Short #1 - MacroPak and the Importance of Calcium

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast where we talk about all kinds of topics related to regenerative agriculture. Historically, we've had very much of an agronomy focus, focusing on the topics that are related to improving soil health and improving plant health, improving livestock health, ecosystem health, and so forth. Increasingly, we've been getting into topics that are related to facilitating market access, regenerating rural communities, regenerating the capacity for stewardship. And there is just so much, there are so many pieces that tie into regenerating agriculture at a local level, at a regional level, and at a global level that are important for us to talk about. Over the next several months, we're going to be trying an experiment. As a result of there being so many different topics and things to discuss, a weekly episode with an in depth interview has been a wonderful format that I've come to really enjoy the the wisdom and the experience that people are able to bring to the conversation. But there, there is so much that is left that isn't touched on in those interviews. Over the next several months, we're going to try and experiment where we produce a second episode every week that is going to be short, to the point, and we're going to be playing around with formats and the topics. What is it that we're going to be speaking about? Well, I hope to there will probably be a few short interviews. Less than 30 minutes will be the target, and a number of these episodes might be me just responding to questions that people have asked or talking about some of the new things that we're working on. There's many different directions this could go and we're exploring. We're just going to figure it out as we go along. So I very much welcome your feedback and any input that you might have. If you have any thoughts or ideas on topics that you would like for us to address, please let me know questions you'd like for me to respond to. Just please reach out. Let us know what your thoughts are on us producing an additional episode per week. So the topic that I want to speak to today for this inaugural episode is to give you a bit of an update on some of the new product releases that have been coming. I hosted a webinar a month or two ago on all of the new products that are being released this spring, but there's one in particular that I think is important for us to understand better the implications that it can have and as context for how I think about this product. I want to use calcium nitrate as an analogy. There are many amazing stories about calcium nitrate as a fertilizer. It's really a remarkable material when you look at it from a chemistry and a biochemistry perspective. And it produces a very nice crop growth response. And we know from the work of Kerry Reams and others that both calcium and nitrate nitrogen produce a very strong vegetative growth response. There's different mechanisms for this. But what is one of the common experiences that we, anyone who's used calcium nitrate is familiar with is that when we apply calcium nitrate, we get this very strong vegetative growth response, but we don't seem to get much of a calcium response. I've been asked the question occasionally in workshops and presentations whether calcium nitrate can be used to correct a calcium deficiency. And the somewhat surprising answer is no, at least not according to all the data that we've obscene that we've observed with our plant SAP analysis. And the reason for this is because calcium nitrate is so effective at producing a nice vegetative growth response that the additional calcium that it contains in partnership in conjunction with the nitrate tends to move to new growth. And so you have higher levels of calcium or a larger quantity of calcium being supplied to the plant, but that calcium is also being diluted out with additional vegetative growth. So the presence of calcium concentration within the plant doesn't seem to improve significantly with calcium nitrate because it is diluted out with increased plant biomass. Now, this is exactly the response that many growers are looking for different crops depending on the crop that they're producing. But there was a story that really caught my attention. Story is from James Johnson, but he's described how they used to have major problems with powdery mildew on their pepper crop when they were producing chili peppers. And a young agronomist was visiting their farm talking about the opportunities and the potential of managing plant nutrition differently. And James was describing how they had all of these infield monitors and sensors capable of monitoring all the weather patterns, humidity and all the meteorological data, and could use this combination of data and growing degree day heat accumulation units to predict and to forecast powdery mildew susceptibility and when powdery mildew would be present. And the young agronomist asked the question, well, who programmed the algorithm to consider when you're applying can 17? And James Brain went into overdrive on hearing that question or that comment, because after a few seconds thought he realized that the historical pattern, for as many years as he could recall into the past Padre mildew would show up reliably and consistently a matter of a couple weeks after their application of CAN17. And this is important because one of the pieces that I've described at length is the increased disease susceptibility, the increased insect susceptibility that occurs when plants have abundant levels of nitrate. And Olivier Husson and all the co authors that I partnered with did a wonderful job in describing how the EH and PH homeostasis within a plant, when that is interrupted, results in increased disease in insect susceptibility in the paper that they publish. I can link the paper in the show notes, but EH and PH homeostasis within the plant is dramatically disrupted by nitrogen fertilization, particularly in the form of nitrate, and also to a much lesser degree with the contribution of ammonium calcium. Nitrate is this wonderful material that produces a very nice crop response from a vegetative growth perspective, but it does have possible downsides, not necessarily always in all contexts, but it does have possible downsides from over application of nitrate. And also when it is applied to soil in large concentrations, it can have a negative effect on soil biology, both on the biology that is fixing nitrogen from the atmospheric gases, because when there is an abundance of free nitrate in the soil profile and the biology no longer has the need or the drive to go fix nitrogen from the atmosphere. And in addition, calcium nitrate is an electrolyte, has a fairly high salt index, and when it's applied in large amounts and not buffered out, it can have a very detrimental effect on soil biology. And so one of the pieces that I have been working on and thinking about for a long time is how can we drive plants to have this very strong vegetative growth response, similar to what calcium nitrate and some other fertilizers produce, but have that growth response be extremely healthy and be resistant to diseases and insects? And so what that looks like is first it means we know that calcium drives strong vegetative growth energy. Actually, I'm realizing I'm missing some context here. One of the earlier episodes of the podcast, I recorded an episode that was titled Vegetative and Reproductive Nutrients. And that one episode I think is the winner of being the most having the most repeat listens. People go back and listen to that episode four or five times, just over and over again because of how dense and compressed I was able to get the information. But what I was describing is that there are four nutrients in particular which drive very strong vegetative growth response. Those four nutrients are calcium, potassium, nitrate and chloride. And the interesting piece is that nitrate and chloride, potassium, those three tend to have a synergistic response to vegetative growth hormones, particularly auxins, whereas calcium through the means of calcium signaling. Calcium signaling to some degree is still very much a black box. It's not fully understood, but we have this calcium signaling mechanism or multiple mechanisms, and the way calcium behaves inside the plant, the plant response that it produces. From an experiential perspective, you could suggest that calcium has a synergistic effect to cytokinins in the sense that it produces a very strong vegetative growth response, but not at the expense of reproduction. So you can have very strong vegetative growth, but also strong reproductive growth. And I would suggest you go back, if you want to dig deeper into this topic, go back and listen to this episode, because there's a lot of information there. But in summary, what I'm trying to describe is that we can use calcium to get vegetative growth energy and grow as much plant biomass in the same or less amount of time as we can fertilizing with potassium and nitrogen, with the key difference that we have higher quality, we have higher disease and insect resistance, but we also have much better reproduction. So if you take alfalfa, for example, when you use calcium to drive vegetative growth energy on alfalfa, you can achieve the same 28 inches to 30 inches of growth in a 28 day cut cycle with calcium as you can when you fertilize it with potassium chloride. So potassium and chloride, you have two nutrients that drive vegetative growth. So you can get the same height of plant in 28 days using calcium as you can, potassium chloride. But the plant expresses itself very differently. You will have leaves that are spaced 2 inches apart on the stem instead of 4 inches apart on the stem. The stem will be much narrow in diameter. And I'm referring here to with calcium. When you fertilize with calcium, you'll have a much shorter node spacing, you'll have a narrower stem diameter, and you'll have larger leaves, which completely changes your leaf to stem ratio. It changes your overall forage digestibility. There's lots of positive attributes that occur from a forage quality perspective when you get your vegetative growth energy from calcium as compared to potassium and chloride. But alfalfa is a vegetative crop, not a reproductive crop. If you take that same thinking to, let's say, soybeans, for example, now you also have a similarly shortened node spacing of 2 inches versus 4 inches. And there's a high probability that you will have more pods per node, more flowers per node. So three or Four pods per node instead of one or two. This is a very common phenomena, and this is what occurs when you use calcium to get your growth energy instead of potassium, some combination of potassium and nitrate and chloride. And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that plants don't need those other three elements. I'm suggesting that optimal health results from a balance where calcium is dominant rather than potassium and nitrate being dominant, as is so common. The reality is we should be thinking of calcium as a fertilizer and not just as a soil amendment. If we thought of calcium as a fertilizer in the same way we think of nitrogen as a fertilizer, our crop health would be much greater, our yields would be higher, and our overall performance would be a lot better. But of course, there's a lot less margin to be made selling calcium soil amendments and calcium fertilizers to be applied to the soil than there is nitrogen fertilizer. So there are some economic motivators in play there. So all of this is context for thinking about how we designed and developed a new product that is being released this spring called Macropack. Macropack is a combination of calcium, silicon and amino acid nitrogen. It is designed to provide highly available calcium in a form that is essentially a calcium fertilizer instead of a calcium soil amendment that gives plants this very rapid vegetative growth response that is very high quality growth. You know, there's another aspect of high quality growth that I missed mentioning, and that is on tree fruit. One of the things that sometimes discussed is this phrase of high carbon wood or high carbohydrate content wood, where you have new wood being developed, where your future fruit is going to be. Either this could be on spur bearing trees, but it is also particularly true for twig producing crops. When we have high carbon wood, which is a reflection of high carbohydrate content wood. That means usually that we have tight node spacing. We'll have again, nodes that might be half the distance apart as compared to when the plant is fertilized with nitrogen. So you have this very high carbon wood, tight node spacing that has a very high yield potential, which is exactly what we're looking for. And again, this is an expression of abundant calcium nutrition. So MacroPack was designed to provide this very highly available calcium, but also to provide very available silicon. And this is an interesting topic. The primary form of silicon that is thought to be most highly plant available is monosilicic acid. But that's of course, as I understand it, that is when we consider silicon from A chemistry perspective, when we have silicon that is mediated by biology and can be released by biology, then whether biology is releasing it into monosilicic acid or is converting it into other forms the plants can absorb. The simple thing that I think we can say is on our SAP analysis there is a degree to which you can almost use. There's of course variations with different geological soil types that have to be taken into consideration. But if you're comparing fields with two similar soil types, you can almost use the silicon analysis as an analog for biological activity in the soil profile. Because when you have abundant biology, then that means generally that those soils are better at releasing silicon and providing silicon to the plant from the soil. But of course, many soils today have challenged biological delivery mechanisms and plants thrive and become much more disease resistant. The disease resistance mechanisms of silicon are very well known and widely documented, widely studied in the peer reviewed literature. And there have been many reports of the synergistic effects of combining calcium and silicon. So in designing the macro pack, we have this combination of calcium and silicon along with energy from amino acid nitrogen. And I don't particularly like the word energy because it's so amorphous and means so many different things that it means nothing. But I don't have a better word to describe exactly what is happening here. In my webinars on nitrogen supply and nitrogen availability, I described how different forms of nitrogen produce different energetic reactions within a plant. Terms of how they cause the plant to utilize water and to utilize its photosynthetic energy. Nitrate is extremely energy inefficient. It costs the plant several molecules of water and a fair amount of carbohydrate energy, photosynthetic energy, just to convert nitrate to glutamine and to amino acids, peptides, proteins, etc. So there's, there's a significant energy cost and water cost for a plant to absorb nitrate, but that is not true. Whereas nitrate nitrogen is the least energy efficient form of nitrogen for a plant to absorb. Amino acids and other organic forms of nitrogen are the most energy efficient forms of nitrogen for a plant to absorb. So there's this phenomena that a pound of nitrogen does not equal a pound of nitrogen in terms of overall crop response. And many growers have observed this. There's always this question of, well, I'm producing a crop with conventional means and I'm applying, I don't know, I'm making it up here as an example, I'm applying 100 pounds of nitrogen, but someone else starts going through a transition to organics and when they conduct a soil analysis and look at the contributions of the manure and the compost and the COVID crops that they are adding. Their total contribution of nitrogen for a crop might only come to 50 units per acre instead of 100 units per acre. And yet the yields remain exactly the same. And not only do the yields remain the same, but it seems that the levels of nitrogen on a soil analysis remain similar after the crop is harvested, as they were before. So all of a sudden, we have plenty of documentation of corn crops, high yielding corn crops, where the total quantity of added nitrogen, even from organic sources that could be accounted for, is in some cases as low as a half a pound per bushel of corn. In many cases it's 0.7 pounds, whereas it's thought to require at least a pound and sometimes a pound and a half or more in some soil types to grow a bushel of corn. And the reason this is true is because from a plant energy response, a pound of nitrogen is not a pound of nitrogen, as nearly as we can tell, and this is just a rough approximation based on a lot of observation and experience, but as nearly as we can tell, it seems that a pound of nitrogen supplied in the form of amino acids delivers the same plant energy response, the same growth response as 4 pounds of nitrogen applied in the form of nitrate, but without any of the negative health consequences. So that is the intended design behind Macropak to produce this very strong balanced growth energy that gives us healthy vegetative growth, partnered with very strong reproduction that also has the disease resistance mechanisms that are result of higher quality balanced nutrition, abundant silicon so that we have this optimal combination of calcium, silicon and amino acid nitrogen for optimal plant performance. I'm very much looking forward to the experiences that I'm confident growers will have with Macropack in their crops this summer.