Regenerative agriculture in action at AEA's Texas Field Day | Part 1 of 5

Thank you all for being here and we're going to have fun out in the fields and talk about some of the practices that have been taking place and some of the things that we're observing in the crops. When I first started advancing eco agriculture, we started doing consulting work, nutrition work with different crops. We soon observed that there were some crops, that crops responded very differently to our nutritional approaches. And over a period of time I came to realize that these crops fell into kind of three very different groups. There was, the first group was what I called the single fruiting reproductive crops. So these are crops that all fruit in a blossom and pollinate in a condensed window of time, like corn and small grains and so forth. You have all the pollination happening in a very short time window and then you have another group of crops which are your vegetative crops, or you're harvesting crop vegetation like alfalfa and kale and spinach and so forth. Then you had this third group of crops, which are your reproductive crops that are multi fruiting that blossom and pollinate over an extended period of time, like soybeans or like cotton. And in the fruit and vegetable world particularly, it became very clear that this group of crops that is reproducing over an extended period of time has tremendous untapped yield potential. So to give you an example of what this looks like, 20 years ago the average yield for strawberries In California was 4,000 flats an acre. Today it's 10,000 flats an acre. It had a two and a half times yield increase over the last 20 years. And that did not come about as a result of improved genetics or improved pest control. Those certainly were a contributing factor. But it mostly came about as a result of fine tuning and refining nutrition management to take advantage of that capacity and that ability to blossom and fruit over an extended period of time. And so prior to three years ago, we've now with our nutrition management system, we've been consulting since 2006 and at this moment we're working on about 55 different crops. But prior to three years ago, we did not have experience on cotton. We did not know very much about growing cotton. We understood a lot about plant physiology, but we didn't have experience on cotton. Three years ago we started working with a few cotton growers, with Chad and with others. And I was amazed at how effectively cotton growers seemed to be shooting themselves in the foot with some of their management practices. And what has happened in much of agriculture over the last couple of decades, 30, 40 years or so, is that we have taken for lack of a better term, I'll say we've taken a somewhat pharmaceutical type approach where there's a specific problem and then we come up with a specific solution for that problem. And then a few years down the road, there's a different type of problem and we develop a different solution for that type of problem. And over time, we've developed this ecosystem where we're using this combination of different management practices that, when you step back and look at it from a different perspective, seems to make no sense at all. And this is actually not uncommon. It's happened in tree fruit production in apples around the country, where they do things, they engage in management practices that are known to significantly reduce fruit quality and to have fruit drop off the tree. And then they put on all kinds of things to prevent the fruit from dropping off the tree. It's this perfect catch 22. And we have the same situation in cotton where historically we have learned that there's this common management practice of putting on fairly substantial amounts of nitrogen and then putting on frequent Repeat applications of PGRs to slow the plants down, to tighten up internodes. And you step back and you look at that from a fresh perspective, you say, wait, how much sense does it make to try to drive with your foot on both the accelerator and the brake at the same time? It really doesn't. And so one of the pieces that I want to talk about this afternoon is how we can unlock that unappreciated or unrecognized genetic potential and yield potential that cotton has. And I'll just give you a very quick teaser. So crops have two types of growth patterns, if you will, or it's not quite correct to call it growth stages. You could call them growth cycles or growth patterns. But one of them is where the plant drives vegetative growth and it's growing vegetatively. There are some nutrients which drive vegetative growth in preference to reproductive growth. And this other type of cycle is reproductive growth and some nutrients which drive reproduction. So what happened in strawberries in California over the last 20 years is they were able to figure out the balance between vegetative nutrients and reproductive nutrients at specific stages of plant development. And that is what led to that significant yield increase. And I'm using strawberries as an example, but this has happened in other crops as well. So there are four nutrients which drive strong vegetative growth. They are nitrogen, particularly nitrate, nitrogen, potassium, calcium, and chloride. All of these drive vegetation. And we understand this very clearly. When we put on a nitrogen application, we expect to see a strong vegetative crop growth response, Then all the other nutrients which are not on this list drive reproduction. But there's a few which have a very pronounced effect on reproduction. One of those is manganese, also phosphorus and also ammonium nitrogen, NH4. I should actually define this here at the top as being no. 3. I don't want to make this too complicated this morning before we get into the field, because I'll be. And I'll also expand on this this afternoon. But there's one very interesting characteristic. These nutrients at the top, across the top, all have a synergistic relationship with the plant hormone auxin, which means that they drive very rapid shoot growth and give us wide node spacing. So these nutrients all drive, when they are applied in generous amounts, any of them will drive plants to grow vegetatively in height very rapidly with wide node spacing, which of course has the effect of reducing yield, with one exception, and that exception is calcium, nitrate, potassium and chloride all have a synergistic relationship with auxin. But calcium has a synergistic relationship with cytokinin. And here's one of the tricks and the techniques that we use to produce plants with a much tighter node spacing. When you balance out calcium with potassium and nitrate, you can get the same speed of vegetative growth. You can get the same volume of vegetative growth in the same time frame. But instead of nodes on a cotton plant being 6 or 8 inches apart, they can now be 3 or 4 inches apart because the plant, because calcium, has a synergistic relationship with cytokinin instead of with auxin. And when that happens, as you well know, when you have tighter node spacing, that gives you more reproduction and more bolls in the same plant height. So this is one of the things that is foundational to managing plant nutrition slightly differently, to produce this strong reproductive response instead of a vegetative response. By the way, when that happens, when you get your growth energy coming from calcium, you no longer have this overwhelming auxin dominance and you no longer need the PGRs. That's a lot of fun. Oh, and by the way, you also need you no longer, because you're getting more growth energy from calcium, you need a lot less nitrogen application. So what has evolved for us over the last 15 years in our consulting work is, if I were to describe what it is that we do at advancing eco agriculture, I would say that we try to look at the entire agronomic system, a soil plant system, as an integrated system, and take A systems approach to solving whatever the problems are, rather than the historical approach of specific problem. And then we'll do a specific solution. And if that creates another problem, then we'll come up with another solution. This approach, in our experience, has tremendous untapped yield potential and quality potential. As some of you have heard about the results that we've seen here in the last couple of years and in other areas, there's a great deal of untapped potential for profitability and opportunity. And I personally believe that this is going to be the way of the future in agriculture, if for no other reason than that the growers who are taking this approach end up invariably being significantly more profitable. Because our experience is that consistently we get nice yield and quality responses, and over time, input costs can decrease. And that, I think, is a really big deal for all of us. So I want to say thank you all for being here and we're going to have fun out in the fields and talk about some of the practices that have been taking place and some of the things that we're observing in the crops. So, Chad, I'll let you tell us where we're going and what's happening next.

Just one more thing to build upon there with, you know, with current pricing on some of the nutrients that we have been dependent on. As most of you know, if you've paid attention to those prices, our typical inputs have skyrocketed and don't appear to be changing much. And, you know, the limited availability of things coupled with that is creating a perfect storm. If we don't consider how to do things differently, we should be able to see what is down that road if we look very far. And so one of the things that we want to consider as we go out and look at these fields is what is the thing that has been driving that and how are we changing it? So that's what we're going to be talking about in the fields specifically. We're going to go look at a corn field that's ready to harvest, and then we're going to look at a few cotton fields that still need a little bit of time to harvest. But primarily what we're going to be focusing on and explaining is how we have done things differently based on this understanding to produce at least a similar result very early on. And what we expect to be a much greater result the further down that road we move, because our focus is continuing to build soil resilience through biology proliferation. So we want to manage to support the biology because it will help us accomplish all of these things, much better. But my point being is that that's really what we're focusing on. What I want all of you to consider, because this seems to come up a lot, is we're a different sort of consulting group from a standpoint of we're not trying to earn your business away from your consultant or your crop scout or the people that are helping you manage your operation today. We're actually here to work with them and you, to help you understand how to change that system so that it becomes more advantageous for you in the things that you're trying to accomplish. And I know there are at least a couple of growers here that are already using what we're doing, that have experience, that we want your consultants or your crop scouts to be well educated, and we want to work with them so that they understand the process and they can help you manage in that direction, rather than feeling like we're trying to take some business away from them, because we're, we're not that kind of consulting company. And so that's, that's, that's one of the challenges that I think a lot of people don't understand early on is that we're not trying to take your business away from where you may already be doing it, except maybe at the chemical supplier who might be providing you some inputs that are not the most advantageous things that you can do. So I just want to give everybody that clarity. But if you don't have, if you don't have a full understanding of that, you know, please ask, ask some of the guys that are, that are using our services and our products. Ask us, you know, please don't assume, based on other things that you've experienced, that, you know, we're doing it one way without fully understanding what we're doing, because we really are here to support the system, the entirety of the ecosystem, which includes how you get what you need from that by managing it well.