only one of dozens of species that fixes nitrogen. We have Azotobacter and Azospirillum, and on and on the list goes of microbes that have the capacity to fix nitrogen without legumes, in the absence of legumes. And what is interesting is these other microbes don't just live in the rhizosphere, They also live on plant leaf surfaces and inside plants.

That is fascinating. I never realized that. That is—

when you can have a plant that is colonized by nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and this is some of the work that Walter Goldstein has been doing at the Mondamin Institute, and he's been collaborating with James White to, to document this. They are developing these corn varieties propagating these old corn genetics that are— and they're specifically selecting these varieties to have a microbiome that has the ability to fix its own nitrogen. Wow. And they've been very successful at achieving that by not feeding the crop nitrogen, making sure that it doesn't have free nitrogen and excessive electrolytes while it's being propagated.

That is so fascinating to me. That's exciting to think of the future of what might be coming down the pipe in soil health communities and hopefully more widely known.

It'll become more widely adopted when nitrogen becomes expensive enough. Yeah.

Yep. Which makes me wonder what that point is going to be. I know I did have some producers reach out to me that knew I did some compost extracts and things like that. And one guy that even plants my corn was saying, I think I'm going to do that. I didn't buy my starter fertilizer this spring or this last fall, so I'm going to do a biological starter for my corn this year, like, like I'd been doing. And that's just really exciting to hear that because that's just in my small community, at least one guy that's starting to think a little bit differently about it. And because they got high enough for him, we could talk for truly days, and I think we wouldn't run out of things to talk about. I want to be respectful of your time. You've been very gracious with us, and I'm so appreciative of that. I have 4 questions that we can end on, and, uh, and you can be as quick as you want. They can be one-word answers if you want, and I know it's sometimes tough to do that, but I decided to call this side Deep Roots Practical Application and just kind of getting to the root of kind of 4 pillars here. And the first question is, if a grower wanted to improve crop performance without simply increasing inputs, where would you encourage them to focus first?

2 things: seed treatments of effective biologicals such as our BioCoat Gold, which I have a lot of experience with, and second, well-designed foliar applications later in the season.

Perfect, that's fantastic. Looking ahead, this question 2, looking ahead, what do you think will separate the most resilient and profitable farming systems from the rest? What's going to make the operation more resilient? Not just growing commodities.

It will be necessary to add further value. It will be necessary to develop a relationship with the end customer. You know, there's all of this complaining about how small a fraction of the consumer retail dollar the American farmer receives. Well, maybe we should take a look at what fraction of a new pickup truck the iron ore miner receives, because that's exactly the mechanism in the way that most American farmers are behaving, is they're behaving as raw materials producers. So compare your income to the other raw materials producers. The, the money has never been and is never going to be in raw materials commodity production.

It's going to be in value adding. Very, very good answer. What is— what— question 3: What is one idea about plant nutrition that you believe will become much more widely understood in the next decade?

Um, well, I've, I've said in the past that the, the history of agronomy has been based on chemistry, understanding chemistry, whether that's nutritional chemistry or a product, fungicide, insecticide, biochemistry, and so forth. The future of agronomy is going to be in a combination, combining chemistry with biology and biophysics. There's an emerging understanding of the impact of redox and what that means from a biological management perspective. The reality is agronomy has historically been framed in terms of chemistry because that's the one thing we were relatively easy— we were, we were able to measure in a relatively straightforward manner. We weren't— we didn't have the technology to measure biology 20 years ago like we do today. Yeah. So I believe the future of agronomy is going to be based on a biological approach, and that's certainly becoming— already becoming more widely understood. Yeah, absolutely.

And you're a huge part of that. We so appreciate you bringing that to, uh, to the world because it's so important. And finally, I actually changed my final question, uh, because I want to kind of hone in on this one. Where do you think the biggest disconnect is between how farmers observe their fields and how agronomy recommendations are made? Where's the disconnection— disconnect between the soil and the farmer?

Well, maybe the question to ask is, are the farmers observing their fields?

It's a great question.

Um, I'll answer the question this way. One of the things We started in 2013, we started analyzing all the recommendations that we made to growers for their ROI. What was the ROI of a seed treatment inoculant versus a foliar application in different settings and different contexts? And so every year at the end of a growing season, we'd have this list of hundreds of growers that we had worked with, and we would rank the relative success of their crops and their agronomic performance on a scale of 1 to 10. And we would put these various groups together and we would compare the differences between the two groups. And talk about a revealing exercise. We learned so much about agronomy. We repeated that exercise year after year after year. But after several years, the differences that emerged were no longer agronomic. They were management-related. And what was interesting I put together this webinar, and it's one of my early podcast episodes as well. What are the characteristics of exceptional farm managers that just get exceptional results? And one of the characteristics that I think is often overlooked is the, the most successful farm managers really honed in on what are the factors that made them money, that determined their financial success. And they refused to delegate that knowledge of managing those factors to anyone. Not to an agronomist, not to a vet, not to— they made sure that they understood those factors very well. So on one of the examples that I've used in the past when discussing this is on cherry production. Historically, when cherries were largely exported, and still even to this day to a degree, The factors that determine a cherry grower's profitability are size and firmness. That's it. That's what it comes down to, size and firmness. And the most successful growers refuse to delegate the knowledge of how to produce large, firm cherries to their advisors. They want to know it themselves. Right. And there are far too many growers today who want to delegate all of the specialty knowledge to their advisors. They don't know themselves, and so they don't, they don't know enough to refute bad recommendations. Wow. And the reality is we have much of agronomy today— I would suggest the majority of mainstream agronomy is applying nutrients that are in unhealthy forms at the wrong time. We have excessive— the majority of disease and insect problems, and the majority of fruit quality problems, the majority of why we have poor pollination and all kinds of, of kernel and seed size challenges are because of excesses of the wrong things being applied at the wrong times. It's not that potash isn't necessary. It's essential. It's required. But you put— you have the plant have elevated levels of it during the bloom and pollination period, it will cost you yield. You will have a yield drag effect from nitrogen and potassium being applied at the wrong time. And majority of crops are experiencing that today. Yeah, that is really interesting.

That is a very, very good answer. It's, it's people that I never really thought of that people that are delegating the most important parts of their operation. I know I've, I've heard it before that if we make our living from the soil, isn't it in our best interest to know what's going on in it? And I think that is if we're relying on the soil, we need to make sure that everything we're doing to it is paying us back and not taking our money.

It comes down to the Pareto principle. 20% of the things you do produce 80% of the results. Right. And yet for us as farmers, we spend 80% of our time focused on the wrong things. And so to come back to the question that you asked, these— the, the top producers, the people who are getting the best results, they actually pay close attention. They are out there, they are observing, they're observing. It's like one of the best apple growers that I know is, uh, he's consistently between 2 and 3x the regional average on apple production, just consistently has been for years. Yeah. He makes it a priority to spend 2 hours every day walking through his orchard, just observing, just paying attention. And that has paid him immense dividends. Yeah, absolutely.

That observation is, is key in making sure that your money is going to work for you and not just being wasted. And also just that things are functioning as they should. And that is fantastic advice. That is a wonderful place to end our podcast. I wish I could talk for another 2 hours with you, John, but I know you have way more important things to get to. But I so appreciate all your time. And where can people go to— I know I mentioned the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. They can come and check that out. They can get hours and hours of content from you there. Is there any other way, uh, they can connect with you?

Lots of places. I'm on a number of different social media platforms, but I think the, the most important place, the team that I work with every day, is the team at Advancing Eco-Agriculture. You can find us on our website. I teach a lot of webinars that have been put on YouTube, and I don't know, we might change up that strategy because now AI is being trained on all of our content. So we might take that private behind a subscriber wall or something like that on the website, just because it's interesting when— if one person tries to learn everything that we put out there, kudos to them. It's going to take them hundreds of hours of learning, and we respect that and admire that and promote that. But AI and, and just making that information more readily available to people who don't really fully understand the full context can be challenging. So there's lots of places to find our information. And yeah, please reach out to us. Oh, and you do need to try pinion. You do need to try that because you can— if you can replace synthetic fungicides, it's a big deal. We'd love to have you experiment with it. So thank you all for listening.

Fantastic. Absolutely. Well, thank you again, John Kempf. We so appreciate it. All of our listeners are better for having heard this conversation. So thank you so much again for your time.

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.