Practice of Biological Farming with Gary Zimmer

Hi friends, this is John. I'm passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce food of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've been fortunate to meet many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems. However, much of this knowledge and information is scattered all over the place. There are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that have not been widely shared. I founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agriculture systems become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared to. To achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone. These concepts and principles about regenerative systems can be applied anywhere and when they're properly applied, they will increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or topics of ideas that you would like for me to discuss, please connect on social media or email me. JohnGenerativeAgriculturePodcast.com Be sure to sign up for our email list@regenerativeagriculturepodcast.com Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.

Hi friends, welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. I'm back with Gary Zimmer for the second time. Gary is the first consultant that we've hosted twice in a row. Gary's had a lot of thoughts and insights that we wanted to follow up on and get it to some more detail.

Pleasure to be here and yes, we talked about some different topics and things. I look forward to it. I've been doing some thinking and searching and hopefully we can share some information here of my life experiences.

Gary one of the pieces that we spoke of a little bit this is fresh on my mind because I had a webinar last night where I got onto a soapbox a little bit was nitrogen management and some of the challenges and the opportunities with nitrogen management today and ways that we can improve it. What have you learned? Nitrogen management and how we can do.

It better so first I always start out and I tell farmers that I don't know if they all realize that nitrogen is a necessary evil, but it also can cause a lot of trouble if we go way back into the early years when everybody started growing corn and they started using nitrogen and the volume of residues grew twice as big. They said, man, this is going to be great. We're really going to grow organic matter now. Well, 50 years later, guess what? It went down. So excess nitrogen is always an issue out here and they always blame tillage. But now even with no till and excess nitrogen, you burn up carbon. So you're always balancing that carbon to nitrogen kind of a situation. So my whole thing on nitrogen is this. I think we can get people. If the recommendations are 1.1 pounds of nitrogen per bushel of corn, let's just pick on corn. I would say that we ought to be able to get that down to 0.5, where a lot of people function in order to do that. There is a lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere. There is a biological link. And they all like to talk about nitrogen credits, whether they be from a legume or a soybean or whatever they're from. And I like to talk about the fact that let's put in the term digestibility and solubility. Because you see, I was at a conference in Pennsylvania a couple years back and they had grown hairy vetch and it was huge and it was rank. And they said, we got all these nitrogen credits and the corn was sick and yellow. They said, we don't understand. We got all these nitrogen credits. And next to it they had a plot where they had clover and alfalfa that they had worked down. It was only a foot tall and it was lush and green. And that corn was absolutely beautiful, but had a lot less nitrogen credits. So what's going on is the term digestibility. Of course, being a dairy nutritionist, treating soil like treating cows is a reality. And so I said, you took that pure mature crop of vetch, ripe seeds and everything in it, and you fed it to a dairy cow. How much milk would you get? Not very much. Although you got a pile of nitrogen, it's not digestible. The young suck young clover was digestible. So I think that's a huge part of nitrogen management. Previous crops. That's why it was corn on corn and you got corn stalks. Not only don't you have something that's highly digestible, you don't have a very big nitrogen base. And so that's why starting that pre digestion a little bit earlier. So what this digestibility really is is about managing biology. Bugs that eat that young succulent clover and alfalfa are not the same ones that eat that mature ranked thing. It's a whole lot easier to digest something that's soluble than something that's complex carbons, and that's all a part of nitrogen management. So I tell people, first you got to get beyond the fact that it's a numbers game. It's not so many pounds of nitrogen, so much as I've seen some pretty incredible crops growing. We're putting low levels of purchased nitrogen. Nobody grew it without nitrogen, they grew it without purchased nitrogen. There's a huge difference. And so my whole thing is this, that as time goes on, because we farm organically, we actually do soil nitrogen tests, and we look at how we manage the COVID crops, and we always say, you gotta have a beautiful, lush, high digestible, high kind of a nitrogen cover crop. It could even be a grass. As long as it's lush and taken down at the right stage. There's a lot of milk produced on high digestible grasses. First you got to get that. If you don't have that good stand, then how do you back down on nitrogen? And I think there's now a couple of people out here, scientific researchers, some with the U.S. department of Aggotcher and one from Australia, that are now convinced that as time goes on, once you start backing off of this soluble nitrogen thing, you'll start to have more biology build up in the soil that actually can pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere. Can we propagate that? It's almost like saying, if I put a lot of nitrogen in front of an alfalfa or a soybean crop, will I get as many nodules? I think there's pretty good evidence that you won't, because the plant determines the soil life and there's a bath and nitrogen. They don't get it. So this whole nitrogen management thing, I think, gets down to our biology is the link, and we can actually grow more nitrogen. That's the only thing we can grow. Other inputs need to be provided, and we got to have these beautiful, healthy soils that got to be fed and fed the kind of materials that digest well and give us out nitrogen. Now, going through that all, how does a farmer deal with that? We'll just talk conventional, because a lot of guys go into the organic world and they want to buy chicken manure or something because they think they got to put pound per pound worth of nitrogen on here. And I don't think they really understand that well enough. Well, let's just talk about a conventional one. My thought would be, on a conventional farm, that best way to be is whatever we got for our little starters or stuff we put out there in the beginning and depending upon the previous crop and whatnot, I would start out by side dressing my nitrogen. I want to be able to split my nitrogen. And I tell farmers nitrogen is the easiest thing in the world if you're conventional. And we're back on corn again and I got whatever I start out with and then I want to come along and side dress them. And hopefully I got good enough and big enough equipment, I can side dress it even later season. I can vary my rates, I can test out what my farm, how it responds on everything. Understanding that the longer I'm at this, that's why I can't do it just once and say, oh, my farm needs 30 gallons of 32% or whatever is to say. I got to constantly keep testing it because as time goes on and my soils get better, because I want to use as little as possible and I want to put it when and where I need it. And I want to use it for a purpose. So splitting the nitrogen and then I'd like to add a carbon to it. So our whole preferred thing is we like our molasses. Or I could put a humate. I want to put something to kind of buffer it out. If I was going to use it dry, I would use some ammonium sulfate, possibly some. We use esn, environmentally smart, that polymer coated nitrogen on a lot of our conventional farms. Or I would use sulfur because sulfur can replace part of our nitrogen. So this whole nitrogen thing I think can be made simpler. Although I went through this maybe too fast, but it can also be fairly simple out here on this thing. Just like we had this meeting the other day and this guy's a hog farmer and he keeps getting response from putting on more nitrogen. I finally said to the guys, you know, maybe it's not the nitrogen, maybe it's the carbon dioxide that's giving him a response.

Exactly.

So when he puts on this extra nitrogen later in the season, he's still got residues. You know that Francis Child is the first guy to grow that 400 bushel corn. What did he say? In order to grow 400 bushel corn, you probably should follow 5, 400 bushel corn because you need those residues for the carbon dioxide release. What are your thoughts on that?

I couldn't agree more. I still see farmers applying nitrogen in the fall. And that to me is. I'm just going to say exactly what I think about it. That is dumb. That's the dumbest thing. I cannot see that making agronomic sense from any perspective, no matter how you look at it. And I was speaking about this to a grower, and I was asked the question as well, why do we get such a big response from nitrogen applications? I believe a large part of it is coming from the carbon dioxide, from the CO2 response, because nitrogen is going to solubilize our organic matter. Which, going back to a point that you made at the beginning, is why. Why have we lost organic matter with continued increased nitrogen applicants over the last 50 years?

Yeah, because we're always balancing that carbon to nitrogen ratio, that basis. And the other thing is when the guy puts that nitrogen on the fall, and I don't disagree with you, and I struggled with this one for a little while because we always say, well, let's say you're growing corn on corn. Let's start the digestion process. Because if I can get that digested down, I cut down on my disease and insects. I said, but you're boiling carbon dioxide off into the atmosphere, and there's no plant to absorb it. If you want to drive your higher yields, you want to save all the carbon you can to release it during the growing season when the corn needs all that carbon dioxide. But putting a little bit, like we're saying, even if it's a light coat of manure or maybe only, you know, 10, 15 units of nitrogen, we like to maybe add a biological to it. Maybe we'd add a little sugars to it with our molasses, and we'd spray that on those cornstalks right behind the harvest and lightly work them in the ground so the digestion process starts, and then the carbon and a little bit of that, as we add, can go into bodies of bugs. And it's not really a boil off of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That. That's different from applying 100 pounds of nitrogen in the fall. Yes.

I think the other thing on this, that's why nitrogen is such a. It's not. That's why it's not a numbers game. I tell people, just think if you farm every year, it should get better. And once you get down to having a huge population of earthworms doing all that digestion, they're 72% protein, they're 11% nitrogen. Our numbers that I read, and I don't know how accurate, maybe someone's going to argue with the scientific behind it, but 25 worms in a cubic foot, we always said, is 80 units in that area and just some old, dead, dying worms if they're there throughout the season. So now, how do you put that.

In your formula exactly and so you've mentioned that comment a couple of times that a pound of nitrogen is not. A pound of nitrogen is not all the same. And this is something that we've observed as well, is that there's this idea that it takes so many units of nitrogen to grow a bushel of grain crop and yet we sometimes see pretty extraordinary yields with sustained nitrogen levels in the soil without those volumes of nitrogen application or even those volumes of nitrogen credits showing up. How does that work?

Yeah, and that's exactly right. And it's because there's this biology link and we're getting it there. And this someone said, well, if I build my organic matter, I'll get more nitrogen releases. Well, you know, that might be a 10 year project. And we can have responses really quick because we just transitioned some more land organically. Now we grew oats, we left the straw out there, we underseed with clover and alfalfa. We did it two years in a row. So last year we worked that all back in and just like people put on manure and they said, well, you only can count 40% of the credits for your nitrogen on that manure. I said, what if I did it three years in a row? So last year we put the COVID crop back in the ground along with the straw, which would help build up my organic matters in my soil possibly, or at least gives me more fiber structural things to help improve my soil structure. Now we do it again this year and then that clover and everything is out there right now. We'll mow it down this fall. Next spring, when that gets a foot tall, we'll lightly work that in. I'm a real believer in my shallow incorporating. And then we'll plant the crop. So how much nitrogen have I really built? Some came from last year, some came from this year. I got some older stuff and I got some fresh succulent stuff I'm breaking down. So I got almost a time release nitrogen. Now we probably will put a little dairy manure on because we're a dairy farm, but we will not see any issues that I know of that we'll. We never see. Yellowing corn, we never see. Nitrogen is not our limiting factor.

That's one of the pieces that we've observed as well. I can't even begin to describe how many farms we begin working with. And of course we're working with SAP analysis. We start working with SAP analysis and the plants tell us, and the SAP analysis and the lower older leaves that they don't need more nitrogen. Many cases after we've cut nitrogen applications by anywhere from 30 to 60%. Huge numbers where we're dramatically reducing nitrogen applications. And I think this, this goes to atmospheric nitrogen fixation and the fact that that might not happen as well if you apply a lot of nitrogen up front. So I guess the question that I have in that for you is what have you observed or what have you experienced with atmospheric nitrogen absorption?

Well, that's, like I said, it's a hard one. And if I'm totally convinced that there's certain organisms that this whole system was designed to work fairly well in the beginning, there's certain opportunities that the plants determine soil life and if they need more nitrogen out here, there are certain organisms that are going to rise to the occasion. Especially if we got a base of carbon to digest from now. That all takes time. But as time goes on, my observations were that our need for nitrogen also goes down. We actually cleared some land that was in Christmas trees, which was 20 year old pine trees. And so there's nothing been grown on it for a long period of time. And it was already could be certified organic. And so we actually put a fair bit of manure out there and grow corn. And guess what happened? It turned yellow. Now the bottom ends, it wasn't a disaster, but even putting on manure nitrogen. But I guarantee you by next year or the year after, give us three years and that'll all go away. So what happened? We had to change the biology, had to rise to the occasion to fill in the gap that right now we don't have enough exchangeable nitrogen.

One of the pieces that I see being important to build exchangeable nitrogen, which you've mentioned, is that we talk about building biology, but we also have to build a food source for that biology which is not just nitrogen, but really the soluble carbon, digestible carbon, which you've referenced a couple of times. Two go together. Yep.

That makes. Yeah, that's why it's perfect sense. So I go back and I tell the farmers, it's really quite simple to manage nitrogen. You treat a, a crop that needs nitrogen like you treat a cow given 100 pounds of milk. If you're not a dairy nutritionist, those guys pretty well got it figured out. What kind of feed you got to feed that cow? Just go search it out. If you want to grow a legume or a soybean crop, you feed that like you feed a dry cow or an old beef cow. You just kind of keep it around and keeping it alive. And you use less soluble nutrients because you don't Want that animal to have all this gain and excess energy and digestibility and protein if she's just not performing well. So I think if we put that mindset onto the soils and look at them, whether it's a grass or a legume, I don't really care as much as I do that digestibility. But this is the hardest topic to get across to farmers. They just don't have a really hard time grasping the same. And I think it's common sense and.

It'S so much fun when it starts working.

Yes, it sure is. It sure is.

Let's talk a little bit about actual nitrogen applications on commercial farms. You mentioned stabilizing nitrogen by adding carbon by adding sulfur, perhaps using ammonium sulfate. What are some of the common tools that you use to stabilize nitrogen applications to make sure we get the greatest crop response?

So first of all, if we go to a farmer and they've been just putting on, whether it be urea or even in some anhydrous, we pretty well don't work with too many that do that. But there's always a few that hard to wean. And let's say they're just using nitrogen. The first thing we want to do, because ammonium sulfate is more of a slow release time release, there's some carbon with it. We tell them that you can replace 25 units of your nitrogen right up front by using sulfur. Both nitrogen and sulfur have a similar effect. They have that greening effect on plants. And so whether that's all 100% scientifically in line with what people think, but we're pretty well convinced that if a guy's putting on straight urea, and if I take out 100 pounds of urea, which is 46 units of nitrogen, and I put in ammonium sulfate, which if you add the nitrogen and sulfur together, it's 45, 21 in nitrogen and 24 sulfur. So we treat those first hundred pounds ammonia sulfate as we would 100 pounds of urea, and we just switch. So now we've reduced this nitrogen, but we haven't really induced any effect yet. So then how do I make urea more stable? That's why we struggle with that one a little bit. So I like to use a little our upfront nitrogen, preferably as ammonium sulfate. If a farmer is not set up to come back and side dress or do some of the other things we'd like to do, then we use the ESN and that's that polymer coated urea, because that gives us a bigger time release because we're trying to get, I don't want to bathe that thing with nitrogen up front. Our preferred thing, come back and side dress and we make a molasses product called Boost, which is really, it's got a lot of sugars in it, but molasses. And there's some other things in there, some yeast and stuff to help stabilize that. So I'm not one that wants to put an inhibitor in my nitrogen because it doesn't just inhibit that nitrogen transition. All these chemistries that we add to the soil have other side effects. It's just, it's more to it than, oh, I'm just going to slow my nitrogen release because it's an antibiological. I'm uncomfortable with those. I'd rather put in. I could do some humic acid. I could put in something that's going to give that nitrogen something to bind to. Now, the sugars don't perform like the humic acids. The humic acids, in my opinion, are a sponge and a holder of nitrogen, whereas the molasses are. Is actually a feeder of biology. And I'm trying, and putting a sugar is kind of buffering around, trying to get that nitrogen as fast as I can into the bodies of bugs. And so then I got it stabilized in a carbon biological cycle. And then of course, we always add some thiosulfate and make sure we got a little sulfur because that helps stabilize that nitrogen. And then putting on both sides of the row, splitting it out a couple of times is certainly. Well, you see a lot of farmers now set up to do that. Having high boys and going in there late season with their Y drops or whatever they do to put on a little extra nitrogen is a way that we can get most efficient because they're all worried, oh, if I don't put a lot on early, it's going to get away from me and I'll miss it. So I think we got tools and equipment to be able to do that. Depends on how the farm is set up. So I don't know if you have other things besides the sugars and the humix that you would add to nitrogen, but that's kind of the camp that we stick in.

I think doing nitrogen applications later when the plants are taller just makes very good agronomic sense, almost irregardless of what you're describing, because how much nitrogen does a 6 inch tall corn plant really actually need?

Yep. And then I tell everybody my story about plants and life is this. Everything is basically lazy and so what will happen, we get all that Nitrogen. We get this big top lush green growth. But the roots got lazy because all the nutrients were soluble and they were stuck right next to that poor little plant. So later on when it runs out, he hasn't built the root base and we may have burned up some of that carbon we wanted to save to later. But they haven't really set themselves up for what's coming because they have no idea. They say, well, this is the way the world is. I don't need it. Grow that bigger, better root system so I can tap into more things. And so that bigger root system. Now the plant puts its exudates in the soil and is again feeding bacteria which we should be able to scrounge and get more nitrogen availability.

And there's not only the root system effect, but also the effect on biology which you mentioned earlier, is that when in the case of nitrogen application, you may not get legume nodulation. And I think the same thing happens with azodobacter and other bacteria that are known to have the capacity to fix atmospheric nitrogen. That isn't likely to happen in an environment where there is already an overabundant supply of nitrogen. That is going to suppress biology.

Yep, that's exactly the way we feel about it also.

Yeah. And to your, to your earlier question about. We also use and make recommendations for sulfur, using lots of thiosol in liquid nitrogen applications and humic acids. We typically use humic acids at about 3% of the solution. And we find that that's enough to really hold and stabilize the nitrogen. Yes.

And so on.

Yeah.

And we will actually, because obviously. And the molasses, we tell the farmers it's an easy way to do us in a side dressing. 32% we'll take if they're putting on 20 gallons. We like to take, we like to treat the solution and take out 10%. Now that, that's about a 30% sugar kind of a thing in that molasses. There's other things in this water. So we actually tell the farmers, if you're set up the side dress 30 gallons of nitro and that's what you're going to do. Take out 10% of that solution and put 10% of this boost molasses mix in and you'll achieve. Now we reduced your nitrogen a little bit. We've never seen anybody go backwards doing that. And a lot of times they'll move forward because now we've actually done it. We've done them a favor and we actually started reducing his nitrogen.

Exactly. Have you used any molybdenum with the side dress or are you looking at molybdenum at all for the fact that it can have a nitrogen in the plant?

As a company, we don't really distribute and work with living. Now years ago I put a lot of work and effort into it on Bolivian. And of course products like that, Idaho phosphate are that we've been marketing. Everybody doesn't use as a pretty good source of living. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. I think to me, the future lies in what we're doing out here. These guys, instead of putting a starter fertilizer down that row that's got just NP and K in it, it's going to have that little cholesterol mix like I talk about. It's going to have root stimulants. It's gonna have some, maybe some kelp in it. It's gonna have some, maybe some sugars. And it's gonna maybe have in some plant compounds and maybe some of these very unique compounds like molybdenum and things belong. Because I got such a small amount. Do they belong in that little trench when I'm starting that thing out, Some root plant protective kind of compounds. I think we can do more in that root zone at planting or that little colostrum mix zone. And. But as a company, we have not moved into that category. And now we do use a lot of natural mined materials for our fer. Some of them have some of those rare kind of minerals in them. And I know one of our topics we're going to talk about was trace minerals. See, because if you look at the earth and what's been marketed, whether the companies are real or not, within the years ago, we had planters and Longboscos and we had all these different compounds. Sulfur plus, I don't know, zeolites are a little bit different. But these mined materials. There's certain mines out here that people search for to find those little rare. What's in there after. Maybe it's some of those little rare minerals. Isn't molybdenum. Do you actually add it on your guys into the fertilizer mixes?

We do. And we've observed this very interesting effect when we're looking at SAP analysis. We've observed that there is this trio of three different nutrients, magnesium and sulfur and molybdenum. When we look at plant saps, we're measuring, we measure ammonium and we measure nitrate and we measure total nitrogen. And our desire, our goal from a plant health perspective is, is to have an adequate or a generous supply of total nitrogen with a non detectable on nitrate and ammonia. We want those numbers to be zero.

Wow.

We can get there very reliably when we have magnesium and sulfur and molybdenum, all three at adequate levels. But if one of them is missing, nitrate levels go up.

Of course, it's always difficult, it's a juggling act to get all that exact into that plant. And I guess that's where you got to recognize that a lot of the farmers we work with are. I don't want, I'm not being critical or anything. I'm saying they're in kindergarten as far as understanding all these things. If we can just get them to run better sources of minerals and look at a few more things and do just a few of these practices, like even putting a cover crop in is a giant step forward. So whether we take it to this level or not, I think it's going to go there eventually. And I respect what you're all trying to do, but I think for the base of the customers we work with, that might be a little more shocking than they could tolerate.

So we've been talking about nitrogen management and a few moments ago we were describing humic substances. One of the pieces that you and I spoke about in our prior conversation was the idea of delivering nutrients much more efficiently and much more effectively using carbon based fertilizers. And I think this ties in directly to our nitrogen management conversation because really what we're talking about is the need to have a balanced carbon and nitrogen ratio in the soil profile and to hold that and stabilize it and keep the plant available. And how does that concept of carbon stabilizing nutrients transfer to other nutrients in addition to nitrogen? How do you utilize that?

Yes, and I think back to my little word of digestibility, that carbon to nitrogen thing. And we're saying that, see, in order to have the biology really do its work and break it down, trace minerals. So what about all the other minerals and how do we get them available? Some of them are just like that, molybdenum. They're pretty small additions. So how do we take that addition in very small amounts and make sure we can actually get it plant active and plant available? And so balancing carbon and nitrogen and just burning up all my carbon, those nutrients then get lost or mixed or tied up or hooked somewhere. So that's the whole other thing with carbon I like whether it be within a plant, let's say I just put some of this stuff out there and grow a plant and then manage the digestibility of that plant. I'm now going to be more time released and I'm going to be distributed better. We had a farmer the other day was asking if he's growing his cover crop now, if he should put trace spindles on it. I said cover crop is not a cover, it's not covering anything. It's actually a crop that you're using to distribute minerals for the next crop and you're going to manage it accordingly. So that nitrogen to carbon ratio comes in line in terms of digestibility. If I'm way too high in carbon and low on nitrogen, it's going to take a long time to break down. I can set myself up for disease in insects and I don't get my availability of my minerals. So if I get that high level of mineral uptake, see me as a dairy nutritionist. That's how I got introduced to some of these things way back 40 years ago was to create better feed for cows. When we started, I spent nine years at the university balancing rations based on a set of numbers. If you turn to get better digestible feed and the mineral levels in that feed are higher, that high digestible feed might have 95% of that mineral available to the cow. The stuff you buy in stones and bags might only be 40% available. So that's why we. So when we quit, when we started balancing rations to cows, I think it's the same thing with soils. We'd say, look, once you start getting these high mineralized digestible and you're managing digestibility, those feeds, you can actually cheat on numbers and cut down what you apply by at least 25%. So they would back off that ration numbers with a lot of success Once they started getting this minerals mixed in high digestible feed so in the soil it would work the same way. That was why it takes several years to really get this thing to crank out to the level. I know for us as an organic farmer, the two years in transition from conventional to organic, all we do is remineralize and grow cover crops to get that soil built up. So when it is organic it's always from perfect. But we started this whole thing about getting a higher nutrient exchange. But it's all based on first getting them out there and then getting them in a form where they go through their carbon biological cycles with plants and.

Biology essentially, Gary, what you're describing is farmers should grow their cover crops as a ration for soil biology, similar to growing a ration for ruminant biology. So in saying that you believe that farmers should manage their cover crops as carefully and as well as they do their actual crops that they're growing.

Yes, I think those cover crops need to be treated as they are my reserve to hold and release the kind of minerals that I want to release. And so then this guy the other day, he said, well, I don't, you know, I like using my homogenized tracements. He said, well, I don't have those available. He said, what if I went and just sprayed some on my cover crop? I said, well, you know, obviously, whether they get absorbed or where they go, I think that's certainly not a bad idea. And then he said, well, can I use a cheaper source of those? I said, well, they still got to be able to get into the plant, and I'm not sure how. We like our sulfate trace minerals or Achilles. I'm not sure how that would really work, but it starts that process. The last thing I want them to do is spend money and buy something and dump it on the land and just another stone added to another big pile of stuff that we already got laying in our soil.

Yeah, exactly. What I can say is what we have observed is our most successful growers, those who have regenerated soil health the most rapidly and have achieved the greatest crop responses, manage their cover crops as carefully as they do their crops. And they'll use foliar sprays, they will put on fertilizers. They will manage those crops as well as they do the crops that they're actually harvesting. Yep.

I'm 100% in agreement with that. I tell people, I was just at some farms and they had some really poor stands of alfalfa, and our cover crops were half a stand. And they said, we're not getting a success. I said, but you don't really have a very good cover crop or a very good alfalfa stand to work back into the ground to feed the soil. If your stand of alfalfa is half gone, so obviously you're not going to get all the benefits. I think you're absolutely right. I think that's a huge ticket to using cover crops or even our rotation. See, we, as a dairy farm, we only leave our alfalfa in one or two years. We like to take that beautiful lush stand of alfalfa grasses and let it get up to that high digestible stage and work it back in the soil. And everybody's, oh, my gosh, I could feed that to my cows. And I said, well, I am feeding it to my soil livestock. And they need to be fed just as well as your cows. Do.

You? Yeah, they certainly do. And I can imagine that would be difficult for some farmers to learn how to do.

I had an old neighbor, old farmer, older than me, probably in his ghost, says 90, and he stopped in one day and he said, zimmer, you're gonna wear those soils out. You're constantly growing something. And then what? They said, yeah, but I'm putting it back. I'm not taking it all. I think they got the mentality, you plant something, you take it.

Yeah. So we've spoken a couple times about trace minerals. What is the optimal way to apply trace minerals from your perspective, to get the greatest crop response? Yes.

So what? My whole thing is good because we're putting on in such small amounts. First we gotta look at sources. We got our oxides, our sulfates, our chelates, and then we got them mixed with other things. And so treasure is in such a small amount. To put a pound of zinc oxide. Zinc oxide. I'm not sure what I get out of that. Let's just take a better source like sulfate. I put a pound to the acre. I got one little crystal of zinc sulfate per square foot. Now, that's from measurements. Actually, it's kind of crazy. So then I said if I would. If I did a homogenized blend, and I took my array of trace blends, let's say it's zinc, manganese, iron, copper, boron. And we do it in a base of natural rock materials where there's other minerals, like there's nickel, there's silica, there's all kinds of other things that are in that source. Then we add humates and we homogenize on. So that whole mix, every BB's got the same analysis. Now, if I put on 25 pounds of that per acre, I got the same one pound of zinc, let's say, but now I got it distributed out here. So I got 50 of those in that square foot, and I've already got them hooked to a carbon. So my chances of having them just tied up and gone, I got better distribution. Because, see, now when I grow my next crop, I want to make sure. Some people say, well, I tested my next crop and the level isn't any higher in my crop. Sometimes they forget the fact that we've just increased their yield. Also, some pounds per acre removed might have gone up. But then in that next crop, see, now I got those minerals distributed in the stalks and the residues. And as this whole cycle keeps going round and round over time, I Just keep building those numbers up, cycling through carbon. There's all these levels of minerals have moved up also. If I'm going to remove all those and of course I'm going to have some issues. So then, so my whole thing about is these homogenized blends have been something I've been working on for 30 years. And then it's about putting them in that base of carbon. And we also try to control the ph. We want to make sure the PH is a little low in that mix. So around each little BB we can keep those analysis higher because we're trying to get them exchangeable.

Gary this is a fascinating topic for me and I'd like to give a little bit of context and background to some of the work that we've done. So we started using SAP analysis to measure the trace mineral absorption and nutrient absorption of what crops are actually absorbing. So the SAP analysis we measure 22 different parameters and it is extremely sensitive and very accurate. It shows very quickly what's happening and what's going on. And when we put on an application that the plants actually absorb, the needle moves very quickly. So about 2012 or 13 somewhere in there. We're working in southeastern Pennsylvania where there's calcareous soils, limestone based soils with pHs of 7.2, 7.4, sometimes higher. And there's challenges with chronic manganese deficiencies. Historically, growers have been applying manganese sulfate as a dry soil broadcast or even as a foliar spray. And we thought we were getting crop responses. When we're using tissue analysis, we would, we would see the tissue analysis levels increase. When we started using SAP analysis, all of a sudden we realized that even the manganese sulfate foliar sprays were not being absorbed effectively. They were still on the outside of the leaf, but they weren't actually being absorbed. As a result of that, several different growers that we were working with out there, we did experiments where they we blended manganese sulfate in with humified compost and we applied it at different plots of rates of £20, £40, £100, £200, £200 per acre of manganese sulfate small plots on an experimental basis to observe the plant response. How much do you think the manganese increased on those small plots? Even where we applied £400 per acre.

I got a feeling one probably as greatly different as one would think.

Not a single point. There was no manganese absorption from the applied manganese to the soil when it was applied with compost. We measured plant absorption for three years after the application and There was not on a single crop was there an actual crop response or plant absorption. And I have a couple of ideas of why that is and why that was going on. But I'd like to ask you the question. Your carbon based fertilizers and your homogenous blends, you mentioned a couple of different pieces that I think are important. How are those different from what I described and how are you able to get those plant responses?

Right, so now you used a humified compost to put them in and we've tried to put them to a sponge that would hold onto them. I think here's the whole thing. Let's go back to even the testing on trace minerals. And I think some of your comments came through loud like fo you're feeding manganese and doing a tissue test. Yes, it might come up because it's on the outside. You just put it there, it all got washed off. But my whole thing is this, that every soil and every biology and every tillage and every farm is kind of different on how they see and proceedings. Your soil has a certain ability to dish out minerals. And so then if we dump down 3, 400 pounds an acre, there's interactions and there's other things happening. So now you've got that mineral in the soil, it tied up with something and went somewhere but did not necessarily go into the plant. Was that a good or a bad thing? Now if we go to soil testing, manganese is one that I'm most critical of. But soil testing these things are just giving us a little bit of clues and maybe your SAP analysis is more accurate. My thing on the SAP analysis, and I'll let you address it here in a bit, is that you got to do it on a lot of basis because the weather changes, the day changes, the plant maturity changes, there's interactions of how long ago I put my fertilizers on and all these other things. But manganese is a, is one of those minerals that to me is a biological mineral. Because we're dairy people, we're constantly testing our feeds. Our feeds are more than double in manganese. So it's more than double in my feeds than what average feed would have, like alfalfa for a dairy cow. And of course, years ago I would tell people that's why my father fed oats to cows. He didn't understand, but oats are a good source of manganese because they're a fairly acidic plant and they can take out manganese where others can't. So then that gets in that oats. So that manganese is double in our feeds. But my soil test, if I send it in, it says it's low in manganese. Now, putting on more doesn't necessarily drive up more. So I tell people that's why you do have to really look at the plants, because we're testing a lot of feed for our cows. So manganese on the chemistry extraction from a soil shows low, and it might be not. Maybe I don't have a big reserve out there. Now, we'll add a small amount every year because that gives more than what my soil can dish out. But because there's a biological link and really strong, I think, on both phosphorus and manganese and maybe some others, that I get a huge uptake of manganese in the plant. So that's really what I'm after, because that's one of the signs to me, that's one way to measure good biological activity is by watching manganese.

I couldn't agree more. When you said that manganese is a biological mineral. It's one of the things that we've observed is that manganese, phosphorus and iron as well, cobalt, copper, the quantity that is absorbed by the plant is in direct correlation to the level of biological integrity and biological soil health. Biology trumps chemistry. You can have really screwed up chemistry in the soil, and as long as you have good biology, you can overcome that to some degree. But the opposite doesn't seem to be true.

And that's why I think if you look at research out here now, your little plots here, using humified compost, which would have been some biological food and things, but what was the biological activity imbalance within those soils? That's when you go to university research. You got to go to their farms and look around. If their soils are really dead and yours are not, and you're a farmer and you're just down the road and yours got a different biological, and you're growing different crops, varieties of crops and cover crops, and you're doing some really positive things out there, not using all these negative inhibitors and pesticides that go on and on. The list goes, just because they did the research at their farm doesn't necessarily help you.

That's very true. Gary. Why use trace minerals? Why the emphasis on manganese and. And zinc and boron and all these various trace minerals? What do they do for you from a crop quality and health perspective?

So I'll back up and say just a little bit, because when we were talking about nitrogen, see, when we added the sugars or the molasses to the nitrogen, we were trading dollars. We took some of the nitrogen away and we put some carbon with it. When we're taking our insecticides or our fungicides, we trade dollars on nitrogen. We trade dollars on a phosphorus starter fertilizer. We take some of that out and we put our sugars in its place. When we go to add in these trace minerals, in today's world of economy, we just added a cost. They are not cheap. And if you go out to buy them, they're very expensive. So now to a farmer, I got to live within their budget. So how do I shuffle dollars out of the farmer or I'm going to have to expect a huge increase in yield. When I think another really hard message to get across the farmers is the fact that plant health is really related to a balance of minerals. And trace minerals are huge. For fungal diseases and insect pressures on our farm, we live right in an area we've never seen the need for an insecticide. There's a lot of corn dying from fungal diseases out here. We see var little activity of that on our farm. So part of that is excess nitrogen. You suck up in that plant and I'm sure you spend a lot of time, probably more than I have, studying that, looking at this DHS and where the fungal disease is set up. But trace minerals are huge. And we've got a lot of evidence from farms. And we actually did some research at the University of Wisconsin on corn and we put our homogenized trace minerals on there. And just testing the trace minerals, well, they put it on a field where they didn't use any biotechnology because they thought we didn't want to use it, which we don't. But their corn was just diseased and brown. And we had a huge response from just a small amount of trace minerals added because we really stopped the diseases. So for a farmer, they've got to recognize that as we get this because of health and benefits and enzymes and where the trace minerals fit in there, all those regulatory things within a plant that actually promote health, stimulate its immune system, stimulate its, its ability to protect itself, I guess we'd want to say. So when you start spending money on trace minerals, you should be able to take the money away from insecticides, fungicides, pesticides and biotechnology to pay for it. But you can't say that to a farmer right up front because he has to earn the right to do that. That should be his goal. I was at a huge hutterite colony in South Dakota last week. They dropped all their insecticides. Now they're Growing huge cover crops and they got livestock involved. They're doing better balanced fertility and they've cut their nitrogens way down. They've taken their soybean yields up by over 20 bushel on just 20 inches of rain. I put one soybean plant with 508 pods on it. It's unbelievable because their biology has really changed. They dropped all their biotechnology and they're slowly getting rid of all the chemistry. So all that money now I can make up by buying nutrition not only to make my livestock and things better, make my soils better in the future. So that's the hard one to be able to stay within the farmer's budget with today's economy, because that takes time. And we just can't say, look, drop all your biotechnology and second size fungicides and put our trace rolls on because, I don't know, maybe your experiences are different, but this doesn't always work 100% that way.

I think that's one of the strengths that we've observed with SAP analysis is that yes, we do have to be on top of it and manage it like you have to manage a dairy ration. You have to measure constantly throughout the growing season, but you can actually be very accurate and predict what's happening and what's going on. We have had successes quite consistently in the first year when we started working with a grower. And we've done a lot of work in southwest Kansas working with commodity crops, corn and soybeans in these very hot, dry environments with both irrigated and dry land corn. And one of the things that we've observed with trace minerals, when growers begin applying trace minerals, the great majority of the time we cut out the mitocide applications. Well, you're talking a mitocide application that costs $40 an acre and you apply it once or twice, all of a sudden you can afford trace minerals really easily.

Yes, and I agree. Now we got to. Whether I put those trace mills. We did a lot of work. I think that's done quite a bit over in Australia where they put all these trace minerals in their compost pile. They put a lot of minerals and things in their compost. Well, hopefully that can really work. There's all kinds of ways to do it. We also got to recognize that health and insect pressure also gets a little bit. How do we prevent diseases? Phosphorus uptake is huge. We got to get high levels of phosphorus uptake. We got to make sure we got our nitrogen to sulfur ratios in line. We got to make sure we got adequate levels of calcium uptake. And we got to have these ratios between those minerals. If you have really high potassium levels and low magnesium.