Principles of Regenerative Agriculture | John Kempf, Founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture

First today we will hear from John Kemp on the principles of regenerative agriculture. And for those who don't know, John is a top expert in the field of biological and regenerative farming. He founded Advancing eco Agriculture in 2006 to help fellow farmers by providing education tools and strategies that will have a global effect on food supply and those who are growing that supply. I have a short video on John that I will share now.

Do I need to disappear for this?

I don't think so. Let me bring up the video. It. Sam sa. Wasn't too bad, right?

John didn't scare me too much. Good.

I'm happy to hear that. So that was a bit about John. As John goes through the topic, his topic. If you have any questions, please feel free to type them in the question and answer box at the bottom of your screen. And we will have a dedicated Q and A time at the end of the event where we will address all of your question. John, I will let you take it from here.

Thanks, Jenna. Hi friends. Welcome everyone. And thanks to you and Josh and Adam and David for everyone being here. We're going to have a lot of fun this afternoon. So I was asked to talk a little bit about the kind of the principles of regenerative agriculture, kind of an introduction to the different management systems that developed over the last 15 years. And you know, it's kind of interesting when you look back in recent history. We first started using the term regenerative agriculture in 2011, and it's kind of having its moment in the sun in the last three years. And it means different things to different people. So rather than using the term regenerative agriculture, I want to just offer some context for this conversation. What we're really talking about is we're talking about managing plant nutrition differently to increase the quality and the yields of the crops that we're producing. And so what does it mean to manage plant nutrition differently? Well, the historical, I call it the historical, recent modern history for the last 70 years or so has been framed around a plant nutrition model where plant nutrition has been optimized to produce the highest yields possible with very minimal or very little consideration given to quality, and particularly with very little consideration given to plant immunity and what is required to produce plants with functional immune systems and give them complete resistance to diseases and insects. And so our approach has been to try to manage nutrition from a different perspective, to say that, yes, we want the highest yields possible, and we also want robust disease and insect resistance based on how we manage plant nutrition. So it's this different approach that leads to a lot of other outcomes from plant health and soil health perspective that we call regenerative agriculture. And so I want to just give some quick introductory thoughts of how we have arrived at this spot and some of the practices, some principles and approach that we use. So with that context, I'm going to share my screen and share some of the thoughts of what have led us here. And if you have any questions at any point, feel free to just type them in and I'll be happy to respond. So when the story really begins with my own personal story and what has brought me here, and I find the video introduction to be interesting as the first time I've been introduced in that way and it gives me a lot to reflect back on over how things have evolved over the years. But my personal story really begins on a family fruit and vegetable farm in Northeast Ohio, in the snow belt south of Lake Erie, where we were growing fresh market vegetables. Our primary crops were tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe and zucchini. We also had some green beans and did some other crops on a smaller scale as well. In the early 2000s, we had a three year period, 2002, 3 and 4, in which we lost. In each of those years we lost better than 70% of each of those four major crops. And this was obviously a significant economic blow and put the farm under a lot of financial stress. But there were different diseases, different years. It wasn't always the same. We had septoria on tomatoes and bacterial spec and bacterial spot. And it seemed the more intense pesticide applications we put on, the worse the disease pressure became and the worse the insect pressure became. And it didn't help that we're in an environment with relatively high humidity. And also three out of our four major crops were cucurbits. So we had lots of challenges with powdery mildew and downy mildew in particular. Even though we had resistant varieties, we still had challenges. And this kind of was coming to a head in the early 2000s. Then in the third year of that three year period, 2004, I had a really interesting experience that kind of shook me a little bit and asked or caused me to start asking questions about what we were doing. So we had this we started in 2004. We started renting a field from a neighboring farm that bordered right up against one of our own fields. And so on the field that we had been farming, we had now for the past decade been running it in vegetables. Vegetables every year, cover crops during the winter months whenever possible And I guess I missed mentioning that my dad was also the pesticide distributor and the local input supplier. So seeds, fertilizers, equipment, so forth. And as a result, we were the new. We were the first people to try all the newest pesticides when they were introduced into the market and then make recommendations to our growers on how well they were working for us. So we were using very intense pesticide applications every year for this 10 year period. This neighboring field had been in a dairy farm, small dairy farm rotation, so it was corn, small grain, and then two years of hay and then back into corn and with perhaps one or two pesticide applications for alfalfa weevil over that entire four year rotation. And of course, they also made manure applications and limestone applications and so forth. So in 2004, we rented this field, and it used to be a relatively long, narrow strip that bordered right up against another long, narrow strip that we had been farming. So now we didn't want to continue because these strips were fairly narrow. They were being tilled up and down the slope and planted up and down the slope, which caused a lot of erosion. So to avoid the erosion, we switched the direction that we were planting and tilling and planted across the former field border. So on the upper end of this field, which was right out by the road, we planted about 2 acres of cantaloupe in our first planting. And on the old soil, the. Or I should say the soil that had the prior history of pesticide exposure. At harvest time, we had 80% of the leaves infected with powdery mildew. And on the new soil, there was no powdery mildew, not 5% or 10%, but you couldn't find any. And there was this knife line effect right down where the former field border had been. And it was so pronounced that there were actually healthy vines growing right in among the unhealthy vines along the field border. And that really caught my attention. Here was the same variety planted at the same time, managed in the same way in every aspect. But some plants were resistant to mildew and others were susceptible. And why the difference? And it was that, that question that led me to. I was very fortunate to connect with a group of amazing mentors and do a lot of reading and studying. And I learned that plants have an immune system much in the same way that we do. But that immune system needs to be supported with the right microbiome and it needs to be supported with the right nutrition. And when that happens, they have the potential, they have the capacity to become completely resistant to all Diseases and all insects. And that's a really significant claim, but it's a claim that I'm comfortable making because it is not a theory, it's not a hypothesis anymore. It was a theory or a hypothesis 15 years ago, but today that's no longer the case because we have now at this moment, we have experience on some over 50 different crops, mostly here in North America, and we have yet to encounter a crop disease or insect combination that we have not been successful in reversing, including a number of incurable diseases like bacterial canker on cherries, crown gall on walnuts, Pierce's disease in grapes. Any number of these diseases for which there is no known treatment that we have been able to completely reverse once it was already present and had caused an infection, we were able to completely reverse it with nutrition management. So and of course we're constantly encountering new diseases and new organisms. So we certainly haven't experienced everything yet. But of those that we have experienced, we have yet to encounter one that we have not been successful in treating with nutrition. So I want to offer some context for each one of us. We like to, we want to work with people who care about the things that we care about and who believe what we believe. And so I wanted to just put out there as a starting place, as a result of things that I've been studying and learning over the last 15 years. What is it that I believe about agriculture that might perhaps be different from the mainstream view? So this slide is also going to be on the follow up. I'm not going to go through it in detail. You can always read it later as well. But I want to offer just a really quick summary of some of the very important points. I don't believe that diseases in insects occur at random. They are very specific. They are nature's survival, the fittest mechanisms that are here to take the unhealthy plants out of the ecosystem. And the, the key, as I mentioned a moment ago, to producing resistant crops is managing biology and managing nutrition. It's those two in combination that gives us the foundation of robust immune systems and disease and insect resistance. There has been over the last, since the green revolution, the main, the predominant model of plant nutrition has been based on the capacity of plants to absorb simple ions from the soil solution. And plants do have the capacity to do this. Obviously that's how hydroponics works. But if we rely exclusively on soluble ions, in other words in chemistry in the soil solution to provide plant nutrition, then that is simply a glorified hydroponics model. And there is now an emerging, emerging science. Well, actually it's been around for over 100 years before the green revolution, but has seen a strong resurgence in the last decade with the realization that biology can deliver nutrition to plants even more efficiently and more effectively, and for a fraction of the expense than purchasing and applying chemistry, applying nutrients in a solution. So what we have observed is that when you have really active and really healthy, vigorous soil biology, it can overcome a lot of imbalanced chemistry problems. But if you do not have good biology, you can have the absolute perfect chemistry profile, you can have the perfect balance of npk, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, zinc, manganese, copper, boron, and still not be able to produce a healthy crop because that is fully resistant to diseases and insects because it takes the combination of both biology and balanced nutrition. So I believe that if we want to have a conversation about a truly regenerative agriculture, we need to regenerate. And then once we've regenerated to a self sustaining plateau, we need to sustain these seven areas. We need to regenerate plant health and soil health, soil fertility, animal and public health and human health, and of course, ecological health and the health of our rural communities or agricultural communities. A farmer's economic health. So I want to give you a quick intro to how we approach plant health and soil health. I'll talk a little bit about some of our missed opportunities in agriculture and then I'm going to turn it over to Josh and Adam and David. So when we look at plant health, as we have worked with many different growers in different environments, different climates, with different, different types of crops, we've observed this gradual evolution of plant health, where plants become, or I should say this progression of plant health, where plants become resistant to different types of diseases and insects at different stages of nutritional integrity. So we developed this diagram that we call the Plant Health Pyramid to provide a high level overview of what we observe happening inside plants. This we have an hour long webinar on YouTube on the plant Health Pyramid. If you want to dig into this deeper. There's a lot of science behind it. I can't do it justice in just a few minutes, but I want to give you just a very rapid couple minute overview. What we observe happening at the first level of the Plant Health Pyramid is plants begin photosynthesizing effectively. And actually there's some context that is necessary here for my comments to make sense. What we have learned is we assume that photosynthesis is a constant. It occurs at the same rate or at a similar rate anytime we have the combination of chlorophyll and water and carbon dioxide and sunlight. But actually that's not the case. Photosynthesis is not a constant photosynthesis. The rate and the speed of photosynthesis can vary by as much as 4 to 5x based on environmental conditions and nutrition. So imagine what happens and how plants change and behave differently. If all of a sudden, if they have a baseline performance of what is considered to be common or normal, and then you increase that photosynthesis engine by, let's say you double it and you go from 15% efficiency to 30% efficiency. That means the plant produces double the sugar content in every 24 hour photoperiod. Now that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get double the plant biomass or even double the fruit yield, but what it will mean is that your fruit is going to be a lot sweeter, there's going to be a lot more of it and your plants are going to be a lot healthier. And specifically at this stage, we observe plants to become resistant to all of the soil borne pathogens like Fazarium and Rhizoctonia and Pythium and so forth. So the moment we have this spike in photosynthesis that changes the soil microbial profile and these plants become resistant to all these soil borne fungal pathogens. The second stage is when plants have the nutritional integrity to rapidly and they have all the enzyme cofactors that they need, such as molybdenum and sulfur in particular and magnesium to immediately convert all the nitrogen that they absorb, whether it's in the form of urea or ammonium or nitrate or even organic nitrogen, and they immediately convert that to complete proteins. When that happens, this again means that in each 24 hour photoperiod every day, all the nitrogen that plants absorb in whatever form gets immediately converted to complete proteins. And there is, there remains no nitrates and no ammonium present in the plant SAP. All of it gets converted. When this happens, crops become resistant to all of the insects with simpler digestive systems that are dependent on nitrate and ammonium and so forth as a protein source. So these would be all the insects that have all the larval insects, for example, like cabbage looper and tomato hornworm and European corn borer and so forth. And then also the sucking insects like aphids would fit into this category and white flies. So at this stage they, the plants become completely resistant to that group of insects. And these first two stages, the resistance mechanisms are simply, this is again, there's a lot of science behind this, but We've effectively simply removed the food source. Plants that contain complete proteins are no longer a viable food source for these insects, which rely on incomplete proteins and soluble nitrogen forms for them to absorb and to use as a form of protein or to form their own proteins. The third level is when plants develop a surplus of energy and they develop higher levels of fat. You have increased lipid synthesis. You see this when plants have a glossy, waxy sheen on the leaf surface. And at this stage, they now become resistant to all the airborne pathogens like downy mildew, powdery mildew, bacterial spot, bacterial canker, and so forth. And then the fourth stage is when you have high levels of plant secondary metabolite production. So these PSMs are compounds. These are phytoalaxins and terpenoids and sesquiterpenes and bioflavonoids and all these various compounds that plants produce as plant protectants to protect themselves from ultraviolet radiation, from insect attack, from disease attack, and so forth. And it's worth pointing out that these top two levels of the pyramid, particularly level four, plant immunity and resistance to diseases and to insects, shifts from being passive to being active. So at level one and level two, we're simply removing the food source. Plants are no longer a viable food source. At level four, plants have the capacity to kill insects and fungus and bacteria with these compounds that they produce, and they produce these compounds for exactly that purpose. So at this point, we shift from passive immunity to active immunity, and this is how plants really become resistant to. At this stage, plants become resistant to the beetle family as well, such as Colorado potato beetle and cucumber beetle and so forth. Marmorated stink bug. There is plants at level four are pretty much resistant. To the best of my knowledge, there is no insect that will feed on a plant that is at level four in the plant health pyramid, including locusts. So we know that locusts will consume pitchfork handles and they'll chew on cellulose and wood. But if you have a healthy plant that is at level four, the locusts will not feed on it. And this is. Actually, I haven't personally observed this, but I have a colleague that has done some work in Africa reporting that fields that were at this level of health were untouched by the hordes of locusts that went through in the last couple of years, when fields around them for dozens of miles were completely decimated. So I found that to be really fascinating. So, excuse me, shifting gears just a little bit from plant health to soil health, we've also developed a very different perspective on Soil health. And there's two pieces I want to point out. First is that the plants. Let me go back to my comments about photosynthesis. Possible. Photosynthesis is not a constant. It's possible to increase the quantity of photosynthesis by up to 4 to 5x. But let's be conservative and just say you increase it 1x or a hundred percent. When you increase photosynthesis in each 24 hour photoperiod by 100%, that doesn't mean you get double the plant biomass or double the fruit. So the question is, where does all the extra sugar go? And the answer is it goes out, goes down into the root system and it goes out through the roots as root exudates to feed soil biology. And what we have come to realize is that when you have really healthy plants at high rates of photosynthesis, they actually sequester carbon and build soil organic matter while you are growing a crop. So there's this perception that we grow a crop and we extract nutrients and organic matter from the soil, then we grow a cover crop and incorporate it back into the soil to replace some of what we've pulled out. But what if the crop that we were growing actually built its own organic matter and increased organic matter rather than decreasing it? That's entirely possible when we have really healthy plants above level three at the plant health pyramid. The second point that I want to make is that the plants which grow naturally in a soil tell us a lot about that soil. And we know that different plants have different nutritional requirements. Like, you wouldn't balance a soil's nutritional profile for blueberries the same as you would for tomatoes. They have very different nutritional requirements. And when you optimize the nutritional balance for the one, let's say you optimize it for the tomatoes, the blueberries are going to be really unhealthy and really disease and insect prone. It just so happens that the same concept is also true for plants. Excuse me for. Yes, for plants, but for those plants that we call weeds. So it is possible to optimize soil biology and nutritional profiles to favor the crops and to put and to disfavor the weeds. So this is actually a photo of a lamb's quarter plant. There was an entire patch of this lamb's quarter at the intersection of a field of tomatoes and green beans and mixed salad greens. Now, the tomatoes are not particularly susceptible to this particular species of aphids. The green beans are, and the salad greens most definitely are. And what I found really fascinating is that none of those crops were being touched by the aphids, that you couldn't find any aphids on those crops. But the patch of lamb's quarter that was right at the intersection was being decimated. This is a lot of fun when this happens, and we see it happen with increasing frequency on the farms that we're working on. So how do we produce these types of results and what does our approach look like generally? When I first founded Advancing Eco agriculture back in 2006, we originally started as a consulting company. We did consulting only we did not have any products. But I became very frustrated with the lack of performance from, from the products that we had available at that moment in time. And starting in 2009, we did a lot of product research and testing and development and first started putting products into the marketplace in 2012 and 13. So today we still have that very strong consulting background and we make recommendations for a broad array of different management practices. We make recommendations for which types of COVID crops to use, which types of soil amendments to use, irrigation water quality management, kind of the list goes on and on. Pretty much everything that touches agronomy management and plant nutrition and so forth, we make recommendations. And then a fraction of those total recommendations include our products in the drip irrigation system and the foliar applications, and that is how we pay our bills. And David and Josh and Adam can touch a bit on this as well. But to give you a very quick overview, some of the systems that we use in our approach is we have a combination of products called the Regens Oil Primer, which is intended to regenerate soil biology and get it off to a rapid start. Then we use Biocoat Gold, which is a microbial inoculant to be applied to the roots right at planting. And then we also use a combination of products that we call the Nitrogen Efficiency Program to make sure that plants convert all the different forms of nitrogen into complete proteins very quickly. We monitor all of this through the season with SAP analysis and we foliar or fertigate accordingly, whatever the SAP analysis tells us that we need or don't need. So that's a quick review and overview and I'm sure the rest of the team here will give you some more detail on exactly how they have approached that on some of the farms that we work on. There's one more point that I'd like to make, which is that most of us don't know what really healthy plants actually look like anymore because of the agriculture. And plant nutrition in many ways has become a race to the bottom. Instead of trying to produce the healthiest, highest quality products and optimizing plant health. We have focused exclusively on yield, with no consideration for health. And here's a little secret. When you improve plant health, you can't stop the yields from happening. You can't stop the yields from increasing. When we first started out as a consulting company back in 2006, our kind of our claim to fame was the ability to grow crops that were resistant to diseases and insects. And we. We didn't really talk a whole lot about increasing yields. But today, we've become known as a company that can have a significant impact on improving marketable yields as a result of improving plant health. So I wanted to share a couple of photos of some of our product test plots that we had. And there's. I have a library of hundreds, thousands of different photos that have stories attached to them. But these are actually your typical common garden variety of radishes. And this is six weeks after planting. And they're the size of red beets that are very large. They are about the entire. A single beet by itself, I think, is they were running between 10 and 12 ounces each. So this one is 11 ounces. And they're not hard, they're not woody, they're not bitter. They are sweet and crisp and clear all the way through this from seed to harvest in six weeks. In northeast Ohio, that doesn't happen. This is normally the same radish that grows to the size of a quarter in six weeks. And so I was really impressed by this particular example. The point that I want to make is that most of our commercial crops, when we talk to geneticists, and biochemical geneticists in particular, we ask the question, what is the genetic potential of this crop? If we were able to fill all the berries on a strawberry plant or all of the flowers on an apple tree, what is the yield potential that this crop is truly capable of? And invariably, we find that the harvest levels that we consider to be common or normal is some in the neighborhood of about 10 to 20% of what that plant is genetically capable of producing. So this means that when we look at yields and from the. From a macro perspective of what is limiting yields, it becomes very clear that genetics are not the limiting factor. It is optimizing those genetics and allowing them to express themselves, which takes the right nutritional balance and the right microbiome support. That is really what is needed to unleash more of that foundational genetic potential. So that concludes my presentation. I haven't seen any questions come through at this point. So I'm going to turn it back over to you, Jenna.

Thanks, John.