Podcast Short #7: Assessing the Efficacy of Regenerative Products with Kish Johnson

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. This is Jon Kempf and today I'm here with Kish Johnson, who I've had the fun of working with for the last couple of years. Kish gets to constantly have a fresh perspective on the value of the work that we do at aea because it seems every day is perspective from a distance. Tell us a little bit about your work, Kish, and what gets you excited every day.

Yeah, thanks, John. Great to be here. And yeah, lots going on in the world of AEA in general, but obviously specifically to what I'm doing. So working on our relationships with our strategic partners and helping us understand how best to expand internationally, being able to offer the same caliber of services products that we do domestically to the US and Canada. So yeah, there's lots of places we could go with that. And of course my involvement with helping cheerlead and spearhead our integrity grown efforts as well.

Yeah, we have a lot of fun with that. And for everyone who you give yourself away with your accent, tell our listeners where you're from and the history of your pathway and how you got to AEA speaking a non American accent.

I don't know what you mean about accents, John.

Yeah, all right then, well, let's just move on.

Yeah, no, yeah, originally from the UK, spent about 10 years in the Middle east before I moved to the United States and I've been here about 16. So I like to describe my accent as just basically confused at this point.

All right. I won't make any jokes about the rest of you that I could reasonably fit in there, but yeah, so you know, Kish, one of the things that I've appreciated about the perspective that you bring to our work at aea, we Advancing Eco Agriculture originally started as a consulting company 15 years ago. We had a great deal of frustration around the lack of performance of the products that were available in the marketplace. And we have to remember we're talking about 15 years ago, not 50 years ago. There were all kinds of EDTA chelates and there was limited product selection in the organic agriculture space. If you wanted to put on foliar applications or work with irrigation applications in the organic space, there was liquid fish, liquid seaweed, liquid humic substances, a few amino acid chelates, and not very much else. But it's a very different space today. And yet the space that we're in today still struggles from some of the same product performance issues that we dealt with 15 years ago that led to us developing our own products. And so I'd love to get your take on that, because you get the perspective of seeing agriculture and seeing agronomy in regions and in parts of the world where we don't yet have AEA products. What does that look like?

Yeah, it's very interesting to see that whole kind of evolution or cycle of where we started as a company having the expertise agronomically to diagnose the symptoms, the problems, and what the best course of action is, and then reaching to that proverbial toolbox for the tool and realizing a lot of the stuff that the growers were putting out, you know, wasn't moving the needle. And here we are now being able to work internationally. And that's honestly the reoccurring theme that I've seen so far in our international efforts, where very quickly, with the help of SAP analysis, of course, we're seeing that the products that are being put out there, even though there are other great products out there now, we're not, as you said. Right. AEA is not standing alone with great products. But by far and large, the reoccurring theme is still that there are products, when held under the light of SAP analysis, are not moving the needle. A great case in point is we just started working with a very large grower in Mexico. And very quickly, within the first three or four SAP tests, we had diagnosed that all of their micronutrient products weren't working at all.

All of them?

All of them were not working at all. You know, of course, with some of the combo products, you might see something like zinc come up, which is, you know, should be pretty easy to accomplish. But when you look at the efficacy and how often they were putting out.

The product and wow, I did not know this story.

Yeah. So all of them were not working. And also we not, not long after that, were able to diagnose that one of the calcium products, and they were putting out a number of calcium products too. One of those was not working at all in terms of seeing that needle move. And of course, we're able to eventually get it to a place where we could get a products in. And true to what we see time and time again here in the U.S. the response was immediate. With AEA products.

This is one of the critiques we sometimes get as an organization is that. And it's interesting to me because this criticism never comes from someone who's actually an AEA customer or who has looked at the inside of the company. It always comes from people who are not yet customers. This critique that we make our living by selling products, therefore Our information is inherently going to be biased and yet the reality is that we didn't voluntarily or willingly even get into product manufacturing. And what is interesting for me, when I look at where we are as an organization, we have a very incredible reputation that I have a great deal of pride in and that I also guard very jealously. And it is that reputation that makes me very hesitant to consider doing consulting that is disassociated from products because of this exact scenario. It's like, all right, and by the way, for all of our listeners, we are doing, we are increasing, particularly internationally, we're doing more and more consulting work that is not connected to the use of products simply because we don't necessarily have products available internationally. But then we run into these situations where yes, we're making the recommendations, but the grower actually never gets to see the benefits and the results of those recommendations because in spite of whatever products they apply, the needle doesn't move. So they never know whether our recommendations actually had merit or not.

That's right. And you know, it's just as frustrating for the growers as it is that the agronomist from AEA where you can absolutely, you know, create the understanding of what's going on, how to resolve the issue and then like you said, you reach for the solution. I mean, what good is understanding what's going on and how to diagnose it if you can't resolve the issue with the right products?

Yep. So this, I didn't, I hadn't even heard of the story of the product performance in Mexico. But what other where have you seen products perform? Or maybe a better question is what other regions other than Mexico have you worked in that you've seen this similar pattern? What are the exceptions to the pattern?

Yeah, I mean we see, you know, we see the same issues in, with products not working with our work in Turkey. We've seen that in Brazil, Colombia as well as Australia. Now is another new area and of course off the back of our recent trip to the UK as well.

Right.

There's some very low hanging fruit, no pun intended, you know, opportunities there pun fully intended for products to make their mark and to start driving change and creating profitability for farmers.

Considering isn't it true that there are growers in these areas that are already working with SAP analysis? And I would expect that other companies surely must have had similar experiences to what we had back in 2011 when we started using SAP analysis and they must also be recognizing and realizing that products are not performing and wanting to develop different Solutions. What does that look like in these different local markets?

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think there's a number of perspectives we could take on why. Right. Number one, we have definitely a number of newer product companies trying to resolve those issues they've been exposed to now, the SAP analysis technology. That's all but well over a decade at this point. Right. And we definitely have seen SAP analysis for us be the ultimate scorecard of our own products performance, but also other people's as well. I shouldn't say ultimate, but a key scorecard for our products performance as well as others. I think you have a number of pieces we've had the tenacity, the forethought and the diligence to look at, you know, products timing of application and those critical points of influence that, you know, you've created the understanding for, for growers through, through our webinars and podcasts. And I think that's a place. Right. You have to be able to understand physiologically when the best timing of those product applications are. So you've got to, you've got to be able to do trials and research to, to, to quantify that. Yeah. And so there's a number of pieces I think we could, we could look at in terms of roi, the belief of products having a significant impact. Great example from the uk. Right. A number of good friends out there, growers that are doing great stuff at large scale and now just beginning to see their ability to take those key micronutrients as part of, for example, creating greater pest resistance. And they're now starting to see that for the first time. But it's a lot of troubleshooting. You referenced SAP optimums. Maybe your SAP results of people that are using SAP analysis before can't speak today using SAP analysis. And one of the other big pieces as well is that if a grower is using SAP analysis outside of aea, but then holding what AEA says to be true against what they're seeing in the SAP results, the next question is how accurate are those optimums? How accurate are those levels to then be able to make the right kinds of recommendations? Because one of the things that I've seen repeatedly too is also that a lot of those recommended levels are off oftentimes by a factor of four, by a factor of five.

Wow. And when the desired values are off by a factor of five, are they on the low side or are they on the high side? That's a significant factor.

Yeah. I mean we would say. Right. For the, for the key role, for example, of micronutrients and the roles that they would play in creating that, the immunity. They're going to be on the low side, you know, dramatically on the low side, and so really missing out on opportunity to make in season corrections.

So this was this leads us right to the question that I was about to ask a moment ago is.

Of.

Course, SAP analysis has been around now for a couple of decades, and there are many growers using it around the world who are not AEA customers. For those growers who have been using SAP analysis, what is the common grower experience like in successfully interpreting that? And.