John Kempf (host) describes his mission to advance regenerative agriculture through improving soil health, increasing yields without synthetic fertilizers, developing disease-suppressive soils, and reducing pesticide dependence. He founded AEA/Advancing Eco Agriculture in 2006 to consolidate scattered knowledge and create products and growing systems to help growers adopt regenerative practices. The piece contrasts 'sustainable' (which Kempf argues shouldn't mean sustaining current degraded systems) with regenerative approaches and includes a sponsor message from AEA.
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Hi friends, I'm John Kempf, hosting this podcast. I am passionate about developing regenerative agriculture systems that improve soil health, produce crops that are completely resistant to diseases and insects, and produce fruit of such an exceptional quality that we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. I've discovered that there are many people with incredible knowledge and information about soil and plant systems and how to develop regenerative agriculture systems. However, much of this knowledge and this information is scattered. It's found all over the place, Some of it has been published in peer reviewed publications, but there are many incredible stories and a lot of knowledge that has not been published and that hasn't been shared with many people. I started advancing EcoAgriculture in 2006 to bring this knowledge together in a more coherent fashion and incorporate it into products and growing systems that growers can easily put into practice. It's my personal mission to have these regenerative agricultural systems become adopted globally and become the mainstream, the status quo against which all other growing systems are compared. To help achieve this goal, I want to share the knowledge that we have learned in the last decade and make it available to everyone while we have developed products at AEA that embody the principles of regenerative agriculture systems and make them easier for growers to apply this knowledge and these principles can be applied anywhere and when they are applied properly, they will always increase farm profitability and resilience to climate stress. If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or ideas, topics that you would like for me to discuss, Please connect on LinkedIn or on Twitter where my username is visionbuilder7 or you can also email me at john kempf.com I would very much like to hear from you and to hear your feedback. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and thank you very much for listening. Enjoy the show.
Hi friends, welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. Thank you for all the feedback and the input that you have been sharing. I've received a lot of emails from many of you which I have greatly appreciated and it's really rewarding to hear from you and hear about the work that you're doing and how the information is able to help. One of the things that many of you have asked for is for me to share some of my own thoughts and observations on what I'm seeing happening in the agriculture space and some of the progress that we're observing on farms that we're working with, new things that we're learning and so forth. As a result of that feedback from you, we are. In addition to hosting a weekly guest for an in depth interview, I'm also going to begin posting a weekly episode just with a very brief 10 or 15 minute topic of something that I've been thinking about that I believe is important for us to discuss and to have a have a bigger discussion around the topic. For today, I want to speak a little bit about why regenerative agriculture is important and how regenerative agriculture is different from some of the more standard terminology that is being used. Over the last 10 or 12 years, there's been a lot of conversation about developing sustainable agriculture, and sustainable agriculture has evolved to become different things for different people. But I have to ask the question, what is it that we are seeking to sustain? From my perspective, we should have no desire to sustain the level of agricultural productivity and performance that we are at today. Our soils have become too degraded, we have lost a lot of soil organic matter, we've lost a lot of soil fertility, our water has become polluted, our ecological ecosystems are becoming depressed because of agricultural impacts on the ecosystem. We should have no desire to sustain where we are right now. We first need to have a conversation about regenerating agriculture ecosystems and also the ecology that surrounds those agriculture ecosystems. When we implement and develop regenerative farming systems, that means that we are regenerating soil health and building organic matter. Regenerative farming systems means that we are maintaining. Actually, I would contend that we need to be increasing yields. Regenerative farming systems have the capacity to increase yields substantially without using mined or synthetic fertilizers. And I know that for some that may sound to be a really big mouthful. And yet this is being done successfully. It's being done successfully on a scale of thousands of acres, with many different types of crops in many different regions and climactic conditions. So the argument no longer holds valid that it can't be done because it is being done. It is being implemented and applied successfully, and it is possible for us to increase yields without using applied synthetic fertilizers. Developing regenerative agriculture ecosystems also means that we are developing disease suppressive soils. And along at the same time as we're developing disease suppressive soils, we're growing plants that have a functional immune system that are really greatly resistant to disease in insect pests and substantially reducing, or in many cases, I would suggest, even completely eliminating the need for pesticide applications. Once we have achieved all of these various pieces, building soil organic matter, increasing soil health, increasing yields without applications of synthetic fertilizers, reducing or eliminating the need for pesticides developing disease suppressive soil. Once we have achieved all of those various pieces, at that point we have achieved a much higher plateau of performance. And once we've achieved that point, and only at that point can we have a conversation about true sustainability. We cannot be sustainable as long as we are constantly importing large quantities of inputs into the farm. We should not have any desire to sustain the agricultural models that we are used today. We can do so much better. We have the knowledge and we have the information how to deploy these regenerative agriculture ecosystems. And the only thing that we need to do is actually implement the knowledge that is already out there and that already exists. So this has been one of the purposes for this podcast is to share this knowledge, to share the information that many people have and to make it readily available. There are many people who have many growers, many farmers, many consultants and advisors who have incredible knowledge. I've been very fortunate to meet with some exceptional people, but I am certain that there are also very many more that I do not know. And so I would ask you if you have any suggestions or recommendations for people who have valuable information and stories to share that are not widely known. I would love to hear from you and would love to be able to give them a platform with which to share their knowledge and information with the world. So thank you very much for listening to the podcast for sharing and actually implementing the information that you learn. Because as we work together and learn together, we're going to be able to have a tremendous impact on the quality of food that is being grown in the world and being able to have a tremendous impact also on the quality of our environment and the ecology. Thank you very much for the work that you're doing and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Be well.
This podcast was brought to you by a great company that I work for, AEA Advancing Eco Agriculture, the leader in regenerative agriculture since 2006. At AEA, we believe in challenging the status quo to find more profitable and regenerative ways to grow crops. We also believe that healthy plants are resistant to pests and disease, and that to grow healthy plants, we must first think different about agriculture, about empowering life instead of suppressing life, about regeneration versus degeneration. To achieve this, we formulate and sell products that help growers produce higher quality yield with less risk of crop failure. In short, we help growers make more money with less risk. Thank you for listening.
