Podcast Extra: Farm to Table Talk - Fresh Eyes to Fix Farms with John Kempf
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You're listening to Heritage Radio Network. Probably by the time this show airs, we will have launched our own AI that is a combination of an algorithmic engine that you can provide it with agronomic data, crops, soil, irrigation water, nutritional profiles, etc. And it will make a set of recommendations. And also with a chat GPT-like chatbot that is trained on all this information, this dataset,

What a journey. We started this out talking about hundreds of years ago, the success of Amish farmers in Switzerland, and we're ending up on artificial intelligence. And we took a swoop down through the soil with what's going on with these wonderful little communities that we're still trying to figure out what keeps them happy and doing their best work just to keep plants going.

It's time for conversations about our food and how it's grown on Farm to Table Talk with your host, Roger Wasson. The conversations I've had over the years have not just been in podcasts, obviously. Sometimes you run into people and you run into people that don't know you.

Make an impression on you. And for me, somebody that has good ideas and vision, that's what I remember most. Now, on the other hand, if somebody invites me to dinner and have a great meal, I remember that too. So there are certain things that I find are important, but I think I still have to rank ideas higher.

And one of those people come back to me today. I'm glad to have with me John Kempf. And John, welcome to Farmer Table Talk. Thanks for having me on here, Roger. It's our earlier conversations bringing back lots of memories of when we met the first time. And I really appreciate all the work you're doing in this space. Thanks for having me here.

Well, I appreciate all the work that you're doing. You came into my office one time when I was back in Aptos, and we started kicking around some things. And I remember from then, and I remember seeing some other things that you've talked about. We were talking about things such as regenerative in different terms, but I think before a lot of people were jumping into it. Knowing that you were going to be on the podcast today,

I went back and looked at some notes, and I was also looking at your website. And, John, another thing came to my attention today, and that is that you allude to this in the website that you are an Amish farmer.

had issues in your own farming operations. Now, I bring that up because I feel that more and more people are recognizing that there's much to be learned about Amish farming techniques and are envious. But what was a bit surprising that you allude to is as a farmer that the

you actually were able to have had some part in putting more chemicals into the land than were probably the right thing to do. And I say that because, again, I think people think, well, gee, if you're an Amish farmer, perhaps you pull back on all those things. But you were able to make the same mistakes people are making today. But what we're going to talk a little bit about is you recognized it and started figuring out how you made it different, and you've been sharing it with people ever since.

Yeah, it's been an interesting journey, Roger. So I grew up in the fourth largest Amish community in the world here in Northeastern Ohio. And on a family food and vegetable farm, we farmed with horses. And you can imagine the food safety considerations that brings to mind, the things that we had to pay attention to. But

You know, the Amish have this fascinating history that extends all the way back to their homeland in Switzerland and through religious persecution, through relocating to different parts of Europe. They were welcomed with open arms to various parts of Europe because they were recognized and known as being exceptionally good farmers and capable of bringing back to life degraded and impoverished lands.

So there were valleys that had been completely destroyed as a result of the 30 years war and various warfare actions. And the Amish were invited into these regions by the rulers, and they were recognized as bringing some of the best farmers in Europe. So they were then, they migrated to North America. And the Amish farmers generally have a culture, there's this tradition,

mainstream stereotype of the Amish being organic farmers and being naturally minded and so forth. And that is true of many of them, but that's certainly not a universal truth by any stretch. It's generally true that the Amish, and I would include to some degree the Mennonites and the Hutterites as well, who stem from a similar Anabaptist cultural background,

As a culture, they tend to be more innovative and more intense at adopting change than the mainstream.

And so what happened is, and they also, aside from the religious persecution, the Amish in particular are taught very strongly to have trust in the government and to have faith in authority figures. And so when extension agents began recommending and endorsing the use of cover crops and GMOs and so forth, there was a portion of government

the Amish community that went in that direction very intensely, all in 110%. And that was the approach that my father took. And that degree of intensity, that intense farming spirit, but also being, still remaining connected to soil health and looking at earthworm populations and plowing behind a team of horses and having that close connection to the earth and to the soil,

also made us aware earlier and sooner, I think, than many people become aware that the pathway we were going down was not a pathway we wanted to be on. Hmm. That's interesting. And I'm thinking about following the horses, too, because I'm wondering in some of those early days, the fact that you were, you had all that livestock and you had horses, the horses were contributing a lot to the fertility of that soil. Yeah.

They were contributing fertility, but there's also when you're plowing behind a team of horses, you just, you have a different relationship with the landscape. You have your feet in and on the soil. I've farmed, I've plowed many, many acres in those days behind a team of two horses and a walking plow. And you enter into a very real visceral relationship with the land.

that you cannot achieve from the seat of a tractor that can that's a little bit of a divergent for me but can you uh can you transition to minimum tillage because uh i i see what you're describing with plows but plows have fallen out of fashion uh of late as far as yeah um

So, yes, you absolutely can transition. The farm that I grew up on, well, of course, there have been generational changes. My brothers are farming that farm now. And the crop mix has changed to be a lot more perennials, a lot more perennial berries. And so tillage is no longer what it once was, but it also hasn't disappeared entirely. There certainly are... You know, it's interesting, Roger, when I...

When I travel across the country and I look at all of these different soil types and different soil contexts, there are many settings in which tillage is extremely detrimental. And yet the Amish farmers have been plowing with their horses for centuries without observing any of those negativities that are observed further west in a lower rainfall environment. So I think there is

There are a number of factors that contribute to that, but plowing shallowly, essentially shallow tillage, much less pressure and weight on the soil from horses, and keeping the soil occupied with living roots as much as possible. There's very few regions where anymore. This used to be a thing a very long time ago. I hardly remember it at all, but

There used to be a time where winter plowing, fall plowing was a thing and leaving soil bare over the winter. That's gone. So now when soil gets tilled, it gets replanted into plants and seeds as quickly as possible. You know, it's fascinating. Some of the healthiest soils with the highest earthworm populations I've ever seen were soils on Amish farms that were being plowed every year to two years. But they constantly have living crops and living plants in them. Wow.

Well, I'm just trying to picture that. So if...

You know, when you go across the country, which you're doing now, and maybe we've got to add a couple transition steps in here, but I want to talk a little bit of how you came to do that because we were just leaving the spot where you could see what was going on all around you. We could see what was going on in your farm and start applying problem solving that this evolved.

And that you were coming to conclusions. Do I get this right? You were coming to conclusions of what would make it better, what would be better than this chemical intensive agriculture and taking steps personally or in your own farm or in your own neighborhood that that in fact then led to you could share that with others? Yeah. Yeah.

In the early 2000s, 2002, 2003, and 2004. So we have here in this environment in Northeast Ohio, we're in the snow belt south of Lake Erie, which translates into a cloud belt in the summer. So we have 280 days of cloud cover. Well, it's changed a little bit now, but a decade, two decades ago, it was 280 days of cloud cover a year. We're 10 miles away from a major munitions factory that we call the Ravenna Arsenal that was built there

precisely because of the cloud cover back in the 1970s, and there wasn't a cloud penetrating radar. And being the second cloudiest spot in the continental U.S. after Seattle. So that also translates into a very high humidity environment. And on a vegetable farm, that translates to a lot of disease pressure. Yeah. We're putting on fungicide applications every five to seven days consistently throughout the summer months on a number of different vegetable crops.

In the early 2000s, we had three consecutive years where we had heavy crop losses that the fungicides just did not seem to touch. And the third year of that three-year period, we started renting a field that was also being managed by an Amish dairy farm. And this field bordered right up against one of the fields that we'd been farming for the prior decade. These were two very long, narrow strips of land that were being tilled and planted up and down the slope.

which was not a great idea, but they were being managed in that direction because of how narrow they were. But now that we were farming both fields, we switched the road direction 90 degrees and planted across the former field border. So this new soil had been in a dairy farm, which meant a four-year rotation of corn, small grains, nurse crop, going into two years of hay, and then back to corn. And...

We had this field of cantaloupe that crossed that former field border. And on the old soil that had the prior decade of pesticide exposure, we had 80% of the leaves infected with powdery mildew when we started harvest on the cantaloupe crop. And on the new soil, you couldn't find any powdery mildew. It wasn't 5% or 10%. It was zero. And there was this clear boundary line right down where the former field border had been.

And it was so pronounced that there were healthy vines growing right in among the unhealthy vines. So this was the same cultivar, planted the same day. Management was identical, except for the soil history. And that experience really caught our attention, as you can imagine. And I spent the next several years studying and trying to understand what are the differences between those two plants? What allows one plant to be resistant to powdery mildew when the next plant right beside it is susceptible?

And that then eventually led to what we discovered about microbiome management and nutrition management and enhancing plant immune systems, then led to the founding of Advancing Ecoagriculture a couple of years later. And flash forward to today, we've got an incredible team of agronomists. So we work with all types of fruit and nut and vegetable and broadacre grain crops and forage crops all across North America.

You know, what you just described, you got me kind of, I'm still thinking back on almost picturing it because when you see that you're trying to think this thing through and you see a different approach.

I mean, I can almost envision you like, I don't know, sitting on a log looking out at the field. I mean, this is one of those things that's almost like meditation. It seems like, you know, you can look at it and you can add up the numbers and so forth. But doing that much thinking and that whole process intrigues me because you do have to be able to have

good eyes to be able to, you know, see what's really going on and thinking of these different options. Now, do you typically, did you accomplish that

by getting some other people and say, let's brainstorm and get a whiteboard out or something like that and start making a list? Or is your way of doing it just kind of walking the field and kind of reflecting on it and sleeping on it a few days and then starting a list? I'm curious about that process. You're asking about the learning process or just the awareness? I'm asking about the...

recognizing, well, first of all, it's not that hard to recognize you've got a problem and that there must be a better way to do it. But then how you get to the stage of getting the ideas and getting the ideas converted into something actionable that you could do yourself and then you could take it out to other farmers too. Is there a stage of that that in the early days you were just kind of going solo, just kind of

you know, scratching your head and, and, and well through these, these approaches or brainstorming with other people. When I, when I first started down this pathway, I had no intention of ever starting a consulting company or I had never imagined being in the place that we're in today. Um, I was simply looking for solutions for our farm as, as the initial starting point. And then, um, my pathway for that is, um,

And I'd always had this very close connection to plants, just being in tune with what was happening and just having this intuitive sense for things that were working and that were not working, where we could put on a fertigation application or a spray application. And in a matter of hours or days, I would have this sense that this was not the right fit. This is not what was needed right now.

And so when I first started, when we had this experience in 2004, I had a fairly high level of frustration because at this point, I was responsible for doing all of our irrigation and spray management. So that included all pesticide and fertilizer applications and so forth. And at the conclusion of that growing season, I started asking lots of questions and reading books. And I had...

I had several things in my favor. One is I grew up several miles away from the library that I discovered years ago has the highest per person book lending rate of any library in the nation. And that's in part due to the presence of the Amish community and the Amish community not having television and radio and everything else, I'm guessing. But that local library had...

remarkable and still has has remarkable service so i was able to ask for book titles and this process went on for years they would get books for me through interlibrary loan from anywhere in the world i still remember my very first experience i didn't think it would be possible i asked them for a book on biophotonics by fritz albert pop and it took about three months but i got that book through interlibrary loan from germany and i was like whoa this is possible i

Um, so I had, I certainly had that, um, exceptional resource available and, uh, I had succeeded in, in, um, making connections, uh, through phone calls, just calling people and asking questions, trying to understand what was happening with our cantaloupe crop. I'd succeeded in establishing a group of mentors that really guided my reading and studying and learning that winter.

And then the next summer, I would go through this process every Tuesday morning after we had shipped for the day. I would walk through the fields and take very detailed scouting notes. And then I would spend several hours on the phone with my group of mentors. It was about four or five people. And I would call each one of them every Tuesday.

and asked them a very similar set of questions, share my observations, what was happening, what was going on, and ask them for their perspective. So these were people from within the USDA, within academia, who didn't typically have a significant presence in the field of agriculture from an agronomy perspective. They were plant pathologists and plant physiologists and microbiologists. And it was fascinating that

There would be degrees of overlap in their answers, but they all had their own unique perspective formed by their experiences and knowledge and training. And I would come away with a very comprehensive picture of what was happening and what was going on. And so then there was further study and further reading and preparation, making changes in the field and preparations for a week later. So talk about accelerated learning. It was a flat out sprint for about three years. Wow. Wow.

I was going to go back and ask you for the name of your library. It's the Middlefield Branch at the Jaga County Public Library. You know what? I think I could probably get a library card. You know, I'm doing that. Have you used Hulu or Libby to...

You can get audios. Yeah. And I've been using audios. And you can check them out. But some libraries run out of things. And it sounds like yours would be a good library to be able to tap. And I could get a library card there. And then I could download audios. Because as a podcaster, I don't know if you've noticed, you probably get these too of people that are publishers that want to send somebody that's written a book and be a guest.

And I've often been offered PDFs, which I could scan it before, but I've just tested with taking a PDF and converting it to a Word document and having an audio produced of it that I could listen to the show. Yeah, technology is certainly involved in a lot of amazing ways. I don't...

Listening doesn't fit into my life, largely because I'm so pressed with so many things I want to get done in life, and I can read about five times faster than I can listen. I'm the opposite. I prefer reading for that reason, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But that's an interesting, interesting process. Now—

And I think the other thing that I'm thinking of as you're talking about this is you're back at that stage where you were saying the Amish community would want to follow what science is recommending. When the extension agents came out and you had Roundup ready this and that and all these other products, you know, go for it and believe that was the solution. But you've had to kind of pull back and it sounds like, say, well, some of these are good, some of these aren't good, some combinations aren't.

Anyway, you have to, it seems to me what you're describing, John, is that you almost have to look at each farm individually.

little bit with fresh eyes. I mean, you could, your advisors, yourself, your guidance and, and so forth, um, reminds me almost, it's almost like a homeopathic approach. It's kind of like you're trying to get in the, the, the broad environment to size up what's needed here. And that what's needed in this farm might not be exactly what's needed in the one right next door to it for different reasons, including its history. Yeah.

Well, your analogy of a fresh perspective is very appropriate. It's spot on, Roger. You know, when you start looking at some of the things that we do in agriculture, we do some things that, from the benefit of a fresh perspective, appear quite idiotic. And I'll use a medical analogy to make this, perhaps to give us a non-biased perspective.

When we go to a doctor, a conventional doctor with mainstream training with a certain ailment, a large percentage of the time we'll walk out of the doctor's office with a prescription for a certain drug. In many cases, a few weeks or months go by and we end up with side effects or further complications. We go back, we end up with a second drug.

And then a third and a fourth and a fifth. And as time goes by, and eventually people end up taking a drug cocktail when in a large number of cases, they might be better off arguably without any of them. But throughout that process, at every stage, the doctor never intended harm. They always had an authentic desire to improve the outcomes for the patient. So there was never any malicious intent or intention.

any harmful intent. But yet we ended up in a space where we might be wiser off doing a reassessment of why exactly are we doing this? Why are we taking this handful of pills after all? And there's something similar has happened in agriculture over a longer timeline in many cases. So there's a couple of examples that I talk about in this scenario. One of them is cotton production.

We started working with cotton half a dozen years ago. And at that point, I could have stumbled over a cotton plant without knowing what it was. Never seen a cotton plant. We'd never worked on cotton before. And yet we had a lot of experience with plant physiology, with nutrition management. So we started working on cotton. And in the first year out of the gate, we get like a 50 to 60% yield response on a number of different fields of different farms that we were working on. How do you do that? Well, it wasn't...

It wasn't that we had anything that was so particularly magical. It was the benefit of a fresh perspective. And the benefit of the fresh perspective revealed that the cotton crop actually required somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 units of nitrogen per acre. There's some variation dependent on soil content, context. And, but the industry standard was somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 to 150. And then to control vegetative growth,

there was a need for constant PGR applications and PIX applications to keep the node spacing tight and to keep the plants from just growing too tall and too leggy. And so a PIX application, every time you put on a plant,

an application of that PGR, you really limit and shut down photosynthesis. You can reduce, you reduce photosynthesis by 90 plus percent for about three days. And then it gradually starts recovering and five to seven days later, it's largely recovered. At which point, in many cases, many cotton growers are reapplying PICs.

So it was common to put on 10 to 12 applications of PGRs over the course of a season. And you come in and you look at that from a fresh perspective and you say, hang on a second. You're driving with one foot on the accelerator all the way to the floor with your nitrogen applications, and you've got the other foot on the brake all the way to the floor. This makes no sense. And so that was...

Now, I'm sure that that situation, that didn't come about all at once. It came about gradually over a period of years. Gradually, nitrogen applications were increased for, I'm sure, what were very good reasons. And gradually, PGR applications were increased until we ended up at a point that doesn't make logical sense anymore. There was a similar situation when we started working with apples in Washington and working with some growers and some varieties who have major problems with fruit drop.

And struggling with trying to understand why a large percentage of the fruit are dropping just weeks before harvest. Well, it turns out a couple of decades prior, some of these varieties had major or had challenges with fruit coloring. And so to color fruit, they would put on applications of ABA, abscisic acid. And then that helped solve the fruit coloring problem.

And I would just make a note in passing that fruit coloring is a reflection of nutrition management, that you can actually color fruit very rapidly based on how you manage nutrition. So it was a nutritional, the lack of coloring was a nutritional imbalance problem that they addressed with a plant hormone application instead of addressing it at its root cause. And then a few more years go by.

And they start having storage problems on some of these varieties, large, weak cell membrane cells. And so the solution they developed was to do water restrictions and water deprivation the last three to four weeks before harvest. Well, as it turns out, when you do water deprivation, that stress response upregulates dramatically the plant's inherent synthesis of abscisic acid.

So now we have a combination where we're putting on an application of abscisic acid, plus we're drought stressing the tree, and then we can't figure out why it's dropping 30% of the fruit. That's exactly what we're signaling it to do. So there's just this benefit. Sometimes, you know, it's easier to see others than it is to see ourselves. We get so deeply enmeshed in what the standard protocol is and the standard practices and everyone else is doing it that...

we fail to take a fresh look at why are we having the problem that we're having? What's the source cause of that problem and really understanding it?

Some of that seems like just applying common sense, but it is really uncommon sense. You know, it seems it should be common sense to ask these basic questions and say, well, wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense at all. But I don't know if we just allow enough time to reflect or to challenge the conventional wisdom to add this stage to

Although in your case, I mean, people could work with your advisors or, you know, somebody get the help of people that maybe are helping them think that way and raise these questions. Well, one of the challenges in this space, we have an amazing team of agronomists and consultants at AEA that I'm

so much enjoy working with every day and just the challenges that we encounter and the thinking that comes out of that and how we resolve those. You know, agriculture is so multidimensional that in order to understand it in the depth that we need to as our science and technology has developed, we have increasing training and education in specialty domains. And we have largely become

a generation of specialists with very few generalists. And in many cases, the solution to these challenges is multidimensional. It requires some understanding of plant physiology and botany and plant pathology and microbiology. And just there's so many intermingled specialty domain areas that it is really, I believe, the future of

of an exceptional agriculture from an agronomic management perspective will belong to the generalists rather than to the specialists. Specialists are also very important. We need that deep domain knowledge. We need deep research and study. But it is the generalists that usually excel in practical application. I also thought that it was always important to not be afraid of asking the stupid question.

Uh, because you, you could get a gathering together of farmers or yourself and you're in a room and you think, oh man, I wish I could just bring this up because something's not ringing true. Most people think that I don't want to look like a fool. I'm not going to say something silly unless I know that it's come up and, uh,

One of the things I've learned over the years, and listeners to the podcast won't be surprised at this, is that I'm not afraid of asking stupid questions. Probably had a couple of them already, John, in talking to you this morning. But, you know, it ends up stumbling across things come out if you're able to speak up and ask the question and aren't afraid of appearing to be stupid at the time. And other people will afterwards say, gee, I'm glad you said that. Yeah, that's so important. Yeah.

It's so important. All of us need to do that and to just to ask more questions. You know, I'm reminded of a story that Greg Pennyroyal shared from Wilson Creek Winery there in California, who's become a close friend and someone we work with. And Greg was asked to chair a board, a scientific research board with a dozen PhDs on it. And he's a farmer. He's not a PhD, doesn't have a PhD. And

And he expressed his reservations and his concern, like, why are you asking me to be in this position? And he had already participated in the board for some time up to that point. And one of his colleagues said, you know, Greg, you're constantly asking all these questions. And nine out of 10 questions, the rest of us around the table look at each other and roll our eyes and like, yeah, Greg is the farmer. It's like he doesn't know what he doesn't know.

But it's that 10th question, Greg. It's that 10th question that's like, we never thought of asking that question in that particular way because Greg is a generalist and he looks at things from a very multidimensional perspective. And so it's a gift that all of us have. And you're absolutely right. We need to, I've, you know, I really enjoy hosting the podcast and because of the amazing stories that people have. And I've come to realize that

That asking good questions is a superpower. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, and I would phrase it slightly different in my own case. It's, it's, um,

Being curious in the first place. I mean, that precedes asking the question. It's like you got to care about knowing that something could be different and be curious. Is there another way to do this? Is there some other reason that this is coming on? You know, a sidebar, my own experience was right after college and I had a degree more in communications than anything else. But I got this job when I was like 23 years old. And I

all of a sudden they said, why don't you help set up sheep for profit symposia all across the country, working with all the land grant universities and have symposia. I didn't know anything about it. And a couple of people from the federal extension service in Washington, Dixon Hubbard and Jim Hall said, they were just going to take you under our wing. And they taught me a lot of that. And so I was always hosting these conversations and,

with PhDs. And again, I was a 23-year-old kid. I didn't know anything, but I was just curious. But I appreciated that some people would give you a pat on the back and encourage you instead of some people say, you know, keep your mouth shut until you know what you're talking about. Other people would say, if you get curious, speak up, bring those questions forward and

That's kind of a diversion, I suppose. But these processes intrigue me, where good ideas come out and apply good ideas. And you're using these kind of approaches. Well, I've come to the conclusion or the realization that everyone knows something that I would benefit from knowing. And I enjoy trying to figure out what that is. What do they know that I would like to know?

You know, one of the things that I think this is a good transition to is towards what end? You also have outlined, and it's on your website, kind of principles and beliefs. So it's at the end of the road, when we go all of this, all these solving problems, all coming up with new approaches, all taking fresh eyes and so forth, there is a bottom line beyond a successful business. And I wonder if you could...

kind of go through those because you identify, I think it was five steps or five different areas of beliefs and, um, being able to pin that on a wall as you're going through this whole process of working with people and hiring teams and training and solving problems and so forth. Can you touch on that a little bit or what are these, what are these points that you feel like, or why do we do all of these things?

Yeah, I realized, you know, all of us enjoy working with people who share our values, who care about the things that we care about, and who believe the things that we believe. And in thinking about what those things are, I realized that my perspective on how soil and plant ecosystems actually work is

had done an almost complete 180 in some critical regards from what I had been learning previously about kind of the contemporary model of agriculture and agronomy. And so there was one of the foundational pieces was this perspective that

plants or that insects and diseases tend to show up at random and not entirely at random. We kind of, all of us as farm managers, to some degree, we recognize that the weakest areas of a field usually succumb first, that there's often a spot or a zone that where diseases or insects show up first and that pattern is often the same year after year, depending on what it is we're talking about.

And yet we think that there is this pattern is insects and diseases just occur for no particularly good reason. They just occur at random. And even in spite of the conversation around the disease triangle, there's still this perception that from a macro perspective, a 30,000 foot view,

that these things show up in a certain system based on wind patterns or rainfall or humidity, whatever, environmental factors. And one of the ways that my thinking changed and that has really influenced one of our core principles as a company is the perspective that diseases and insects, excuse me, that plants have the capacity to be completely resistant to all diseases and insects. And this is essentially a rethinking of

A redefining of the one aspect of the disease triangle, the disease triangle is a conducive environment, a potential pathogen, and a susceptible host. And it's commonly considered that a plant being present of a certain type that's susceptible to that insect is by definition, is by default, a susceptible host. But I've developed a very different perspective to say that actually.

a plant is not inherently susceptible to all diseases, to insects, just whatever may happen to show up in the environment, that you can change a plant's susceptibility significantly based on its microbiome, based on its nutrition management, based on its immune status. Just the same way as we know for people, we all have our own immune systems, but they don't all function equally well. Some become ill very readily, others not so much. And the same holds true for plants. So,

This foundational concept of managing nutrition for pest susceptibility and managing the microbiome for pest susceptibility has, when you start thinking about it from that perspective, it gets you, it's kind of a foundational principle.

From a first principles thinking point of view, you realize that, all right, if plants have the capacity to be resistant to disease and insects, how do I need to manage nutrition and how do I need to manage the microbiome to achieve that outcome? And it's the process of answering that question that you arrive at a place of nutrition management and microbiome management that not only gives you disease and insect resistance,

but almost invariably increases yields as well. And this has been this fascinating realization for us. When you have really healthy plants, you can't stop yields from increasing. It's kind of a, it's a secondary outcome that turns out to be very important. You're making me think back to something you said maybe 10, 15 minutes ago, perhaps, talking about medicine's approach and doctors that have good intention that said, prescribe this and let's add this and let's add this.

And they're all trying to help you get well, but they're not able to quite pull it back. And as you were talking and I was thinking about that dimension, that role, it made me think that it's kind of like the trend with concierge medicine in a way instead of in an ideal situation. It'd be nice to have doctors working with you looking at a whole combination of different things and being able to be creative and like you were saying earlier, take some things out of the mix too.

But again, it's so intriguing that that approach. And I think maybe we should pause here and get back into what's like your company currently. So you have, in addition to consulting that you can work with farms and farmers, do you have products that you can actually provide or have produced or manufactured and distributed as well?

Yeah. So the history of the company is we started as a consulting company in 2006. And the product landscape was very different in 2006 from what it was today, from what it is today. And I became quite frustrated with, and when you start considering plant immunology and resistance to various types of diseases and insects, some of the trace minerals and trace mineral nutrition becomes very important. It becomes important to start paying attention to selenium and molybdenum and cobalt.

and things that are just today starting to enter into the conversation for many people. But in that era, we were making recommendations for cobalt or molybdenum applications, and the applications wouldn't get done because farmers had a difficult time sourcing the products. And

That generated a degree of frustration to the point where we started testing products in 2009, 10, if I recall correctly. We first started releasing products into the marketplace in a significant way in 2011 and 2012.

And so where we are today as a company, we kind of have these specialty plant nutritional and microbiome support products. So not your traditional NPK fertilizer. It's a very different landscape today. There are a lot of great products on the landscape. So we focus on providing products that really move the needle for plant health and for plant performance and marketable yield very quickly.

And that actually came about, well, I want to come back to this point. I want to talk a bit about, we had a major product shakeup in 2013 that I want to talk about a little bit because it has a lot of relevance for many people. So, but flash forward to today, we offer independent consulting. So we do a lot of consulting for a number of larger scale operations, right?

That is independent of products. Then we also offer products. And many of the growers that we work with use some combination of consulting and products in Blend. And people can also just buy the products on their own. So we do all of those things. And we've also made significant investments in technology to facilitate this. So we've made some investments in infield sensors to facilitate

to be able to measure plant nutritional profiles in real time. That's a year or two away from being released in the marketplace and it's been a couple years in development at this point. We've made investments in microbiome DNA sequencing lab where we can measure the microbiome anywhere in a plant or in the soil. So we've made a number of technology investments to facilitate this more multidimensional perspective of agriculture.

But I want to go back, if I may, to just talk about our products for a bit. 2011, throughout 2000, up to that point, we primarily had been using tissue analysis as our report card of how well our plants were doing at absorbing nutrients from the soil. And I became very frustrated with tissue analysis because according to the literature that I was reading,

The peer-reviewed papers that I was reading were suggesting that there are correlations to certain nutritional profiles and disease susceptibility, that if plants have adequate levels of these nutrients, then these diseases should be less of a problem. And we could not see that correlation with our tissue analysis reports. And so one of my colleagues suggested I take a look at an emerging technology that was coming out of the Netherlands called plant sap analysis. We started testing plant sap analysis in 2011.

And so this is an analysis where we collect leaves from the field, two different locations on the plant, sometimes three, send them to a laboratory. The laboratory, rather than ashing them and dehydrating them, instead pulls out or presses out the sap in some way and measures the mineral content of the sap itself. And so we experimented with this technology for several years, 2011, 12, 13, and we

I became very excited by the implications because it corresponded to what was happening in the field so accurately that with a bit of experience looking at the analysis, we were actually able to predict disease or insect susceptibility into the future, several weeks into the future, based on what plant nutritional profiles look like. So this was an incredibly powerful tool because it gave us the capacity to manage nutrition much more accurately than we'd been able to up to that point.

But it was also a very revealing tool in that it revealed a number of products that we, of our own products that we had designed, as well as competitors' products in the marketplace, were not delivering results. They deliver results according to a tissue analysis, but not according to a SAP analysis. And so it was quite revealing that

to realize that we're putting on an application of a manganese chelate, and the tissue analysis results increase, but the sap analysis doesn't, and that's a reflection of the manganese still being on the leaf surface rather than actually being inside the leaf. And so we had a major product lineup overhaul in 2013, 2014, and that resulted, today, our products are going into international markets,

And it's fascinating. Growers in international markets start using plant sap analysis and they think they are using good products. They're using chelated products.

And they start using sap analysis only to discover that the products they're using are not moving the needle. There's not actual plant absorption. And on one hand, that's rather disheartening. On the other hand, it's extremely empowering because now you can make changes. And what many growers are realizing is you make changes to products that are more effective, of which we've got a lot of experience in creating that. But we're certainly by no means the only product company that has great products out there.

When you get the right products and the needle moves, plant performance changes dramatically. It's been one of the things that I've been fascinated by is that when you have a well-formulated product, it takes ounces per acre, even calcium. We've got growers on, let's say on apples, for example, who are applying multiple forms of calcium, calcium acetate, calcium chloride.

Not calcium nitrate, but calcium carbonate, a broad chelated calcium, EDTA chelated calcium, calcium in a half a dozen different formulations and not see significant responses. You put on a good form of calcium at an application rate that seems trivially small and you get this tremendous plant response. It's remarkable to watch. Wow.

With some of these developments, too, how are you looking under the soil? I mean, can you determine whether the microbiome is healthy, getting healthier, you know, in a bad mood, going to go on a sit-and-break or something? That technology is still very early days, Roger. When you look at what various companies have been doing, Trace Genomics and B Corp with their biomakers analysis,

And with the very early stage of work that we've been doing with DNA sequencing, there's a variety of different reports out there now that are looking at the soil microbiome. And the reality is very crudely, very broadly, yes, we can tell whether things are in a disease suppressive state or disease enhancing state. We can have kind of a general relative overall perception of the state of soil health.

But there is still so much nuance that needs to be learned. We are in the early days of beginning to understand the microbiome and microbial interactions. And that's really exciting. Yeah, actually.

Well, and you're going to keep thinking of other good ideas. And I think so people can keep track of the ideas that you're coming up with and the products that you have and so forth. Let's remind people how they can find you, how they can get more information on your organization too. Yeah, you can find us on our website, advancingecoag.com. I have a personal blog at johnkemph.com and I host the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, which is...

I think my team tells me that we're constantly bouncing around the number one spot in the earth sciences category on Apple podcasts in the U S. So we have got, I've got some really great guests there that I really enjoy. Have some fun conversations. Yeah, that's great. Well, I've listened to him. I listened to caught up a little bit this morning as well. And, and you do have some, some great conversations. John, you always make me think, and I find it. That's better than the alternative. Yeah. Well, let's just be on automatic. Yeah.

And so one more thing as we wrap up, I'd like to ask you what you're thinking about now. I mean, when you look down the road, it's been quite a journey. You've gone back and talked about what's happened over those last 20 years and the approaches that you're taking and so forth. But what's the frontier ahead look like for you? What gives you some encouragement, curiosity, even optimism? Combine all these things.

and look at the stage in front of you right now that you think, boy, I can't hardly wait to get into this. Well, I could talk about some things that appear to be less than optimistic from a macroeconomic perspective here in North America, but I'm going to leave that whole conversation for a moment. I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to focus on things that you asked me about around optimism. So we just got done talking about the microbiome. Yeah. Imagine

We know there are tens of thousands of different microbes in the soil, hundreds of thousands. And we have some general very crude information

of what a tiny percentage of them might be doing. We call them PGPRs, and we think they have the capacity, in the case of some groups of organisms, for phosphorus solubilization and for nitrogen fixing, and we get really excited about those things. But the reality is, the majority of it is still a black box for us. But now, we are now, we're only getting, we're now standing on the threshold of being able to measure the...

the soil microbiome DNA, the genetic profile that is present, how active those genes are. And I expect that in the near future, imagine having a data set that indicates that we have all these various fields of a certain crop type, and some of these fields have very good phosphorus absorption.

And you start unleashing machine learning on this data, and you realize that, oh, all of these fields that have very good phosphorus absorption have this consortia or this group of 50 or 100 different microbes that are associated with good phosphorus absorption. And it has been a, it's very seductive to think of biological and living systems as

in the framework of a single cause or single solution for a single problem that, oh, we have this disease, we're going to put on this particular microbe. But the reality is natural systems don't work that way. There are all these multidimensional factors and interactions that take place. And I expect what we will find is we will find, we will discover and we will develop a fresh appreciation for the role of communities, that we have microbial communities that produce certain outcomes.

And from my perspective, I believe the frontier that we stand on, what is really exciting, agriculture for the last century, or I should say agronomy, agronomy for the last century has largely been defined in terms of chemistry management, managing soil chemistry and irrigation water chemistry and plant chemistry. For the very good reason that chemistry has been the one thing that we've been able to measure relatively well up to this point.

But we now stand on the threshold of being able to measure the microbiome in ways that we've been able to measure the chemistry historically. So I think the future of agronomy will be about measuring and managing biology and biophysics rather than chemistry. Wow, that's interesting. Two words stand out to me.

One is you were talking about communities. And what's interesting to me is you can combine communities just as we're also alluding to what we're going to be contributing from artificial intelligence and large, you know, use. And you didn't mention it as an AI or chat GPT per se, but I was immediately kind of translating in all the ways that we're going to be able to utilize all the information that we're able to gather.

And to combine a term in my own mind, like artificial intelligence, with what we're really trying to understand is communities of microbes and what affects them and how they're oriented and what works best in what situation. It's just a huge amount of information. One of the strengths that we have as a company is that we've developed all of this SAP analysis data already.

this library of data that describes how mineral profiles are associated with relative plant health and what is associated with disease susceptibility or insect susceptibility or achieving marketable yield. So now you combine that with microbiome data. And so we're actually in the process, I think probably by the time this show airs, we will have launched

our own AI that is a combination that is a combination of an algorithmic engine that will can make you can provide it with agronomic data crops soil irrigation water nutritional profiles etc and it will make a set of recommendations and also with a chat GPT like chat bot that is trained on all this information this data set that uh

looks at all of the nutrient interactions and all the microbiome interactions and makes a set of what I refer to as nonlinear recommendations. So linear agronomy, which is largely what we've done for the last century, is to say, oh, if you're low in calcium, you add more calcium.

And nonlinear agronomy is to say, ah, you're low in calcium. Well, yes, maybe you need more calcium, but also you need to address boron. You need to address silicon. You need to address magnesium. And you need these five microbes. And that is going to have a bigger effect than actually adding more calcium. Wow, that is exciting. Everything you've done up to now, up to that point,

You could go to places like the Ohio State University and recruit agronomists or the University of Illinois and Iowa State and Texas A&M and all these good places. But it suggests to me that as you start getting into this building these bigger models and working with algorithms and incorporating the best you can get out of artificial intelligence that you may need to have

different talent in the future or additional talent. Is that right? I mean, recruit people that can do this or is it readily available just by going to companies that are already in the AI area to work with? Well, what makes AI useful, it's the proverbial adage of junk in, junk out. It all depends on the quality of the data that you put in. And so I think there are many ways

We're in a very privileged position right now. There are many companies who would desire to be in our space. What we have that many other people would desire to have is the depth of the data. It doesn't matter. I mean, just as I described all these nonlinear interactions,

you're not going to see the impact that biology and some combination of biology and cobalt and selenium and molybdenum have on nutrient availability if you've never measured those things. So we've been measuring those things consistently over time for the last decade and a half. And when you have that data set...

If you're only measuring certain nutrients, let's say a dozen of the most common nutrients, but you don't have the biology parameters to go with it or the trace minerals to go with it, you have a much shallower data set that isn't able to provide nearly the meaning and the value. No, no.

What a journey. John, this just reminds me we need to do this more often. I don't think he's keeping track, but we started this out talking about hundreds of years ago, the success of Amish farmers in Switzerland and we're ending up on artificial intelligence. And we took a swoop down through the soil with what's going on with these wonderful little communities that we're still trying to figure out what keeps them happy and doing their best work just to keep plants going.

And I'm ready to do it again soon, John. So let's not take too long before we have another conversation. I'd love to make that happen. John, thanks for being on Farm to Table Talk. Thanks for moving food from the farm to the table. Thank you all. You've been listening to Farm to Table Talk with your host, Roger Wasson.