The transition (to regenerative ag) doesn't have to be so difficult | James Johnson | Regen Rev 2021

And next up, we have a grower that I have the privilege of consulting with on a weekly basis this past year and has been with Advancing Eco Agriculture for over three. James Johnson, fourth generation family row crop and tree nut producer in southwest New Mexico. James is a meticulous record keeper and and observes in the field like no other. I'd say his mistakes through the regenerative process have been more like aha moments that have led to answers, greater understanding and many accomplishments. Welcome, James.

Thank you, Rachel. Hi everybody. Yeah, most of my aha moments so far have been learning that a lot of my misery was self imposed. And with that I'm going to start my slideshow. I like to start it off with this Einstein quote that I saw in another slide presentation. That the significant problems that we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. Our farm history here we started in 1918. My great grandfather moved here from south Central Texas. We were established as a cow calf operation in 1918. Terrible droughts in the 30s as well as the 50s made them have to diversify a little bit. Irrigation wells were drilled in 1951 and it was originally used to water grassland. We were furrow irrigated until 1999 with intense ground preparation. So basically every season we went in with deep tillage, ripped it, break and plowed it. And then we started subsurface drip irrigation in 1999. I kind of took this as a quote that I learned from John. It was on one of his other speaking engagements that he did on a podcast. And I kind of modified it a little bit and said, how do we as farmers start being the ones being farmed? So to talk about the plant health pyramid, John went over it quite a bit. It's kind of funny. I've, I've looked at this thing. I actually talked to John about it a few days ago. I said, I believe that most growers are in the minus 1, maybe minus 2 range. I was probably in the minus 3 range. Whenever I started this journey. I like to say, hi, my name is James and I am a glyphoholic. I'm a recovering glyphoholic. Out of 3100 acres of crop land in 2017, I used almost 1600 gallons, up to almost 20, 700 gallons in 2018, 795 in 2019, and down to 340 in 2020. I mean, I'm at least headed in the right direction. One of the ways that I believe that farmers are being farmed, you look at the Caps. There's my wife and I on vacation on the beach and I've got a Helena, Helena chemical hat on. And then two of my boys, my older boys wearing the exact same cap. So you know, he's been farmed just like I was farmed. Grew up in this chemical companies, seed companies. And these guys are the ones that are actually farming the farmer. At this point I'm giving a little bit of a, I guess a lookup things that maybe most people don't show. This is kind of where the money went over the years. I, I went back 13 years because that was everything that I could pull out of my computer at the time. My 13 year average on my input costs between fertilizer, chemical, seed, labor, all at the bottom. The fertilizer one and the chemical one are the two that I'm going to key on the most. My 20, 20 I was up on fertilizer. I was down significantly on chemical, actually up 22.23% on the fertilizer inputs, but down over $300,000 in chemicals on the AEA program. Chemicals and fertilizers basically are just, and I'm a short term or I guess I've just started believing this and truly understanding this. But it's been money that's been thrown out the window. Our atmosphere is 78% nitrogen. There's, you know, I looked up this stuff today. There's £70,000 of nitrogen above each acre. There's 500,000 times what is needed for a hundred bushel corn crop. And biology is the key to unlock this potential. John Kemp and Tanio gave a lot better than I did as far as how that actually works. But I did want to bring that up because I wanted to say this was the first time that I trialed the Taneo product in 2010. I did this with very little help from, from the outside. Nobody told me hey, whenever you apply this biology you might want to back off on your nitrogen. I actually ended up with these, actually, a whole 34 acre block of 6 and a half and 7 inch onions. So when we apply our soil primer, we, we banded in right into the seed lines. We actually seed five lines per 40. These are, these are actually on 80 inch beds for our harvester. 220,000 seeds per acre, really small seed. So we have to do a lot of intense management to get seed to soil contact. Those seeds are really, really shallow, just a hair deeper than a lettuce seed. So if anybody's planted lettuce, they know they can't get it Too deep. But you got to have good seed to soil contact our soil primer, as was recommended by AEA, the Rejuvenate Hemocarb C Shield 3 of the different Tano products, the spectrum being because of our high heat, the spectrum plus MyCo, mostly because of our extensive and excessive phosphate use in the past. And then the OP8. And more than anything, we use the OP8 trying to reduce any of the chemical residues held over in the soil. Does it work? I'd like to say it does. Don't mind the flip phone in the left. But the mycorrhizae interaction with the roots on that, that little bit of oats that was left over from the previous year's cover crop. And those onions, the worm activity which we don't see very often, and the root growth in these very small dormant winter onions. These are overwintered short day onions and the root growth is absolutely phenomenal. Going back to what John presented and his talk about what, you know, good photosynthesis or good nutrition can do. Historically in our onion crop, we've used chlorpyrifos in our put down with the seed to try and take care of onion maggot. In 2019, we actually found that we had some chlorpyrifos resistant maggots because this, this field here actually had the chlorpyrifos applied with it. In 2020, we went ahead, we used chlorpyrifos again. It's on the chopping block by the EPA, but it's still legal to use. Again. In our 2020 crop, we had another maggot infestation. It's kind of interesting because our normal crop consultant wanted us to soil apply through the drip irrigation, some diazinon. We looked at different ways of trying to control this. Our AEA rep, Raychelle and the other rep that I was working with at the time actually said that, you know, we needed to apply three to five pounds of magnesium sulfate, quart of their rebound molybdenum, a pint of the rebound boron, and just like John said, Within 24 hours we completely had wiped out the onion maggot problem in the field. And that's led us on to a successful harvest. I'll go on to our cotton program. We got a little bit longer time to converse and to get the little more guidance, I would say from AEA as to what we wanted to do on a cotton program here in the Southwest because of our heat, our low organic matter, it was decided that one of the determining factors or defining Factors in total cotton production was probably carbon availability or CO2 availability late in the season. And so we opted to plant this really thick cover crop. We, we went in and we strip tilled the COVID crop, went in with a nutritional schedule on the cotton being. We applied bio Coke gold with seed in our planter application. We put it on the spectrum DS with a few other micronutrients and some micronutrient food with the, or the micro microbial food with rejuvenate. And we actually planted right into that standing cover. If anybody wonders why I still had, why a glyphoholic would go back to the bottle. We had a really hard time getting this cover crop to terminate and we had to get it under control because it was, it was going to overrun us. We were very happy with our emergence and our stand establishment. We had excellent root growth in our, in our cotton. There's always a fear with cotton of having rhizoctonia and damping off. We saw absolutely zero of that because of the healthier soils. Just a few pictures of the crop going through and the COVID crop and how it started to change over time and the crop starting to grow. I've been told that I take really good pictures. I'm obviously much better at that than I am with the, with the technology of trying to put these things together. It was a really fun crop to watch. This cotton crop was completely grown and it's the first time ever on my farm that we grew an entire cotton crop without any plant growth regulators or without any insecticides or fungicides. So whenever we talk about the savings in the, in the chemical world, it all came from the fact that we were at least spending a little bit more money on that biology. And a big portion of the, of the expense that we had that we called fertilizer was in the biology. And the absolute best thing is whenever we roll that cotton up and send it to the cotton gin and we call that a success. One of the other proud moments that I had was I realized that after I had harvested that I still had pretty good ground cover under that. This already has another next year's cover crop planted right into it. So keeping that soil covered tips to the average grower as far as how to transition. The first one is don't be afraid. I tried to go about this on my own, but I was, I was timid, I was scared. It finally took the AEA team telling me that, you know, there was, I was doing a lot of the right things at the wrong time. And in the Wrong amount. And so for that, I say become part of a team that sees your success as their own. Best thing that I can tell you is surround yourself with growers that are on the same journey or just ahead of you. The coffee shop's not the same anymore. Whenever you start doing this, the neighbors start driving by and they start. They start wanting to throw rocks at your program. They did that all summer with me, right up until harvest time. And then at harvest time, I had a lot of interest in what we had going on. I feel like individual and key growers should lead by example and bring on other growers and show other growers what they're doing and be completely open and honest with that. That's why I share my numbers like I do. Understanding that the system takes time. What we're building wasn't destroyed in a day either. One of the key takeaways that I had with a fantastic meeting with AEA was. And that's why I say that, take advice from a team that knows the process and the timing. I am a glycoholic. It's a process trying to get away. I've had to wean myself. I've had to go back to things. As John has told me over and over again in the past, you're going to have to pay your dues. You have made a lot of mistakes. And to get this thing back into the top tiers of the pyramid, you're going to have to pay your dues, and that's going to take time. The last comment I put on this slide, you may have to adjust your operations in more ways than you think. Ultimately, my journey with aea, I started with one crop consultant that had been a crop consultant with first my family longer than I had been alive. About three and a half to four weeks into the. Into this journey, he came to me and said he thought that I needed to find another crop consultant, that he was just too old. He was 71 years old at the time. He didn't want to learn a new way. I told him that I would. I would prefer to do this with him than without him, but he absolutely refused. And it ended up being one of the best moves of my life. So I think you have to be willing to let go of your comfort zone sometimes and let the journey guide you. In conclusion. I mean, this is what we do it for. This is my first grandchild sitting in the field, and I love the little excitement look on her face as we're playing in the dirt. I thank you guys for listening to me. If any other growers or anybody wants to reach out to me, I put my Facebook, Twitter, and my Instagram up. Feel free to hit me up on any of those platforms.