We Can Do This Podcast: A Conversation with John Kempf

Welcome everyone to the We can do this podcast, Kiss the Ground's weekly conversation about how you can participate in the healing of ourselves and our earth as we are one in the same. My name is Rylan Engelhardt. I will be your host and it is a great, great honor to be here not only with one guest, but two guests today. One is Don Smith, who is is been a team member of Kiss the Ground for many, many years. He's been one of our most loyal and amazing participants in the organization since almost inception. And I love the story that we were some 20 something year olds in a house in Venice, very inspired about soil. And we invited Don to come and talk about worms and vermicompost and he showed up and did an amazing presentation and we were enamored by his presentation about worms and he was just as enamored that we were enamored by his presentation in worms. And so yeah, it's a joy to have you on the team, Don. Thank you for your dedication, devotion, and we actually made a request to our team, who are some of your favorite people in the regenerative movement? And Don recommended John and I'm going to give pass the baton to Don to introduce John, our amazing guest for today's podcast. So thank you, Don, for joining us in this conversation and I pass you the baton.

All right, thank you, Rylan. So I've been somewhat of a voracious reader about all kinds of cool things and regenerative ag and worm composting and compost and growing healthy food, etc. And of all the people that are out there, I found John Kemp to be, you know, one of the thought leaders in this movement. And yet a lot of people have never heard of his name, unfortunately, and I'm here to help spread that message. He's probably one of the most well read, well studied people in the regenerative agriculture movement. And he looks very far afield from just standard agronomists and is always looking for different information that helps helps us grow healthier food. So John's just amazing and he synthesizes really complex ideas and puts it in layman's terms because most people don't want to hear about cations and anions, et cetera. But when he explains things, he can take it to whatever level of complexity you need, but he can also keep it really simple. And it's just he's got a great skill, ability to communicate and his lectures are always packed wherever, whatever conference he goes to, their standing room only. It's amazing. So great Stuff. So glad to have you here, John. I just want to clear up one thing. The reason, normally these are broadcast live, but because of your tradition, we just like to hear a little bit about the reason that we're doing an audio without the video. It would be great if you could explain it to our audience just so that people understand the whole. The whole concept.

Well, thank you, dawn and Rylan. That was quite the introduction, and it's certainly an honor to be here. I grew up in an Amish community, and I'm still a member of the Amish community here in Northeast Ohio. And within that tradition, they generally are opposed to photography and videography of people actually being recorded and their image being shared. So for that reason, this is why on my podcast, it's audio only. And I'm very passionate about sharing the information that we've developed, but I try to stay off camera as much as possible. I've actually found, initially there were. There was the idea and the perception from some of my colleagues that this might be a weakness. And I've actually found that there's a bit of fun, mystery and intrigue of being the guy that's off the camera all the time. So I really enjoy it.

Fantastic.

Love it.

And John, just so I can understand at a little deeper, I imagine that there's some philosophical reason for. I made up in my mind a couple different ideas of why they don't want image captured or. And I was just curious, what is the sort of philosophical idea around not having our image captured or shared?

Well, it comes from the historical Judeo Christian worldview and perspective that the Anabaptist and Amish community really came from and originated from. And the idea was the. Their translation or their interpretation of one of the Ten Commandments which says, thou shalt have no graven image before me. And so their interpretation of that is, since we are built in God's image, then we should have no images of ourselves that are out there that are circulating around that we can refer to.

Hmm, that's beautiful. My only distraction was that you were breaking up a little bit on the audio. And so you said that you are recording a hard audio. Okay, cool. So it will have.

Beautiful. Awesome.

Thank you for that.

All right, great. Now we can get to the real meat of this. Can you describe what regenerative agriculture means to you?

I believe that the way regenerative agriculture conversation is being framed today is commonly focused on regenerating soil health. And that isn't particularly incorrect, but I believe it most certainly is incomplete. And we really should be if we go for the ultimate goal, the ultimate goal in my, from my perspective, that we should seek to regenerate public health and ecosystem health. So we should seek to regenerate the entire ecosystem of the planet, the globe, what that means for all these different organisms, wild plants and animals and rivers and streams and so forth, and then recognizing that we are one of the organisms within this ecosystem and one of the metrics that we can use to, to evaluate regeneration of ecosystem health is regeneration of public health. We know that. We have a public health crisis on our hands right now, where if we keep going down the pathway that we're on, then we will cripple the United States economy and the economy of many developed countries around the world simply from increasing health care costs due to degenerative illnesses. And these degenerative illnesses are fundamentally, I believe, an agricultural problem. Farmers and growers can do more than doctors and hospitals from a public health perspective because they have the capacity to grow nutritious food that can prevent people from becoming ill. Doctors and hospitals don't prevent people from becoming ill. They only treat the illnesses after they occur. So from my perspective, regenerative agriculture, the ultimate objective of regenerative agriculture should be to regenerate plant health so that we have plants that are resistant to diseases and insects and eliminate the need for pesticides that regenerate soil health, which then contributes to regenerating ecosystem health and ultimately regenerates our own health as a human population around the globe at the same time. So regenerative agriculture really should, I believe, take a much bigger perspective than simply the perspective of regenerating soil health and building soil organic matter? The conversation deserves to be much bigger than that. Awesome.

Fantastic.

One, follow up just on. Has regenerative agriculture always been the word that you've used for describing agriculture that's increasing biological life on land? Or is that a relatively new term that. Because I know there's a lot of views on where that term comes from. And so I'm just curious on how you. Where you perceive that term coming in.

It's not a new term for us, and I know there's other people in this space, but it's not a new term for earlier on. I first started advancing eco Agriculture in 2006, and we use the terms of ecological agriculture or biological agriculture, which is really where the name of advancing eco agriculture came from. Was the intent for the word, for the syllable eco was to represent both ecological and economical agriculture. But then we chose, very deliberately, in 2011, we chose to begin using the word regenerative agriculture. So there have been other people who've been using that word in this space, but I think we've certainly helped to popularize it and bring it to the mainstream, at least for the farming audience that we work with. And I believe the word itself is very. Words are powerful and the concept is extremely important. Before the popularity of regenerative agriculture, which has really exploded in the last three years in particular, and very recently before that, the quote unquote fad of the day was sustainability and sustainable agriculture. And I made the point then that we should have no desire to sustain where we are in agriculture. What is it that we're really trying to sustain? We first need to have a conversation about a regenerative agriculture that regenerates soil health, regenerates plant health, and grows plants that are resistant to disease and insect performance, resistant to diseases and insects, and has extremely high yields of high quality food. Once we've achieved this much higher plateau of performance, at that point, and only at that point, can we have a conversation about true sustainability. Ecosystem or an agricultural management system that is constantly reliant on external inputs of fertilizers and pesticides cannot be defined as sustainable from a global context.

Yes, we've had a very similar idea and communication around that sustainability is ahead of its time, because to sustain something that's been degenerated or sustain something that's already broken is totally doesn't make sense. Why would we want to sustain that? So I love hearing reflections of similar insights that are just emerging in different times and spaces, but in similar ways. It's awesome, Don. Yeah, go for it.

So what was your big aha moment that started you down this path of learning about regenerative agriculture or just how plants grow in particular?

Oh my. There have been several. The. The first significant aha moment that really changed my pathway. It's important, I think, for context to understand that I didn't just gradually grow into the concepts of regenerative agriculture and producing healthy plants. I was from the opposite side of the tracks. My father was a pesticide distributor for the local region. I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm. I was a licensed private pesticide applicator when I was 16 years old. And as a result of my father being the local distributor, we were the first people to try all the newest, latest and greatest cocktails and then make recommendations to our customers and how well they were working for us. So I was really embedded in that system and understood it quite well, very well. I studied pesticide modes of action and how they worked. And then later on I also went on to study how they influenced the human organism, which is a really scary topic if you really start getting into it. And then in the early 2000s, 2000, 2003 and 04, we had a three year consecutive period of very challenging weather conditions. We were in the snow belt south of Lake Erie, so we have high humidity and lots of rainfall, lots of disease and insect pressure. And in Those, in that three year period, we lost over 70% of our crops three consecutive years to a variety of different diseases and insects that we were unsuccessful in controlling and managing with ever increasing pesticide applications. And this led understandably to a lot of frustration. I still remember making the comment to my dad that I might as well do nothing for nothing as do something for nothing, because it seemed the pesticides were being largely ineffective. Then in 2004, the third year of this three year period, we rented a field from a neighboring farm that bordered right up against one of our own fields. So on our own field that we've been farming for the prior decade, we had vegetables every year, year after year with pesticide applications every summer, and then a cover crop during the winter months. So, so we were doing cover crops and some of those practices, but it was still very intense pesticide applications every year. The neighboring field had been in a dairy farm. Corn, small grain and hay rotation with manure applications and some lions with applications and very minimal fertilizer applications and almost non existent pesticides. These fields used to be two long narrow strips and because they were quite narrow, they were being tilled up and down the slope and planted up and down the slope, which was not ideal. Now that we were farming both fields, we switched the direction of planting and tilling and we started planting crops across the field border. This field was right out beside the road where everyone could see it driving by. And on the old section, we planted this field in 2004 into cantaloupe. On the old section that we've been farming for the prior decade, at harvest time, 80% of the leaves were infected with powdery mildew. And it almost cost us the crop. On the new section that had been in the dairy farm rotation, there was no powdery mildew. There was this knife line right down where the former field border had been that you could clearly see the divide of the section that was infected versus the section that was not infected. And yet it had been managed the same. It was the same variety planted the same day, fertilized in the same way, but two completely different outcomes. And that was the first significant aha moment that really led me to ask the question, what are the differences between these two plants? What allows one plant to be resistant to powdery mildew when the next plant a yard away is susceptible? It was so pronounced that there were actually healthy vines growing right in among the unhealthy vines. They were intertwined interior into each other. So it was not a question of the pathogen not being present, but the plants expressed themselves completely differently. So that was the first significant aha moment that really got me started down a different pathway of realizing that plants have immune systems and can be resistant to diseases and then resistant to insects. Then the second significant aha moment was the realization that when we have these regenerative systems that regenerate plant immunity and plant health and soil health, we also are growing plants that have high concentrations of medicinal compounds that. And immune compounds that enhance our own immune systems. And we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. The realization that we can have an agriculture that regenerates soil health and regenerates plant health and regenerates human health all at the same time, I found to be incredibly inspiring. And this is why my personal mission is to have these agriculture models become the mainstream globally in the next couple of decades, hopefully.

So, wow. I am totally lit up and inspired.

I am.

Wow. Really, really amazing. Amazing. Just your articulation is beautiful and speaking right to my heart. So thank you for that. I had one question that came up in my mind, which was in. In Amish communities, you know, in my mind, which is kind of naive and uneducated around, you know, that tradition. But I was thinking that there's kind of a natural element to, you know, Amish communities and that pesticides, you know, synthetic fertilizers, wouldn't be, you know, typically used within Amish communities. Again, that was completely fictitious coming out of my mind. But I'm just curious. Is there within the Amish communities, more of a natural approach to agriculture, or is that not the case at all?

That is a popular and unfortunately incorrect misconception. This has been a recurring conversation. I've been asked this very exact question that many times over the years, and I would say that I would describe the Amish communities in general. This is obviously sweeping with broad brush strokes, and everyone is an individual. But in general, the Amish culture is to be fairly intense at whatever approach that you take. So there are many farmers who. Many Amish farmers who they were very trusting of authority figures in governments and within academia, and they adopted GMOs and they adopted pesticides. I mean, they went in 100%, no holes barred and no holding back because this was all supposed to be safe. And then there certainly were elements of the community that have taken a more conservative approach and a more natural approach. But the community really is composed of individuals and there are people across the spectrum, just like there are in the community at large. Got it.

So if regenerative agriculture can produce, you know, such better results and even better economic results, why do you think the adoption of this methodology is so slow?

Oh, this is a really fun conversation and fun question and one that I've spent a lot of time thinking about and asking other people about. And I think there are a number of contributing factors. I mean, we could generate a long list with a little conversation. But I think some of the most significant contributing factors to why adoption is slow is first is the very human characteristic of just the general human characteristic of being slow to change change. Something that is new and that is unusual is there's, there's a lot of unfamiliarity. This is for many farmers today, farmers who've been farming for 50 years or longer. Some of our very older generation still recognizes this from 50 years ago. So are some of these practices. So for them it's not particularly new. But there is, for a large part of our farming population, these ideas and practices are relatively new. They're unfamiliar. And so that unfamiliarity produces a lot of hesitation. And then in addition, there is the factor that these regenerative management systems generally include a lot of cultural management shifts. You might time your planting differently, or maybe you need to prune differently, you need to control weeds a little bit differently. And it is often more management intense. It doesn't lend itself to farming 10,000 acres quite as easily. And so there is that learning and information shift. But then I think one influence that is very close to the top of the list is concern about what friends and neighbors will say. What are the people at the coffee shop and at church and in the local community? What is my family going to think? What are my neighbors going to think? That is a very, very significant influencing factor for many people. I think it's human. It's true for all of us. We all care about the opinions of the people around us. And so recognizing that, I think if we recognize and acknowledge that, that can actually be very powerful for people who desire to make this change because now they can consciously choose to surround themselves with like minded people and say that I do care about the opinions of the people in my family, in my Neighborhood and church and so forth. And I also care about the opinions of other regenerative farmers and make a conscious effort to connect with a group of like minded people to create your own peer network to give you the support that you need and the encouragement that you need through the difficult moments that are certain to come in any endeavor. Great.

And do you think if. Do we need government to change its policies, do you think that would have an impact or would it be better if the government stayed out of it completely?

That's a very polarized question. So could the government influence the adoption of regenerative agriculture? Yes, it most certainly could. Does it have the ability, the execution ability to actually bring that about? And should we look to government? My opinion is that change very often happens in spite of government policies and not because of them. And I think there certainly are policies in place today that limit the adoption of regenerative agriculture. And there are some that could be put in place that would dramatically speed the adoption of regenerative agriculture. So it is certainly an avenue where significant change could be produced if there was the collective will and desire to produce it. I don't see that environment existing at this moment in history, and I would be happy to be mistaken. So my general message and approach and the way that the farmers that we work with is that we seek to produce changes in all political contexts, regardless of what the policies and governmental regs might be in a local situation.

And John, what do you see as the reason that over the last three years there's been a bloom or a expansion of the adoption and even the mental awareness of this promise or possibility of regenerative agriculture?

The bloom as you expressed it, and the interest in regenerative agriculture within broad acre crops in the America, Midwest and the Plains regions has come as an unexpected surprise for me when I started advancing eco agriculture and then became inspired by the capacity of these regions of agriculture management systems? I've stated it many times that my mission is to see these regenerative agriculture practices become the mainstream globally, the status quo against which everything else is compared by 2040, that's in 20 years from now. And I believe that this is a very achievable and very realistic goal, that we're well on the pathway to achieving this goal. I've tried to be very specific and very strategic about how do we get there from here, from where we are today? And 10 years ago I believed that the answer to that question was that we would first begin working with the innovators and the early adopters. Those people with that mentality and mindset, who had a higher appetite for risk and so forth. And I believed that those growers, those producers, would mostly be the high value fruit and vegetable crop producers, because many cases, there are many innovations that happen there that then begin moving into broad agar crops a decade or so later. And it's also how we have the most immediate and most direct impact on the quality of the food that people eat. But I was wrong. And I was wrong in that the surge in popularity of the regenerative agricultural models and ideas have become so popular in the Midwest so quickly. And trying to understand that, researching that, I've come to learn that people make this shift, we as farmers make this shift from mainstream practices to regenerative practices in two very different pathways. 60% of growers begin or become open minded to farming differently as a result of some personal crisis. It could be a health crisis in the family, it can be a crisis, an economic crisis on the farm, or a crop crisis on the farm. It can be any number of different directions that this can come from. But it's some sort of personal crisis that triggers the realization that I can't keep doing what I'm doing and expect to get in a different place. And then the other 40% kind of make this gradual transition as a result many times of social changes in their peer network. And so I believe what has happened in agriculture, mainstream agriculture in the American Midwest and the Plains states for the last couple of years is that a large number of growers, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, against the proverbial brick wall. And that has led to an openness to innovation and new ideas that didn't exist before them. And this also, when we think about the future of agriculture, there are many farmers who are very challenged financially. We have lots of farm bankruptcies and dairy farmers going out of business. And that is, and I'm very sympathetic and empathetic with those growers and producers. And at the same moment, we have growers producing the exact same things who are extremely profitable and who are making a lot of money because they've adopted regenerative agriculture practices. So it really is, I think this crisis can bring about the birth of new opportunities and perhaps a shift in the agricultural models that are the status quo.

Yes. All right, so I'm going to shift gears slightly and talk about something that you call your plant health plan pyramid and why plant healthy plants are resistant to pests and diseases. Could, could you go into and elaborate on your plant health pyramid?

The plant health pyramid is really at the Foundation. It's one of the foundational concepts that we developed and that I've spoken a lot about. And the foundational idea behind the Plant Health Pyramid is that plants have an immune system much that functions much the same as ours. Plants also have neural networks that function much the same as ours. In fact, they have the same neurotransmitters of serotonin and melatonin and so forth that we do, which is a whole other fascinating conversation. But in the context of plant immunity, we understand that each one of us have our own immune systems, but they don't all work equally well. We become ill. Some people become ill to the first cold and flu bug that comes along, and other people practically never become ill. And the difference between those two is how well their immune system, that is their microbiome, and everything that comprises their immune system has been supported with nutrition over the course of their entire lifetime, in fact, from even before they were born. And this same concept also holds true for plants. Plants also have their own inherent immune systems. They have the capacity to be completely resistant to all diseases and all insects when they are supported with the right nutrition and the right biology. And I know that that sentence that I just said is a very significant statement. It's a very big statement. To claim that you can produce crops that are resistant to all diseases and all insects is a very big claim. It's not one that I make lightly. I know from infield experience that we can produce crops that are resistant to every disease and every insect, including locusts. So if you can have a conversation about developing a crop that is resistant to locusts in Africa, you can have a conversation about a broad other array. And so I make that comment and make that statement based on actually achieving and delivering those results on hundreds of thousands of acres, across dozens of different crops, all across North America and some foreign countries as well. So the Plant Health Pyramid is a diagram that we developed to describe how we observe plants becoming resistant to different groups of diseases and different groups of insects, based on what was happening within plant physiology, and that the level of that plant's nutritional integrity and the plant's microbiome integrity. So there are four different levels in the Plant Health Pyramid. The first level is when they develop, when they have strong photosynthesis, what I call complete photosynthesis, which means that they now produce both more quantities of sugars and photosynthetic photosynthesis every day, and also a higher quality of sugars and photosynthesis. At this stage, the plants become resistant to all the Soil borne fungal pathogens such as the cerium and Verticillium and Rhizoctonium and Pythium and so forth. The second stage is when plants begin forming complete proteins and they no longer have the soluble nitrogen forms, nitrates and some soluble forms of amino acids, the plant SAP that are required by some insects as a food source. So for all these, this group of insects, which would include aphids and whiteflies and leafhoppers, and all the larval insects, such as cabbage looper and tomato hornworm and corn earworm and so forth, all these larvae, they require soluble forms of nitrogen in the plant SAP. When you change the way you manage plant nutrition, it's possible to have a plant that has an abundant level of protein, even extremely high levels of protein, but no soluble levels of nitrates or some of these amino acids in the profile. And now you've removed the food source for these, all these insect pests. So this is. These first two levels of the pyramid are what I refer to as passive immunity, simply removing the food source that the organism requires in order to sustain itself and to feed itself. The second two levels of the plant health pyramid are when the plants. The third level is when plants have a highly functioning microbiome and they begin absorbing the majority of their nutrition in the form of microbial metabolites. They get this glossy waxy sheen on the leaf surface. When they have surplus energy, and they store this surplus energy in the form of fats and oils, they get this glossy waxy sheen on the leaf surface. And now they become resistant to all the airborne fungal and bacterial pathogens, downy and powdery mildew, bacterial infectious diseases and so forth. And then finally, the fourth level, at the peak of the pyramid, is when plants begin producing high levels of these plant secondary metabolites, phytoaloxins, terpenoids, all these various aromatic compounds that plants produce as plant protectants to protect themselves from ultraviolet radiation, from insect attack, disease attack, overgrazing. You may recognize some of these compounds, such as resveratrol in red wine, anthocyanins in blueberries, lycopene in tomatoes. These are all plant secondary metabolites that are at the foundation of these plants immune systems. And we know that they can also enhance many of these, can also enhance our own immune systems. So at this last stage, this fourth stage in the plant health pyramid, this is when fruit develops extraordinary flavor and aroma. They're extremely flavorful. And these plants now also become resistant to all of the insects with more difficult digestive systems. Or I should say more complex digestive systems, such as the beetle family marmorated stink bug and Colorado potato beetle adults, and Japanese beetles and cucumber beetles and corn rootworm beetles and so forth. So there's a lot of science and information behind the Plant Health Pyramid. And we've actually put a course together on our academy online. There's also a couple of YouTube clips. So it is something that's really worth getting into and understanding a bit more deeply. And we've put lots of resources online where people can learn more about the Plant Health Pyramid.

Yeah, I highly recommend the course. It's awesome. So I've heard you mention this many times about farmers should really focus on maximizing photosynthesis, both farmers and ranchers, and that should be like their highest priority. Can you go into that a little bit and how that's related to the genetic potential of a plant?

Again, such fun conversations. There has been this, I believe, incorrect framework in the organic and regenerative agriculture community to emphasize soil health, to say that we need to build soil health. And the pathway to building soil health is by growing cover crops and by adding compost and keeping our soils covered and incorporating livestock, etc. I don't disagree with any of those things. I think they are all accurate and correct. But I believe they miss the fundamental point, which is that the process of photosynthesis is the only way we have of bringing new energy into the ecosystem. It's the only way that we can efficiently and effectively capture carbon and store it in the soil. If we import carbon in the form of compost and manure and other things, then we're not tapping into what we can achieve with, with growing plants. So what I've come to realize as I studied this in this pathway that I was on of starting with the observation, the experiences on the farm that I grew up on started thinking about, okay, plants have the capacity to have this tremendous immunity. Why does this not exist and what's the pathway to getting there? And I realized that for many crops, many crops don't have the capacity. They never develop a functional immune system because they are so low in energy. They are chronically sick because they're not photosynthesizing well enough. And what we have come to accept as common and normal today is plants which are photosynthesizing somewhere in the neighborhood of about 15 to 20% of their inherent photosynthetic capacity. So that means that every day in each 24 hour photoperiod, they are only photosynthesizing at less than a fifth of what they're capable of. They're producing much fewer sugars, fewer energy. They're sequestering only a fraction of the carbon that they're capable of. And this is slowing down the entire ecosystem. So it seemed to me, the pathway to, I'll call it hacking the system. The pathway to hacking this biological system and excel, or I should say accelerating the system, is to speed up photosynthesis. If we can go from 20% to 60%, then we can triple the quantity of sugars that is being produced in that plant in each 24 hour photoperiod and triple the overall ecosystem's performance. So I spent a lot of time thinking about what are the limiting factors that limit photosynthesis? How can we increase it then of course, how can we incentivize this for our growers and our producers? And this speaks to the associated question that you asked, is how does this connect with genetic potential? In the late 1970s, 1977 or 78, there was a biochemical geneticist at Iowa State University named Charles Tsai. Charles has since passed on. I would have loved to interview him, but he was the first geneticist to calculate the genetic potential of the corn plant. And he described that all the corn genetics available at that moment in time had the genetic capacity to produce 1100 bushel per acre. And more recently, other geneticists have said that modern day genetics have the capacity significant significantly more. As much as 15 to 1600 bushels per acre. Average yield across North America is something, I think 155 bushels or something like that. We're harvesting only a fraction of what that plant is capable of. And the reason fundamentally is because these plants are not photosynthesizing well enough. It's really that simple. There is this direct connection between genetic potential and photosynthetic potential. We're harvesting 15 to 20% of a plant's genetic potential of many of our commercial crop species, and we're only harvesting 15 to 20%. These plants are only at 15 to 20% of photosynthetic capacity. So what this means, in essence is we already know from field experience on many acres, tens of thousands of acres, is that it's not an unrealistic expectation to expect to double or triple photosynthesis. That means it's not an unrealistic expectation to get significantly higher yields, 30%, 40%, 50% higher yields. We have already experienced this and done this on a commercial scale on many high value fruit and vegetable crops. And the same capacity exists on broad acre crops as well. And so this then speaks directly to the conversation of how are we going to feed a growing world population. Well, I can tell you that we're not going to significantly expand or increase our efficiency by pesticides, more fertilizers. The answer lies in increasing photosynthesis. And that ultimately there's one more point that is important, is that when you grow these, there's this idea that to build soil organic matter, we need to grow cover crops and we need to do all these various things. But in reality, fundamentally, you can build organic matter while you are growing a crop. You can build organic matter while you are growing corn. In fact, back in the 70s, much of the agronomic literature of the day reported that the fastest way to build organic matter was to grow corn. Today we have the idea that the fastest way to extract organic matter is to grow corn. And the only difference is in how we manage the ecosystems today versus the way that they were managed in the 20s and 30s and even before that. There certainly were some damaging management practices back then as well. So the reality is that we can grow these really healthy crops that are resistant to diseases and insects, that provide food as medicine, and that regenerate soil health and build organic matter while we are growing a crop. We can do that while we're growing wheat, while we're growing oats. Doesn't matter. All plants have the capacity to do this.

Awesome.

Wow.

That's going to open a lot of people's minds because I love how you can say it, because you've actually done it. It's awesome. So talking about soil organic matter, can you explain why building soil organic matter is so important and how a robust soil microbiome is critical to the process?

This is another fun question. So actually, can you repeat that question once? Sure, sure.

I had one follow up to. Before you do a whole new question, I just had one follow up to the last question, which is so most people think that you have to do application of compost cover crops, you have to do these additional things to build soil organic matter. Where you're saying, you know, and there's kind of a perspective that growing corn is an extractive, fundamentally an extractive crop. But you're saying that we actually can be growing a crop such as corn, that we can be producing food as medicine, we can produce more yield and we can be pumping carbon and restoring soil health. And my question is, what's the blind spot that we're not seeing? Why there's even in the perspective of possibility of regenerative agriculture, People are seeing we need to do these Additional things. And you're saying we can do it. Actually doing the thing that is most wanting to be grown on most of the acres of this country.

Yeah. So I'm not a fan of production, so I should express that opinion up front. But I will use corn as an example because it's perhaps the example that has been the most well studied and well documented. It is possible to build organic matter while growing corn on corn year after year. We actually have farmers who have done this who gained growing corn on corn year after year, multiple consecutive years, and gaining an average of a half a point of organic matter per year on a typical soil analysis. So significant organic matter gains and the pathway to achieving that outcome is simply by increasing the plants photosynthesis. So this is the blind spot that you asked about. The blind spot is that everyone assumes that photosynthesis has a certain set level that is called normal. And that is what it is. And that isn't the case at all. It very common. I'll continue with corn as an example. And this also speaks to the question about why is organic matter important. We know that for a plant to photosynthesize, kind of the macro ingredients that are needed are that you need to have adequate sunlight, you need to have adequate water and you need to have adequate carbon dioxide chlorophyll in the leaf. And I would add to that list manganese, specifically for water hydrolysis. That is the one nutrient that merits being mentioned on its own. So when you look at this from a macro perspective, it's common for us as farmers and growers to think about, okay, it's usually water that is the limiting factor. That's what we've become acclimated water factor that limits photosynthesis. But in fact, in most of commercial production agriculture, it's not water, it's carbon dioxide that is the limiting factor. When you have a green corn growing corn crop on a late June or early July day in the Midwest, the background atmospheric carbon dioxide is somewhere in the neighborhood, let's say of 400 parts per million. And there is a very slight flush of carbon dioxide that emerges from the soil early in the morning. And usually it is common in many agricultural fields, particularly if they're surrounded by corn fields for miles and miles, is that this growing corn crop will deplete the carbon dioxide levels in the air from 400 parts per million down to less than 100 parts per million by 9 or 10 o' clock in the morning. That means that for the rest of the day it doesn't matter if you have Perfect water and perfect sunlight and a dark green plant with chlorophyll to intercept all of it. The limiting factor for photosynthesis from 10am until 7pm is CO2. So this also speaks to the question, why is organic matter important? If we ask that question, we can get lots of correct answers. We can say that organic matter is important because it increases water infiltration and water holding capacity and it provides a substrate to increase our microbial populations. All of those are good answers. But I believe the biggest answer, and the best answer, if we want to accelerate the system's performance, is that we need to have high organic matter soils so that we can cycle it, so that we can lose carbon as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and increase the plant's photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide. Carbon isn't meant to be static in the soil. We shouldn't just have a conversation about sequestering carbon. Our goal as farmers should be to cycle more carbon. We want to sequester more and Release more as CO2 as a result of microbial respiration for the next green growing plants to absorb. This is really why organic matter is so important to increasing. And the key point in all of this, you could say, well, that if you want to cycle more, does that mean that the atmospheric levels remain the same? And the answer is it doesn't. They don't remain the same. They do actually drop. But that's another broader conversation. But there's. There are very important. There's one very important side effect, if you could call it that, which is that when you cycle more carbon through the ecosystem, you significantly increase yields and you significantly increase quality and health as a result of increasing photosynthesis. You raise the entire ecosystem's level of performance. And even though you're cycling the same quantity of carbon in the total ecosystem, the reality is you're holding more in the soil as a part of that total cycle and you're increasing the overall ecosystem's performance. That is really the objective, and I think that is the blind spot as you described it, is that we have assumed that photosynthesis is a constant and it's not a constant.

Excellent.

Wow. That's a whole new story that I haven't been privy to it.

Thank you for that.

Missing out, Rylan.

Yes.

Hence why John's on the show. And could you also talk a little bit about how that microbiome is key for the plant health as well? What are all those microbes in the soil that are eating those photosynthes? What are they doing for plant health?

There's so many dots that tie in to answer your question. So the microbiome is critical, it's fundamental for plants to get to higher levels of plant health, level three and level four on the plant health pyramid. And there's kind of this chicken and egg question of which comes first, the plant microbiome or the soil microbiome or the plant's capacity to support it? And I believe again that the answer, the source is photosynthesis. That's how you bring new energy into the system. So let's talk first about how we sustain large microbial populations. The first is that the way that you sustain a very large microbial population is obviously they need to have a very large food source, much larger than what could again be considered normal or common. And when you increase a plant's photosynthesis from, let's say, for the sake of discussion, 20% to 60%, you triple the quantity of sugars produced in every 24 hour photoperiod. But it would be a rare crop for which that translates to triple yield. It's not common to see 300% yield increases. You might get a 30% yield increase or a 50% yield increase. And on some crops, everything is context dependent. So the question that we then need to ask is if this plant has produced three times more sugars, but the quantity of sugars in the crop has only increased by 30% or by 50%, then where did all the remaining sugars go? And the answer is they went down into the root system. We have larger root systems and larger root biomass, and we also have a significantly higher percentage of the total photosynthes that were sent out through the roots as root exudates to feed soil biology. So when you consider carbon partitioning and sugar partitioning of where the carbon flows in these different ecosystems, there are dramatic differences based on the level of plant health. The healthier a plant becomes, the more it photosynthesizes, the higher a percentage of the total photosynthesis are actually sent out through the root systems as root exudates. And so you have this compounding effect, this flywheel effect of rapidly regenerating soil health. So this is how you sustain a large microbial population. But then why is this microbial.