Updating Soil Analysis to Consider Microbial Influence with Rick Haney

Hi, friends, this is Jon, and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health, and ultimately public health. My guest for this episode is Rick Haney, a name that you've probably heard, or hopefully you have heard and are familiar with over the last couple of years, who developed the soil test that carries his name and the soil test that. That I'm quite intrigued by. We've started using it on our farms that we do consulting work on. And I wanted to have this conversation to learn more about how the assay came to be and what we can learn from it and to hear from Rick's perspective directly. So, Rick, thank you very much for joining us and for sharing your wisdom.

Oh, glad to be here.

Rick, you've become very well known for the soil test that carries your name now in the last couple of years. But what was the pathway that led you to developing that soil test? What brought you to this point?

I get that question time to time. And, you know, I grew up in Iowa as a kid and my grandfather farmed and, well, both my grandfathers farmed. And so I was around agriculture a lot. But until we moved to Oklahoma when I was, I think 15 or 16, I ended up started working on farms. I had worked on farms in Iowa, but, you know, I was young and I didn't, you know, couldn't do much. But I went to work for farmers and ranchers in Oklahoma and I watched them for years borrow a million dollars to fund their operations. And I watched just the dadgum devastating effect of the way we do agriculture on their ability to make any money. And I always felt bad for them because it was like, how can we help these guys? How can we help these guys do better? Because I'm watching them spend all this money, hardly make any money, and supposed to be feeding the world and all that. And yet why is it such a struggle? And so that really impacted me as a young man. And then the opportunity later in life occurred to go back to college. I had actually dropped out of college after a year and a half of high school and just went to work on farms and ranches and did furniture, upholstery. I did a whole bunch of things and came back to going back to college to get my degree. And then it was like, what am I going to do with my life? And I had an uncle in Austin, Texas, that suggested, well, why don't you guys, why don't you get into agriculture? That's what you're passionate about. And so I got into Texas A and M, which is a whole nother story, but ended up getting my master's and PhD. And my focus was to give these farmers and ranchers some hope, give them some tools to help them have the opportunity to make, make a living at what they were doing.

And what happened after you left the university, how there's, there's still a big distance there between leaving university and developing a soil assay. So what, what led you eventually to realize the need to have better tools to manage or to measure soil nutrients?

Well, when I was in graduate school, I did a lot of experiments and testing on different things. And I remember so clearly a colleague of mine, Dr. Alan Franz Lubbers, showed me an equation that he had worked on. He was doing these soil incubations. So we're trying to look at the life in the soil, the microorganisms breathing CO2. And we were doing these long term soil incubations, like four or five, six weeks, six months. And it was like, wow, look at that. These soils are separating by this amount of CO2 that they respire and their fertility was lengthened. So the more they respired, the more fertile those soils were. Because we knew these soils. And he showed me this, he said, you know what? He said, I think we could do this test in one day. And I said, well, let's try it. And so I started doing it and sure enough, we figured out you could do this 24 hour CO2 release from a dried rewetted soil and get the same type of information you get from a 30 day incubation. That's when the light bulb went off. I thought, well, here we go, we can do something with this. We started down that road and that's when I really discovered bull testing. Now you can do 20 years of research and come up with something, a new crop variety or something, and that's all great, but how can we impact these guys every year? How can we help them every year in over fertilization, Everybody knows it's happening, seem to be a key component that we could zero in on to really make an impact.

I think over fertilization is one of the most significant and one of the least appreciated factors in agronomy and plant nutrition. When we started using plant SAP analysis, which I consider to be pretty much the epitome of nutrition management at this point, some of the best technology we have available, it quickly became clear that agronomy is using the wrong frame of reference. When thinking about nutrition management. Our entire Frame of thinking has been framed around the law of the minimum. We need to run an assay, figure out what's missing and add more. And we've completely missed the opposite, which is the law of the maximum, which is that is the nutrient which is in excess that creates deficiencies of something else. And over and over and over again, when we use SAP analysis, we see that in fact the deficiencies that are showing up in plants are a result of the excesses of nitrogen and potash, particularly sometimes also phosphorus that growers apply. So it's actually the excesses that people are applying that are creating deficiencies and that are, it is these nutrient excesses that are at the foundation of most disease and insect challenges and most crop yield and quality challenges that many growers experience. And it's largely unrecognized in mainstream agronomy today.

Oh, I agree with that. We've got a pretty big data set of soil health parameters and standard analysis and all that stuff. And we see really high nitrates in soil, the microbial soil respiration drops. I mean, it's a clear trend. And so in my whole thing about this is I've been a real big fan of nature. I think nature's done research and development for quite a bit longer than we have and has this system figured out. And we came in and just really kind of ignored observation. My mantra is that nature is trying to tell us the correct way to do farming, the correct way to interact with the earth. And we're ignoring that because of our so called technology. The best technology in the world is right out there in the field. The best technology we have are our eyeballs and our brain. And I, I want to listen to what nature's telling me. You know, I want to stop and listen and observe and then try to apply fundamental rules that it uses to the way we do agriculture. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about. We're just missing the system that's so eloquent and beautifully designed in front of us. And we're just going to go in there and tear it up and do it the way we.

Let's speak about the soil assay a little bit from, from your perspective. It's evolved over the years. You've worked on this for a number of years. What is the goal of the Haney soil analysis and what does it do exceptionally well? What's the hole that it fills that other assays are not delivering?

Well? When I got into it, looking into all this in graduate school, the thing that struck Me was that I talk about this in my talks is that there were farmers that had tech samples in their fields out there and these guys were growing, you know, 100 bushel corn with no fertilizer at some of our research plots. We were growing it, you know, 70, 80 bushel corn with no fertilizer in Texas, which is odd because I'm going to say for the record, a good crop in Texas is crop failure in the Midwest. I don't know why we're growing corn. But anyway, that struck me, where's this nitrogen and why are we not accounting for it? And so, you know, I started looking into that more and more. You look at all these long term research plots that have got these check samples that are year after year with no fertilizer, are still producing crops and it's like, wait, you know, why are we not accounting for this? How do we account for that? You're not gonna go through the growing season and then go back in time and apply the right amount. Based on the check sample yield results, we got to have something out in front. And it seemed to me that the soil respiration being a representative of the fertility of that soil was the key component to move forward in that because carbon and nitrogen are coupled, we measure them and act like they're separate, but those are coming from the same molecule. So if you're getting this much respiration, you should be able to get this much nitrogen, especially if we know the CDN ratio. So that's really the biggest impact that this has is estimating how much organic nitrogen is going to be released from a given soil. As that number is roughly $20 an acre across the nation on average. Not chump change. When you look at the millions upon millions of acres that we're currently farming.

What is the $20 per acre number? Is that the cost of over applied nitrogen?

Well, that's how much you can save if you use this test average. If you've been putting out, let's say 200 pounds of nitrogen to grow 200 bushel corn. And our test comes back and says, look, you can grow 200 bushels of corn on 160 pounds. You know, that's a, that's a dollar twenty an acre saving in nitrogen. The only thing we seem to be able to control in ag is the amount of fertilizer. You know, your seed prices are set, you know, your management's probably set, your commodity prices are kind of set. The one thing that, that farmers can really have a control over is how much fertilizer they put out on their land.

I can certainly relate to the scenario that you described. We also have growers that we've worked with throughout the Midwest. But at the moment there's one example that comes to mind, a very distinct example in southwest Kansas that was growing corn on corn dry land. And for the three year period that I have in mind, they were averaging in the neighborhood of 17 to 18 inches in rainfall per year. So it was higher than their typical rainfall in that region. And they were averaging 180 to 200 bushel corn per year, three consecutive years with no cover crop, no manure, no liquid fish or anything else. This was an organic operation. There was no nitrogen input other than a microbial inoculant that was known as Zodobacter and others that were known to have the capacity to fix nitrogen. They were growing 180 to 200 bushel breaker corn crops with no additional outside and inputs year after year. I can relate very much to the scenario that you're describing, that there are these ecosystems that are supplying all the nitrogen that a crop requires without outside inputs. And the question of how we account for that and how we measure that is a critical one. So the next question that comes to mind for me on this assay, William Albrecht used to have this saying about the state of soil science at the time. And he would say that you should read books and study nature and when the two of them don't agree, you throw out the books. And this, in my opinion, I believe this also applies to soil reports. And I have my own perspective on kind of the mainstream soil reports of looking at cation exchange capacity and minerals that are supposedly exchangeable. I think that can provide us some useful information. But what I can say with complete confidence is that there is zero correlation between the minerals that show up on those types of soil reports and actual plant absorption. And we have a database of hundreds of thousands of samples that shows that to be very clearly be the case, there is no correlation. And the correlation is much more strongly we can bring. We can start lining up the dots and making correlations when we begin accounting for biological activity. Which is why I have the intrigue and the interest in the assay that you have developed. So I'm giving a long explanation to ask the question, what percentage of the time does the Haney analysis not correspond to field observation? How often do we need to throw out that report?

Boy, that's a, that's a good one right there. So I'll answer that with a long winded answer. This will be fun. On our research farm at USDA, we've got about 150 acres. And we've been. We split that up into conditional till the motel. And we've been tracking that. We were tracking that every three months to pulling samples every three months. It really got to be interesting because we were seeing this. These changes. So then we decided, let's just start every month. It's like, oh, my God. And so we were getting. Because we were getting all these people sending us these questions, like, well, you know, I pulled this sample and ran this test on it and last year, and it's different this year. And my answer was, well, thank God. And he said, what do you mean, thank God? It should be the same. I said, no, we're measuring a dynamic system and we can't use static thinking to understand dynamic systems. And the thing that I enjoyed more than ever about all that sampling we did and analysis was that you could see that during the seasons when you had water, when temperature was up, you know, when water went away or when temperature went away or moisture went away, it was like watching a heartbeat dynamic system. It's like the soil was alive and it was responding to external stimuli just like an organism. And that's the fun part about the test, is that it takes into account many factors and then gives you a different picture. Now, I would stand by any recommendation that we make because we're not manipulating the data. We're using passive systems like drying and rewetting and measuring the CO2 that comes off. We're using water as an extract because that's what it rains. It doesn't rain. Malik 3. It doesn't rain KCL. It doesn't rain things that we throw out of oil in a lab. And my point is that if we can't mimic nature in a lab, we're wasting our time, because in the field is where it's happening, it's not happening in the lab. And we can get all kinds of different nutrients by changing the strength of our extractants. And that's just no problem. If we want the right answer, we've got to do it as passively and as close to how nature is doing it as possible. And so your question being, which ones do you throw out? Well, if they don't line up with yield, like if we make a recommendation based off that test. And for the record, I never called it the handy test. I called it the soil health nutrient. And the reason I called it that was because that's what it was about, accounting for nutrients in the soil that we've been ignoring based on biology that are going to come available based on biology. This test is actually designed to mimic what happens when it rains because if it doesn't rain, it doesn't matter. So when do you throw it out? Well, number one, I look at a lot of soil sample results from my lab, different labs around the country that get sent to me and it's pretty quick to tell whether the numbers look right or not. So there are some analysis that I've seen that are just, you know, useless numbers make any sense. And so that's the first thing I look for is, you know, are, is there a balance here? Do things make sense on what you're seeing? Is the CDN ratio in the right ratio, what does respiration look like compared to the amount of carbon? That's those kind of things. So the first thing I look for is, you know, is everything look kosher, everything look like it's ballast. And so, you know, that's a tough question. It should reflect, you know, you should be able to get a yield response based on the fertilizer we're using. So, you know, that's a, that's a tough question to answer. It's just like when somebody sends us one sample to represent a thousand acres and they don't understand why everything didn't work exactly right.

You make a very important point. It's a point that we've observed. It's much the same as when we've started using SAP analysis very intensely. And our history before the Haney analysis, actually before SAP analysis, we used to use soil saturated paste analysis on our high value fruit and vegetable crops. And we would measure on these high value crops where it's important to understand what's happening and what's going on. We would conduct a soil assay in the row every 14 days through the growing season. And now we do that with a SAP analysis. I think this is the historical use of soil analysis has allowed us to develop the paradigm that it is okay to take one sample per season and have that reflect the entire year, when in reality that you couldn't possibly imagine a way to misrepresent living systems more. They are a dynamic system. And so with SAP analysis we take samples constantly through the growing season. And it's an incredibly valuable exercise because you, you learn how nutrients are being released from the soil profile very clearly and you learn what the plant is actually absorbing. And so the scenario that you described of only pulling one sample per thousand acres, I would say you're making an equal or bigger mistake. To only pull one sample per year and expect to understand what's going on in your entire soil profile. Because as you described, and I'll actually, I'll pose this as a question. What happens when you get an inch and a half of rainfall three days before the sample is collected versus not having had any rain for three weeks before the sample is collected? How does that influence the results?

Well, it does influence results. The interesting part about this test is that when we get the samples in the lab, we dry every one of them. We grind them pretty gently, and we do that on purpose because we don't want to destroy the aggregates that are there, which certainly do if you over grind it. What we see when, why we dry it and grind it is to make it uniform, put everybody on the same playing field, moisture wise. Because what we want to do, especially with the respiration test, you know, we dry that sample and then we rewet it. And that's an important thing because so we stop the system by taking the water out of it, by drying it, and then we rev it back up and let it tell us what it sees. Because ball game out in the field is not static. It dries. Soils dry out, they get rewetted. There's a flush of nitrogen and phosphate. This is why soils are not soils. But plants green up after it rains because of the nitrogen that's available from the organic fraction. And so we're trying to mimic that in the lab. The whole test is based on let's stop this system and then rev it up and see what's happening. Now, in theory, if soil's dry when you take the sample, we should see the flush and we should be able to estimate the nutrients. Even like if you took it when it was dry before it rained. We're hoping that we're mimicking what's going to happen when it does rain. And because one of the things we've also seen is when we get samples and we've gotten an unbelievable amount of different types of samples, some that are more water than soil. You know, those don't work very well. We have people take their, their, their contact information and put it inside of a wet bag of mud. Don't know who they are because everything washes out. But I'm getting off track. The point is we're trying to estimate what happens when it rains, because that, that's where the ball game is it. Souls dry out, they get rewetted, they dry out, they get rewetted. And that's when those come from. That's how everything greens up.

So in essence, what you're describing is that if the, the amount of rainfall that you get during close proximity to the sample is going to influence the lab results.

Yes, but it really shouldn't matter whether you took it before it rained or after it rained, because we're trying to mimic what's going to happen when it rains. So we get this question a lot. When should I sample? And my answer is when? Do you want to know something? What do you want to know? Because if you're interested in reducing fertilizer inputs, then take a sample a couple weeks before you put fertilizer. But if you're interested in what's the dynamics of my management system and soil health and all that, then take two or three or four samples a year at different times and watch that trend and see what's happening. The other thing we recommend is composite bunch of samples in your field and then go to your fence row and take a deposit set of samples out of that, because you're not farming the fence row. And that's going to give you a benchmark as to where your farm could be opposed to where it is. It's really been fascinating to see those results from around the country, folks that.

Are doing that, in my opinion. Rick, I actually believe that there is a lot of value in sampling even more frequently than what you are describing. So I would propose that not necessarily you don't need to do this across the entire farm, but select a representative field that has been exposed to a certain crop rotation or whatever is standard, or maybe a couple of fields and measure them every 30 days during the growing season. I have experienced this on many different farms and in many different fields. When you take multiple samples in a season, you get to see the trends of how biology becomes active. You get to see nutrient release change at different periods of time. You get to see crop nutrient demand. And all of a sudden this picture of nutrient interactions and biological delivery becomes really, really clear. It is so inexpensive for the information that you get. This is, from my perspective, this is way more valuable knowledge and way more valuable information than collecting a couple of samples per season over a lot of acres. Because you get to see how your crops and soils truly interact in ways that you don't see. If you just collect a couple snapshots in time. You get to see the true trend lines.

Oh, I agree with that 100%. You hit on something there. I've had so many farmers say, you know, why are these commercial labs charging $50 or whatever they charge for this test, they say, I can get this a standard test for eight or ten dollars. I said, well, that's great if you don't want to know anything. To me, that's money wasted because it's not telling you anything about how the system actually works. You're going at it blind. And so I'm a big fan of more data that tells us that's what we started doing every month. That was so eye opening to me. It just absolutely shocked me. And the one thing that really struck, and I'll give you a quick scenario, here we were, we had had wheat planted in our field and we're. We're in high pH soils. Eight, two, bunch of calcium. There's still, you can still see the seashells in the. It's 55% clay, so high ph, high clay. So hardly ever get any phosphate when we extract it with, you know, eight pounds. Not enough to grow a crop. However, it seems like we grow crops every year. So it, yeah, oddly it gets that. And one year when we were doing that monthly sampling, we had wheat growing out there and we, it was rocking along there. You know, we were seeing 8, 10 pounds of phosphate. Then right when it started, the, the head started to move up into the boot phase and really started to develop. We had pulled samples and all of a sudden there was 30 pounds of phosphate. Never seen that before and ever. And that was a direct indication that those plant roots were dumping those organic acids out and solubilizing that phosphate. And there it was. And then the next month it was gone. And, you know, in the head had already kind of. And it was just so eye opening to see validation of the theory that you think, you know, we know they released organic acids through the roots, but, you know, here was. There it was the. We had fertilized these soils in 10 years and boy, that was neat to watch.

There is only one thing that is worse than no data, and that is bad data.

Yeah.

Because bad data or data that is based on a false premise gives you the expectation that something is okay when it's really not. And I have perhaps a different opinion than the mainstream. I'm sure I do. But I would say that the mainstream MeHLK3 extraction or ammonium acetate extraction is usually bad data. And the reason it's usually bad data is because as I've commented a couple of times in this conversation, there is zero correlation between what shows up on the soil report and what the plant actually absorbs. So does it really help you grow a better crop? Does it really help you improve soil health. The reality is, I make that comment and I express that opinion, and I do want to express that we still use this assay on the growers that we work with because they're familiar with it, and we have been able to use those test results to produce positive crop outcomes and improve yields and improve quality. However, we're doing that with a long, long list of caveats. It's almost like learning the English language as a second language. That's all these rules apply, except in all these special situations. So we have this long list of special situations that we look at the soil report and we say, well, what's the soil's mineral geological foundation look like? How much sand, silt and clay is in it? What's the biological activity? And we take all these other factors into consideration to try to interpret the results. And sometimes we're correct, sometimes we're not. And so I think the value that I see in the analysis that you have developed is removing some of the external factors that we. And the rules that we need to consider and the exceptions to the rules that we need to consider when making recommendations.

Well, yeah, that. And when I was developing the extracted back in the early 2000s, what struck me was that we had, like, Malic3 Bray1 monimastate, which is fairly neutral. And, you know, we had Olson, and it's like. So we had these highly acidic acids and these highly alkaline extractants. It's like, where's the middle? What. What's happening in the middle here? And I wanted to develop an extracted based on what plant roots do. And the fun part is it's not highly buffered extracted. So the PH of the soil tends to determine at what ph it gets extracted at. And that just made sense to me. It's like if you over buffer and extract it, then you're ripping out phosphate, potassium and calcium that's not really present for a plant to deal with. Or if you're doing it too alkaline, again, you get the same result. And I was also shocked at how easy it was to move all those numbers around based on just a little bit of tweak into an extract. It was just made no sense to me. So I really spent a lot of time developing that.

Earlier in our conversation, we were speaking about the variability of data and when, when. When do we throw out the lab report? And you commented that sometimes you see numbers coming back from laboratory assays that don't make sense. So I know that as a government employee, you have some sensitivity about Making laboratory recommendations and I respect that. I would like to ask the question. It's my understanding that the assay has evolved over time. You've developed different generations of it. You're constantly refining it and tweaking it and improving it. Who are the laboratories that are running the most recent version?

Well, to my, to my knowledge, there's a lab region, Ag Lab has contacted me and they've got the most recent iteration. Brookside Labs got the most recent iteration. There's one called I think Next Level Ag in South Dakota that does. I don't tell these people this is what you should be doing because I'm a federal employee, that's all up to them. But if they contact me and want to inquire about, you know, where are we at, what are we doing? I'm more than happy to give them all the information. That's just not a problem. But there's quite a few labs that don't seem to have any contact with us at all. It's odd to me, but because I've seen a lot of results that don't reflect what we originally designed. It gets to be challenging at times when we get results back and the numbers don't make any sense. And you know, the farmers will say, well, what should I do? You should, you should call these labs and tell them. And I'm like, no, you, you call your money your deal. If they want to call me and ask me what we're, you know, maybe we're doing something wrong, then I'm more than happy to help them try to figure that out. That's, that's out of my hand.

The assay that as you've developed it is relatively new. I suppose you could say it's actually not that new given the amount of time that you've been working on it. How much calibration is still needed for this assay to become mainstream and to become accepted by the mainstream?

Oh, I'm so glad you brought that up because that's such a fun ish calibration. I have looked and I spent a great deal of time in graduate school looking at the so called and I'm going to say, so calibration from the standard test. And when you dig and you look, there is no calibration, they, there's so much variability in their data, it's mind blowing. And I'm not badmouthing them, I'm just saying this is a daunting task because again, we're trying to use static systems. Like when you put this recipe of NP&K down, you should expect this yield. Right? That's fine. That is not how it works. So there should be tremendous variability. They should not be calibrated very well. Boy, they defend so fiercely that their data is calibrated. I remember, I won't say who, but I got into a conversation with a scientist that was talking about their university. Calibrations were on the money. And I found the paper. It was written in 1953. There were 6 points on it. Phosphate, phosphate added yield 6 points. The R squared, which is just, you know, a number, was like 0.25. And I thought, that is terrible. But they were still using it to that day. To this day, they're still using that. And I thought, what's going on here? Well, here's the reason. Nobody wants to spend the time and the money to really get at this stuff. So my point of view was, we've got this new set of tests. I know that we can back off on nitrogen and phosphate because we have the evidence that you can grow all this yield for various crops with no fertilizer. We know that. So we're showing that there is more nitrogen, phosphorus there based on this organic fraction we're measuring in the water extract. That's good to go. We're good to go. We can do that. It doesn't have to be, quote, unquote, calibrated. So the biggest joy I have is when farmers call me and say, you know, I grow 160 bushel corn year and year out. And I did it with half the fertilizer in the last three years that I was using. There's your validation. And so we're going to get caught up in numbers where, oh, well, we get the soil test. Here's a recommendation that's good to go with calibration. Have come on in a rain, you might have a drought. You might. You know, we can't. You can't tell because I remember one guy one year said, well, I'll tell you what, if it don't rain, your fertilizer recommendations aren't going to work. I said, well, neither. And he didn't. Boy, he just looked at me like, okay, got point taken and walked off. You know, but that. We don't think like that. We just don't think about how nature does things. And how is this test I developed perfect? No, it's the beginning of the chain. We've been doing these standard soil test methods since the 40s and 50s. This is the 21st century. Sure to God we can do better. And again, nature is telling us, you know, look at the dead zone of the Gulf. There's your calibrated data right there. And I told this in an audience a while back, and I said, so apparently our standard test is calibrated to the dead zone of the goal. Everybody just kind of looked at me like, what? It's like, think about that. We supposedly had this calibrated data from all this stuff for 60 years. And the dead zone in the Gulf gets bigger and bigger. So it's apparently calibrated to that, and that's not really what we're after.

It's a very good point, Rick. The reality is that anytime you have a new innovation, new technology, whether it's a new product or new soil assay or whatever it might be, there will always be detractors and there will always be the defenders of the status quo. The one question that comes to mind when I was thinking about this conversation is what would the detractors have to say about the presently existing soil assays if they were being developed today as new technology? And I think you made a great point earlier is that the quote, unquote calibrations, they're not based on agronomic reality and actual crop required nutrients and soil required applications. We have lots of evidence for that.

Yeah, I've had several conversations, fairly heated at times and from folks and different universities, and I'm like, well, that's, you know, we can end this argument. Just send me your calibrated data and, you know, I'd like to see it for my own benefit. Well, they can't ever seem to find it. It does. It sure never gets to. I mean, that's the end of the conversation. And then I followed up a couple of times and they were like, well, we. We don't know where it's at.

So I've had similar conversations and I've also actively gone out to look for it in the literature and in the data. If it exists. It sure is hiding very well.

Yeah. And you know, and I'm not down on any of that. It's just that, come on now, if we're going to judge a new test by old standards that didn't work and defend them, defend the old standards that don't work and try to make the new one fit into that just doesn't make any sense to me. We in ag research should be. We don't have to, you know, rely on growing a crop because all of us researchers would be broke living on the street, Right? So it's real easy for us to say this and that, but I want to help these guys, these farmers and ranchers and we, we get paid to do ag research. We should be doing everything we can to come up with solutions to help farmers be more efficient. That's on us. And we've done a terrible job of education. Our methods have not been well thought through. And it's the 21st century for God's sakes. You know, I, I talk about in my talks, you know, is anybody carrying around a rotary phone in their pocket? But we're still carrying around soul testing methods from 40s and 50s thinking we know something we don't know hardly anything about how soil actually functions.

Rick, I very strongly agree with the perspective you just expressed, and the same is true of plant analysis. I've been a big advocate and champion of plant SAP analysis for the last decade, which all the listeners of this podcast surely know. And the reality is that dry matter based tissue analysis is also 60 to 70 year old technology. And it's incredible to me how many conversations I've had with agronomists. It seems about every agronomist who has roughly a decade of experience, who pulls a lot of tissue analysis and pays close attention to them somewhere between five and 10 years in, depending on the crops and the context they're working with, they say, you know what, this tissue analysis does not correlate to anything that we're doing. It's worthless. And yet many of us continue, have continued to use them because it is the technology that we're familiar with and that is most widely used and known.

Well, sure. And you know as well as I do that change is hard. It's hard for all of us. And when we come along and say, you've been doing this soil testing wrong for, you know, 60 years, that's a tough build as well. I'll get that. Because somebody's going to come along and say, well, Haney tried his best, but that was like a really pretty dumb set of tests he came up with. You know, in the future, you know, that's going to be on. I'm going to be like, well, now wait a minute, you know, I don't want to be that guy. I want to, I want to embrace and I hope before I die that somebody, you know, improves upon all this and has a better deal that I didn't see because I can't see it all. I do know that what we've been doing isn't working because we have the evidence again, the dead zone and the Gulf. So we have to make a Step in the right direction. And what you're talking about with SAP analysis versus tissue is a step in the right direction. This set of tests versus the standard test is a step in the right direction. We've got so much to learn because I'll never forget when I got my PhD, right before I left graduate school, there was a talk given by an older gentleman and he basically said, and this is no kidding that I don't know what you grad students think you're doing. Because we've had all this figured out since the 60s. And we were like, what then? Why are we here? Well, the reality was that's the mantra that they believe that they had it all figured out back in the 60s and 70s and everything was just going to be fine from now, from now on. Now let's ignore the fact that we do no tillage. Now let's ignore the fact that varieties have changed a little bit since the 60s. Ignore the fact that all the chemicals that we use. I mean, let's ignore the fact that the climate's a little different. I mean it's like that we were just sitting there in stunned silence that anybody would be so bold.

There's even a more fundamental fact that is missing in those assumptions and that is the assumptions in the 60s and 70s were that we had figured out the system completely and it was almost exclusively based on chemistry and genetics. There was no consideration for soil microbiology and the capacity of biology to deliver nutrition. With the emerging knowledge and information that is becoming more available today, as we better understand how biology influences nutrient availability and as we better understand how the biophysics of organisms influence biology, then all of a sudden it becomes clear that looking at these living processes and living systems through a lens that is exclusively comprised of chemistry is a very shallow and short sighted view.

It absolutely is. I believe biology drives the chemistry, it's not the other way around. And it's just like plants. Plants and microorganisms have the ability to respond to their environment and that's not something fertilizer does. In the example earlier, if a plant needs phosphate in a high ph soil, it has mechanisms that it can employ to get it. And we ignore those mechanisms. Chemistry and physics is much, much easier to measure than biology. And I think that's a big reason why it was ignored for all these years. Because there were guys back in the 20s and 30s that were headed down the road towards drying and rewetting and actually one day CO2, I mean, I've got the papers and then, you know, in the 70s they came along, said, oh, no, it's all about microbial biomass. My deal was, who cares what microbial biomass is? It's all sitting there and nobody's doing anything. Then who cares? It's activity that's important. And I give that and I give the example of it, and people really love this example. So if you had a hundred government workers, since I am one, you know, in a room and only one of them was working, and then you can see them all nodding their heads like, that's right, you know. And I said, as opposed. We can measure the CO2 in that room. And I said, as opposed to 100 people in a room that are all working, the CO2 is highly elevated. So mass could be misleading. Activity is not misleading. So that's a simple way to understand how important biology and that we can measure.

I agree with you with your comment that biology drives chemistry. And I believe there's emerging knowledge that is going to come to the forefront in the next couple of years where we will learn that the biophysics of soil and plant ecosystems is actually what drives the biology. But that's a bit of a different conversation for us to get into. I do want to go back to the comments that you made about new technology and how you hope to see the soil analysis evolve in the future and field of soil analysis in general evolve in the future. A few episodes ago, I had the privilege of having discussion with Rick Mulvaney from the University of Illinois where he described how they are now measuring amino sugars in the soil profile within their. I think he called it the Illinois Nitrogen Test.

Illinois soil test.

How does that soil nitrogen report compare to your soil nitrogen report? And how should growers think about the two of them?

For the record, I like what Dr. Mulvaney's done. I think he's a. He's been out in front. I really admire the things that he's done. He took on this, you know, the standard issue thing and, you know, I'm a big fan of the organic fraction of nitrogen. His test was, I thought, a breakthrough thing. I did a bunch of his tests with a bunch of soils when I many years ago and compared them with soil respiration, found some really strong correlations, which I thought was just awesome. The thing that I thought was going to be very difficult was that I know a lot of farmers, they're used to putting on X amount of nitrogen every year and they were not ready for us to come in there and say, you don't need any nitrogen. Based on this Mulvaney test You don't need any. They're not going to do that. And so my deal was I wanted to be a little more specific. And that test, you know, it uses sodium hydroxide. It basically rips the nitrogen out of the soil and then traps it and then you can back titrate to find out the answer of how much nitrogen is in there. So that's fine, but not all that's in play. And what I was looking for was my test was in play right now. And so that's really the difference. It's going to show there's a lot more nitrogen there than we are, and that's fine. And you know, because he's got different ways to interpret what you're seeing than other people do. And I, and I like what he's doing because I think that's the right road. But until the farmers are ready to really buy with quite a bit less than what we're doing, I think this kind of baby, stepping them into this deal is one option. And so ours is we're never going to recommend as little nitrogen as what the Mulvaney test might. So I guess that's really the difference. He's looking at a big extract of nitrogen and we're looking at a smaller pool based on a water that. That's. Those are the difference.

Thanks for that response. I think I don't have experience, I don't have expense, I don't have any experience with Rick Mulvaney's assay. I'm looking forward to doing some experimentation in the coming growing season. But what I do have extensive experience with, again bringing up the plant SAP analysis. And we generally make recommendations to our growers to apply as little nitrogen as possible at planting. And we'll look at history and context and what's going on. We prefer to apply none. We will wait to make our recommendations for side dress nitrogen or nitrogen applications later in the season if that capability exists. And, and then we make recommendations for nitrogen requirements based on actual measured crop requirement. And it's common for us to in a single year reduce nitrogen applications by 40 to 60%. That's very common. And to have yields go up at the same time as we're doing that. And the reason we are comfortable making those recommendations and the reason the growers are comfortable applying those recommendations is because they can actually see it in the field. You get a SAP analysis report back that shows that you, that a crop has a desired value of, let's just say 1500 parts per million nitrogen in the plant SAP and the actual level is 3000, then you're not going to gain or benefit anymore by adding any additional nitrogen. And so it's a real, really strong in season in field validation of what's actually going on. And I imagine you could do something similar to that with your soil analysis by measuring every 30 days in the season and seeing what's actually going on.

Yeah, And I also think that in the future we're going to see a big impact from infield sensors that can be put in the field and measured periodically. I think the future of a whole lot of this analysis is going to be infield testing again. If we can't figure out what's happening in the field, you know, we're kind of wasting our time. And I think the SAP stuff is awesome. That's a great point, because I'll tell you, I was. I've been working on some of these infield sensors, and I. I had a farmer that I've known, I used to work for him, and he's been farming for 40 or 50 years, conventional tillage, monoculture wheat, you know, won't change, won't listen. And I took some of these sensors up there to his farm a while back and showed him the microbial response in his tilt field versus 20ft away in a pasture. And I will never forget the look on his face because, I mean, I've known this guy a long time, and he was stunned. And I said, you see how those numbers fell off really bad when we went from your pasture to your field? And he said, yeah. I said, that's the effect of village. I could have slapped him in the face and done less damage. I mean, he was just stunned. And I thought, there it is right there. They need to see in their field in real time, from time to time, what this looks like, what is actually happening. Because it wasn't me telling him anything. He was watching the graph, he was watching the movement, and there it was. And, boy, that is so important. You hit on something there. That's so important because it's the psychology of these farmers that has got to be also helped. Like all of us, they've got to have a different perspective. They've got to see these things different. We've done a terrible job of educating farmers on how soil actually works and how plants actually work and what's really going on. And we just got to do a better job.

Rick, I'd like to change the conversation for just a moment to get your insights and perspectives, perhaps on a more macro level of where the world of agriculture is going and where the opportunity exists in the future. What is something that you believe to be true about ag that is different from the mainstream view that would kind.

Of go towards the whole nutrient density of foods? I believe that the way we're doing modern agriculture is producing a fairly poor, nutrient dense food and we can do better. Everybody knows that their garden grown tomatoes are better than store mile. Again, nature is telling us, you know, this is the wrong way to grow things. We've got to do this differently and I don't know what it's going to take to change the mindset that the agronomic system that we've got right now is not sustainable, especially for my children and grandchildren. We are at a place right now where I think we can turn the corner and start moving and just admit that maybe we haven't done it perfectly and there's room for improvement here. I'm not sure I even answered your question.

Well, I think in, in a general sense here, your assessment is that what is different, your viewpoint of what is different from the mainstream viewpoint is that you're indicting mainstream commodity food as not being nutritious. If I'm understanding it correctly.

Yeah, that's, I, I believe that. I mean, we have a garden and my wife Liz does a fantastic job of growing gardens and I, I've never had such cantaloupe and watermelon and I mean it's just like, my God, it's night and day compared to what we're buying. And again, and being a big fan of nature, there's never been a drop of fertilizer put in her garden. The only fertility that's been put in her garden is cover crops. And my goodness, what a change, what a difference. Especially when it rains. We've never seen such quality of food coming out of that plot of gardening. We didn't use cover crops before. We didn't, we've never used fertilizer. But you know, we've had gardens for many years and when we started, when we introduced cover crops into that garden, my God, everything changed. And this is something that nobody really believes yet. You know, mainstream wise, cover crops are the key. And I've said many times that I'd rather see somebody conventionally till with COVID crops using cover crops, then no till without them. And I believe that, that it's the key.

Yeah, I agree with you on that and I know that that's a very controversial opinion. There are many ecosystems and many crop production systems where no till. A dogmatic no till is not the answer.

It Is not.

But that's, that's, that's a conversation for another day.

I'll give you a quick example. We had a guy send us. These researchers sent us two samples that were composite samples, one for a conventional tail, one for no tail. We ran the analysis, sent it back to him. He said, your test is wrong. That was his first thought. Your test is wrong. I said, why? He said, the conditional till is higher in nutrients, soil health score, everything in the no till. I said, well, how long ago did you plow that field under? He said, about two weeks before I sent the sample. I went, well, there you go. So again, he was just convinced that no till was better. Right. So you've got this dogma on both. Both sides. Yes. The point is, you got to be versatile. I know farmers in Oklahoma that are set up to go conventional till or no till, depending on the year and the season and the moisture and all these things. And that is a more versatile.

If we want to develop truly regenerative agriculture ecosystems, there can be no room for idealism and there can be no room for dogma. We have to be willing to take a very pragmatic and a very practical approach and always ask the question, what truly produces the best outcomes for soil health, long term and short term? And what truly produces the best crop quality and the best crop yield? And if we're willing to ask that question and leave our biases behind, which is difficult for all of us because we're all human, we all have our own biases, and we may not even recognize them or not know them, many times the answers we come up with may be different from what we might anticipate.

Absolutely. That's. I've done a lot of work with soil respiration, and I can't tell you the times that things have happened that were opposite what I expected. And it's like, well, this is what's going to happen. Based on my extensive knowledge, we're going to see this kind of soil respiration, and it was the opposite. And. But I love that kind of stuff because. Because, like, no, nature's throwing you a curveball and it's my job to figure out, well, how to hit that curveball. And that's, that's where you learn. It is.

Yeah. We've had, we've had the same. We've uncovered a number of different. I won't call them science pieces because when you dig into them, you discover that they're actually not supported by evidence. But there's been a lot of narratives in mainstream agronomy about certain nutrient interactions or how nutrients behave and interact with each other, which, when you develop a large data set, as we have on SAP analysis, all of a sudden the narrative becomes significantly. It's not just unsupported, it's disproven. And so there's. Yeah, there's lots of fun things to unwrap there. Rick, what is something that you wish all farmers knew?

That's an easy one. That your soil is alive and that you should treat it like that. That's any. And I think that soil respiration is an excellent educational tool to show them because, you know, I have farmers and people that come through the lab. You know, We've got these CO2 sensors, and I let them breathe into it. You know, immediate spike of CO2, and it's like, well, look at that, you're alive. And then we'll take and put it on a jar of soil, and it does the same thing. And then they're like, whoa. And that is. Is such an important. I mean, if you're going to treat soil like it's just some inanimate object, like a machine, you're going to treat that very differently than knowing that it's a living entity. We've got to get that through everybody's head that that's important. And you're the caretaker like that, like it's your child.

Rick, what do you believe most limits farmers? The conversation we've been having, we're talking about the capacity and a lot of untapped potential in soil ecosystems. A lot of untapped potential with crop development and yield capacity. What do you believe is most limiting farmers from achieving the potential they are capable of?

Well, you just said it. It's an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem. We don't treat our soils and our lands. The farmers don't believe or understand or have been taught or been exposed to the fact that this is a gigantic organism, that everything's connected. Water cycle is connected with soil, with plants. Plants and soil are interconnected. Plants and microorganisms are interconnected. You know, they don't know that. Somehow we've got to get that message across. Everything's interconnected. And the methods and the context that we use to describe farming is completely disconnected from nature. And nature's got the better way. We think. It doesn't, but it. It does. Proven track record. We've had people tell us that, well, this doesn't. No, this doesn't mean anything. They're like, well, what was the land like back when the buffalo were in the Midwest. Well, you think it was pretty fertile. It's like, oh, my God. Yeah, it was fertile. Well, nobody was fertilizing. Okay. How's that possible? Oh, they see simple things that they don't. How do you grow 100 bushel corn without nitrogen? You know, ask them that question. You know, it's. It's an education gap. We've done a terrible job.

There are lots of education gaps. How is it possible for trees to grow out of bare rock faces with no soil?

That's a great slide. You know, it's like compacted much. You got this tree grow, and that's another one. So I remember seeing those in grad school going, how does that happen? Well, that's when you stumble onto the organic acids by the root system, dissolving minerals. That again, observation. Ask nature what's going on here and try to figure out a way to find the answer.

Yeah, and asking the question, where does the nitrogen come from? That in that system. And where does the phosphorus and potassium come from? What if the soil. What if the rock that it's growing on contains no calcium? Where does the calcium come from? Yet it's somehow all there in that tree. Where did it. Where did it. Yeah, where did it come from?

It's. I mean, it just blows the mind to. Well, mine anyway, to try to even comprehend.