The Revolution is Regenerative: Guiding Agriculture Towards the Future

All right, so now for the moment you've been waiting for. I'm thrilled to present John Kemp. John Kemp has been rocking my world this week. He is the leading crop health consultant and designer of innovative soil and plant management systems. He's the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, a plant nutrition and biostimulants consulting company. He's a top expert in the field of biological and regenerative farming and founded AEA in 2006 to help fellow farmers by providing education tools and strategies on regenerative farming. He's the host of the podcast Regenerative Agriculture, where he interviews top scientists and growers about the science and principles of implementing regenerative agriculture on a large scale. He has a unique ability to simplify and clearly explain complex concepts in the areas of soil and plant health. John's mission is to provide support to the world's farmers and globally impact our food supply. When I was on the radio with him last week, he made the claim that he can help people grow plants that are resistant to all pests and diseases it except gophers and voles, but just by adjusting the soil nutrition and the health of the microbiome. And that's a big claim. But in hearing him talk last week and today in his breakout, I'm beginning to believe him. So welcome, John.

Hi friends. 2021. I hope that you're finding it useful and enjoyable. I'm sure that you are, because after all, the work that we're doing is the work that the planet desperately needs. Having a virtual conference instead of a live conference means that we actually have more time to reach out, to make new connections, new introductions, and we can actually learn more from the other people who know things that we would like to know. So I would encourage you to be proactive. Reach out to people. Don't just wait to passively bump into people. An event like this requires a bit more overt interaction, but it's very rewarding. So I hope I'm trusting that you find the conference useful and helpful and want to dive into our topic for this evening. Our discussion in this presentation is a description of what I believe the future of agriculture will really look like as we adopt regenerative agriculture on scale. My personal mission and passion is to have regenerative agriculture. My personal mission and passion is to have regenerative agriculture become the status quo, the standard against which everything else is compared globally in the next 20 years. So my goal is to have 80. My goal is to have 80% of farmland be using regenerative agriculture practices in the next 20 years, when we think about, and I try to think very strategically about how we get there, how do we achieve that point from where we are today? And I believe this is a very realistic and a very achievable goal. And in fact, we are well on a pathway to achieving this goal collectively. So in this keynote, I want to give you a rapid overview of the possibilities and the potential that I see for regenerative agriculture to solve and be the solution for many of the challenges that we face, many of them that we have created here on our planet Earth, and what we can do about them today. Agriculture is often credited as being a source of the challenges with nutrient pollution and soil erosion, soil degradation. And it is very common for society at large to have a negative perception around the impacts that agriculture is having in our environment. In some cases it's over inflated, and in some cases it's justifiable. So what I became really excited about in this pathway, my own pathway, is the realization that agriculture can be not just the. We can do more than just resolve the challenges that we are creating. We can in fact resolve the challenges that are created outside of our milieu. And we can actually be the solution for regenerating ecosystems and landscapes on a significant scale. As my own pathway to describe some of this story, I think it's important to share some of my own history and context. One of the benefits of this being a virtual conference is that I didn't have to travel to the conference on Amish airlines. That always makes travel easier or non travel easier. I suppose the context for my own personal story is that I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm in Northeast Ohio in the snow belt south of Lake Erie. So we're about 20 miles or so from the Pennsylvania border, and 20 miles south of Lake Erie, we have a very high rainfall, high snowfall environment. Typically anywhere from 100 to 120 inches of snowfall per year, plus an additional 30 to 40 inches of rainfall per year. As a result, we have a fairly high humidity environment, lots of disease and insect pressure during the summer months. And we also have a lot of cloud cover, not just too far distant from us, about 20 miles away, we have the Ravenna Arsenal, which was located in this part of the country because it was the second cloudiest part of the country, second only to Seattle. So we have lots of cloud cover, lots of humidity, sometimes limited sunlight during the summer months, and particularly during the winter months. All of this results in an environment that is very conducive to intense disease and insect pressure. My father started growing vegetables commercially for a fresh market in 1996, and I grew up on this farm. When I graduated from school at the age of 14, I was given the responsibility of doing all of the drip irrigation and foliar applications of both fertilizers and pesticides. When I was 16, I became a private licensed pesticide applicator. My father was also the distributor for all the different inputs, seeds, fertilizers, equipment, and so forth for fruit and vegetable growers in the local region, as well as pesticides. And as a result of his being a distributor for pesticides, we were the first people to try all the newest, latest and greatest cocktails that came on the market and then make recommendations to our growers and how well they were working for us. We had severe challenges in the early 2000s, 2000, 2003 and 2004. We had three consecutive years where when we lost the majority of our primary crops that we were growing at that point, we lost greater than, had a greater, greater than 70% harvest loss in three consecutive years. And this was in spite of intensifying pesticide applications. It seemed the more we applied, the more intense the pest pressure became. In 2004, the third year of this three year period, we began renting a field from a neighboring farm that bordered right up against one of our own fields. So the field that we have been farming for the prior decade had been growing vegetables in the same soil during the summer months every year, and then followed with COVID crops during the winter months. But the soil was being exposed to the intense pesticide applications every summer. The neighboring field was a dairy farm that had a corn, a small grain, and two years of alfalfa rotation that did not have the intense pesticide application. So these two fields were very long, narrow strips being tilled up and down the slope. At harvest time, we planted this field. Now that we were tilling and planting both fields, they were no longer as narrow and it made sense to plant across the field border. So we switched the orientation of the rows and started planting across the previous field border. At harvest time, the cantaloupe that were on the old soil that had the previous pesticide exposure, 80% of the leaves were infected with powdery mildew. On the new soil, there was no powdery mildew, not 5% or 10% infection. There was zero. You couldn't find any. In fact, the difference was so pronounced that there was a knife line right down through the center of the field where there were healthy vine from one side growing into unhealthy Vines from the other side. There was this distinct difference between these unhealthy plants and the healthy plants that were the same variety had been planted the same day, the management had been identical, and yet we had two completely different outcomes. I wanted to know what are the differences between these two plants and what allows one plant to be resistant when the next plant a meter away is susceptible? And what I learned over the next several years of intense studying and research is that plants all have an inherent immune system. They have the capacity to be completely resistant to diseases and insects when they are supported with the right microbiome and the right nutrition. And just we know that each one of us have all, we all have our own immune systems, but they don't all work equally well. Some people become ill with the first cold or flu bug that comes along, and other people practically never become ill. And the only difference between those two, between these two, is how well they have been supported with nutrition from even before they were born. And it is possible for us to manage nutrition and biology in such a way to grow crops that are completely resistant to diseases in insects and eliminate the need for pesticides. This is the foundation of what I consider to be a truly regenerative agriculture, because we now eliminate the need for pesticides. But not only do we have these extraordinarily healthy crops that have a functional immune system, they can also transfer their immunity to the people who consume them as food. And we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. So I want to describe some of the potential and the possibilities that I see with regenerative agriculture. Ecosystems to regenerate, Soil health, plant health, landscape health, public health, and ecosystem health, and all of the different factors that need to begin working together for us to have a truly regenerative agriculture landscape. I believe that we often don't realize the tremendous untapped potential that our plants are really capable of. What we have come to accept as common and normal is plants which are only growing and photosynthesizing somewhere in the neighborhood of about 20% of their inherent photosynthetic capacity. To get to 100% would require an ideal optimal environment in a greenhouse with perfect water and sunlight and CO2, etc. It's unlikely that we will get to 100% on a consistent basis in an outdoor production environment. But it certainly seems reasonable to move from 20% to 40% or 60% photosynthetic efficiency. And when this happens, plant health improves in ways that are difficult for us to imagine because many of us have never experienced it. And have never observed plants at this level of plant health. These are photos from some of our test plots in 2011 when we were doing product development research. These are radishes that are your common garden variety. I think these might be either champion or cherry bell. I'm not entirely certain which common garden variety typically grows to the size of a quarter after about six weeks. These are the size of a softball after five weeks after planting. And not only are these radishes supersized, but they are not woody, they're not bitter, they are sweet and crisp and clear all the way through, with an Average weight between 10 and 12 ounces each. Five weeks after planting. That's what the radish plant is actually capable of delivering, Just using this one plant as an example. We have hundreds of examples that I could point to in our, in our consulting work that we've done at advancing eco agriculture. But one of the comments that I make quite frequently is we don't actually know what really healthy plants look like anymore. We have forgotten what really healthy plants look like. And we can reclaim that and begin producing exceptionally healthy plants when we manage nutrition and when we manage biology well. And that gives us the foundation to develop a truly regenerative agriculture. So agricultural cycles, when we look at plant and soil ecosystems, can function in two different directions. One is we can have plants that are only at 15 to 20% photosynthetic efficiency, which is part one here, where we have decreased photosynthesis volume. This leads to fewer sugars going out as root exudates through the root system to feed soil biology, which leads to number three, limited microbial activity, which leads to number four, poor mineral absorption, which leads to number five of a pest susceptible and insect susceptible crop, and poor fruit quality. This is a degraded, degenerative agriculture cycle, which is how the majority of agriculture functions today. This is what we are familiar with. This is what we have come to accept as being commonplace and what we perceive as being normal. But if you define normal as being healthy and define normal as what we would desire to see happening, then this is not in normal agriculture at all. This same cycle can also function in reverse, where we have a regenerative ecosystem. Step one is where we increase photosynthesis volume from 20% up to 40 or 60% or higher, which leads to more sugars being sent out through the root system as root exudates to feed soil biology, which leads to accelerated microbial activity. And these microbes extract minerals from the soil mineral matrix and make them available to plants, which then leads to step five an increased pest resistance and the exceptional flavor and aroma and quality and all the characteristics that we are looking for. This is the exact same cycle as the previous cycle, except in reverse. And the only difference between these two, the determining factor that determines which of these is operating in our agricultural ecosystems is our management decisions. We can manage these ecosystems with our cultural management practices to be moving in either one direction or the other. And it is possible to develop regenerative agriculture systems that accomplish significant benefits for the ecosystem and for society based on how we manage it. So I believe that a truly regenerative agriculture is able to regenerate and sustain in these seven key areas. And I chose to use the word sustaining these seven areas very carefully. There have been, over the last decade or two, there have been lots of conversations about agricultural sustainability. And I was one of many voices to express the need for caution around the term sustainability. I think we need to ask the question, what is it that we desire to sustain? Why would we have any desire to sustain our current agricultural systems that require the use of toxins to support plants and to get them through to the point of harvest? Why would we desire to sustain an agriculture which is losing billions of tons of topsoil per acre? We first need to have a conversation about a regenerative agriculture that regenerates soil health and plant health and all of these various ecosystems to a much higher plateau of performance. And only when it reaches a point where it is self sustaining can we have a true conversation about sustainability. So when we look at these seven areas, a truly regenerative agriculture needs to be able to be self sustaining without continuous external inputs. In each of these seven areas, the area of plant health, soil fertility, animal or livestock health, public health, and the health of the local ecology and ecological landscape. The health of the community. Community is a very important one. Nothing can be truly sustainable until it sustains the sustainers. And this is an area in which agriculture has really fallen short over the last six or seven decades here in North America because of our cheap food policies. And then, of course, economic health and financial health of that community that is in the agricultural landscape. Let's take each of these one at a time. I'll give you some thoughts of what, how I perceive regenerative agriculture and what the possibilities and the potential really are. The first area is the area of regenerating plant health and delivering true plant health. I know, and I can speak with confidence, having worked with hundreds of different crops across North America and also internationally, that it is possible for plants to develop complete resistance to all diseases and all insects and completely eliminate the need for pesticides. I know this sounds like a significant claim, it is a significant claim, but it is not something. This is not a hypothesis, this is not a theory. This is something that we have actually done successfully on scale, on a scale of hundreds of thousands of acres across dozens of different crops. So this is not something, it's something that we may need to learn about how to apply in a specific context. But the foundational principles are the same. All plants have immune systems and it's possible to support each of these immune systems to deliver true resistance. And this is something that is very realistic and very achievable on scale, as we have worked with growers over the last 15 years to help them achieve this. These types of disease and insect resistance. We've observed a gradual evolution of plant health, where plants become resistant to different types of diseases and insects at different levels of physiological development, or I should say physiological completeness or nutritional support, perhaps nutritional integrity. And we developed this diagram back in 2011 to describe how we observed plants becoming resistant to different groups of diseases and different groups of insects based on what was happening with plant physiology and nutritional integrity. The first level of the plant health pyramid is when plant photosynthesis increases both in quantity and in quality. And at this stage plants become resistant to all the soil borne pathogens such as Phytophthora and Fusarium and Rhizoctonia and Pythium and so forth. The second level is when plants begin forming complete proteins. All the nitrogen that they absorb in each 24 hour photoperiod is rapidly converted to amino acids, peptides and then to complete proteins. And they become resistant to all of the sucking insects and all the larval insects, such as cabbage looper, tomato hornworm, European corn borer, aphids, whiteflies, leafhoppers, and so forth. The third level, these first two levels of the plant health pyramid are purely a function of balancing chemistry, balancing the nutrients within the plant, making sure the plants have adequate levels of magnesium and sulfur and iron and manganese and so forth. These first two levels of plant health pyramid can be accomplished in a hydroponic setting. They are not difficult, they're very straightforward and plants respond extremely rapidly. We have many cases where we have applied nutritional applications to plants that had nutrient imbalances, that had pests present, say they had aphids present or had spider mites present on a crop, and we put on the needed nutrients to help that plant balance its internal chemistry and trigger its immune system. And the plant Becomes rapidly becomes resistant to those insects and will actually kill the insects that continue feeding on it simply as a result of changing nutrition. No insecticides being applied, no bio controls, nothing of that, people, purely a nutritional change. So these first two levels of the plant health pyramid are not that difficult to achieve in the field. Level three and level four are slightly different, however, in that in order to get to level three, plants need to absorb their nutrition from soil biology, from the microbiome. And when that happens, they develop a surplus of energy. They begin forming elevated levels of lipids, which are fats and oils in plain English. And at this stage, they develop this glossy, waxy sheen on the leaf surface, and they become resistant to all the airborne pathogens, both bacterial and fungal pathogens, such as scab and rusts and mildews and so forth. And then lastly, at level 4 of the plant health pyramid, plants begin developing elevated levels of these compounds that are referred to as plant secondary metabolites. In plain English, we call them essential oils. These are compounds such as terpenes, bioflavonoids, phytoalexins. Some that you may be familiar with would be anthocyanins and blueberries, resveratrol and red wine, lycopene in tomatoes. These are all compounds that plants produce to protect themselves from ultraviolet radiation, from insect attack, from disease attack, from overgrazing. They're plant protectants. Every plant produces plant protectants. But when they become really healthy, the concentration of those plant protectants within each leaf can increase by a factor of 20 to 50 or 100 times. So the concentrations can really increase. And this is what, of course, also gives plants a very strong aroma and flavor. And it is at this stage that they become resistant to all of the chewing insects, such as grasshoppers and Japanese beetles and Colorado potato beetles and so forth. It's a lot of fun when we optimize soil health to favor the domesticated crops that we are trying to produce and not the pioneering species that are referred to as weeds. When the crops we are growing become healthier than the weeds because the soil is optimally balanced for them, that means that the diseases and insects will be first attracted to the plants. Plants we call weeds. This is a lamb's quarter plant being consumed by aphids. And this lamb's quarter plant was growing in a patch. There's a patch of lamb's quarter at an intersection between a field of tomatoes, a field of mixed salad greens, and a field of green beans. And the tomatoes are not particularly susceptible to aphids, but the salad greens and green beans most certainly are, and the aphids chose to completely ignore them and focus on the lamb's quarter. That's a lot of fun when that happens. And this is the potential that regenerative ecosystems really have is to optimize where they can be managed, to optimize the health and the performance of the crops that we are growing. The second aspect of a truly regenerative agriculture is the potential to self regenerate soil fertility and reduce or eliminate the need for fertilizers within the confines of that soil's geological bedrock material and, and the foundation that we have to work with. So I believe that it is possible for soil biology to deliver 100% of a plant's nutritional requirements with no need for added nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, zinc, manganese, copper, as long as we have the soil geological profile where biology can extract those minerals and make them available for the crop. Most soils across North America, with the exception of really sandy soils, have the capacity to deliver nutrients to growing crops for hundreds of years, even thousands of years, just in the top six inches alone, without even going underneath that. There's of course variability if we were to speak about each individual nutrient. But I do want to offer the caveat that this is not universally true of all soils. Some soils are completely missing molybdenum, for example, or perhaps cobalt. And some soils might be really sandy soils and don't have the geological foundation to deliver nutrients. So with, with that caveat as a foundation, we have many growers we've worked with, and also growers that we have not worked with across the country who have demonstrated that they can produce crops of a higher yield than regional averages and a more sustainable yield, or should say a more consistent yield than regional averages, without any external fertilizer inputs, with no soil amendments being added, simply by building and sustaining soil microbial populations to deliver all of that crops nutritional requirements. I believe that a regenerative agriculture can also deliver optimal livestock health, where our livestock animals also have functional immune systems and are resistant to parasites and insects and disease, and eliminate the need for warmers and other support materials. One topic that's very important to me is I also believe that agriculture has a tremendous responsibility in the domain of public health. You have probably heard the phrase that we are what we eat. And I added to that to say that we are what we eat, drink, breathe and think. Ultimately to a large degree, we are a product of our environment in many different ways. If we are what we eat, then our food is making us sick. Because collectively, as a society in North America, we have an epidemic of degenerative illnesses that is going to produce public health care costs in the near future that are unsustainable in our current economy. I believe it is the directive of agriculture in general and the directive of regenerative agriculture to lead the charge in producing food as medicine, food that can actually enhance our immune systems and that can suppress inflammation in our bodies rather than enhancing inflammation. Today, 48% of adults in the United States have some type of cardiovascular disease. Why would we accept that as being. Why would we consider that as being acceptable? That's completely unacceptable. 39% of women and 40% of men living today, again, this is us CDC data living today are expected to have cancer in their lifetime. So think about your family and think about your friends. You have yourself and three friends or two or three friends with you. Almost half of you are expected to get cancer in your lifetime. Now, I would be. I would anticipate that given the type of event that we are at Eco Farm and the types of interests that we have, hopefully that is not true of us as a group, but it is probably true of our families and friends and the people within our community. This is also, from my perspective, not an acceptable situation. And it is a situation that I believe agriculture has a great deal of responsibility for. Autoimmune disease. I think this is in young adults under the age of 20. If I recall the reference correctly, prevalence doubled from 10.4% in 2010 to 20.8% in 2018. So we had doubling of autoimmune diseases in eight years. Is that trend going to continue? It'll double again in the next eight years. That means we'll have 40% by 2026. I believe that farmers have the capacity to contribute more to public health than all the doctors and hospitals combined because we have the capacity to prevent the cause of illness rather than to treat the symptoms. We have the capacity to produce nutritional food, nutrient dense food that can reduce inflammation, enhance people's immunities rather than the opposite. And I would like to point out that I don't necessarily place 100% of responsibility for our current public health challenges in the agricultural sector. I don't believe that that is representative of reality. We also have food processors which add extremely high quantities of salt and sugar and unhealthy fats. So there's more to the story than just agriculture. However, agriculture is the foundational place. Food processors and distributors are incapable of producing healthy foods that healthy packaged foods that enhance people's immune system unless they have high quality raw materials to work with. It is our opportunity and our responsibility as farmers and food producers to produce food as medicine that has a high level of nutritional integrity. And then I believe that we should also be rewarded for that. We have had over the last seven decades or more a cheap food policy that has gutted the countryside and rural communities. And to some degree, agriculture and farmers are being pointed to as the cause of some of our environmental challenges. Because they're a minority group, they're easy to malign. And many farmers, many of us as farmers. I consider myself a farmer and grower. I have not been growing for the last couple of years, but hope to again soon. There is an element of we are once again being asked to fix a challenge without being compensated for it after having had that story repeated dozens of times over the last decade or so. So we have the capacity to deliver a lot of these ecosystem services, some public health benefits, and we should, it's our responsibility. And when we deliver on that responsibility, we should also take home more of the consumers food dollar than what we do currently. I believe that regenerative agriculture can also deliver ecological health, regenerate landscapes, ecosystems and wildlife diversity. And this happens the best when we as growers develop and cultivate an empathy for the landscape. The best growers we have worked with who have the most extraordinary crop responses are those growers who walk into a block of an orchard or into a field and they say, something is off with this block. Something is wrong. It's an intuitive feeling. It's difficult for them to identify exactly what is not right, but they sense that something is off. And it is those growers who produce extraordinary responses with crops, with their employees, and in the landscape and ecological context. I believe that regenerative agriculture also needs to facilitate a rebuilding and to regenerate community health and to build vibrant and resilient agricultural communities. There can be many conversations about what this means, but we know that rural landscapes, rural communities, have suffered significantly over the last several decades or century or so. And this is something that does need to be reduced if we want to. The only way that a landscape can truly be regenerated is if it has caretakers. Landscapes, ecological landscapes, need caretakers. And those caretakers also need to be sustained, inspired and supported. All of this can only happen if these rural communities have vibrant economic health. I believe that it is necessary for regenerative agriculture to provide attractive compensation to growers for delivering all of these ecosystem benefits and all the public health benefits that we're really capable of delivering. I would like to point out that organic agriculture does not necessarily lead to any of these outcomes that I described to regenerative agriculture practices. It's possible, and I believe that the intent of many original founders of the organic agricultural community was to deliver these compounds, was to deliver these benefits. But over time, as the organic certification process has evolved and as the bureaucracy has evolved, we have arrived at a place where organic agriculture no longer necessarily delivers any of these outcomes that we would desire to see. I'd like to end with a few examples to provide a vision for what is possible. We worked with an organic green bean grower in coastal Washington who had a priority four year average of producing three and a half tons per acre. The first year, with changing nutrition management, his yields increased to 10 tons per acre and he had no disease pressure. The white mold completely disappeared. This was in one year as the result of changing nutrition management to emphasize nutritional integrity. These are honeycrisp apples, also from a grower in Washington that we've worked with for the prior three years. The first two years we worked with him, regional average for honeycrisp in the region is about 50 bins per acre. The first two years he was able to harvest 100 bins per acre. And the third year he was able to produce 150 bins per acre with a 95% pack out and a high enough mineral content for six months storage. For those of you not familiar with what this means, so we're talking about a 50 bin regional average versus 150 bins. Nutrient dense, high quality apples with no insecticide applications. Honeycrisp are worth about 100, about $1,000 a bin times 150 bins. You do the math. This is a crop that's worth more than growing marijuana and it is providing. So this grower, because of his substantial yield increases and quality increases, this grower has become. Not only is he providing all the ecosystem benefits that I described that regenerative agriculture is capable of delivering, but in addition to that he is also a low cost producer. It costs him less to produce a bushel of honeycrisp than any other grower in the region. One last example, and I have hundreds of these examples that I could talk about, this is a grower. Just this last year we worked with cotton in New Mexico. Pima cotton produced a 40 to 70% yield increase on different blocks using 20% less fertilizer with no insecticides and no PGRs and increased yield on the Pima cotton from 880 to 1490 pounds per acre. These are the types of case studies that I get really excited by because when we consider cotton or when we consider apples, apples are on the list of dirty dozen of the crops that get the most intense pesticide applications. And when we're able to grow such a vibrantly healthy, high yielding crop with no pesticides, that is a significant impact that we're having on the quality of the food that people eat and the nutritional benefits for them. So I would leave you with these three questions for you to think about as you think about the future of shifting and evolving your farm in a regenerative manner. How would you desire your farm to develop and grow and evolve? What would you desire to experience on your farm? And what do you desire your farm to contribute to the landscape, to the community, to your family? So I want to say thank you. I hope that you found this useful and interesting. I will look forward to speaking with you. If you have any follow up questions for me, I will be participating in the Q and A session at our exhibit here at the conference and you are also welcome to reach out to me on social media or by email and I'll be happy to connect. Thank you very much.