Soil Testing 2.0: Build your Soil, Cut Costs, & Increase Profits with Regenerative Agriculture

Hi, folks. Welcome to our webinar. This afternoon, we're opening the gates a minute early because zoom brings people in gradually. So I know we have lots of people out there waiting for us to get started. And rather than starting on the top of the hour right at the moment, we're going to hit the broadcast button a little bit early and allow everybody to come in so that we can get going. So people are showing up very quickly here. Over 100 already. We had close to 500 being registered, and typically about half of those show up and the other half catch the recording as soon as it becomes available. So give people a moment to arrive. The topic today is an interesting topic. I hope I can present it in a manner that is sensitive but accurate, because there's the possibility of stepping on a few toes, which if I do step on them, I hope I don't squash them too hard. All right, so we're going to kick things off. Hi, friends. Welcome to our webinar. Today is February 16th, and for our topic today, we're going to be talking about how we have evolved our use of soil analysis over the last 15 years and how we look at soil analysis today differently from everyone else that I know of and that I'm aware of, and that different perception of the use of soil analysis has come about as a result of our widespread use of SAP analysis on all the farms that we work on. So there's quite a lot of content and information. I'm going to share my slide deck here in just a moment and fly through a lot of the things that we have observed and some of the perspectives that we have gained over the last 10 or 15 years. If at any point you have any questions that you would like to ask, you can type them in down below on the lower right in the Q and A box. And once I'm through with the presentation, then we're going to go straight to Q and A and answer any questions that you might have. So when we consider the use of soil analysis, we have a few perspectives that are quite different from the mainstream perspectives in soil analysis. And these perspectives, I will just say I'll just open it by saying that William Albrecht used to have this quote that I really appreciated. He said that you read books and study nature, and when the two of them don't agree, you throw out the books. And so when you think about that phrase, that quote, I'd like for you to think about that in terms of. In the context of soil analysis. You read the soil analysis reports and you study nature or specifically in this context, you study what the crops are saying. And if the two of them do not agree, which are you going to believe? The crops are the final report card. They're the ones that tell us what's really happening and what's actually going on. And if the crops and the soil analysis do not agree with consistently, then perhaps we should consider throwing out the soil analysis or reconsidering our reliance on them. So that's the context for the conversation and the discussion that I want to have this afternoon. So I'm going to share my screen and kick things off. So what we've observed with we observed that within the industry, and this is when I'm not pointing fingers at any one individual or company or enterprise, but there has been this approach within agronomy that soil analysis are used as a sales tool. They are used as a fertilizer sales tool. And sometimes, necessarily and for good reason and other times the need for the products being sold is quite debatable. So unfortunately, in far too many cases we've observed that it is the use of soil analysis that results in the over application of products that actually creates most of the nutritional imbalances that crops experience that create a lot of disease and insect susceptibility and cause reduced profitability and yield losses and all this type of all these various challenges within agriculture. So we wouldn't normally think about a fertilizer application reducing yield, but it absolutely can. There have been many cases where potassium applications have reduced yield or nitrogen applications have reduced yield, and this is particularly true in the fruit and vegetable production world. But it's also true in broad acre crops where we can have lots of challenges being produced by excessive applications of nutrients at the wrong time and based on the use of soil analysis. So I'm going to move fairly quickly through some of our observations to begin at the starting place of what is it that we believe? I believe that the purpose of agronomy is to balance nutrition and biology for optimal crop performance, to produce the highest yields, the highest level of marketable yield possible, and to have disease resistant crops and insect resistant crops at the same time. And the purpose of analytical tools for agronomy purposes like soil analysis or plant analysis or whatever the case might be, is to accurately describe the nutrition available for plant absorption, or in the case of SAP analysis, to accurately describe that which has already been absorbed. The key phrase here is accuracy, because if we don't have accuracy, then we have to question whether bad data is worse than no data. And ultimately the plants are the Final report card. I believe that the plants are the final report card of what is actually happening, what's actually going on. The nutrients that they absorb from the soil profile are the final indicator of what actually possible and what that soil had the capacity to deliver in that cropping season. So we know that soil analysis have a very venerated history with the first being a pioneer. The CEC type analysis that we're familiar with today being pioneered by William Albrecht at the University of Missouri. And Albrecht did a lot of foundational research on the value and the importance of plant nutrition from a public health and livestock health perspective. And his foundational work in soil analysis is still to this day considered a mainstay, particularly within the organic and biological agriculture community, but also in mainstream agriculture community. We still have a majority of farmers that pull soil analysis across the country get a CEC type analysis with different types of extraction agents, might be malic3 or ammonium acetate or other various extractions, but fundamentally they still are all based on this foundational framework of looking at cation exchange capacity of the soil colloids from that history. Of course, there have been refinements and improvements over the years, but the foundations haven't really shifted fundamentally in the last 70 years since he developed his original research. However, our work at AEA, it's now been since 2011 that we have done extensive work with SAP analysis. And every year that has gone by, we have raised bigger and bigger question marks about how soil analysis is typically used and how it should actually be used. Asking the question, is it just that soil analysis is incomplete or is it that it is completely inaccurate because soil analysis reports are not correlating with what the plants are actually doing. And this goes back to the quote from William Albrecht, if it's, if the disease or the soil report and the plants do not correspond, which of them are you going to believe? And we believe that, that the plants are the ones that are actually telling us the truth. And so if soil analysis is significantly incorrect frequently and does not correlate with crop performance, at some point we have to ask the question, is it better to have bad data or better to have no data? And my perspective would be that in many cases it's better to have no soil analysis data than to have bad data. Because when we have no data, that means we rely on our other senses more. We rely on looking at crop performance and looking at other things that are happening. And we may actually get a better perspective of what's going on if we are more conscious of the overall ecosystem than just relying on a soil report. When we think about soil analysis in eco agriculture, soil has been described as being composed of three primary components, the mineral, the physical and the biological. And if you've noticed, our soil analysis that we have built our entire framework of managing plant nutrition around only measures one of these. They only measure the mineral aspect. There is no consideration given to the physical soil characteristics and aggregate structure and aggregate stability, for example, and no consideration given to the biological aspects on the soil reports that we get back from a typical soil laboratory. Now, there certainly are biological assays available and they're increasingly being used. I'm a big advocate and a big fan of using more biological assays, but the point is that what is considered a standard soil test, if you were to ask someone to run a standard soil test, immediately, our immediate perceptions that we're talking about a mineral soil test or a chemistry soil test, and we do not consider the biological and the physical characteristics. And it's my perspective that this use of primarily focusing on a chemistry based analysis has really led agriculture astray. Because just by the. And by the way, I'm not suggesting that there were nefarious intentions historically about the emphasis on chemistry based analysis. It was simply the technology that we had access to that at the time that we understood. Well, we still to this day are learning to better understand soil microbial assays and biological assays, and the technology is still rapidly developing. So this to some degree was just a function of the technology that we had. But since we focused only on this chemistry based analysis, it gave us a very narrow perspective, that it gave us a subconscious bias every time we get a soil report back. And it is those things that are on the soil report that we focus on balancing, because they're the things that we've been able to measure. And we have lost sight of the fact that this is only a third of what we should be measuring, that we also should be considering the soil's physical characteristics and biological characteristics. So this has really led even in the regenerative agriculture space, in the biological agriculture space, this has still led to a paradigm of chemistry based plant nutrition, because we have chemistry based soil analysis. Fundamentally this is the antithesis of a biological agriculture. In a biological agriculture, the primary emphasis should be on biology, not on chemistry. And this, I hold this to be particularly true because of the field experiences that we have had, and I've reported this in many conversations that we have observed that biology supersedes chemistry. In other words, you can have a completely imbalanced soil analysis From a chemistry perspective and still produce very high yielding, high quality crops when you have robust biology. But the reverse I have never observed to be true. If you have a soil analysis that is perfectly balanced and everything is exactly at the desired values, you cannot produce healthy crops in that type of an ecosystem as long as you do not have good biology. So perfect chemistry with poor biology will not produce healthy crops. But perfect biology, or I should say abundant biology with imbalanced chemistry can still produce perfect crops. So this soil analysis framework has really led us to a very narrow, a falsely narrowed perspective of plant nutrition and agronomy. Fundamentally, though, my growing discomfort with our reliance on soil analysis has come about as a result of the observation that reported results on the soil analysis do not correlate to measured plant nutrient absorption. And this is a really big deal. You would expect if the soil has high level soil test shows that we have high levels of iron, then the plant should absorb high levels of iron. Except that it doesn't. You would expect that if a soil has high levels of magnesium, the plant should expect should absorb high levels of magnesium. Except that it doesn't. And the list just kind of goes on and on. I shared two obvious examples that are very well known, but there are many other examples as well. And so at some point I found myself asking the question of why are we relying so heavily on these soil analysis that do not correlate with the actual measured nutrient absorption. And so I would also like to expand for just a moment on the phrase or describe what I mean and the context when I use the words do not correlate. So we now that we have extensive experience and are developing a database of plant SAP analysis reports, we are able to look at the nutrient correlations between and describe look at the relationships between how nutrients relate to each other within a different within a given crop, and then also how that correlates to soil analysis as well. And there is describing the research that we have done on looking at nutrient correlations could be a three hour presentation in and of itself. So we're not going to go into that in detail, but I wanted to give you just a quick glimpse into some of the type of nutrient correlations that we're running and the type of data that we're looking at. So as we get into this, the key point is that we've observed is that soil analysis does not correlate to plant nutrient absorption, it does not correlate to nutrient density, and it doesn't correlate to crop performance. And in reality, in my opinion, Is it should do all of those three things if it is to consider, to be considered to be accurate and be reliable. So if it were true that soil analysis correlated with plant nutrient absorption, then the nutrients which are high in soil should also be high in plants, and nutrients which are deficient soil, as indicated on the soil report, should also be deficient in plants. But neither of these is the case. And because of that, we cannot make reasonable and effective agronomic recommendations, soil amendment recommendations from soil analysis alone with mathematical calculations. So my point is that if we had soil analysis, let's say we use magnesium as an example, and it showed that we have a magnesium deficiency and we need to add 50 pounds per acre of additional magnesium, if we were to add 50 pounds per acre of additional magnesium, that should give us all the magnesium required for a really healthy crop, Right? Except that that's not necessarily true. It depends on calcium levels. It depends on a whole lot of other factors of what are going on in the soil profile that aren't accounted for in the lab report. So I've used the analogy that learning to interpret soil analysis reports is a bit like learning to speak English. And this may not be as familiar for those of us who are native English speakers. English is a second language for me. I was not the first language that I've learned to speak. And when we learn to speak English, for each rule, we have to remember all the exceptions to the rule. And in some cases, the list of exceptions is very long. And the same is true of the soil analysis that in many cases there is a long list of exceptions to the rules. And so we have come to, we've recognized this, and I'm not indicating anything new that agronomists and soil scientists are not familiar with. This is common knowledge and has been from the beginning that these tools, these chemical assays that chemistry assays that we have, do have limitations. And we have to understand the nutrient interactions to be able to make recommendations from them. Well. And so we have to remember all the different nutrient interactions and remember all of the caveats. So the caveats, the exceptions to the rule, some of those that are known as we know that when we have really high magnesium levels, that actually limits magnesium availability. We know that when we have excess of phosphorus levels, that limits phosphorus availability, we know that what are typically considered to be adequate desired values of calcium are not enough in lighter, sandy soils. And these are just a couple of examples. There's. For every nutrient, there are a list of rules or exceptions that we have to understand the interactions and interplay between geology and other nutrients in the profile, as well as soil biology as well, and give those consideration when we're making recommendations. We know that potassium levels which are considered, which would show up to be very deficient, are actually very adequate in most of our agricultural soils because they have abundant potassium levels in the soil mineral matrix that they can supply to the crop when we have good biology. So we also know that soil analysis does not report the nutrient redox state and it doesn't actually accurately report nutrient availability. And then we have other challenges that the typical CEC analysis usually does not report bicarbonates and chlorides, which are extremely important for managing biological activity and managing overall nutrient availability. So within that context, let's look at some correlations. So with our SAP analysis data, we've observed that the SAP analysis data doesn't correlate to the soil analysis data, that those two do not match. And I chose to believe the plants because I believe the plants are an accurate indicator of what's actually happening and going on. And then the SAP analysis data also shows us how these nutrients interact with each other inside the plant. So the context for my observations is that we've observed and worked with thousands, tens of thousands for that matter, of different soil analysis from different laboratories, tens of thousands of SAP analysis on 50 plus different crops and in all types of growing environments and soil types, mostly here in North America and Central America, but also some international work as well. So here is an example of one table for one nutrient of looking at nutrient correlations. If you look at the far left column, the nutrient represented here is ammonium. The second to the left column describes all of the different crops. So I think there's 35 some different crops. This is from data analysis we did back in 2018, if I recall correctly. So this is now a couple of years old. We've done more recent data work since then, but this is what I have on the slide deck. What we're looking at is we're looking at correlations with each of these nutrients to all of the other nutrients reported on a SAP analysis. And the correlation can range from a negative one to a positive one with zero being the neutral point. So if you have a positive one, that means you have a perfect one to one correlation. If you have a negative one, that means you have a perfect inverse correlation. We went through and highlighted, color coded some of the different cells to show up so that would be easier to read and you didn't get lost in the data overwhelm for the sake of this conversation. We're just going to focus quickly on the columns that show up as a strong highlight. We see that we have on the nitrogen column in the center of the slide, we have a strong blue column that indicates that for all those different crops, there is a high correlation between every time that total nitrogen levels increase, there is also an increase in ammonium. And if you go to the third column from the left, you see that there is a negative correlation with sugars, that generally, when you have higher ammonium levels, sugar levels tend to trend down. And this is not a surprise because we often have observed ammonium levels to be higher. When plants are in photorespiration mode, they're stressed because of high temperatures, they're not photosynthesizing well, and they're consuming the sugars and proteins that they have built in the past. And so the result is you end up with a low plant that is low in sugar and high in ammonium, which is the perfect environment for spider mites and those types of diseases or those types of pests to show up. So this is an example of being able to observe nutrient correlations. And I wanted to. I have a couple other examples as well that I wanted to point out. So when I wanted to use this to describe my use of the phrase no correlation. So when I say that we are observing no correlation between SAP analysis data and soil analysis data, it is because of these types of observations of what we're seeing in the field that the two do simply not match up. So here's another. This table is for silicon. You have the same column of crops on the second from the left. And if you notice, there is a correlation between silicon and iron and aluminum that is fairly pronounced. And I find this to be really interesting because usually aluminum is considered to be an anti nutrient. It's considered to be a negative. And yet at the levels. Excuse me, I've been presenting a lot for the last week and my voice is beginning to tell will strain a little bit. Usually the popular narrative is that aluminum is an anti nutrient and only is accumulated in plants when you have compromised root system integrity. If you, let's say if you have nematode damage or you have fungal infections in the root system, then aluminum goes into the root. And a similar narrative is also considered to be true of iron when you have higher iron levels. And this is particularly true historically when we were looking at tissue analysis instead of SAP analysis. But the narrative, the popular narrative for silicon is the opposite, that plants primarily absorb silicon in the form of monosilicic acid, which is released from the abundant silicon in the minerals comprising the soil when you have abundant microbial activity. So the popular narrative has been that when you have really good biological activity, silicon levels go up and iron and aluminum levels go down. Except the data shows that that isn't actually true, that those three tend to correlate together. Now, it is worth mentioning in this context that for whatever reason, SAP analysis apparently only reports the iron that is in the reduced form or that is physiologically active inside the plant. It doesn't report the oxidized iron that might be stored in the plant vacuoles and so forth. And so the levels on a SAP analysis might be 3 to 5 parts per million as compared to a tissue analysis, where we might be looking at 40 to 80 parts per million. So the types of iron that are being reported here are different from what they are on a tissue analysis. And the same could possibly be true of aluminum, although I don't know that for sure. But I know that the levels of aluminum that show up on a SAP analysis are typically in the 2 to 10 part per million range, not in the 50 to 200 part per million range that might show up on a soil or, excuse me, on a tissue analysis. So we're looking at different levels and are different types of nutrients from different locations being reported in the SAP analysis? And as a result, on SAP analysis, these three nutrients correlate with each other very highly. If we look at calcium, we see that calcium correlates very strongly with the presence of magnesium, which is not a surprise. We see that there's also correlations with sulfur and there's correlations with manganese. But. And there's others that we could go. We could also look at the correlations between boron and sodium and chloride shows up really high. And that's partially because of where some of these crop samples are being pulled, being irrigated with relatively saline water. So there's some of that context that we have to understand for the data as well. But of particular interest is phosphorus, at least I find it particularly interesting. So there's actually a negative correlation, generally a negative trend, between the presence of calcium and the presence of phosphorus within plant SAP. And the historical knowledge has been that these two nutrients have a synergistic effect within the plant and that when one of them increases, it also increases the presence of the other. So that when you increase calcium levels, you get higher phosphorus levels. Except, at least for SAP analysis, the data shows the opposite to be generally true. So I think there are many laboratories have existing databases of analysis that they have run over in the past. And I think it's time for us to begin looking at some of these nutrient interactions a bit more closely. Now that we have access to larger data, I want to give you some actual real examples of what this looks like. This is a soil report that shows really high magnesium, excuse me, really high calcium levels, 21,000 parts per million, and really low iron levels of 31 parts per million. And this soil analysis, it's worth pointing out that the I put these starburst highlights here to indicate that this soil analysis is undoubtedly inaccurate. So we know that where this soil test came from, geologically, we do not have a total exchange capacity of 114 milli equivalents. We don't have that high a CEC. But remember that the CEC is just a mathematical calculation. So if the soil analysis accidentally picked up a small piece of limestone, then that would tremendously increase the calcium content and that would increase the calculation for the cec. And it will also show that you have an inflated, artificially high level and high desired value of magnesium and potassium, as you can see. So this report is saying that we want potassium levels at 1781 parts per million. But we know that that is not possibly correct. And so this is what the soil analysis looks like. Let's translate this to an actual, to a SAP analysis. And this is what the SAP analysis looks like. So it actually, the SAP analysis shows that we have deficient calcium instead of excess of calcium. We have deficient calcium. And instead of deficient iron, let's go back and look at this. So iron is at 31 parts per million. And here it is also showing that we have relatively low iron levels as well. So here's another example. Calcium desired value 1300. Actually, value found is 1500. So this is saying that we have excessive levels of calcium on potassium. Desired value is 151. We actually have 83. So it's showing that we have low potassium. Then when we look at iron and manganese, iron shows up as being extremely high and manganese shows up as being on the high side. So let's look at the soil reports or, excuse me, the SAP analysis reports. So these SAP analysis reports, we start with potassium at the top. So here potassium is adequate to approaching excessive, and yet over here it was deficient at 83 parts per million. If we look at calcium, calcium is very inadequate on the young leaves. We only have 570 parts per million where the desired value is 3,500. So our calcium is very deficient. And yet over here it's showing that we have excessive calcium. If we look at iron, iron and manganese both show as being severely deficient. And yet here we have excess of iron and manganese. I'm just showing these as a one off example. When you see this often enough, over and over and over again, day after day after day, which our consulting team does all the time, you start really questioning soil analysis and how useful they actually are in making recommendations. So when we consider how to manage soil, there are really four different areas. There's soil structure, chemistry, biology that I mentioned earlier, and then there's also the soil geology. So obviously there's limited things that we can do to change soil geology, but we can balance it, support it, and figure out ways of synergizing with the geology that we've been blessed with. So I believe that we should approach plant nutrition from a biological perspective, not from a chemistry perspective, and really come from the framework that, with the emerging sciences that we are developing and Learning about from Dr. James White and others about how biology feeds plants, that we should try to get all of our plant nutrition from biology and not from chemistry. And so within that context, the use of soil analysis, chemistry based analysis has really kind of given us a set of blinders. It has blinkered our perspective to really focus on the chemistry alone. And so if we want to manage soil well, we should try to get soil analysis reports that describe biology and structure and geology. And these reports should have at least as much weight for us as our chemistry analysis. So we have found that the only nutrients which tend to generally correlate between the soil analysis and the SAP analysis reports, sulfur, zinc and boron. That's a very short list. That's three nutrients out of a total of what is it, 16 or so, or maybe it's 12, 12 that are typically reported on a common soil analysis. So three out of 12, that's what, 25%. So how do we use soil analysis today? We do still. The growers that we work with do still pull CEC soil analysis. We find that they do still have some limited usefulness and they're also familiar. And it's useful to observe how things are improving over history, over time. So the way that we use them is we use them specifically to manage our calcium to magnesium balance. We find that that tends to be very valuable and very important. We also use them for sulfur, zinc and boron. And then that is just about it. Everything else is context dependent. Everything else depends on knowing and understanding that long list of caveats that Long list of rules or exceptions to the rule, I should say. So when we talk about everything else being context dependent, the context is the soil's geology, the biology and the structure, the other things that we should be measuring. So our approach today and how we manage soil mineral balance is instead of only collecting this CEC analysis, we've broadened our range and we're looking at collecting two other types of analysis as well. So the first is collecting a total geological assay. So these are assays that are essentially mining analysis, mining assays where geological prospectors would send in ore samples and rock samples to a laboratory to run a complete, full analysis on them of everything that is contained within that rock. So there are a few laboratories that run these analysis today. There's ACME labs in British Columbia, there's Agent labs in Ontario and Midwest labs, which many of you are familiar with, that run soil analysis. They I'm of the opinion that they do not run a full, complete geological assay, but they do run an assay for all of the agronomically important minerals. And so we run this type of analysis only once. This is not something you need to repeat year after year, but you only do it one time, and it will tell you the total nutrient content of your soil for a given nutrient. And this can be very valuable and give you very valuable perspective. So one of our consultants, David Miller, a couple of months ago was looking at soil analysis from, I don't recall it was either Kansas or Nebraska. And the same day he was also looking at soil analysis from Florida. And on the CEC analysis, he had both the CEC analysis and the geological assays. I think these were both done from Midwest labs, if I recall correctly. So he had all these samples that were pulled at the same time on both of these soils, manganese showed up at 10 part per million. On the CEC analysis for the Midwestern soil and for the Florida soil. On the geological assay, the Florida soil showed 10 parts per million manganese as well. So in other words, 100% of what was there was showing up. On the CEC analysis, the Midwestern soil showed 400 parts per million manganese. So for the Florida soil, if we want to build manganese levels greater than 10 parts per million on the CEC analysis, solution is fairly obvious. We're going to have to add more because it was not present on those sandy soils. But for the Midwestern soil, the opposite is true. If we already have 400 parts per million in the top 6 inches, then we don't need to Add any more. We just simply need to give biology the food sources that it needs to tap into and extract that manganese and make it available to the crop. So this can be very valuable and give us a valuable perspective on how we should manage soil amendments. And I think this is very important within the context of regenerative agriculture. There is the stated intention from a number of growers and consultants and agronomists, and I've suggested this as well, that our goal, our aspiration should be to develop an agricultural ecosystem that is so robust and so healthy that we do not need to be constantly adding inputs. We need to remove the need for inputs. And I think there's one important caveat to that, and that is we may need to make occasional amendments for the minerals that do not are not present in our soil profile because of our native soil geology. So if you are grazing livestock and you want to have healthy livestock that are immune to parasites and all types of different diseases, you will want to have adequate selenium levels in your soil and adequate molybdenum levels and adequate zinc levels. But what if your native soil geology and your foundational bedrock didn't give you enough selenium and didn't give you enough molybdenum? So those are type, those are nutrient applications that you may need to only make once every three years or every five years, or maybe even only once every decade. But there are those types of amendments where we may need to add what is missing in the native soil geology. Anyway, moving on. So we take one of these and you only need to take this sample one time for each soil type because obviously they're not going to change. We pull the CEC analysis once a year for high value fruit and vegetable crops and once every 36 months for broadacre crops. And then the additional test that we pull is we also pull the Haney analysis. And I've really come to we've only started using the Haney analysis for the last two years. So we're still gaining experience with it, we're still developing more data. But what has become obvious just in the last two years is that the Haney analysis does correlate with actual measured plant nutrient absorption as reported on a SAP analysis, much more closely than the CEC analysis does. And it also correlates with crop response and the way the crops are behaving in the field much more closely than the CEC analysis does. So when you take this different perspective, additional different approach agronomic recommendations, change product recommendations, change fertilizer recommendations Change. And I hesitated almost to share this slide because there's some very broad brushstrokes and very broad generalizations being made here. And obviously everything is context dependent. Every farm and every field is unique. But kind of from a really big picture perspective, the way that we have observed our agronomy recommendations changing as we've used SAP analysis and we've shifted our perspective on the CEC soil analysis is that we typically see potassium applications drop in as much as 70% or even higher. We typically see nitrogen applications drop in the neighborhood of 60 to 70%. And almost universally, we find ourselves adding manganese foliar applications and adding iron foliar applications. And it's very common for us to also add copper, cobalt, molybdenum and boron. So those are the really broad brushstrokes of what we see happening in most agricultural contexts when we begin working with different growers. And this is partially a result of shifting our perspective on what's happening with soil chemistry by using different types of chemistry analysis. But it's also a result of emphasizing and focusing on biology. Because when you add and build biology, biology can supply a tremendous amount of nitrogen and potash to a crop if you have that potash in your native bedrock. So we need to ask the question, what has changed and what is different today from when William Albrecht developed this soil analysis? That was the emerging science of the day back in the 40s and 50s. And why did this. And we hear these stories. Cary Reams and William Albrecht both used to report how they could make soil amendments of a couple tons per acre of limestone and a ton or two of rock phosphate and a ton or two of poultry manure. And see these incredible recoveries where yields on alfalfa and forages would jump by 50 to 60% in a single year. And they reported these incredible crop responses, and not just once or twice, but there's. If you go back to the historical literature and read all of William Albrecht's original Albrecht papers, there's a lot of really interesting results that were reported from the work that they were doing with soil balancing. We don't see those results today. I have very seldom observed the types of results and improvements that William Albrecht reported. I certainly have seen it occasionally. It happens sometimes, but it doesn't happen consistently. And I've come to the conclusion that they were able to see these tremendous turnarounds because they had really active soil biology. Our soil biology, My theory, my hypothesis is that our soil biology collectively has really degraded extensively in the last 70 years since that foundational research was done because of the widespread use of pesticides in the environment. In addition to the widespread use of pesticides and the degradation of soil biology, we've also are using much larger equipment today and we have much greater compaction than they did 70 years ago. And so it's a combination of those factors and probably other factors as well that have really changed the way our soils respond. And again, in a nutshell, I believe that it comes down to today we have relatively degraded soils that do not have the biological activity that was present 70 years ago. Here's a fundamental question. If your crops produce high yields of exceptionally high quality and they're completely disease and insect free, do you actually care if your soil analysis report is ideally balanced or if it's in the perfect range? I don't think so. I know that I don't care for the growers that we work with. We really care about producing healthy, high quality crops. And historically we've been told that if we produce, if we have our soils optimally balanced from a chemistry perspective, we will achieve healthy, high quality crops and high yielding crops. And I would suggest that that isn't completely true, that even when we have this ideal balanced soil, we still must have vigorous biology. So in other words, is your goal optimal crop performance or perfectly balanced soil report? And these are two very different goals. You can have optimal crop performance even when you don't have a perfectly balanced soil report with good biology. So to close with this permutation of William analysis, quote, read the lab reports, observe the plants, and when the two of them disagree, you need to find better laboratory analysis because the one that you're relying on is probably not giving you an accurate indicator of what's going on. And finally, if you could chose to use lab analysis or lab analytics that correlate to field observation 10 times better than the soil analysis, why wouldn't you? And that's an obvious plug for SAP analysis because it does correlate to field observation very closely. So if you want to dig into this a bit more deeper, if you want to dig into this deeper, I'd invite you to connect to the AEA team and dig into, learn more about the work that we're doing on all the different crops that we're working on. So I want to say thank you. I'm going to switch over to the Q and A. You can type in any questions that you have in the Q and A box and there's quite a few questions that come in already. So I'm going to move through these as concisely as I can, There's a question here from Justice. Hi John, after the SAP analysis results, how do you quantify the quantities for full year application? The answer is with experience because it varies dependent on the stage of crop growth. It varies depending on the product's concentrations and its effectiveness. And so there's lots of variables that are part of that. And over time you learn that you need low, medium or high application rates to produce different responses at different stages of plant development and what's happening and what's going on. Follow up question from justice where do you find information about the critical points of influence for crops? There's a webinar on that, it's recorded and it's on YouTube. So if you want to go into and learn about what the timing is for a specific crop, I've been able to find much of this information just simply using Google and doing intensive search. Look for, go to Google Scholar, look for the cell division period for grapes or for a specific crop or the bud initiation period for a specific crop and you'll be able to find the information on these critical points of influence. The research is almost all out there in the literature. Question here from catalyn, total nitrogen and plant SAP analysis. Does this include the amino acids and peptides? And the answer is yes. The total nitrogen includes everything, proteins, peptides, amino acids, nitrate, ammonium, urea, glutamine, everything is there. Question here from Steven. Hi Steven. When listening to a conference recording of a talk by Bob Wilt, he said that foliars work by sending the nutrient in the foliar out through the roots as exudates that excite the biology who go get the nutrient, apply it from the soil, and that if the nutrient from the foliar isn't in the soil, then it won't work. I know this is incorrect, but where does this idea come from? Don't know the answer to that, Stephen. That's the first time I've heard of that idea, so I'm not entirely sure. Follow up question so much of soil science and plant science is looked at separately as two separate silos with different experts in each. Isn't this separation into different silos a large part of the problem when doing any analysis? The brief answer is yes, of course it is. This is fundamentally a problem with much of our agricultural research, is that you have all of these different specialists, entomologists, plant pathologists, plant physiologists, botanists, agronomists, geneticists, and lots of other specialties that focus on understanding one specific aspect of soil and plant ecosystems, and they don't connect the dots and they miss the rest of the picture. What we really need desperately regenerative agriculture, specifically in agriculture in general, is we need more generalists, people who have a broad base of working knowledge in all of these different domains and are able to bring the pieces together. A question from Riley in other conversations I've heard you briefly discuss the topic of plant biophysics and describe how the time to maturity of crops can be significantly reduced. Could you briefly describe what testing and cultural practices are used to achieve those results? That could be a topic for a future webinar. I'm not sure if I can describe it briefly. I've shared a couple of blog posts, written a couple of blog posts on the interactions between different nutrients and how they affect senescence and maturity. So what I can say I would refer you to a podcast episode very early on where I talked about balancing vegetative versus reproductive nutrients. And if you get optimal nutrient balance, that will really speed up growth and then boron will speed up maturity. So there's a lot more nuance to the answer than that. But that's a great starting point, and perhaps that is something we can dig into more deeply at some point. Question from Ron Are you comfortable or confident on Novocrops SAP analysis? Optimum levels for non mainstream crops like oats, wheat flax, yellow peas and canola. Sometimes it seems they have limited experience and our previous data points to compare with. So I know that Nova Crop Control will only put together desired values for a given crop once they have 400 data points, and that could be considered to be a relatively small sample. But it's also it's not an insignificant sample, and it's a number. I'm actually comfortable putting together desired values with fewer samples than that and then revisiting it later. But I would point out that it is my understanding the desired values that Novocrat Control puts together are based on It's a bit imprecise to say averages, but for lack of a better term, they are based on the averages of all of the data that they have run for that crop up to that point. And frankly, I care deeply about not growing an average crop. I want to grow crops that are exceptionally healthy and that have functional immune systems and are resistant to diseases and insects. And as a result, that means we may need to balance nutrition differently than the average crop is balanced. So when you if you run samples through crop health labs, this is for everyone listening here in North America. If you run samples through Crop health labs, we actually have developed our own desired values that are based on crop performance and disease and insect resistance rather than based only on laboratory averages. I see that I'm going to need to move fairly quickly. We have lots of participants here and the questions are piling up really fast. We've got almost 50 questions, so I'm going to make my answers as brief as I can and move fairly quickly. Question from Darren could you expand on why high magnesium in the soil doesn't correlate to high magnesium in the crop? Is it a functional of tightening soil and a lack of oxygen for healthy root growth in general? Yes, and it is also a function of imbalanced calcium to magnesium ratios generally as well, and just limited nutrient absorption overall, not just magnesium. Question from Alice when should you take a SAP analysis? How often do you take a SAP analysis in the growing season? I've given several taught several webinars in the past that you can find on YouTube where I go into those questions in some detail. Here's another question that is a repeat of that one. It's a question on the role of the Haney analysis for spring fertilizer applications. So we use the Haney analysis in the spring to determine, particularly to determine nitrogen applications before we can pull a SAP analysis. So obviously the earliest stage you pull a SAP analysis, let's say, on a corn crop, for example, is when you're at about 6 to 8 inches tall. And in some contexts we need to make decisions about nitrogen application rates before that stage. So that would be where we would use a Haney analysis to quantify how much nitrogen is in the soil profile and how much the soil is capable of delivering. Let me see. Question here from John in permanent crops, farmers often fumigate and see a boost in subsequent tree growth. I have wondered how killing microbiology would increase tree growth and theorize that the biology has sacrificial given up their sequestered nutrients when killed. Have you done any soil sampling before and after fumigation? Or can you better explain or can you explain better growth in a sanitized soil beyond the removal of soil pests? John, your hypothesis is correct. When you fumigate soils, that has the effect of killing all the biology and releasing all of the nitrogen and all of the other nutrients contained within their cells and making them available to plants. So that's why you get the growth response from fumigation. You get the same type of growth response in greenhouses. There's a common practice of steaming soils also for pathogen control and sometimes solarizing soils also for pathogen control. All of those have the effect of killing biology and they all have the effect of producing a strong growth flush afterwards from the nutrients released from that biology. Question from Felix what are your thoughts on the REAMS style of soil analysis? What I can say is that we used to use them years ago and we no longer do, and I think that is probably enough expresses enough of my thoughts and of itself. Question from Lloyd Spar hi Lloyd, For a mining assay, do you need one for each soil type, such as Penn and Lehigh and Abbottown? And the answer is yes for each different type of soil geology, you'll need to run one of those tests for each one. Question from Albert could you give us a lab reference for the geological analysis? I've never heard of that kind of soil analysis, so I already mentioned the different laboratories that run those and if you need more information on that, then I will dig in a bit more deeply and publish some a blog post in the coming weeks with specific information. Question from Greg Pennyroyal hi Greg, Using iron as an example of how biology will make iron in the oxidized form available by reducing it, I assume the iron will be available primarily through the rhizophagy process. Does the iron become oxidized again when the plant uses superoxide to break down the cell wall of the internalized microbes to release nutrients? Is this also true of any other oxidized or reduced dependent minerals or compounds? Greg, you ask awesome questions. My understanding is that the answer is no. They do not convert to the oxidized form through the rhizophagy and oxidation process that happens in those growing root tips. Because the iron inside the bacterial cells is actually stored in vacuoles and doesn't exist in the ionic form of iron. It is combined with various amino acids and other compounds, nucleic acids, and so forth. So it's actually deeply internalized within the organs within the cell. That's my understanding at this moment. Question from Jonathan Gingrich My organic certifier requires a soil analysis showing a deficiency of trace minerals in order to add them. Which test would be the best to accomplish this? So Jonathan, this is a good question, and at this moment I can't say that this is universally true. You would need to check with your certifier. But a large number of certifiers are accepting SAP analysis as an indicator to indicate that you have a trace mineral deficiency rather than a soil analysis, because they're recognizing that the soil analysis doesn't correlate with what the crop is actually reporting and what the crop is actually doing. So you'd need to check with your certifier. But there's quite a long list of certifiers at this point who are recognizing and using SAP analys to document a deficiency. Question from Michael, have you seen any correlation with saturated paste analysis as well? It seems to show some hidden hunger, but maybe not necessarily the plant. So similar to the previous question on the Reams style assays, the Morgan extraction, we used to use a lot of saturated paste analysis before we had SAP analysis. We relied on them very heavily and for saturated paste analysis their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness and that it only shows the nutrients that are immediately available in a water solution and for most agricultural soils and they do not show the nutrients that are available based on biological activity. So for that reason we have gone almost exclusively to the use of Haney analysis for that purpose. Question from Sandy hi there. Greetings from Zimbabwe. No SAP analysis laboratory is located here. Where could we send samples and will a result still be representative if shipped and they take a week to get to the laboratory. So Sandy, this is a good question. At this moment the kind of the preeminent lab in the space is Nova Crop Control in the Netherlands. I know that there are samples being shipped there from all over the world. From Australia, from New Zealand, from Brazil, from here in North America, from Eastern Europe and from Asia as well. So there are a lot of samples that are going to the Netherlands for analysis and I expect that in the future other technologies will become available so that that is not necessary. But the direct answer to your question is yes. When cold packed and rapid shipped then you can still get good data even if it takes a week to be transported to the lab. Some repeat questions. So a question from Glenn. So if we have been using limestone to raise PH based on chemistry tests and now have excessive calcium levels as well as excessive magnesium levels, will SAT tests still be helpful? The answer is yes. SAT tests will be tremendously helpful because they will show what the plants are actually absorbing from that soil. So you might have excess of calcium and magnesium levels, but the crop might be actually deficient in calcium and magnesium. In fact, that would be my expectation. Question from Dimitri. Your data has immense value for practitioners and consultants worldwide. I'm probably speaking for many here, but would you be interested in selling this data or getting wider access to it? Maybe on Kind Harvest? I have to be cautious there Dimitri. I'm willing and happy to share what we have learned, which is what I'm doing here on these webinars. But the data is actually not our data. It is our growers data, the farmers that we work with. It's essentially their data. They own it. And I'd be willing to consider in the future is not a priority project for me because I have too many projects already, but I might consider asking growers for their permission to share the data and what we've learned. But ultimately it's I'm just passing on the experiences and observations that we've had and we don't own the data, so I'm not really at liberty to share a lot of those details. Lots of questions with a bunch of repeats of things that I've already spoken about. A question on SAP analysis of forages for forages for livestock production. I would suggest using a forage analysis to indicate the nutrients that are best going to be absorbed by the livestock, but I would suggest using a SAP analysis for managing that forage crop well. A question from Nathan can you recommend a book or other source that does an adequate job of explaining nutrient roles in plant health? I actually have a blog post going out about this exact topic tomorrow, so I would suggest you subscribe to the blog@john kempf.com I will be going into some detail with different references and resources on nutrient roles in plant health, and I would specifically recommend the book Mineral Nutrition and Plant Disease. I'm going to I want to be considerate of everyone's time. We're already five minutes over the clock, so I'm going to pick a couple more questions to answer. There's many more that I haven't gotten to yet, so if I haven't gotten to your question, feel free to connect with me directly on social media or on kindharvest Ag, which is where I'm doing a lot of communications nowadays. Or just send me an email directly and I'll be happy to follow up as well. There's a question here from Greg. Is there anything to learn about plant mineral uptake at the end of the season by noting the various fall colors and streaks in leaves for a plant like grapes as they enter fall senescence? I generally see a yellowing of grape leaves as they turn their fall colors. I sometimes see fall leaf colors in one variety that look like magnesium deficiency, even though our soil is very high in magnesium. That's an interesting question, Greg, and I've never considered it quite from that possibility or from that perspective, but I think the answer is possibly yes. If we can learn what it is that we're looking at and what we're looking for. When you remove the chlorophyll from the leaf, then what you have left, of course, is all the carotenoids and all these different phytoalaxins that provide the coloring materials. So it is interesting, it's an interesting question to see how those might correlate with different nutrient profiles. My guess is they probably do in some ways, but I don't know exactly how that would be. That would be something worth digging into. Question here from Kyle. Have we noticed any correlations between changes in SAP analysis and microbial biomass or fungal to bacterial ratios? I'm asking about this because I'm curious if we can start getting a measurement clues between plant health and soil health. So, Kyle, this is an interesting question and the answer is yes, there certainly are correlations. There are three nutrients which correlate very highly with biological activity that as biological activity in the soil increases, we also see, we see increases in the plant SAP in silicon absorption and iron absorption and manganese absorption just consistently like clockwork. Those three happen over and over again and they seem to be dependent on good soil microbial activity. So there's many more questions here. Unfortunately, there's more than we have time for. So I apologize if I haven't gotten to your question yet, but we will follow up with you. Please reach out to me directly to follow up on any of those. Thank you all. I hope you found the information useful and valuable, and I look forward to speaking with you again in our next webinar. Have an awesome day and enjoy winter. Thanks.