The Fallacy of Perfect Soil Reports

Hi friends, I'm John Kemp, hosting this podcast. I am passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce fruit of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've discovered that there are many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems and how to develop regenerative agriculture systems. However, much of this knowledge and this information is scattered. It's found all over the place, some of it has been published in peer reviewed publications, but there are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that has not been published and that hasn't been shared with many people. I started advancing EcoAgriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agricultural systems become adopted globally and become the mainstream, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared. To help achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone while we have developed products at AEA that embody the principles of regenerative agriculture systems and make them easier for growers to apply this knowledge and these principles can be applied anywhere and when they are applied properly, they will always increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or ideas topics that you would like for me to discuss, Please connect on LinkedIn or on Twitter where my username is visionbuilder7 or you can also email me at john kempf.com I would very much like to hear from you and to hear your feedback. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and thank you very much for listening. Enjoy the show.

Hi friends, welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. I want to share some thoughts on the misuse and abuse of soil analysis. I've observed far too many instances where growers and agronomists are using soil analysis in a fashion that is a detrimental it's a detriment to the crop that they're trying to grow. It's a detriment to the long term soil health and it's a detriment to the farmers financial and economic viability as well. The challenge lies not within the use of soil analysis themselves, but how we think about them and how we use them to make recommendations. So here's the simple version. Soil analysis are a very useful tool to help us Balance nutrients to grow a really healthy, high yielding crop. They are not the goal. I've observed far too many instances where recommendations are made based on a laboratory soil analysis report. Where the report is, okay, we have a desired value of 500 pounds of potassium per acre. I'm just making up hypothetical numbers. And we found an existing value of 200 pounds per acre. Therefore, we need to add an additional 300 pounds per acre of potash, where the idea is that we need to bring soil nutrient levels up to the desired value that is reported on the soil analysis report based on a soil's CEC cation exchange capacity, or to bring it into balance and ratio with other nutrients. This is a problem. This is a really big problem. And the reason it's a problem is because the goal of a farmer is not to produce a pretty soil analysis. It's not the goal to make a nice looking piece of paper from the lab. Our goal as growers needs to be to grow a really healthy, high functioning, high yielding crop. And nutrient applications needed to achieve that are usually very different from the nutrient applications that are needed to make a pretty soil report. So the bottom line is that soil analysis need to be used as a guideline with the goal of growing a really healthy crop. The soil analysis cannot become the goal in and of itself. That is the challenged thinking that has emerged in some areas, which has the capacity to cause major frustration and major headaches and quite simply can drive growers right into major financial disruption on their growing operation if they're not careful. On the other hand, there's also this thought pattern of applying the nutrients that are needed for crop removal. So instead of looking at a soil analysis, and there are many growers who've reported the experience of submitting a soil analysis to three different laboratories and getting three very different lab reports of what the nutrient profile of the soil actually is, and yet still getting exactly identical nutrient recommendations. This is because so many people are still looking at nutrient removal and asking the question, how much nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, et cetera, is required to grow this crop and what are the nutrients that we need to apply to achieve a certain level of yield with a fairly complete disregard for the nutrients that are actually present in the soil profile. And this is equally a fallacy. These are both very simplistic approaches. They're coming from a different perspective, but they're very simplistic and they're often used simply, I believe, because people love simplicity. There's this desire for simplicity because soil science, if you really get into it, soil science is Such a complicated science, and it's complicated because there is so much that we don't know. When I speak with soil scientists and microbiologists, the few drops of information that we think we know about soil biology and agronomy compared to the ocean of things that we don't know, can be quite overwhelming. So we know that soil analysis and soil science is to some degree, still a very imprecise science, and that drives a desire for a more simplistic approach to balancing plant nutrients. So the question becomes, how do we use soil analysis as a guideline to give us useful insights into what is happening with soil and with plant health, and how do we manage it to help us grow a really high yielding and healthy crop? I believe there are two pieces, major pieces, which our current soil analysis does not take into consideration, which any good agronomist needs to take into consideration when making recommendations. Many of us are already thinking about crop nutritional requirements and crop removal rates. We're already thinking about what is present in the soil and what might be needed to bring the soil up into balance. But there are two other pieces that we need to think about as well that we often ignore. First of those two is taking into consideration the tremendous nutrient reserves that already exist in the soil profile that do not show up on a soil analysis. So the soil analysis methodology that is used today, and there's a number of different methodologies used in different types of growing environments and so forth, but the goal for each of them is to develop an approximation of the nutrients that are available for this crop to grow on this growing season. That's the goal. That's what they desire to extract and be able to give us a window and insights into nutrient availability. They deliberately exclude the tremendous reserves of nutrients that are locked up in the soil profile. So throughout North America, particularly for much of the midwestern soils, where we have clay, silt, loam soils, an overarching general number that is often used is many of our soils in the top six inches will contain upwards of 40,000 pounds of potassium per acre and 9,000 pounds of phosphorus per acre, just in the top six inches. So there's this tremendous nutrient reserve and nutrient bank account that will never show up on a soil analysis. The soil analysis will not show you the reserve that is present in the soil profile. This is the one other piece that we need to take into consideration is what is the nutrient reserve that we can tap into and release over time. There are many growers and many agronomists who have 20, 30 years of experience who have observed that on fields where nutrients were not applied for a long period of time, according to crop removal rates, there should have been a decline of available phosphorus and potassium and other nutrients. But that didn't happen. In fact, in some cases there was a gradual increase where phosphorus and potassium became more and more available. And I'm using these two as an example because they're two of the macronutrients that we need to pay a lot of attention to. The same holds true of magnesium and calcium and other nutrients as well. So this piece that I'm suggesting we also need to take into consideration is understanding the geological profile of the soil that we're working with. If we have a limestone based soil, a limestone bedrock, there are going to be some soil profiles that don't have large levels of phosphorus or potassium or calcium that they can release. So this is not universally true of all soils. But many soils do have tremendous nutrient reserves that we can tap into. And I'm suggesting that we need to understand those better, need to understand what they are. Then the next piece that we need to take into consideration and understand better is how do we tap into them and how do they become available? This is really a function of soil biology. When you have very active soil biology, active organic matter, available carbon for the biology to work with, you can tap into these new tremendous nutrient reserves and make them available to plants. This again, is a process that we don't understand well. We are gaining an understanding and a window into the results. We can see on some soils that we have tremendous nutrient availability, even without nutrient applications for very long periods of time. So we observe some of the outcomes of what is happening when we have really healthy soils. And we don't always fully understand how it works. But the important piece is that when we do have good biology, very active biology, we can tap into these tremendous nutrient reserves. For this reason, I believe it is very important for us to not apply agriculture inputs that suppress soil biology. Let's try to reduce our management practices, whether they be excess of tillage, whether that be putting on pesticides or fertilizers such as anhydrous ammonia or potassium chloride, that have a very negative effect on soil biology. Let's try to limit product applications that suppress soil biology, because the more we suppress soil biology, the less we're going to tap into these nutrient reserves. And this is what has happened on many operations and many soils over the last several decades. Soils have become so biologically depressed and biologically degraded as a result of continuing nutrient applications with a suppressive effect on soil biology that we have arrived in a place where for some soils, there is very little or perhaps even no nutrient release happening from the locked up soil reserves. So this is something that we have to recover on our agricultural soils and something that we can recover. One of the pieces that I'm always impressed with is the incredible resilience and regenerative capacity of natural systems. All we need to do is begin managing soils differently, begin managing our crops differently, and soil health has the capacity to regenerate incredibly quickly if we simply give it the materials that it needs and get out of the way. The beauty of these ecosystems and working with soil health and plant health is that they were designed to work, they were designed to function and to be truly sustainable without a lot of human intervention. When you work with an agronomist or a consultant, or if you're making your own recommendations, in addition to thinking about crop removal, in addition to thinking about the nutrients that are being reported on a soil analysis, also think about these other two pieces. Think about the nutrient reserves that are held in your soil profile and how you can use biology to tap into those two nutrient reserves. It is these two ideas that are really at the foundation of developing truly long term sustainable and even regenerative agriculture ecosystems. You want to work with people who use that approach and who use this thought process to develop ecosystems on your operation.

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