Podcast Extra: Working Cows Podcast Episode 393 with John Kempf

John, thanks for joining me again on the Working Cows podcast. Welcome back, Clay.

Thank you so much for having me back. It's quite an honor. It's surprising to me how much time has gone by since I was here in our previous conversation. I need to have you over to my podcast for a conversation as well.

Well, I look forward to that opportunity if it, if it materializes the. Yeah, six years. Six years is too long. But we've both been doing our own thing and very, very much appreciate all the work that you've been doing over those number. And today, this is releasing the day, Lord willing, this is releasing the day before the 2024 presidential election. And throughout the process of the lead up to that election, there have been many conversations that you and I both have kind of probably had to close our mouths at. Like, wow, I can't believe we're actually hearing people who with influence in presidential campaigns talk about the need for regenerative agriculture to fix the health crisis in America. So I want to talk to you today about making America healthy again and kind of your thoughts on how we would go about regenerating and I think probably relocalizing on some level our food system. Do you think that both of those things are important or one of those things is more important than the other?

Oh, my goodness. You want to have this conversation in an hour? This is such a big conversation. You know, my kind of stark realization, I did something 15 years ago that wasn't easy, but I do wish more people would have an appetite for, and that is we were mainstream, very heavy pesticide users. And there wasn't a lot of information available at the time. There is more information available now, although it's not nearly enough. But I started digging into and understanding, trying to understand the exact modes of action, the exact mechanisms for various pesticides, how they influenced living organisms, both the target organisms that they were going after, and also the implications that that then had, that those modes of action had for perhaps similar or related metabolic pathways in the human body. And you do that homework and you try to really understand it and it will freak you out. It will really freak you out. And so we look at, and kind of in parallel with that, I was looking at all the data of pesticide performance in the environment. You know, it's been a while since I looked at this closely, but if I remember correctly from there's this, this chart and this graph is out there. Folks can find it online. But Roughly around early 1970s, the U.S. the trend was we were losing somewhere between 6 and 7% of our gross crop production domestically every year to insect pests. And there was a certain level of insecticide use. I forget exactly what the number was. But from early 1970s until late 1990s, pesticide use, or specifically insecticide use, increased by 7x in pounds of insecticides applied, pounds of active ingredient applied, and our collective crop loss to insects increased from 7% to 16%. So if you look at that from a very macro perspective, the argument for the effectiveness of insecticides isn't particularly strong. Now, on an individual grower level, then sure, there's a lot of comfort and reward there. But anyway, to come back to your question, you know, we have this. Anyone who's paying attention, anyone who looks at the statistics and the numbers, is justifiably appalled at the erosion of health that we have in our society. We have, in 10 years we went from 5% of young adults and children under the age of 18 having an autoimmune disease to 18% in 10 years. That ending date of that research I think is two years ago. When we look at all of these degenerative illnesses, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, all long term degenerative illnesses, they're on this steep upward increase over the last two or three decades. And we have to ask ourselves the question, how did we get here? What are the contributing factors that are contributing to this dramatic increase? And this is not an agricultural problem alone. There are also problems of food processing and food additives and there are also problems of other environmental exposures, perhaps WI fi and electrosmog. There's a combination of contributing factors. It is not agriculture alone. However, agriculture is also not completely innocent. Agriculture and the food production, the toxins that we put in our food supply are at least a contributing factor. And many would suggest a significant contributing factor. I think it's hard to untangle and unravel exactly to what degree these various factors contribute. But I think many would agree that the two most significant contributors are ultra processed food food additives and our methods of agricultural production and the quality, or lack thereof of the products that we are producing.

So yeah, that. No, I appreciate that. I think that's definitely, definitely true. Definitely something that we, you know, I mean, just think about that we 7x the spend or the amount, the amount of money or amount of pounds applied. 7x the amount of pounds applied for doubling the, the insect loss. More than.

By the way, these were.

Yeah.

And these were not snapshots of a single year in time. This is a graph. This is graphed data over multi year trajectory and There was this, the data was very clear. The more insecticides that we collectively applied, the greater the crop loss to insect pressure. It's not a great case if you're selling insecticides.

Yeah, well, and I think, you know, just think about it. Again, I keep on saying this, but we, we live with a very small view of our world and we think that the way it is now is the way it always has been. But just think about it. Did Doritos exist before World War II? Did, you know, insert any highly processed food into that? Did that exist before World War II? It becomes pretty plain that things have changed drastically in our food system.

We also tend to have a very short sighted view of how the things we are doing currently, the environment that we're living in, the food that we're eating in, is affecting the current young generation and future generations over the course of their lifetime. You know, you go back, I don't know, take a date 20 years ago, maybe 30 years ago, depending on where you were in society. But somewhere in that approximate time period, tobacco, the use of tobacco really fell into disfavor. And yet there are people, and there are still holdouts in pockets of society to this day where tobacco use is a status symbol. And they will say, well, my grandfather smoked until he was 95 and he was perfectly healthy and happy and vigorous. And the answer is yes, he did. But what was the formative environment? What was the formative environment that he grew up in and that his body was developing in during his boyhood and his teenage years? And you know, when we look at the embryo development process of how ovaries develop, when you're sitting beside a lady, you're sitting beside five generations of women, the two that came before her and the two that come after. Any daughter that she may have has the ovaries for the next generation already present in her body when she is born. In other words, the ovaries of the second generation are a reflection of the diet of the current generation. And there was this fascinating study, it was done on the long term implications of glyphosate. I forget who published this, this is several years old at this point, but they fed trace amounts of glyphosate. In fact, I don't think they fed glyphosate directly. They just simply fed GMO corn that had measured amounts of glyphosate in it, along with the same variety, the identical variety of GM corn that had no measured traces of glyphosate to the parent generation. They did not feed it to the subsequent generations, they just fed it to the parent generation and they found that they continued the study for five generations and they found they had the peak of the most degraded health outcomes, severely degraded outcomes in generations three and four and five. Those had much more significant negative health outcomes than generation one and generation two. And we think about, we need to think about that. What is the long term implications? We do not, we don't have long term insights. If you look at glyphosate from a simple perspective, from another perspective perspective, glyphosate is getting all the heat for the last half a dozen years. Why is it getting more heat than some of the other compounds that are, that are out there, that are, many would argue, are arguably more toxic? I think part of the answer to that is simply that it's been around longer and it's been more widely used and we have more data around it. There's a very plausible argument to be made that there are many other compounds that we're actively using that are significantly more toxic and we just haven't figured it out yet. You know, 70% of all this is a different field, slightly different topic, but it still relates. When the USDA approves a new, not the USDA, when the FDA approves a new medicinal compound, the new pharmaceutical, 70% of them are recalled inside of 10 years or have a warning label, either recalled or a warning label, or there is further refinements of the warnings in the development of that drug, 70% of them. What if we looked at pesticides as closely as we looked at drugs? We don't.

What I think I hear you saying is that grandpa could smoke until he was 95 because he wasn't. He didn't grow up and his mom didn't grow up swimming in a sea of petrochemicals. Is that what you're trying to get at?

That's in essence exactly correct, yes.

Yeah.

There is something to be said about the biblical principle of the sins of the fathers being visited on the third and fourth generation.

Yeah. Yeah. We live in a covenantal world, Right. We live in a world that's ruled by covenant and. For sure, absolutely. So, yeah, back to the original question. I think you are involved in work on both of these prongs, right? Relocalizing and regenerating the food system. Would that be fair?

Yes. Are they different? I suppose they are in some ways.

But I think you could probably do one without the other, right?

Well, yeah. So I think when we think about regenerating food supply, there are multiple dimensions of this that need to happen. One is what I've emphasized so far is reducing the toxin load. That's one aspect. Actually producing food that has exceptional nutritional quality and nutritional integrity, as I like to describe it, is another aspect. And those kind of behave in parallel, but it's not a perfect parallel between the two. And then, of course, relocalizing and regionalizing food production as well. Do you know that the United States imports something like 45%, or it might even be greater than that of our fresh fruits and vegetables every year are imported. How much sense does that really make from a food sovereignty and a national food security perspective? And then there is also. But to accomplish all of those things. When you think about regeneration at its most fundamental level, regeneration is fundamentally about regenerating relationships. Regenerating relationships between livestock and the landscape, between plants and the soil, microbiome between people and the landscape. And ultimately we also need to include regenerating relationships between the human organizations and the people that are around the farm and their relationship with the farmer. A degraded relationship, an unhealthy relationship, is a relationship that is extractive. It is selfish, it is seeking to win at the expense of someone else. And that's exactly the relationship that surrounds farmers in many cases, both from their input providers as well as from the people who are buying their products from them. The offtake as well. On both sides, we have people who are unwilling to participate in the risk and they are unwilling to be unselfish. In many cases, they protect themselves and is the farmer that assumes all the risk. This is the definition of an unhealthy and degraded relationship. Regenerated relationships are relationships that are truly collaborative and synergistic. And you know, we talk about, in biological systems, in the soil, microbiome and plants, we talk about symbiotic relationships, relationships that are mutually beneficial, that are not selfish. Those are the types of relationships that we as farmers need to engage in with the rest of the supply chain, with consumers, with the people who are buying from us, the people who we are buying from. And in my opinion, we will be unsuccessful in the long term in achieving regenerative agriculture from the perspective of reducing pesticide use and improving higher, producing higher quality food. Unless we are successful in first addressing the relationship between the supply chain and producers, it is as long as that particular relationship remains extractive, then necessarily by default, the farmer's relationship, he is forced into a situation where he has to be extractive to the land and to the farm that he's responsible for stewarding.

Can you give me an Example of what a regenerated relationship between the farmer and the supply chain would look like.

Oh, I have a beautiful example of this. And I need to have a conversation with a couple of my colleagues from the Netherlands and Belgium and refresh on this, because I experienced this story several years ago and I need to refresh it. But in this tiny country of the Netherlands, there is a grocery and fruit and vegetable distribution supply chain or grocery chain called Albert Hain. And the food buying habits of the Europeans tend to be very different from what they are here in North America. You buy enough food for dinner and for the next day on your way home from work, so the food is very fresh. You don't store a lot of food in your house usually. And so the Albert Hain chain at the time when I was sharing this story represented, if I recall correctly, something like 60 or 70% of the total food distribution in the country. They were significant, had a significant presence, and they were as ubiquitous as Starbucks are here. They're in every bus station, in every train station. They're all over the country. Albert Haine had a very. Developed a very close relationship with a farmer cooperative distribution chain or co op called Bakker. So Bakker is the logistics and distribution cooperative that is owned and operated collectively by the farmers. And then you have the farmers, those three organizations, none of them had salespeople, none of them have buyers. They all have completely open financial transparency. They all see each other's books. They know exactly what everyone else is making and what their profit margins are. The farmers set the retail price point for the produce that is on Bakker's shelf. And the farmers determine what products are going to be sold on sale and what the sale price will be. So here's an example of this beautiful supply web in a very compressed geographic space. And you know the best part, they have a target of getting fresh fruits and vegetables from the field to the consumer's refrigerator in 24 hours, which is a target that at the time they achieved over 90% of the time. Isn't that incredible? Of course, they have a lot of geographical advantages and cultural advantages to making that happen. But that's still a remarkable logistical feat. But it's also a remarkable feat of human collaboration. Think about the level of trust that needs to be developed between organizations and between people to have that level of financial transparency and accountability.

And this isn't a story that you read in a history book from the 1930s.

This is. No, this is. I had conversations with the people who were actively doing it.

Yeah, I mean, because we do hear stories like that from people who grew up in this country in the 1930s, and they'd take their cream and their eggs to town on Saturday night and get their cream and their egg check and buy their groceries, you know, for the week. And that was kind of part of the supply chain and the way it worked as recently as, you know, the 1930s, 40s, 50s even, maybe the industrialization, I think, really ramped up in the. In the four after the World War II, you know, as. As I understand it. So that was when a lot of this started to shift. What are some of the keys, in your experience, for making this happen from the farmer's perspective, from the producer's perspective? You know, you said a lot of these are in this kind of extractive relationship with the supply chain. And so then they are kind of forced to be extractive of their land resource to meet the supply chain demands. What are some of the keys for farmers being able to make this transition?

Boy, you ask. You ask a very good question that I actually think has an answer that is easy in principle and challenging in practice. And kind of. To preface my answer, I'll offer a bit of a sidebar, which is that we now have. You started our conversation by talking about the current political campaign for the presidential election that's coming up. And it's really fascinating to observe the political dynamics, because here we have the Trump campaign and the alliance with Bobby Kennedy, talking about the need to make America healthy again. And one of the things they're talking about is agriculture and the challenges with pesticide use, the challenges with the types of food that we're producing, the seed oil production and so forth. And yet politically, many in the agricultural community have supported Trump historically. There's historically a strong political alliance between the agricultural community and the conservative end of the spectrum, and Trump specifically. And so I imagine there has to be a certain level of unease amongst the commodity groups and even amongst farmers to just think about, all right, what exactly are the implications of this? What does the future look like? And of course, the place we go to with our lizard brain is immediately thinking about, well, how is this going to impact me and what do I need to be afraid of? So this is a particularly germane conversation to this moment. I think the answer to your question is we need to reduce our vulnerability to the commodity supply chain. In essence, we need to decommoditize ourselves. Now, what does that mean exactly? That can mean a hundred different things. That can mean forming a close relationship with the people who are buying Your.

Product.

Perhaps that is consumers directly, but for many farmers it's probably not. But perhaps it is not just selling your product or your grain production to the elevator, but taking it all the way through and selling it to the people who are actually incorporating it into a recipe somewhere. CPG companies and so forth. I find it interesting. I've never attended Expo west, but I have dozens of friends who attend every year and there is this recurring refrain that there are dozens, actually, it's probably safe to say, hundreds of emerging CPG companies, small to mid scale, who are desperate for high quality, locally, regionally sourced, regionally grown ingredients that they cannot find. And they don't know who to call. They do not know who to call. Some of the most successful farmers that I know of who are in grain production, who've been successful at decommoditizing themselves, went to Expo west to look for buyers and found all the buyers that they needed in a single year. Now, decommoditizing yourself can mean many different things, but one thing it does not mean is sitting back and waiting for the market to come to you and being frustrated when it doesn't. It requires effort, it requires energy. And I'm very clear that this is something that this is something that comes easily for me, but that doesn't come easily for many other people. And so to me, I always have this reaction that, well, this is easy, just pick up the phone and start calling people. I'll give a personal example. A couple of years ago there was a group of local farmers that wanted to sell and they have succeeded in starting a local cooperative to sell direct to consumers. It is a meat and animal products plus vegetable fruit products as well, but it's really focused on animal products. Weekly box delivery in the greater Northeast Ohio region. And they were sitting around this table talking about, well, how are we going to find customers and how are we going to get things started. And I have great respect for these individuals and I applaud their innovation and their success. But I was intrigued by the conversation because. And finally I shared with them a personal story. About a year or so prior, it was less than that. Six months prior, I had started a honeybee business and I had my first significant honey harvest of my own honey, which was comb honey. But then I'm producing exclusively comb honey. But then I also worked with a group of other local beekeepers to sell honey that was being produced without any chemicals being put into the hives. And I started on the phone, I started making phone calls and in two days I sold an Entire year's worth of honey production from a group of about a dozen beekeepers. And to me, the idea of being puzzled about how are you going to find customers has always been a bit of a puzzle, because the answer to me is simple. You pick up the phone and you start calling people. So, anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent here, but I think the fundamental answer is we have. Going back to the Maha conversation and the unease, the discomfort that farmers have with how the political dialogue is evolving. We have discomfort because we perceive we are at the mercy of the marketplace. But that is a choice that we've accepted to some degree. Ultimately, we are responsible for our own destiny. And certainly federal policy, agricultural policy and so forth has guided farmers like. I'm not faulting or blaming growers. We are in this situation together because the powers that be. And we followed the course of the policies that were put in place, the incentives that were in place, and here's where we've ended up. And we also have to accept responsibility for following the easy pathway that was set out for us. Many other farmers chose not to take the easy path, and they are in a much better place. So stepping outside of the easy path and being willing to take the initiative and to take responsibility on our own is, on the one hand, it's very intimidating, but it's also incredibly rewarding because it gives us the opportunity to be in a very different space in the near future.

Yeah. Broad is the way that leads to destruction, am I right? It's maybe a little. Maybe a little too far of a stretch, but I don't. I don't. I don't know.

Well, it's. It's. To the. It's the way that leads to being a financial serf.

Right? Yep.

For sure. Farmed.

You know, I mean, just think about it. How many. How many producers, how many farmers in the I states sell food off their place directly to their neighbors?

If you grow anything other than corn and soybeans in Iowa, it's considered a specialty crop. And alfalfa is a specialty crop in the state of Iowa.

Right, Right. And even that's a forage crop, which would have to go through a ruminant before it would become useful.

Right.

I mean, so. And then you think about the influence that the I states have on agricultural agriculture, broadly of, you know, we're all in this game of who's got the highest yield and who can grow the most, you know, bushels per acre. And that becomes the. The metric of success rather than profit per acre, rather than Did I sell nutritious, nutrient dense, healthy food to my neighbor? You know, I mean, that's the definition of success in farming. If we want, you know, I think it should be at least part of the metric.

I think we would all do ourselves a significant disfavor if we assumed that the political campaign of the moment is bringing attention to this issue and that this too shall pass and we will return to the status quo in another year or two or five years from now. I think the status quo, as it has been up to several years ago and still exists in this moment for many growers, is rapidly becoming obsolete. In fact, you could suggest has already become obsolete and is just gradually being replaced.

So.

If we truly want to develop a viable, a long term, viable farming operation for the future, one that can be successful into the future, we have to look at all of these pieces producing healthier, higher quality food that people actually want to eat. We have to decommoditize ourselves. To do anything else is to accept that our farm at some point is going to be purchased by investors or other growers and that there is going to be increasing, continued consolidation for a few commodity crops. What I see is this increasing divergence, these two parallel pathways, and the pathway of conservation agriculture. Organic agriculture started out as this tiny trickle, this tiny stream that was hardly merited attention even a couple of decades ago, and even today it's less than 10% of production. But regenerative agriculture is having its moment in the sun. It hopes to correct some of the challenges that organic agriculture encountered. We will see how that shakes out in the next five to seven to 10 years. But I think this is a genie that you cannot put back into the can with what happened during COVID and the increasing realization that we have this epidemic of degenerative illnesses and the implications for agriculture's role in that this is not going away. It might encounter stiff headwinds from all types of directions, but the issues are not going away and people are not going to remain silent until they are resolved.

So you at Advancing EcoAg have a broad, I think, experience with a lot of different acres across the country. I don't know if it's concentrated more in the Northeast or not, but I mean that you, you have many people out on many different kinds of acres. And so I'd like to get some examples of people who have decommoditized themselves, what have been some of the crops that they've been able to switch to. If you have examples from the West, I'm all ears on that. You know, and would love to hear some of those examples as well. But what are some of the crops that you find? You know, these high value crops, these high value crops that can generate current year returns. Some of those examples, oh my goodness.

There are. So at the moment we are working on close to 5 million acres and that represents close to 100 different crops. Quite a bit of crop diversity in that mix. Fruits, nuts, vegetables of all types. But, and there are many examples that I could give of growers of these various crops who are doing very well. And I have, I have a number of examples on, on my podcast and the, the folks that I interview and the growers I have conversations with. But before I go there, I want to, I want to respond to a point that you made. I'm actually not suggesting that people need to change the crops that they're growing when they, quote, unquote, decommoditize themselves. They don't, they don't need to change the crops they're growing. They need to change the type of people who they are selling to and the quality of the crop that they're producing. So I'm going to go all the way to the most extreme end of the spectrum that I can think of. Just to give you a very extreme example. There's a farmer in north central Illinois who is growing a variety of very unusual and uncommon crops for sale into the Chicago market to high end restaurants and others. And he is growing an old variety of Native American, old Native American corn variety. There's an eight row corn that has a particularly unique flavor profile. And the way that it's harvested is intended to be harvested and roasted and then ground into cornmeal. It's roasted on the ear and then ground into cornmeal after it's been roasted. The last I knew, it's been half a dozen years since we had this conversation, but the last I knew, he was selling that roasted cornmeal for $8 a pound. He's still growing corn.

Let me tap on my microphone. You didn't say $8 a bushel.

No, I said $8 a pound. Now that's an extreme example that doesn't fit a lot of people. Not a lot of people have access to that market. There's not a large volume for that market. But what if instead of growing corn, you sold cornmeal? What instead of growing the list? I, of course, I spend my life constantly coming up with new ideas and helping farmers of all types do these things. And so to me, the opportunity seems almost limitless. It's almost endless. There is so much opportunity, there's so many different things that you can do with the crop that you're already growing. It's for example, if you're growing corn, you have the setup, you have the equipment, the machinery, you have the capital investment to continue growing corn. How can you produce, how can you decommoditize yourself growing corn? Well, as it happens, look at what Charlie Brown is doing in Wisconsin with brown seed genetics. He's producing very high oil content corn with a specific carotenoid profile, high beta carotene corn that is in very high demand as poultry feed. And he's growing, he's actually propagating the genetics. His corn seed genetics are being exported all over the world. The majority of them are being grown in the Middle east because he has this extremely high quality, nutritional quality corn for livestock feed. And they recognize that while they are growing slightly fewer bushels per acre, they are increasing the animal performance per acre and they're exporting his corn genetics all over the world. Well, what if you as a corn producer entered into a relationship with someone who's actually growing and directly feeding your corn to hogs or livestock and you said, hey, I want to be paid based on animal performance instead of based on bins and bushels? Bingo. You've decommoditized yourself and you've entered into a regenerative relationship instead of a degrading relationship, you've entered into a relationship that necessarily needs to be win, win, you both need to win. And it's those types of scenarios. You can decommoditize yourself while you're growing corn and soybeans and quote unquote commodity crops simply by entering into different relationships who are willing to pay for performance not just for bushels.

Are there certain opportunities presented by the infrastructure that exists already in American agriculture? Because I think that's a big challeng challenge for us in decommoditizing ourselves is while the infrastructure is set up to ship it to the coast and send it somewhere else. You know, and so I'm wondering if there are opportunities presented by that where we can still use some of that existing infrastructure and send it in a different direction.

The opportunity is similar to the guy who went to Africa 70 years ago to sell shoes. I'm sure you've heard the story. The first salesperson came back and said there's no market in Africa, no one wears shoes. And the second salesperson came back and said, came back with or sent back huge orders for shoes and said there's A huge market here, nobody wears shoes. And we're in kind of the same situation around infrastructure. You could say, well, it's very challenging to decommoditize ourselves because the infrastructure doesn't exist. And the other perspective is to say there are endless opportunities to decommoditize ourselves because we can build the exact infrastructure we need. Yeah, but yeah, your point is very appropriate. That there is a tremendous lack of infrastructure for processing and value adding, whatever that might mean, whether that means processing grains, processing livestock. There's not nearly a lot of that infrastructure has been lost as lost to consolidation over the last half a dozen decades. And now if we want to have regionalized and decentralized agriculture, then a lot of that will have to be brought back and to be approved of on with current technology.

Yeah. And I don't know, you know, I don't know if it was Brian Alexander's influence or not, but Temple Grandin took to saying big is fragile. Right. And we've seen that obviously with the COVID issues that were created in the supply chain. But then also right now in Denver, Colorado, I believe they are working on an ordinance that would limit or completely do away with all of the meat processing infrastructure within the city limits. Well, what happened was they built the meat processing infrastructure 50 years ago or whatever it was, and then the town grew up around it. And now the meat processing infrastructure is in the middle of the town. And a big chunk of America's lam processing infrastructure is threatened by this one ordinance. So they're again biggest fragile. If we have these big processing facilities, they can be shut down with. With the stroke of a pen. And what are you going to do now?

Yeah, that is, I think big is fragile. There's a lot of downsides and vulnerabilities to consolidation, not just in addition to being big, but also to regional centralization. Like, is it really a good idea that 90 some percent of our Apple production is located in a couple hundred mile region of Washington? Is that really healthy for us? You know, if you go back to before the big freeze, when was the big freeze? 1969 or 70, 76 maybe I forget the exact date, but Iowa used to be sixth in the nation for apple production. 6. And if you look at the numbers for potato production and flax production like we used to have significant decentralization. And historically, again we go through these, these macro cycles of what happens in the landscape. But California won out because of their. And apples in Washington are a similar example. The west coast fruit and vegetable production has historically had a Number of significant strategic advantages. Access to a skilled, affordable labor pool was one of them. An ideal climate, an arid growing environment that reduced disease susceptibility was an advantage and access to water was an advantage. If you stop to think about it, they have systemically lost every single one of those significant advantages over the last several years and are continuing to lose them. We now have. They have major soil quality issues from salinization showing up. There is no longer the abundant water, or I should say water. Water availability is going to be a continuing challenge for the foreseeable future. The labor pool is, I believe over the course of the next decade, farm labor in managing high value crops, fruit, nut, vegetable crops, is going to be replaced with robotics to a rapidly growing degree. And so all of a sudden the labor equation gets removed from the window, from the scenario as a win that they've had. And what is also happening in California is that they're increasing, putting these high value berry crops like blueberries and raspberries and so forth, they're being put in high tunnels. Well, the moment you put a crop under a high tunnel, you can put it under a high tunnel in Iowa equally as cost effectively, in fact, probably more so than you can in California. And we have more water. So you look at the historical strategic advantages that California has had are rapidly being lost and guess who's looking at it? The large scale investors are looking at it. The major companies that produce these products. I mean there's, there is vegetable production moving out of California into New York, into Kentucky, into Tennessee, it's moving east. They didn't get large by being stupid. And there is an opportunity here for innovative and leading farmers to be on the leading edge of this necessary, from a climate perspective, necessary decentralization. But to your point, infrastructure is required, investment is required.

What are you focusing on for the next, you know, you can pick your times, timeline if you want, but what are you focused on focusing on to help move this ball of making America healthy again down the field at advancing EcoAg? Specifically, what are some of the things you're focusing on over the next year? Five years.

Oh my goodness. The challenge with asking that question about focus is that you're assuming there is a focus and there necessarily is. There is a great deal of strength in limiting and confining the projects that you're focused on. But I have the luxury, I have the benefit of being surrounded by an amazing team of people and I'm working on different projects with many of them and they are then being able to bring the focus to bear on a specific project. So various things that are happening. We are, we're rapidly developing our integrity grown verification that has taken off in, was originally developed for cotton. And the demand for that verification has been much higher than I expected. So we are rapidly expanding that to other crops. Our research work in agronomy and in our product development has been such a joy to work with over the course of the last couple of years. We are making so rapid advances. You know, when we started working on cotton five years ago, prior to that moment, prior to us working with our first cotton grower, I knew nothing about cotton, no experience with it. And yet in that first year, right out the gate, we were able to get about a 60% yield increase with adapting what we knew about plant physiology to that crop. What has been fascinating is that all of the significant results we've been able to get historically, we are now at the stage where we are already experiencing the next generation of results in our research projects. And we're a year or two away from a lot of releases into the marketplace. And I'll just give you one example of an idea that has been percolating for a while. This summer I was privileged to be invited to speak at Joel Salatin's place for the Stockman grass farmer event that they had. And while we're there, we're having a conversation about endophyte toxicity on fescue. And I started thinking, you know, okay, I know nothing about this particular endophyte or these couple of endophytes. I don't have a ton of experience on fescue, but I do understand how endophytes express themselves in plants generally because this is a common phenomena that we to want work with in other crops. And if what we have learned in other crops can be transferred to fescue, then it should be conceivably possible to either. There's a couple of possibilities. Either A, we greatly reduce or possibly even shut down the synthesis of these, of these mycotoxins, or B, their synthesis is continued, but we reduce their toxicity, or C, we change the animal's metabolism so that the animals are no longer affected with it. And all of these ABC possibilities that I've proposed would be a reflection of a change in the, in the fescue plant's nutritional status. And so this is an idea, of course, I have no idea whether it has merit or might work or not. I start doing some digging and some research, and within 10 minutes I discover that I'm not the first person to have had this idea. And that there is. There were several papers published back in the. One of them was in the 70s and one of them was in the 50s describing specific nutritional supplementation to livestock to remediate and to fight toxicity. And oh, by the way, they had an extremely high rate of success, but the work was never commercialized because there were no incentives like the. The nutrients that they were talking about are effective when they're put onto the field at an application rate of a few ounces per acre. So in one sense, it's premature for me to even talk about this because we haven't done it yet, but this is an idea that we're going to work on. Can we develop a foliar application that has these trace nutrients in small concentrations that are affordable to be applied onto fescue and other forages that can mitigate and defy toxicity and restore the yield potential of fescue in a meat per acre perspective? So that's one idea Clay and I have. There's like 50 of those ongoing all at the same time, so I have a lot to be excited about.

When you think broadly about this idea of making America healthy again, what are some of the things that you think this needs to be said before we wrap up this conversation? Things that we haven't touched on yet.

When we think about stewardship and when we think about the implications of pesticide toxicity and potential damage to the third or fourth generation, we should ask ourselves the question, are we being our brother's keeper? You know, there's this saying that ignorance is bliss, and many of us historically have been ignorant. There was a point in my life where I was ignorant of these challenges. But once you are no longer ignorant and you become knowledgeable, then knowledge is responsibility. And it is irresponsible of us to do nothing once we know we cannot, we should not be able to in good conscience continue doing what we have done in the past, or we cannot consider ourselves our brother's keeper, in my opinion.

Yeah, for sure. I've thought about that a lot from the perspective of, you know, marketplaces meeting, meeting demand with a product that the market is demanding and doing it in a way that is beneficial for the person receiving the product. And I connect it to the idea of loving your neighbor. You know, is this loving my neighbor to provide this whatever product into the marketplace, and are they going to be better for it as a result? You know, kind of back to that win win that you were talking about earlier. So, yeah, very good. Well, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for engaging in this conversation, albeit at a high level. I appreciate it and thank you for the examples you shared today. So John, thanks for your time today.

Thanks for having me on. I look forward to more conversations.