Yields Can't Help But Go Up S4E6 John Kempf

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Hey now, it is Dan Eberhard here, today's host of the Growing the Future podcast. And we are back with season four, Episode six, a very special episode today. But before I get to that, I just want to let you know you can sign up for our newsletter at GrowingTheFuturePodcast CA. You can get new emails about our episodes whenever they come out. You can find out all about our past episodes there and make sure to give us a follow on the social media platforms out there that'll keep you informed and our YouTube channel. You can watch the videos of our conversations here on the show. You can also find the Abrahart family of companies online. Starting with aberhartfarms.com you can learn more about our farming operation in Saskatchewan, SureGrowth CA to learn more about the precision agronomy consulting services offered there. Convergencegrowth.com, one of the newest members of the family. They accelerate solutions across food, health and agriculture. And of course, last but not least, Neighborhood agsolutions ca where we deliver one of a kind fertility solutions of the future to your farm. My next guest almost needs no introduction in the regenerative ag circles here. He is an author, host of Regenerative Agriculture podcast and founder of a very interesting company that truly is advancing eco agriculture. He has a really interesting story starting at a young age working on the family farm, using horses instead of tractors and taking a problem on the farm and turning it into a big opportunity for himself. He's a young guy, but he's moving and shaking, folks. Today he's known as a top expert in the field of biological and regenerative farming who is building a comprehensive systems approach to plant nutrition that we're going to hear about today. And you can find him on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and his website is www.advancingecoag.com. all the links will be in the description, so make sure to give him a follow. Personally, this gentleman's podcast is the agricultural podcast that I most tend towards listening to. I really enjoy it. So today I'm so excited to be quizzing about, you know, how he got started in the regenerative egg business. There's an interesting background there, his perspective on modern farming practices and also the modern food system we're all ingesting as we go and also talk about how he's building a company culture that's helping to scale his philosophy out into the agriculture community. Welcome to the show, the one and only John Kempf.

Thank you Dan. Thanks for having me on here. That's quite the Introduction to live up to. My goodness, is it all downhill?

No pressure, no pressure. Well, it is absolutely amazing to hear your voice, my friend, because I've listened to your show so much and it's like, I know you before we ever got a chance to meet. So thank you for all the work that you've done on the show. And it's always just sort of giving me, like courage and confidence about, hey, you know, with regenerative ag, there's something there that we can sink our teeth into and we can start to execute on because people like you are bringing it to the market in a fashion that I think everybody can relate. We want to delve into your philosophy, but can you tell us, first of all, how did you get your young guy? You're 20. How old are you now? 20?

I'm early 30s.

Oh, okay. I was reading your bio and I was like, you were 26. Still really young by entrepreneurial standards for the wisdom that you carry. So. But how did you get started in this journey with the farming systems that you now espouse?

I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm in the snow belt of Northeast Ohio, east of Cleveland, where we have summers with really high rainfall, really high humidity and limited sunlight. We have. We're the second cloudiest spot in continental North America, second only to Seattle. And as you can imagine, the combination of a lack of sunlight or low sunlight plus the high humidity creates a very disease prone environment. We're ranging between 50 and 55 inches of rainfall a year. So our problem is usually more related to excess water rather than not enough. We have lots of fungal disease pressure and bacterial disease pressure and so forth. And growing up on the fruit and vegetable farm, when I graduated from school, being within the Amish community, we only go through the eighth grade, so I graduated at age 14 and started working on the farm. And I was given the responsibility of doing all of the irrigation and the spraying, including spraying both fertilizers and pesticides. And on a vegetable operation, we're usually at a five to seven day interval in this type of environment. Very intense fungicide applications and insecticide applications. And that after a decade of that continued work, we were coming to the end of the rope and kind of smacking our head against the brick wall. In the early 2000s, 2002, 3 and 4, we had a three year consecutive period that we lost greater than 70% of our crops to a number of different diseases that we were not successful in managing or in controlling with the fungicide applications. And the crop that really Caught my attention was in 2004 when we rented a field from a neighboring farm that had been a former dairy farm rotation, had not had the pesticide exposures that our soils had had. We started planting these two fields, switched the direction of the rows by 90 degrees, and started planting across the former field border. That first year, that 2004 season, the third year, that we had these severe crop losses, and this split field, the old soil, this field was planted into cantaloupe, and the old soil that we'd been farming with the intense pesticide applications every year for the prior decade, we had 80% leaf infection of powdery mildew at harvest, when harvest first started. And on the new soil, there was no powdery mildew, not 5% or 10%, but zero. And that really caught my attention. I wanted to learn what are the differences between those two plants and what allows one plant to be resistant to powdery mildew when the next plant two feet away, is susceptible, and what I learned from asking that question. And I was very fortunate to quickly become connected with many leading plant pathologists and agronomists, both within academia and independent consultants from all over the country. Well, from around the world, for that matter. And I learned that plants have an immune system much the same way that we do. We know that we all have our own individual immune system, but they don't all function equally. Well, some people become ill with the first cold or flu bug that comes along, and other people practically never become ill. And the only difference between those two is how well their immune system has been supported from since before they were born. And the same concept holds true of plants. The fundamentals of supporting immune function in both plants and humans and livestock is support with mineral nutrition and the microbiome. It really comes down to those two foundational pieces is supporting the microbiome and supporting nutrition. So we made a rapid change on the farm, started managing nutrition very differently. And I think, here's the point that really stands out for me when looking at agriculture today is the knowledge and the information about how to manage nutrition for immune function has been around for decades, but it's never been transferred into agronomic practice. To this day, our agronomic focus is we have this very singular perspective on looking exclusively at yield. We can identify, we think, exactly the quantity of nitrogen or phosphorus or potassium or calcium required to produce a bushel of corn or a bushel of grain. But we never ask the question, what do the ratio of these nutrients need to be to produce plant immune responses? And so our approach over the last decade and a half since then has been to seek to balance plant nutrition and microbial function so that we do have these really high yields and that we also have plant health as well. And you know what's been really interesting is that when you produce really healthy plants that are resistant to diseases and insects, you can't stop yields from happening. You can't stop yields from increasing. They will invariably go up when you produce really healthy plants.

Why is it that we've gotten so far off track or this. This knowledge of the soil has. Has been absent? I mean, if you talk to most modern farmers, are they familiar with the biome? Are they looking at the biome? How do we get away from that sort of holistic view of farming, do you think?

I believe that the answer to that question lies in the saying, you achieve what you incentivize. And when you look at the macroeconomic perspective, we have incentivized patentable solutions. So if you can patent something, if you can identify a specific insecticide or fungicide with a mode of action or a mechanism that you can describe, then you can successfully patent that, but you can't put together a microbial inoculant that has 20 different species and patent that combination. And therefore, there has been no economic incentive for agribusiness to develop that.

It appears to me one of the barriers here, too, is the complexity of these systems. Whereas you can apply a chemical solution that immediately addresses any symptoms, you're trying to get to the heart of the problem. But the sophisticated methods that are conversations, evaluations that are required, the component is people. Right?

That's partially true. I mean, it is. We're talking about implementing a different system of plant production that is based on a different mindset, a different approach, different principles than point and shoot solutions. That's certainly true. We're seeking to identify and prevent the root causes of problems. But yet this is not something that's so particularly difficult. It's not really that different from many of the things that farmers do already. We are already trained to be systems thinkers. We have to be systems thinkers or we don't survive in business very long. And it's certainly not beyond the skill set and the capability of most farmers. I mean, I would say this is something that is, in my estimation, it's not difficult at all, because as growers, we already have to manage such diverse complexity of weather and planting and insect management, disease management. It's simply a shift of framework that rather than waiting to identify a problem and treat it, once we have A problem, we seek to prevent it proactively. So we have to manage for the future that might arrive next year or five years in the future or next month, rather than waiting until we actually have a problem. So there's a shift. There's a shift in the time frame in which we're seeking to manage. Are we managing for the future? Are we managing for the past, for what has already happened? Most farmers today are managing for the past. They wait until a problem, and I'm speaking here specifically in the context of diseases and insects, they wait until a problem has expressed itself or is beginning to express itself before it's. Before an application is made. And so there is a slight shift in thinking there, but it's not insurmountable. This is not really that significant a shift, in my opinion. The emphasis on the shift in thinking required is often greater than what the actual shift is. I think this is something that farmers are. We're all already doing it to some degree. It's not that difficult.

Right. So you're talking about once you've shifted the mindset, the actual implementation is easier than you would imagine from the other side.

Well, the implementation is easier than you would imagine, but also I would say the shift in mindset is not as significant as most people actually portray it to be. Is there really a difference in the difference fundamentally, the way that I would describe it, and there's. Yeah, there's a lot that we could unpack here. But fundamentally what it comes down to is a difference of treating symptoms versus trying to identify and prevent root causes. So we can say, well, we're concerned that we are going to have flea beetles on canola when they emerge. So therefore we need to treat the seed with a neonicotinoid. That's a preventative action where you're trying to prevent something in the future. Or you could say we're concerned about flea beetles being problems on canola once they emerge. So we're going to treat the seed with an application of boron and molybdenum and sulfur, and that's going to prevent the problem. The difference is that the insecticide only functions by treating the symptom, by killing the flea beetle, whereas the nutritional seed treatment changes the plant's biochemistry, so it's no longer a viable food source for the flea beetle. So you're addressing the root cause of the problem and the reason the flea beetles are there in the first place, rather than simply treating the symptom. Flea beetles are not a problem, they're a symptom of an underlying problem as is true of all diseases and insects.

When you embarked on this journey. Tell us more about some of the people that had a big influence on your mindset in terms of mentors.

Oh, there's quite a list that deserve credit in the early days. And you know, that list just continues to grow as time goes by. Early ON it was Dr. Michael McNeil and Jerry Hatfield, Don Huber, Gary Zimmer, Jerry Burnetti, Bruce Taineo who's now passed away and I guess Jerry Bernetti has also passed away. So there was an amazing group of people early on, but that still continues. There's many people today who I still consider to be my mentors. And you know, you gave a lot of compliments to my podcast. Thank you for that. But the podcast originally started because of the personal experience that I had with Jerry Brunetti and Bruce Taneo. Here were two people who, quite simply put, were geniuses and.