Sarah Burnett of Texas Earth: Part 1 Bringing Depleted Soil to Life

Join me as I sit down with Sarah Burnett from Texas Earth, a company at the forefront of biostimulant production.  Listen as Sarah takes us through her family's journey in this industry, which began when her father, Jim Burnett, accepted a calling to heal the soils of the earth. We will delve into the importance of soil microbes and the roles they play in crop nutrition. 

If you are wondering how natural products can compete with the chemical heavyweights in Big Farma, Sarah's got answers for you. Together we will explore the benefits of more natural farming, how it can improve soil health, and its surprising financial benefits.  Get ready to have your mind blown by the power of nature.

CONNECT WITH GUEST, SARAH BURNETT, HER COMPANY, AND HER PRODUCTS THROUGH THE LINKS BELOW.  PLEASE LET HER KNOW YOU FOUND HER THROUGH OUR PODCAST. 

Disclosure:  End-O-Fite Enterprises LLC collaborates with Texas Earth on research exploring the impacts of soil amendments on plant and soil health. Host Dr Mary Lucero’s husband distributes Texas Earth Products to farmers and gardeners in Eastern New Mexico.

SARAH BURNETT

TEXAS EARTH HOMEPAGE

BIONECTAR

 Watch Rotten on Netflix (not an  affiliate)

NEW AND CLASSIC TEXTS ON SOIL MICROBIOLOGY (UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED, LINKS BELOW GO TO AFFILIATE SITES)

Not Too Technical

The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet

Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web (Revised)

Teaming with Fungi: The Organic Grower's Guide to Mycorrhizae

Let’s Dive Into the Science

Stress Tolerance Through Plant, Mycorrhizal Associations

Soil Microbiology and Sustainable Crop Production

Advances in Soil Microbiology: Recent Trends and Future Prospects: Volume 1: Soil-Microbe Interaction

Microbiological Activity for Soil and Plant Health Management (2021)

Soil Health Classics
The Ideal Soil, V2.0, by Michael Astera (not an  affiliate)
Soil Fertility, Animal Health-With "The Loss of Soil Organic Matter and its Restoration" by William Albrec

The Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems Podcast Introduction by David Lucero.
Theme music by Zakhar Valaha 

This version was updated in summer, 2023, when we decided to remove the cornerstones.endofite.com website reference.  The only change was to remove the word cornerstones from the website reference. 

This podcast is created and produced by End-O-Fite Enterprises LLC.

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Transcript

Mary Lucero: 0:19

Welcome to the Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems, and we have a very special guest here today. I am here with Sarah Burnett from Texas Earth, which is a company based near Lubbock in the town of Texas. Texas Texas Earth produces bio stimulants, which are products that help boost plant production, and we're going to talk today not only about how Farrah and her family got involved in this industry, but also kind of what bio stimulants do, how they help your plants, some of the issues around labeling and marketing and using bio stimulants to get the best result. So, Sarah, welcome and thanks for joining me.

Sarah Burnett: 1:08

It's always a pleasure to chat with you and I you thinking for your podcast today. We're happy to be here.

Mary Lucero: 1:15

You know, I think working with bio stimulants is probably something I get the most questions from people about. But before we dive into all the details, tell us a little bit about your company, how it got started and kind of what the inspiration behind Texas Earth was.

Sarah Burnett: 1:37

Yeah, absolutely so. My dad, Jim Burnett, started Texas Earth in about 2001, that he called it sustainable ag technologies at that point, and then in 2004 he incorporated under the name Texas Earth. And he was just a lifelong learner, so had started out in the ruminant nutrition industry and inherently understood the need for good tattle speed and what that did for the ruminant of the animal and ultimately the people consuming the meat, and so he kind of that was the basis for what he was interested in. Along about 2000 or so he came into contact with a common friend of ours, od Mays, of all people, and you can tell that story if you want to because it's a good one, but he was Bial flora right, and so Bial flora was one of the first products in the market that really kind of tried to capture the natural aspects of fertilizer in a very chemical and commercial world.

Sarah Burnett: 2:47

At that time my dad was doing seed sales in for Ranger seed company, so they were exploring seed coat and you know it was kind of some different ways to enhance their business. So after my dad's interaction with OD man, the fire was lit, you know, and it wasn't like a little campfire, it was a forest fire, for what he became so passionate about, which was soil health. So in 2004 he started the journey of Texas Earth and Brownfield, texas, and just dug in and started making what we call bio nectar, which is still our flagship product, and it is a liquid compost tea, a soil amendment that has been just a workhorse and the backbone of our entire company. My dad had a dream. God came to him in a dream and basically said I'm going to give you the tools to heal the soils of the earth. And when he woke up from this dream he knew what he needed to do. I think.

Sarah Burnett: 3:51

More specifically, he was like had a plumbing question about how to make it or something, and he was working through something and God provided him that answer, and so our mission is not one of financial gain or of, you know, world domination or anything.

Sarah Burnett: 4:09

It's about serving the Lord and serving our customers and honoring the mission that my dad set out with, which was to heal the soils of the earth through beneficial and natural soil amendments, and so that's still what we strive to do today.

Sarah Burnett: 4:27

In 2016, we moved to our new location, which is on the Idlew highway between Lubbock and Idlew, and my dad had been suffering from a really severe cancer battle with NKT cell lymphoma for 2014-15. And then, actually the day that our building was completed, that we got the keys, my dad passed away, so he did not get to see this second iteration, if you will, of Texas Earth under kind of my purview, but he knew where we were headed and he, up until the very end, was very active and involved and still studying. You know it was really his passion at the very end of his life was focused on carbon and what carbon can do, should do and will do for your soil health when applied correctly. And so I kind of took that piece of the puzzle, read through all of his notes and started my journey in this leadership role exploring carbon, and so he left me a little bit of a roadmap to go off of and in that show, that's kind of how we got here.

Mary Lucero: 5:39

And it's interesting to me that he started out in Ruhman microbiology or Ruhman nutrition, simply because the Kettle Ruhman is very much like a bioreactor it's just a place where all these microbes break down the grass and turn it into food and so I'm sure he had a really good understanding of the importance of microbes and it transferred very easily to soil health once he pointed his sights in that direction.

Sarah Burnett: 6:15

He was very much ahead of his time.

Sarah Burnett: 6:18

His thesis for his master's degree from Texas Tech was in, I believe, 1970, I'm going to say 1979, right in there, and in the paper he wrote about he wrote specifically about microbes and how that was kind of part of the bigger picture you might really haven't been explored, you know, and it was sort of a foreign concept and so he was always a little bit ahead of what kind of the curve was when it came to nutrient dense food and feeding our animals. In a certain way he was very much interested in the mineralization of cattle and how that affected their overall health, which obviously we can take the Ruhman and the idea of mineralization and you and I have had good conversations about this apply it to human health and the quality of food that we're growing and all the things that go along with either appropriate nutrient density or lacking nutrient density and what that can do for the plant or the animal or the human. So studying the Ruhman for him was really like that gateway for exploring soil and where we are today.

Mary Lucero: 7:37

But if you understand the soil you should understand the tenets of human health too, something that always surprises me as I look at where we are today in agriculture and in nutrition, and where we were even a hundred years ago, is that there has always been this little strand in the mix that has focused on microbiology and understood it, and yet, as a whole, we've been very slow to seize these tools and apply them Right. Yeah, people, my gosh, we knew about mycorrhizal fungi in the 1800s, correct? And yet many of our technologies that we use in ag disrupt these processes and make it a little harder.

Sarah Burnett: 8:28

That's a very gentle and a very appropriate way of putting that. Absolutely yeah, it's not a big hill to climb and I always kind of talk to people about it when they call me and they seem overwhelmed with where to start and how to begin and what to do. And I want to always tell people hey, what are your intentions? Are your intentions good, yes or no? Generally they say yes, right. So it's baby steps towards soil health. If you want to go down that path, it's not a hard path to go down. You just need to find somebody that kind of knows what they're doing and has the right stuff and the right intentions. I think everybody probably listening to this podcast understands the intentions of doing something good for your body, for your health, for your soil, for your kids, whatever the case may be. So it does not have to be scary. Obviously you touched on I call big pharma F-A-R-M-A.

Sarah Burnett: 9:21

You know that's the big pharma that stands in the way of people getting good information or not understanding or only believing that chemicals are the solution, and they're absolutely. I mean, we don't. We don't do that here, and if people want to, that's up to them. But like, for instance, we just started a flower farm here at Texas Earth and we're doing cut flowers and vegetables and we are growing those crops it's a specialty crop right. No pesticides, insecticides or herbicides. It's all natural products that we either order in or produce here and it's gone really well. It can be done without using those things. Now, what are the downfall right? Pest predation or infestation, I should say, I suppose, which can be controlled with certain things, or weeds.

Sarah Burnett: 10:15

Weed pressure People will talk about oh, I don't want to do it that way, because the weeds get out of hand. Well, two things they make a hoe and you have to use it, or you balance your soil and then you have less weed pressure, right. But it's not something that happens overnight and people, me included, in the world today really want urgency. You know, I have urgency. I want it now. I want my internet to be faster, I want my coffee to brew faster, I want my weeds to die yesterday and it's just not going to work that way.

Sarah Burnett: 10:49

When we're taking those steps to improve our soil health, it will happen, but it's not an overnight process. So anytime we chat with customers they have to understand that this is a microbial marathon. You know, generally at that three-year mark is where we see tangible changes in their soil and their crop health and their yield and their expenses. For instance, there's two brothers here in Lovett County that after several years of using our product line, specifically Bionecter, they were able to go away from a technically designed cottonseed suppressing certain, you know, diseases and pests or whatever the case may be. I don't want to get too specific, but they were able to go to a brown bag cottonseed because their soil had improved in quality, which allowed them to make more affordable input choices because they didn't have to combat so many things.

Mary Lucero: 11:56

And I know.

Sarah Burnett: 11:56

I'm kind of being broad here, but I think that you get the gist of healthy soil leads to positive impacts for a grower's bottom line.

Mary Lucero: 12:08

But yes, and you know it's funny, I first observed that on a much more scale. I think I was in high school taking a horticulture class and for some reason you know how many of your classes from high school do you really remember. But I remember one day we were in there and the instructor has gone over all the calculations. You needed to learn to figure out how much NP and K nitrogen, phosphorus and PODF you needed on your soil and how to read the fertilizer labels and all this kind of thing.

Sarah Burnett: 12:43

That's awesome. Actually, my dear high school, that would have been helpful.

Mary Lucero: 12:49

And the bell rings as he's finishing up and we're all shuffling out the door and I was a little slower getting out and I heard him mumbling as we be lining for the door and books slamming and whatever. And he says but just remember, four inches of organic matter will do the same thing. Oh yeah, of course I go off to Ag school and I never heard much else about organic matter, I mean right there. But the focus continued to be how to use the chemicals properly and which chemicals to use for what and this kind of thing.

Mary Lucero: 13:27

And we lived in town for much of my career. You know we were kind of little suburban house and the front yard and this and that, and I always kept some kind of a garden. But I often used the standard chemicals and I was very conscious of using them properly and and just felt like I was doing the best thing, of applying the best technology. And I never seemed to get in sync. Of course you have your career demands, your family demands and all these other interruptions between me and my garden and it seemed like in the summer with I'll give the example of squash bugs Plants and Keenie.

Mary Lucero: 14:13

Sure Right, it start growing and pretty soon you'd see some squash bugs. So you'd apply the spray and and they tell you to repeat every two weeks and I mean, if I missed it by two weeks and two days the explosion of squash bugs was just unbelievable. If I was in the middle of a busy week I could come home and find every plant dead. You know just solid squash bugs.

Mary Lucero: 14:40

Anyway, the year after my son was born I thought you know by that time he just loved to be outside all the time, little boy kind of tugging along at you, and I wanted him in the garden with me and I didn't want to be mixing all these chemicals around him. And so, for some reason, that's when I click. Well, why don't you try that four-inch of organic matter stuff? I always started piling leaves on the garden and doing all this and I think about mid-July is when I noticed I hadn't really applied anything and there were a few squash bugs here and there, but I didn't have this explosion where the squash plant turned into one giant squash bug. And of course, in the meantime by that time I had gone back to graduate school and was looking at plant biology from a very different perspective and starting to recognize all the chemical, ecology and the microbial interactions that play into when insects choose to attack different plants and I realized kind of what we've all been talking about.

Mary Lucero: 15:58

It goes back to the health of the plants in the first place and the best defense is taking care of that health, making sure you've got the soil health and the plant nutritional health in line Right.

Sarah Burnett: 16:13

Yeah, bugs are going to attack sick plants for more simple sugars and for an easier buffet, you know. And so, yeah, that's exactly right. That's the reason If there isn't another to. You know, focus on health is because it just makes life easier really in the long run when it comes to suppressing kind of those things that are so annoying about growing your own vegetables and things, sort of those battles. But we've put our garden in, I don't know, at least probably six weeks ago, and we got hail which damns plants, but I haven't seen many squash bugs yet. So, I am sure, thankful for that.

Sarah Burnett: 16:53

But we started with an amended soil, a nice, you know base of a kind of a I'm going to call it the miracle grove. You know the stuff that you can buy but that kind of. We didn't buy it, but it was sort of that mix and look. And then we amended it with some worm castings, some carbon, you know some humates. We amended it obviously with some of our you know, alfalfa and some other products that we have, and bionic or dry, and you know basically microbes, microbial food and low release natural fertilizers, and we blended it all together and we put it in these raised beds and put it in our beds and had good luck so far. So you know, if anybody wants to take away from that, do the work in the beginning and hopefully you'll have the results that you want and maybe not so many of the headaches, right.

Mary Lucero: 17:47

And you mentioned miracle grove, and when I hear the brand name, I think of, I think of the fertilizer, but you're talking about the potting soil, correct?

Sarah Burnett: 17:55

Yeah, the potting blend. Sure, Basically, you know, most folks don't have access to soil that they can just go dig up and use in their garden. They're going to buy something right, and so they might feel like it's amended. But you can go a step further and really focus on inoculation of those microbial colonies and feeding those colonies and not just putting soil on the ground.

Sarah Burnett: 18:21

That didn't you know you didn't go dig up or whatever, and you and I just went through this lately, you know, with trying to find soil for some testing and things, and it's a bit of a chore. So lots of folks are just going to go buy what they can in the store and there's nothing wrong with that. But in our experience we took it a step further and it has paid off to amend it prior to planting and not just applying liquid fertilizers foliar. So it really the soil is where we focus and that's what we continue to do is really focus on beginning with a good quality soil that has what we feel like is important to grow healthy plants.

Mary Lucero: 19:00

We talk often here about the difference between what you can do in a garden and what you can do in a farm.

Mary Lucero: 19:06

You know, the gardener will gladly spend a fortune putting together a vegetable garden and not really keep track of the bottom line, and they can get fantastic results. But when you start doing that commercially, you've got to go a completely different route, simply because we don't pay for our food what we might pay for hobbies. So to make it profitable for the farmer, they've got to watch that bottom line a lot more closely. And of course, so many of our farms are on soils that have been played out Depreter. All right, and some of this goes back to the whole focus that our schools give on the chemical approach.

Mary Lucero: 19:54

But people were very quick to adopt the NP and K approach and I remember one of the oh my gosh, what have we done? Moments that I had when I was working in the sciences was listening to the outcomes of the Great Prairie Metagenome Study, where the Joint Genome Institute and other groups have gone in and analyzed the microbial communities in prairie and farm soils. One of the things that they derived from this information was that when you apply nitrogen fertilizer, many of these microorganisms will literally discard the genetic material that enables them to fix nitrogen. If they don't discard it, they'll turn off those genes and stop using it Right, and so they use their abilities.

Mary Lucero: 20:49

They lose their ability to capture nitrogen from the air around us Remember, the air is 78% nitrogen and they start using the fertilizer instead. But in addition to that, it's really a double whammy because we have another class of microbes in the soil, called denitrifying bacteria, that take that fertilizer and convert it back to the form of nitrogen that we find in the air. So as you apply that fertilizer, yes, some of it is feeding your plants, but another portion of it is decapacitating your soil.

Sarah Burnett: 21:25

Yes, Balance, balance, balance. That's just flashing in my brain and right Las Vegas letters. Balance, balance, balance is the key to success. So you have these transformative microorganisms converting atmospheric nitrogen into plant usable nitrogen, and then you have this need for commercial agriculture to produce large amounts of food on demand in season and all these things. That's like. You know, there's a balance for a lot of people. On de-transitioning from the use of synthetic nitrogen sources 32, 00, 28, 00, whatever your area and starting to introduce to them, what you just described right, that the soil can do it for you if you will feed it and allow it to do so.

Sarah Burnett: 22:16

We've kind of talked about how to just de-transition people or to introduce them or educate them about, hey, this is what is happening in your soil, this is the natural way. It doesn't have to be technical. You know it's a very simple thing in. You know, a 30,000-foot view, right, but people just don't understand for the most part the function of the soil and what it is actually doing. I mean, it is the soil alive, absolutely. But are we educating people about their soil and its duties, jobs and functions?

Mary Lucero: 22:49

And so, besides nitrogen, what are some of the other functions that you recognize in the soil? When they start taking the more natural approach?

Sarah Burnett: 23:01

Well, so you're going to inoculate your soil with certain bacterial and fungal strains.

Sarah Burnett: 23:05

Fungal is something we can talk about, you know as well, but you know in my part of the world we have very low, you know, fungal presence and fungal strains are very important. Again, balance, balance, balance, balance. But for example, you know some of the benefits of microbial populations and cotton might be that the, you know the bacillus family could or would protect and stimulate, say, root growth and overall strength of the plant break, maybe breaking down nutrients to more you know, soluble forms, available forms for plant absorption. They're in this little doing that work. We make no claims but you know you could argue that bacillus are natural antagonists of predatory nematodes, you know. So that's a positive benefit for a lot of people that have heavy pressure. So I'll talk about suppressed soil-borne diseases in, the, say, pseudomonas family or stimulating plant immune defense system that are inherent to the plant and inherent to success.

Sarah Burnett: 24:12

You obviously touched on nitrogen fixation and establishment of root nodules. That to solidify in organic phosphate, bio-remediation. Look at hemp and what it did for Chernobyl. I think it took, you know, a number of years, 10 or 12 years or something, but that's how they remediated a lot of the toxins in the soil by using plants to extract and remove all the toxins. So there's lots of positives To utilizing or harnessing the power of macro organisms in your soil. It works very well if we will allow it to do so.

Mary Lucero: 24:50

It's funny you mentioned using the plants, and it takes me back 25 years, when phytoremediation was a new term. Prior to that, microbes have been widely used in remediation of damaged lands like mine spills, oil spills, chemical spills, this kind of thing, and there was kind of a movement to start adding plants to the formula. And then the sciences. The question came up is the plant really doing the remediation or is it just feeding the soil microbes so that the microbes can remediate the waste? And so there were papers coming out supporting both arguments. Sure, right, like everything in nature. I mean, you've got diversity of plants, diversity of microbes. Some microbes are breaking down the waste, some plants are breaking down the waste and the whole system is working better than the individuals. But I think as our understanding of microbiomes expanded, it became more and more clear that it's really this interplay between the plants and microbes that catalyze the process.

Sarah Burnett: 26:02

They have just different demands, and so the demands of a hemp plant are going to be different than the demands of an alfalfa or corn or a cover crop or a flower or a peanut or whatever the case may be. So utilizing the strengths of those plant demands or the design in conjunction with beneficial microbial strains is really powerful stuff that way. But knowing what your plant needs is part of the battle. I would say maybe not the whole battle, but at least some of it.

Mary Lucero: 26:38

Sarah, I could not agree with you more. So much of what we think of as a problem in agriculture is really a problem of understanding. It's a problem that has arisen because what we've been taught is just a mere subset of what's important for the plants and soil. And when we understand this bigger, more holistic picture, soil health improves and plant productivity accelerates.

Mary Lucero: 27:06

Now, listeners, we're going to end right here for today, and I'm going to break this recording down into a few parts, because Sarah and I actually have a fantastic conversation that goes on to cover some of the behind the scenes details about labeling and packaging that most consumers are completely unaware of. And this is not only important when you're reading the labels on your farm and garden products. It's also important for almost any consumer product you buy, because while a label is really important for providing some level of safety and confidence for the consumer, it doesn't tell the whole story. So please tune in next time. As for this time, please take a look at the show notes to find links to Texas Earth's website and to Sarah Burnett's contact information. I've also included links to several great beginner and advanced texts that deal with soil biology in depth. So if you want to learn more about some of these amazing functions that microbes contribute to the soil. These references will guide you on your journey. Thank you for tuning in today.