Why Regenerate? The principles of regenerative soil systems with Nicole Masters | Regen Rev 2022

Welcome, everybody to regen rev 2022. As you arrive, please feel free to share to share where you are joining us from today to say hello and to tell us where you are on your regenerative journey. You can do that in the chat function to your right. We'd also love to learn a little bit more about you. If you could answer a quick poll for us, that would be great. On the right side of your screen, please click on Stage. And there you'll find three options. Chat, Polls and Q and A. Please click on Polls. We did have a lot of registrations come in from around the globe, so we're looking forward to seeing who's with us today. I'll give you guys all just a second to do that while we welcome people into the room. So far, I see people joining us from Arkansas, Austria, Illinois, Mexico. I saw a Belize. That's fabulous. Welcome, everybody. Okay, and for those of you just joining us, please feel free to say hello in the chat. Please. Please feel free to share with us where you are in your regenerative journey and where you're joining us from today. We also have a poll question. In the poll, you can find your way there through the stage button on your right and then clicking on the poll function and we'll get started in just one more minute here. Okay, I've. I've just been notified that it's not in the stage section. I apologize. Click on the event function in the upper right corner of your screen, it says Event. And then click on the polls function under that option. Apologies for that if you guys are navigating your way through the platform. Thanks, Timothy, for catching me on that. Appreciate it. Okay. All right. With that, I'd love to welcome everybody to regen rev 2022. My name is Sarah De Lavac and I'm excited to be your emcee this event. While you enter the information in the chat and while you take that poll, I'll just tell you a little bit about myself and the awesome organizations that are putting on this event. There are many new names out there, but some of you may recognize me from my work at Acres USA and Regenerative Food Systems Investment. I split my time between these organizations working on initiatives that connect and equip farmers, investors and others to help move our food system system forward. I'll tell you more about myself later today when I present. I'm super excited to be with you all today for the second annual Regen Rev event. Our first Regen Rev last year was such a success that this year we decided to do it again, but bigger. So thank you for all your support. Regen Rev started with three organizing companies, Advancing EcoAgriculture, who offers regen Consulting, liquid plant, nutrition and soil health products kindharvest, which is the Regen Ag social media and learning platform and Taneo Biologicals, who make natural and organic biological inoculants. These three organizations have been working to further the Regen mission long before regenerative agriculture was a buzzword. And since last year they have partnered together, invited some of the top minds in the industry and exemplary growers to give you the tools needed to start and further your regenerative revolution. We're also thankful to our media supporters who can help you learn even more about regenerative agriculture, so please don't forget to sign up for their content. I happen to know a couple of these very closely. Regenerative Food Systems Investment works to catalyze capital for regenerative food systems by offering opportunities to learn and connect and Acres USA is the premier ecological farming media and conference organization. Regen Farming News is an online hub for for regenerative ag news, jobs and training. Thanks to all of these organizations for making this happen today. So before we get started, I wanted to give you a glimpse of what lies ahead in the next two days. Here is what we have planned for you today for the for this afternoon, in just a few moments we'll kick off with the incredible Nicole Masters who will speak about why we should regenerate. Dennis Warnecke and Steve Becker of Taneo Bio will be up next with a fascinating and I'm sure entertaining look at the role of biology in regenerative agriculture. And after a short afternoon break, I'll be back here to talk to you about the economics of regenerative agriculture and what the role of investment in the space could mean for you. At 3:35pm Eastern Time, Dan Kittredge will join us to talk about nutrient dense soils. And at 4:35 Steven Berlink will discuss boosting fruit quality. At 5:25 you won't want to miss a chance for all of the speakers to come back together for a Q and A that's moderated by John Kempf. And finally, at 6:00pm Eastern Time, please join us at the Expo booths for dialogue and questions with our Region REV organizing companies. As you can see, tomorrow we have another incredible lineup of speakers and topics, as you can see here. And again we'll have lots of opportunities for Q and A to get your questions answered and to visit our producing companies in their virtual booths so before we get started with the content, I just want to give you a few tips and tricks for using this platform. There on the left hand side I'll try to get this right since I already seem to mess it up in the intro, but on the left hand side of your screen you should see a menu with different icons on it such as Stage, Session and Expo and we're currently in the stage. These are all the different virtual spaces that you can visit throughout the two day program, so you'll visit them by clicking on them. But don't do that right now. Stay right here. The Booth Expo won't be open while the speakers are live, but we will have a dedicated time for those at 6pm Eastern time on both. So you won't click on Expo until 6pm Eastern Time each day. And at the end of each day when we do the Q and A's, those will take place in the sessions rooms, so you'll click on the Sessions button for that. When it's time for us to go there, we'll let you know so you don't need to worry about that. Until that time. Feel free to ask questions through the chat throughout all the presentations and our team will compile those and make sure that those are asked of our speakers when the time comes. You can also use you can also direct message other attendees and you can do that by looking by clicking on the little envelope icon that you see should see in the upper right hand corner of your screen. If you click on that and then click Start Conversation, you can either click on somebody's name or you can chat with them and then you can chat with them directly. If you have any questions, you can also direct chat our support desktop as well. And I will note that if your questions don't get answered by any of the speakers while we're here today, you can join us in the Q and A session, but also you can email them directly. The companies and the speakers. Okay with that, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our first speaker of regen rev 2022, Nicole Masters. Nicole is an independent agroecologist, pattern thinker, author and educator. For over two decades, Nicole has been recognized as a knowledgeable and dynamic speaker on the topic of soil health, and she really does make learning soil health fun. Her experience has spanned diverse sectors from community gardens and horticulture to vermiculture, compost tea production and diverse multi species systems. Her company, Integrity Soils, delivers coaching and educational programs to producers and organizations spanning across 24 million acres.

Wow.

In 2021, integrity soils shifted away from in person consultancy to focus on training the next generation of coaches. Her book titled for the Love of Soil Strategies to Regenerate our food Production Systems showcases examples of the tools and principles producers are using to regenerate their soils when the roads are good, unlike they are here today In Colorado, you'll find her traveling in her Ford 350 horse horse trailer intel working alongside producers to build soil and sink her carbon emissions. Please welcome Nicole.

Thank you, Sarah. I can't even express what an honor really it is to be here with you all today and amazing to see where people are coming from around the world. Yeah. So thank you very much for having me. I'm just having issues sharing my screen. Can someone let me. Oh, magic. We do like that. So this past summer, I'm now based in Montana and as many of you will know from what happened here this summer, right across the US we saw catastrophic fires, massive droughts, and I spent my time on 24 different ranches in June and July or in May across many areas. And what was fascinating is how on 22 of those ranches they were absolutely at the whim of the environment. So I just want to put forward a case for why it is that we need to regenerate now more than ever. So I was driving along the Montana high line and so right up the top, close to the Canadian border for those of you who don't know it. And as I was driving, there were these huge dust storms that were blowing and those dust storms blew right across the main continental USA and have done since, well, probably the last hundred years. But what was interesting this day is we had gale force winds, there were trucks flipped over, the power lines were on the roads. There was dust storm blowing like this. The dust then met the smoke that was above it that was coming from California and Idaho to the west of us. We had 700,000 acres were on fire and then above that was this dry lightning storm that was just forking lightning down. And the roads themselves were absolutely slick. And I just, I had this sense like really, really like Armageddon is upon us right now. And in June last year, the National Weather Service in Glasgow actually put this image up on Facebook and it looked like rain was coming and people were super excited. Yeah, we needed some rain. But in fact, it wasn't rain at 10,000ft. It was the satellite images bouncing off grasshoppers. There were literally billions of grasshoppers coming across Montana and cleaning up what little growth we did have. So if we think about what has been promised in the last 200 years of the Industrial Revolution, or the Green Revolution, really, since the 1950s, there's this concept of we need the world to fit to us again. We're being offered all of these promises, from miracle seeds to incredible yields. And a big part of this is how do we remove uncertainty? So eliminating pests and weeds and diseases, increasing efficiency, increasing irrigation, the promise to eat, to end hunger around the world and profitability for producers. Right. And what's fascinating out of all of this for me is that many of these, these promises were delivered. Right? But as we, as we've seen, there's also the other side of this promise, which is the unintended consequences of how do we consider what is the risk of trying to. Risk of trying to reduce something like uncertainty. So I like Voltaire's quote on this. And that doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. And here we are in so much of our agricultural systems trying to chase this certainty model. I want to be able to command and control every single aspect across my property. And the promises that then I'm going to be more profitable. But these unintended consequences, we can read this in the news at any time. We've got mass swarms of grasshoppers. You see the locust swarms in South Africa. We're seeing frost damage at different times. We're seeing flash floods, then droughts, flash floods, then droughts, heat waves, dust bowls. And what's really being revealed through Covid is the breakdown in the entire system in terms of food accessibility, profitability and who's making the money, really. But there's a whole lot of, I think, very topical issues that all speak into this promise of we can control and manipulate nature. And so in the US and this would be the same all around the world. It depends where you are. On average, we lose about 4 tons per acre per year of topsoil. But actually, in some areas, like Iowa, they've measured as much as 100 tons of topsoil per acre per year. And in some ways, this is like the death by a thousand cuts that very, very slowly. So with each tonne of soil, it's about the thickness of a piece of paper that gradually these soils have been washed away, was or blown away. And that has significant consequences for our bottom lines on so many different levels. And so what I want to say is these issues are not due to a deficiency in pesticides. It's not due to a deficiency in nitrogen or phosphorus or any other input. It's really reframing this in terms of am I being proactive around my management of my landscape or am I being a reaction? Am I just reaching for some kind of prescription or some way to substitute what I've been doing instead of thinking why is it that I have pest, weeds and diseases? Why am I losing so much soil? Why is this ground getting harder and harder and harder? And so what I want to propose is we need to be deeply regenerating our landscapes. And by doing that, it's not just a practice change. So something like a cover crop, this could be degenerative in certain hands, or regenerative depending on our philosophy and how we manage these landscapes. And so if we come at it in terms of there's a silver bullet and I just need to do this and then I'm going to get this amazing result that is not what regeneration means. So I'd like to ask you all is how do you define regenerative agriculture? And to really ponder deeply on this and what we're seeing is this drive from marketing organizations and government policy and science groups wanting to really, really clear, clearly define regenerative agriculture. And so if we look into the literature, we can find these definitions. So it's a system of food or fiber with these objectives. So think these outcomes, the incorporation of natural processes into agricultural production, ensuring profitable, efficient and quality food production. So if you're not profitable and you're growing a low quality food, then that's a place to look at in terms of am I regenerating that we reduce the need for inputs. And this is the important part, it's that how do we create a system that requires very little inputs, that we start to get a refinement in terms of what we're doing. So can we reduce any external, harmful and non renewable inputs and then use more targeted remaining inputs with the aim over time to reduce all of these costs? Right. And so for some producers they're doing this within, you know, 18 months or three years. For some people this might be a seven year journey, but it's definitely a journey and the producers are the experts. Alright? So while I stand here talking at you like a talking head and I'm the expert, I want to tell you that I very firmly know that there's so much to learn and I'm only part of many, many people that around the world that are having these conversations. But producers are the experts, it's the people on the ground. So it requires full participation of rural people from any scale and anywhere in the world, in all aspects of how do we Analyze problems, how do we develop technology or adapt, and then how do we share those ideas? So this success in regenerative agriculture really starts with enabling people. And I have to say that includes ourselves. So regenerative farming systems or ranching systems are a complex learning system. It's not an add on. So I use this pyramid to kind of explain that in terms of it sits on top of our mindset and our paradigms. And then we are informed by the education we choose to take, the people we're talking to, where are we getting information from, the observations that we're making on the ground. And then I talk about addressing limiting factors or enabling factors. I think John might have some different ways of framing that. But our management is, is the bottom of that pyramid. We don't just put some kind of inputs in or put a cover crop in, or be feeding microbiology without good management. Now you can choose to do that and some people do, it's going to cost you a lot of money. So we're really looking at how do we find solutions and apply those into our local context. So the more that we can attend events like this, get into conversations, go to workshops, whatever it takes, and to learn more and more about these systems. So for us at Integrity Soils, we define regenerative agriculture as our way of being in the world. So this encompasses these complex ecological adaptive systems and the thinking that's required to be able to address many of these issues. And so we ask the question of where would you rate yourself in terms of a scale of 0 to 5 in terms of achieving environmental outcomes, water quality, animal welfare, profitability, your spiritual or land connection, community, family, self care? I have to say, self care really for most people seems to rank really low. And I'm pretty passionate. If we're not looking after ourselves, then how do we expect to be able to look after land really, really well? And so for some of us, we will be doing really well in some aspects of this. Like you might be, like my animal welfare is amazing. And for others it might be. This is an area I really need to be focusing on. And there's no dogma in this, which I quite like. It's a personal expansion of that journey. So it's a journey of production that's improving the outcomes for soil health, biodiversity and ecosystem health or life support systems while producing high nutritional quality food and happy producers. And this is shaped by how we view the world. And that's why that mindset and paradigms and philosophy is such an important part of this. Am I trying to Force the world to fit to me or is it that I look to how do I get in sync with nature? Because when we get in sync with nature and start to work with soil health, all of these issues that we were talking about before, from flash floods to droughts to frost damage, to having landscapes that are no longer have nutrient cycles or carbon cycles, is all because of how we're interacting with that landscape. Right. And it's all because we've been led down this track that we're separate in some way. So what I want to show, this is one of the best fence line images. It's from Kim Deans in Australia in Tinga, New South Wales. And this is just after they had fires come through their property. So they were a tall grass grazing, regenerative management for 14 years. And so what you're seeing is the consequence of the fire coming through. You see those fence posts are a burnt. I'll show some other photos. But what's really interesting, and she noted this, when the wind came up, the dust storms began at the fence line. Like literally that dust blowing. And I think they had a dust storm that came off Australia that was three and a half thousand kilometers long. One of the biggest movements of soil that's ever been measured and then dumped out. Oh, luckily in New Zealand, I'm sure New Zealanders appreciate some of those resources, but it's land management that addresses these issues that we're facing. And then they got torrential downpours. Absolutely fantastic. But notice how the lake stops at the fence line. And this land is absolutely flat. There's no difference in elevation between the neighbors and their place. What's happening on this side of the fence is that water is actually infiltrating. How do we create systems that actually hold on to work like a sponge and very slowly release water over time? And right now we have the opposite. Like the fact that you call in America these areas water sheds is true. You guys are shedding so much water, it's not funny. As opposed to what we call them in other parts of the world, which is water catchments, how do we develop a water catchment? And there's a lot of focus at the moment on carbon. Right. Everyone's getting pretty excited about carbon. And when we have carbon, we have water, we have carbon, we have nitrogen. All of these things are interrelated and interlinked. Like we don't think of them as separate parts. Right. So our job as producers is to capture sunlight energy as efficiently as we possibly can. And there's a couple of different processes that are going on, right? So that carbon is breathed in by the plant and then that process there also takes up water and then the plant is respiring oxygen and building carbohydrates. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. Right. So a lot of people are familiar with this carbon cycle, but what I find is most producers are familiar with this top smaller cycle on the surface. Right. I call this that I'm here for a good time, not a long time, honey cycle. So it's your microbiological respiration cycle. It might be you've applied compost or you're trampling organic materials, or you're applying biological stimulants. So every day that soil breathes in and it breathes out, and it's very important that's going to help to stimulate plant growth because obviously carbon dioxide is a very stimulatory effect on plant growth and yield. But the other part of this cycle that's happening deeper down is from our fungal partners, the mycorrhizae. So myco, meaning fungus, rhizomeaning root. So these, these organisms are able to live in symbiosis inside plant roots and they are able to expand potentially by a hundredfold from that access from that plant root. So the plant is sending sugars down or exudates, and that percentage depends on how stressed does that plant. Does that plant have the trace elements that it needs? How hard have you been grazing it, how well have you been managing it? That all impacts on how much exudates, sugars, amino acids, all sorts of things that that plant sends out to pay that mycorrhizae to go out and access nutrients. So that plant is saying to that mycorrhizae, and it actually is signaling and communicating with that fungus and saying, hey, I need some phosphorus or hey, I need some zinc or nitrogen. And the mycorrhizae will actually go out and deposit carbon deeper down through that soil profile. And what's interesting is 50% of that carbon may in fact be below that 4 inch level, maybe anywhere from 500 to 2000 years old, right? So very, very old carbon, if we're interested in how do we really draw it down through this biological relationship. And it can be very, very protected in there. And the other part of this is what's happening with water, right? So as we start to see more carbon, we get more aggregation. So that when a raindrop falls, instead of dropping straight down, soaking into that top couple of half an inch maybe and then evaporating again, which is what I see on most operations that Water will start to percolate and infiltrate. Well, infiltrate first, then percolate, infiltrate through those different crumbs. And that slows that water movement right through that profile. And that's what we want to see. So we're not losing from evaporation because we've got that plant cover. We have water moving very, very slowly through that environment. And that's one of our goals is how do I slow water down? How do I absorb it? And a big part of that is how do we build aggregate structure? All right, and all of this is about microbiology, right? So you think these aggregates or these crumbs, when you look at your soil, do you see that lovely crumbly chocolate cake type structure or do you just see flat plates and very blow away? So I was saying, I was on 24 ranches this summer, 22 of them had these blow away soils. All right? There's no aggregate structure in there, which means that we are not able to hold on to water. We have no aeration in that process. We have no dissolved organic carbons. Right? So I want you to think of inside those aggregates. You can see in that aggregate, there's all these crumbs. And then right inside those crumbs is this aggregate reactor. Right? And this reactor is what drives the success of your entire operation. It's. Is the soil holding together or is it blowing away? Is that water cycle working? Can that water weave its way through those aggregates or is it just washing away? And you are in a drought within two weeks of your last rainfall event. And what we're seeing globally is this is what's been created. We've degraded our soil structure to such a level that we no longer have any of these structures happening. The microbiology are undermined. And so we might see something like this. So on the left is a soil that was water repellent or hydrophobic, literally. So we're seeing more and more soils that are afraid of water, which is not a good thing. Right? And they're these big blocks. They are. There's a lot of insect disease, insects and diseases in that compared to the soil on the right. That's just a sponge, right? That crumbly structure. You can see there's a difference in color. These soils were taken about three feet apart. So on the right hand side is underneath the fence line, on the left hand side is in the field. And this is all management that's created this. So we've lost our reactor, we've lost the currency that's fueling that whole Soil resource, which is your carbon. And now we have systems that are incredibly vulnerable. And people are now needing insurance payouts because of what is intrinsically a soil health issue. So I want to see big, beautiful, what I call the Rastafarian roots. But these dreadlocks on my plant system, they are able to defend that plant from variations in climate. They're able to protect it from massive changes in temperature from ph. So as much as 2 units difference on the inside of that Rastafarian or rhizo sheath can be two units different. So you might have a pH of nine or a pH of five, and that plant's experiencing seven. How do we build more resilience in our systems like this? It's all being driven by sunlight capture. Feeding that microbiology and building structures like this. So I just want to show this example and I often do. And it is an older piece of research, it's from 2006, but it was done on a friend of mine's property while we were working together. So I like to share it. So across a headland, this is best practice at a research center. So it's apple production. They're not using any compost. They're doing all those best practices. So they have herbicide rows and they're applying irrigation. There was about 5.3 pounds of carbon per square yard in that top 4 inches compared to the biological system. And I still don't know where they got this photo from because I never saw crazy trees like this in this place. But you can see there's a full sward of grass underneath there. He was applying compost. There's no herbicides and no irrigation because there was no need for irrigation. And he had 8.4 pounds of carbon per yard squared in that top 4 inches. So significant difference in the amount of carbon that's in that soil and that's below the compost layer. Right. And what was interesting is over time, this sward totally changed. And what began to grow were more of the companion plants for these trees. So we were seeing clovers, alyssum, wild strawberries started to show up. Now what I really liked about this research is they took a photograph basically of the pore spaces using like an X ray machine to take the pore spaces of the soil. So on the left hand side is best practice, on the right hand side is the biological. And what you can see is the dark is soil and the pale is all that area for air and water to move. Now what's fascinating on the right hand side is there is more air in that soil than there's actually soil which is wild and you could feel it when you walk on it. There's this real bounce. Like it was absolutely extraordinary to walk around on this soil. They did some tests where they applied 2,4d to the top of that soil. And if you apply 2,4D in this situation on the left, it washes off like you're just going to get runoff in a soil like that. There's no infiltration and the 2,4D is basically lost to the environment. On the right hand side, when they apply 2,4D, they remeasured the soil and it was gone. There wasn't any 2,4D in there. So they did it again thinking someone had stuffed up. And no, sure enough there was no 2, 4D. The microbiology in there had bio accumulated and bio remediated that soil, broken that 2,4D down into its component parts and made it unavailable to the plant. They also found significant reductions in other greenhouses gases, nitrous oxide. So they looked at what was the total area of connectivity and in the research station, this is the total area that was connected. And it's probably going to be an insect pest. So this might be your grasshoppers, this might be your weevils, it might be a grass grub, it's some kind of pest insect. We find cicadas really like these kinds of soil. So when we lose our structure, what you also lose is your ability to control a lot of insect pests. Because there's none of the beneficial bacteria and fungi that actually eat insects. They disappear when these soils become compacted as opposed to what's happening underneath the biological. So nearly 80% of that total soil environment is connected, which means there's no limitation to air and water movement. That water can very slowly move through that and then become available over time. So ask yourself, am I creating a soil like this that's just compacted, whole lot of plates, or am I connecting a soil like this? You walk on it, it's soft, it's spongy. There's a lot of old accounts of cavalry men or early colonial accounts of walking across landscapes in Australia and the US that are semi arid that talk about these spongy moist soils and streams running where you go there now. And these are just dried up desertified areas. I just wanted to share this image just to think about what's creating all of that structure. As you have your plant root hairs up on the top left, your mycorrhizal hyphae that's spreading right through and it's able to get inside those crumbs so it can access water and nutrients that the plant can't reach. You've got all those microbes and they're exuding things like poos and wheeze and vomit and spit. And all that stuff is what's sticks those soils together so that when the wind blows, the soil movement stops at the fence. Right. So that's what Kim and Angus Deans have created at their place is a soil that holds together despite, you know, heavy rainfall, despite wind. Right. So thinking about how do I build those structures, it's all about supporting microbial life. So one thing we, I can suggest that's a good idea to do is to set up a system that feels safe to fail. Right. So try some things, you're hearing about all these different approaches, practices, products, whatever, and you might have some skepticism. Start to do smaller trials for yourself. And what I like about this trial, it's at Cotopaxi, at Nancy and Steve Oswald's place in Colorado, is they did a trial of just one yard square spray of 30 pounds an acre of a Johnson Sioux compost extract on top of COVID crop. This field was called the cheatgrass field. And if you have a look on the right hand side you'll see most of that's cheatgrass and on the left most of it's purslane or bare soil. That's all that's growing. The COVID crop really struggled except for these areas and they had little markers so we could see it right across the field. Any of these big green patches is where the extract was applied. And what you see is that's where the plants are growing. We looked at the root systems, the aggregation, everything was like black and white compared to the area that wasn't. So if you think something like 30 pounds an acre of compost is not going to cost you a lot, start trialing different things. It might be you want to try high impact with animals or maybe you could exclude an area from fertilizer. Maybe you want to try buffering some of your chemicals with carbon based products. Just start doing some little trials that if they weren't to succeed, it's not going to, it's not going to cost you a fortune, right. And then you can start to see what's going to work well, because what was interesting on this trial, these soils are very, very, very bacterial, very low in biological diversity. The extract worked amazingly well. And then in their meadows that were more fungal dominated, had a lot of biology. The extract did nothing right there was no response, no growth response. So take a look and see is this going to be fit to my context. So my invitation to you really is that the future truly is in our hands. And producers around the world are rapidly restoring biological water, carbon and nutrient cycles, as well as restoring food quality. And it doesn't matter if you're talking about vegetable production, if you're in viticulture, if you're in turf livestock operations, there's huge opportunities for all of us to do it. And really the time to regenerate is now. But everything that we're seeing right now, we're not talking about climate change, we're talking about water cycles, we're talking about the impacts of land management. 90% of landscapes here in the US in the semi arid zones now are considered significantly degraded or desertifying. We have huge opportunities to turn this around. And as we do that, we actually have the opportunity to shift what's happening climactically. So I want to thank you so much for listening in. I hope that gives you some kind of positivity and I think we have time for some Q and A.

Yes, fantastic. Nicole, I do think we have a couple questions for you and we have just about seven minutes to do that, so we'll hop right in. Yeah. Okay, so first question is, would you encourage growers to allow strips of weeds to increase diversity to feed microbes?

What's a weed? And this is part of thinking, like if you want to get rid of weeds overnight, stop calling them weeds. You know, these are indicator species. So yes, I'd be looking at what is your specific context. But the more diversity that we can get in these systems and often looking at these plants are trying to tell you something. What are they trying to indicate? Is it just a healing crisis? I see a lot of properties in healing crisis and it's like just allow that crisis to work its way through and it might just be that's just a temporal blip with whatever that specific plant might be. But yes, the more diversity. Maybe you think it's a weed, but that's a food for a monarch butterfly or some kind of beneficial parasitic wasp. You know, starting to think much broader than just our own needs because all of that benefits us, everybody.

I love that indicator species. That goes back to this whole mindset shift. Right? What's a weed? Perfect. Next question. Is it possible or realistic to build sufficient aggregate structures, structure in an annual cropping system, for example, corn, soybean, winter wheat, cover, crop rotation, or are perennials typically required to transition to healthy Soils.

No, it's a really, really good point. And I think it depends if you're no till or if you're cultivating. I think if you're cultivating soils in an annual situation, you really are pushing the proverbial uphill and potentially going to be looking at more inputs or rotating a fallow period in order to get that aggregation. But I think what we're seeing is people that are in aggregate are in annual systems. Yes, you can, but you're going to be putting stuff on the seed, you're going to be putting biologicals down when you drill and potentially using foliars in the season just to keep overcoming the fact that you've. You're keeping your system in an annual cycle and you're not necessarily feeding a lot of fungi. And then two, about what are you doing with stubble retention? What are you doing in terms of what happens after harvest? And it depends as well, how long's your season? Have you got a shoulder period where you could plant something else in after your crop? But I think practices like chemical fallows or cultivating in fall or autumn is probably some of the worst stuff that you can do in terms of building aggregate stability. So just nothing simple.

Right.

It's all to do with what's your particular context. But yes, in shorthand, yes, we can do this in annual systems. I'm seeing people doing a great job.

Perfect. And I'm going to squeeze one more. One more in here at least, I think. And one of our guests is asking us what the role for biochar is in your mind.

Biochar questions. Does he sell biochar?

He did not let us know. I'm not sure.

Yeah, I think any kind of complex carbons. There's definitely a role having microbially charged biochar. I think if you're creating energy from that hydrolysis process. Yeah, there's a role for biochar. George has got a question. Have we got time for George?

Is it about.

Yes.

Do you see it? Read it for yourself to make sure that I don't get the wrong one there.

George is asking, when we produce regenerative, the increase of minerals in the harvest is are we creating better food for us?

Yes.

And I think this will. We have Dan Kittridge on later on today. Yeah. Part of what you're going to see is better storability. We'll see a reduction in pests and weeds and diseases. It's absolutely fascinating is that as we start to create more nutrient value, there's all of these other unintended consequences that are positive instead of the unintended negative consequences. Oh and just quickly someone asked about that Cotopaxi compost. Did it lead to an increase in cheatgrass? No. Was fascinating. Is that it actually excluded that cheatgrass. And if we think of cheatgrass and a lot of those annual weeds as an indicator, they very much like these very bacterial soils. Poor calcium and phosphorus mobility. So when we apply something that starts to liberate phosphorus and calcium and feeds fungi, then we start to see that's not going to be well suited to cheatgrass and that's why it's a great trial for people to do. We're also seeing people do that just through management. Right. So through good animal management we see the shift away from cheatgrass. But great questions. Thanks.

Yes, very good. So I think we will wrap it up with that and thank you so much, Nicole. That was an amazing kickoff to this event and always so enlightening.

So thank you. So great to see you. Thanks Sarah.