Embark on a journey exploring regenerative farmscapes with myself, Kara Kroger, and the insightful Peter Brezny of Psycho Chicken Eco Farm. Together, we traverse the evolution from conventional to regenerative agriculture, uncovering the power of holistic farming practices. We promise a journey of enlightenment; from the role of energy efficiency and biological fertility to the perils of chemical dependencies, this episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone passionate about the future of farming, food, and our planet.
As we chart the course through our discussions, we honor the legacies of visionaries like Charles Walters of Acres USA and Rachel Carson author of Silent Spring, who've sparked a community eager for change. We examine the pivotal moments and conferences that have stitched together a tapestry of knowledge, encouraging soil-centric farming that mirrors the robustness of nature itself. The heartrending tales of bees decimated by insecticides and aquatic devastation serve as a stark reminder of the consequences of our actions, while the success stories of farmers like Jimmy Emmons in Oklahoma illuminate the path toward a regenerative horizon.
Concluding the episode, we celebrate the microscopic marvels beneath our feet – the soil bacteria. These tiny but mighty organisms are the unsung heroes of plant growth and nutrition, shaping the health of our soil and, ultimately, the food on our plates. The conversation surges with passion, emphasizing the importance of consumer choices and the interconnectedness of our well-being with that of the earth. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and above all, equipped with knowledge that transcends the boundaries of conventional agriculture.
Embark on a journey exploring regenerative farmscapes with myself, Kara Kroger, and the insightful Peter Brezny of Psycho Chicken Eco Farm. Together, we traverse the evolution from conventional to regenerative agriculture, uncovering the power of holistic farming practices. We promise a journey of enlightenment; from the role of energy efficiency and biological fertility to the perils of chemical dependencies, this episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone passionate about the future of farming, food, and our planet.
As we chart the course through our discussions, we honor the legacies of visionaries like Charles Walters of Acres USA and Rachel Carson author of Silent Spring, who've sparked a community eager for change. We examine the pivotal moments and conferences that have stitched together a tapestry of knowledge, encouraging soil-centric farming that mirrors the robustness of nature itself. The heartrending tales of bees decimated by insecticides and aquatic devastation serve as a stark reminder of the consequences of our actions, while the success stories of farmers like Jimmy Emmons in Oklahoma illuminate the path toward a regenerative horizon.
Concluding the episode, we celebrate the microscopic marvels beneath our feet – the soil bacteria. These tiny but mighty organisms are the unsung heroes of plant growth and nutrition, shaping the health of our soil and, ultimately, the food on our plates. The conversation surges with passion, emphasizing the importance of consumer choices and the interconnectedness of our well-being with that of the earth. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and above all, equipped with knowledge that transcends the boundaries of conventional agriculture.
Welcome to the Land Food Life Podcast. I'm your host, kara Kroger. In each episode, I'm dedicated to enlightening you with invaluable insights on how we can heal the land, our ecosystems and improve our overall health and well-being. My goal is to raise your awareness about caring for nature as a whole and the life-giving breathing soil beneath your feet, help you understand the origins and medicinal value of your food and embrace the interconnectedness of everything that surrounds you. With 25 years of combined experience, studying and coaching in regenerative agriculture, natural medicine, nutrition, cooking, mindfulness and cultivating abundance, I am thrilled to share the life-changing tools I've learned. By implementing these practices, you'll experience a regulated nervous system, a nourished body, ready to pursue your dreams with energy and vigor, the ability to collaborate with nature and a renewed sense of hope and purpose. I am so grateful to have you here today. If you like what you hear, please rate, review and help me spread this information to as many people as possible. Let's get started.
Speaker 1:Hello, well, we are joined today by Peter Bresny, and Peter and I both currently live in the Appalachian Mountains near Asheville, north Carolina. Peter is a seventh generation Ashevillian. Is that how you say it, peter? Ashevillian.
Speaker 2:Bunkham County, native.
Speaker 1:Bunkham County Native. Okay, there we go, but he is very deeply connected in his blood and bones to the area and has a deep understanding of the land around him. And Peter and I were fortunate enough to get to know each other in 2021 as students of Nicole Masters' Create Program, which was the inaugural 17-week course that focuses on training serious agroecology students to become agroecological land management coaches. So through this program we got to know about 20-plus other students and instructors who are leaders in the regenerative movement globally, and it was certainly a transformative experience for both of us that we will never forget. I think you'll agree with that.
Speaker 2:Without question.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. The bonds we formed in this group of students and the accumulated knowledge of this group is definitely going to serve us long into the future on a personal and professional level. So I'm super excited to have Peter here and continue that work that we are focusing on as agroecological coaches.
Speaker 2:Great to be here.
Speaker 1:Yes, very glad to have you, peter. So Peter and his wife Trina tend the land and are the creators of the Psycho Chicken Eco Farm, which is both a certified Appalachian grown and naturally grown farm. He also has plans with Trina to create a regenerative agriculture education center on a beautiful old house on the farm. Peter is a very smart guy and he holds two undergraduate degrees in environmental science and chemistry and a master's degree in biochemistry. He approaches everything with a very scientific mind, but also taking into consideration many of the other factors that play into being a good agroecologist, which we're going to talk about and he pours over the research before he tries something. But he is also very curious and experimental and is always up to some interesting experiment every time you go out on the farm whether it's mushrooms or biochar, mushroom inoculation, testing which methodology of sterilization is going to be better and produce more mushrooms, and things like that.
Speaker 1:So we are very glad to have Peter here, because he's the perfect person to talk about bringing awareness to the growing paradigm shift of energy efficiency as opposed to economic efficiency, and to biological fertility versus chemical fertility and farming practices. Welcome, peter. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Kara. It's a real pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're going to kick this off. So this is our very first recording of the Land Food Life podcast. It may not be the first episode that comes out, but we are trying new things here today, so thank you for being a good sport and working with me on this.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Let me just throw in there I never really understood Albert Einstein's quote imagination is more important than knowledge. Until we were most of the way through the CREATE program with Nicole Masters and, coming from a scientific reductionist background, things really started to fall into place, learning about holistic management and outcomes-based monitoring. And it's true, if you can't imagine it, we can't get there, it doesn't matter how much data you have to back it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everything begins with a thought. We are thinking universe. Well, at least the humans are manifesting through thought. So that is very, very true. All right, peter. So I'd like to know what the most reductionist thinking you have engaged in and what did it cost you? And to clarify a little bit more. The whole point of this podcast is to help people move from thinking in parts to thinking in holes. When we think in parts, we are often thinking very reductionist. Can you share a little bit more about how you engaged in thinking in parts rather than holes, and what did that cost you or what was the benefit to you? Maybe both.
Speaker 2:I suppose the biggest cost of a reductionist thinking approach came from going through three years of graduate school in a very reductionist mindset. What I studied in graduate school, after I'd finished all my general courses and done my preliminary examinations, was artificial photosynthetic systems. The ones that we worked on mimic the way plants photosynthesize light energy into stored energy, but they're very simplified. We looked at creating very small bubbles, essentially that we would put an indicator die on the inside of, and my job was to create a series of different compounds and look at the kinetics of electron transport from the outside of those bubbles to the inside, trying to find the most effective molecule to shuttle electrons across the membrane, getting charge separation. That's about as reductionist as you can get when you're just looking at one tiny little molecule in a system engineered to create charge separation and store energy.
Speaker 2:But the interesting thing from that I'm going to flip our thinking in parts to thinking in holes on its head a little bit is focusing on the minutiae and looking at very small parts of a whole system really forced me to learn more about that system. I completely agree that it's easy for humans especially to get stuck on one thing and focus on just that one thing and not really recognize the potential external costs or eventualities that we might not recognize right away. Our environment is full of examples for that. Just pollution of water from insecticides, for example, is a really obvious problem. We focused on the bug and didn't pay attention to what spring that bug with a toxin is going to cause to the rest of the environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now we have huge amounts of herbicides and pesticides in our drinking water which we're taking in, and unfortunately, many of those are antimicrobial agents. So we're struggling with a loss of our own microbiome in our gut, which is a huge impact of reductionist thinking, and it's causing a lot of health issues right Anywhere from neurodegenerative disorders, people suffering from Parkinson's disease to, just straight up, can you digest the nutrients that you're trying to take in from the food that you're eating? Is there anything else that you'd like to say about that experience of being a scientist and how it informed your ability to think in holes?
Speaker 2:So it definitely did put me in a reductionist mindset and it took a while for me to. I don't really want to say break free of it, but to recognize that when we focus on a very small part, we may not see the changes in the whole system that are caused by minute manipulations, when we're just looking at one little thing. And the best example for that, I think, in agriculture, is when the fertilizer salesman first came around in the 50s and said try this new ammonium phosphate, just put down a strip in your front lawn and see what happens. He came back two weeks later and this strip where the fertilizer was applied was much taller, much greener, looked healthier. Well, it was obvious Anybody would take that over the struggling grass on either side of it. It was easy. But we didn't know the consequences of that at the time. We didn't know that those chemical salts actually killed a lot of microorganisms in the plants and in the soil which are partners in the natural system. With those plants Now we can make it look better and grow faster and stronger, but as soon as we start doing that, we get on a treadmill. Where it's a requirement, the natural system is no longer in place.
Speaker 2:Chemical dependence Chemical dependence and one of the best analogies that I've heard to describe that is that between a drug dealer and a user. Unfortunately, a lot of farmers today are stuck on this treadmill. We all know how drug dealers work. They need you to become dependent so they can sell you more and more, and the more you use it, the more you need to get the same result.
Speaker 2:The analogy fits perfectly with natural systems and farms, because as you degrade the soil, putting these chemical salts on, you need more and more to get the same effect, and it degrades the soils and the plants' ability to withstand dramatic changes. Sometimes you have a drought, sometimes you have too much rain. Biological systems have evolved for millions of years to be able to handle that. But when we eliminate the biology in the system through chemical toxins like pesticides and herbicides or even fertilizers which most people they think fertilizer, you have to have it, you got to get it in there. It's actually bad for the soil and it kills the interactions that plants have evolved to have with fungi and bacteria to survive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I love to think about that a little bit deeper we have made our plants that we're eating chemical dependent, right, and when they become chemically dependent, one of the things that reduces in them is the phytochemicals that they produce to protect themselves, because they don't have to work as hard to get what they need from the land, and so ultimately they kind of lose their ability to produce phytochemicals. And those phytochemicals are very, very helpful inside of our bodies to prevent disease and illness and do a myriad of functions that we don't even. We've only begun to scratch the surface of what those do, right, but not only that. Those phytochemicals are the chemical messenger that attract good insects or detract the bad insects, right. So we run into then needing, after we've applied fertilizer, needing to apply pesticides.
Speaker 2:That's right. It's just like putting an animal in a cage Wild animal you don't have to do anything for it, it's going to care for itself. But once you put chickens in a coop or cattle in a fenced-in area, you're responsible for making sure they have what they need.
Speaker 1:That brings up a story that I lived on a ranch in Uvalde. The chickens that were on the ranch there were all wild. They roosted at night in the trees on the ranch. They were hardy, hardy, hardy chickens. Ultimately they were being used as a way to control insects more than being used for their eggs or their meat. But we did harvest them and use them for meat eventually. But ultimately they were there to kind of keep the ecosystem around the house Right A little bit pests away from the house. But man, those chickens were hardy, hardy chickens and I was always impressed by their ability to survive. Very few of them were killed by predators.
Speaker 2:Right, this is sort of a good lead-in into Jonathan Lunkrin's talk at this past year's Acres USA conference. It was December 2022. He did a study that compared regenerative farms with conventional farms as far as their productivity and profitability and soil health. Just a few of the statistics that were really pretty mind-blowing to me Number one was the conventional farms that used herbicides in its exercise and fertilizers. It had 10 times the insect problems that the regenerative farms did. That's an astonishing number. You think, oh, if you put insecticides on there, that's going to eliminate the problem. Right, that's what they're supposed to do. Well, these farms had 10 times the insect problems that the regenerative farms did.
Speaker 2:The other real big take home from that was that the regenerative farms were more profitable than the conventional farms, Not necessarily because they produced more than the conventional farms, but because their costs were so much lower. They didn't have to bribe proprietary seed. They didn't have to buy chemical fertilizers. They didn't have to buy chemical control methods for quote unquote protecting their crops from insects. They were significantly more profitable. The soil health was also higher. They had less runoff into regional streams from not applying any chemicals, making the entire ecosystem healthier all the way down into the Gulf of Mexico. Huge advantages by leveraging natural systems to provide the fertility that you need for your farm.
Speaker 1:And to keep the fertility of the land all the way from that farm down to the Gulf of Mexico and into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, because we are having major issues with the deoxygenation of the water that comes along with pesticides and fertilizers going into the water and killing large, vast areas of the ocean Right.
Speaker 2:And we have coral bleaching down there and everything.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And that's the other great thing about biological versus chemical nutrition management for your plants and a biological system. There's actually a communication between the plants, the fungi and the bacteria. When a plant needs something, it sends out signals in its roots and says, hey, ecosystem, I need this. And the ecosystem actually negotiates an exchange between the plant and, many times, the fungus, where the fungus will say, okay, I can get you some phosphorus, say, the plant needs phosphorus, what are you willing to pay for? And the plant says, well, I've got all these sugars and lipids that I know you want, let's trade.
Speaker 2:So then the fungus actually reaches out to a bacteria and says, hey, I need you to mine some phosphorus from it, because bacteria are very skilled at mining minerals, micronutrients that plants need to survive. Bacteria says, sure, which can you give me for it? And it was like, well, this plant is going to give me all these yummy sugars. I'll share that with you. So the bacteria runoff, mine the nutrients that are needed, give it to the fungus, which has an incredible amount of filaments in the soil. One gallon of healthy soil that's full of fungi has 300 miles of microfilaments within the soil connected to that fungi.
Speaker 1:It is the original worldwide web it absolutely is Communication.
Speaker 2:So if you visualize that 300 miles of fungal hyphae in a one gallon volume of soil, what are the chances that they're going to be near a bacteria that happens to be near a mineral that they can mine? It's much higher than if you just have plant roots in there and these fungal hyphae associate directly with the plant roots. The bacteria of mines the phosphorus, gives it to the fungi. The fungi hands it off to the plant. The plant says thanks so much. Here's some yummy sugars that I made from photosynthesis because I'm a primary producer. That's what I do and the whole system supports itself. More importantly, it only provides what's necessary because there's an interaction there. It knows how much the plant needs. It hands that over. The plant gives an exchange back.
Speaker 2:When we apply chemical fertilizer directly, we might think we have a good idea about how much the plant needs, but when we apply it we almost always apply it in excess because more is better, right. What happens is a lot. The vast majority in some cases, depending on the type of fertilizer, doesn't get utilized by the plant. Nitrogen fertilizer will frequently just off-gasses nitrogen dioxide or become mineralized. Phosphorus will stick to the soil and if you have erosion because you till all the time that's going to go straight into the creek and wind up in the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 2:If you're on this side of the Rocky Mountains, it's a big problem and we don't have the ability to deliver exactly what the plant needs in the form that it can use. That was another great thing that came out of one of Jimmy Emmons talks, again at Acres in 2022. It requires a significant amount of water for a plant to convert fertilizers in the conventional forms that we apply them into a plant usable form. So if you're out west, where we've had dramatic droughts over the last 20 years, every little drop of water is precious. To force your plant to use more of the water available to convert fertilizers from the chemical salt form into a functional form that they can use is very costly.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well. I feel like we've gotten a little bit ahead of ourselves because we didn't actually talk about the Acres Conference. So I want to go ahead and take a minute to just expand on what Acres USA is, who it was started by what the audience is like at the Acres Conference because we're sharing great information that comes from these very smart presenters at the conference. But ultimately they come from a long lineage of people who have been promoting agroecology for a very long time. Acres USA was started in the early 70s by a guy named Charles Walters. He was a confirmed maverick. Basically Overall he had grown up on a farm and had then also grown up in the time of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. He came of age during World War II and served in the war, came back, earned a master's degree in economics with the GI Farm Bill and then he finally settled in Kansas City. He never forgot his farm roots and ultimately he realized that farming was being changed, especially after the war and the excess nitrogen and different chemicals that they had on hand. They had to figure out something to do with them. So they created fertilizers and different ag chemicals that were being promoted as a panacea for improving agriculture and increasing yields. And ultimately he realized that this was going to be very costly, right? Because the flood of corporate money pushed into the American farming scene was going to create a new dependence on supercharged fertilizers and powerful new pesticides. And he knew that such little was known about these things that it was probably going to cause some havoc. And so, ultimately, he began producing a magazine called Acres USA. He figured out that there was a lot of other people who were having the same feelings as him.
Speaker 1:This was the same time when Rachel Carson's book came out, called Silent Spring. All of a sudden, there were all of these people that were coming together trying to promote the agroecological way of thinking and get out from under this paradigm shift that was occurring in American agriculture at that time, and he knew that the powers in Big Act were going to be a big force to be reckoned with. He knew he had to fight the good fight on his own terms. Acres USA was his base camp, and while he was struggling to keep it afloat in the early years, eventually it attracted all kinds of fascinating figures, and there was a lot of other mavericks out there who helped him grow the business.
Speaker 1:Over the years they have basically published many, many books that are the foundation of agroecology and anybody who is practicing agroecology has probably bought a book that was published by Acres USA, even if you didn't know it, or you frequent the bookstore at Acres USA, which is books published by all different kinds of people talking about not only agroecology human health, animal health, just systems thinkers. They started the Acres USA Eco-Ad Conference in 1975. This conference has been going on for a very long time and is definitely leading the charge for anybody entering into this world wanting to know more. This is the place that you go. When you walk around, you're constantly being engaged with other like-minded people. It feels like a super safe and awesome place to be because you know you can talk about all the things that people might look at you sideways if you're talking about these things at a conventional agriculture gathering, but here you can speak your mind and people are willing to listen. They're willing to have that discussion and think about bigger picture stuff.
Speaker 2:And the access to really great minds in the agricultural field is incredible. At one moment I was standing there talking to John Count, jimmy Emmons and Rick Clark just having a conversation on the showroom floor, and just about every presenter that was there would stand aside after their presentation or go out in the hallway and were willing to spend a great deal of time just talking to anybody that had additional questions and business cards so you could have direct contact after the conference. It was really it was a great conference.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's like you know, we read these books and we're so inspired by the things that these people are studying, researching, experimenting with, whether they're doing it in an academic environment or whether they're doing it on their farms. It's like these two worlds coming together and colliding. We read these books, we idolize these people and then all of a sudden you wind up at this conference and you're just face to face and you find yourself in the circle of these three people that you just are really looking up to. You have the chance to just ask questions and dig deeper and decide conversations. You know, sometimes just walking up to a circle and just listening, you're going to find some of the most amazing gems of information that you just really can't get anywhere else. Also, the showroom floor right, the showroom floor. There's a lot of different vendors there.
Speaker 1:You get a plethora of ideas of different ways that you can amend your farm, amend your own health, because a big part of the conversation at the Ecoag conference and this is near and dear to me because I am a nutritionist and herbalist and that's how it came to agriculture was realizing that we weren't getting anybody any healthier until we got the soil healthier right. But when you're walking around the showroom floor there, not only are you seeing these amazing companies that are doing consulting or have some type of product that's a natural fertilizer or different things like that, but there's a lot of people who are also promoting health goods. This is important, because food is our medicine. We need to start approaching it from a perspective where the land is a reflection of our internal body as well, and if we take care of the land and we have good, functioning soil, we're going to much more easily have better functioning bodies.
Speaker 1:Right, right, yeah, all right, so let's get in. Peter gave us a bit of a teaser and he talked about Jonathan Lundgren and Jimmy Immembers were two of the people that spoke at the conference in 2022. Let's maybe go a little bit more linearly. Let's talk a little bit about Jonathan Lundgren first, where he actually resides and what he does, and then a little bit about what you learned from him.
Speaker 2:Okay, jonathan Lundgren. He was a PhD researcher and I'm sorry to say I don't remember which university he worked at for the longest time, but he focused on looking at the larger impacts of pesticides and herbicides on the environment and our health and farms, as well as other studies that he's done, and when he started coming up with data that wasn't supportive of the Big Ag folks who sell all of these seemingly important products for larger farms, he started to get more and more pushback from not only corporate entities but the universities themselves, which are in large part funded by Big Ag. That turned him off quite a bit and some of his studies, when published, which showed the devastating consequences of, in particular, using neonicotinoid insecticides. There's an important distinction that maybe we should make about insecticides. Very few of them are specialist insecticides that will only kill one bug. Most insecticides out there are generalists insecticides that any bug that comes in contact with them will be destroyed. Among those types there are systemic insecticides, which are mobile in both the soil and water and are taken up into the plant so that whenever an insect bites anywhere on that plant, they'll be poisoned. Those are different from insecticides that are more designed to adhere to leaves and stick tightly to them. So Neonix are in that first category of systemic insecticides that will transport through soil and water and the vascular tissues of a plant.
Speaker 2:He was beginning to show the devastating consequences of using these insecticides, and a lot of seeds are pretreated with a coating of Neonix, and Metacloprate is the one that he in particular studied. The coating on a single seed is toxic enough to kill 180, some odd thousand bees. Now imagine how many seeds of corn go into an acre just one acre. All of you corn guys will know I don't have that number on top of my head. It's a lot. Multiply that by 180,000 and that's the destructive potential of those insecticides. And of course, because we're not able to meter out these things as precisely on a microscopic elemental level, we put too much on. And since it's mobile in the soil, it transports through the water.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, they're treating the seeds of corn before they go into the ground. Is that what you're saying? That's right. Ultimately, each one of those seeds has enough chemical on it to kill 180,000 bees. One seed, wow, yeah, that's pretty significant.
Speaker 2:And the repercussions of that are vast, because this is a mobile chemical. It's moving through the water, it's getting into the water tables, it's getting into well water, surface water runoff all the way down into the ocean and it's having dramatic impacts, not just on insects but it causes endocrine problems and mammals. It causes deformities, it causes learning disabilities, it causes difficulty in responding and moving quickly. The study that was really revelatory to me because you think, oh, these things are designed only to kill insects, they're not going to be a problem for mammals. That's the story that we've been told, either directly or indirectly by the industry. He did a study that was designed to really figure this out. People were reporting malformed deer. That seemed kind of stupid. They wouldn't run away when you approached them. Some of them had shorter lower jaws, which made it very difficult for them to eat. They were unable to digest certain foods. They had food intolerance. Their reproduction rates were low. They were infertile in a lot of instances.
Speaker 1:Do you know the name of that? Study off the top of your head, Peter.
Speaker 2:I don't, but I'm sure we'll be able to find it and put it in the show notes for this episode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll put it in the show notes, because there's some visuals that are pretty profound. They're striking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I just want to make note, I like to hunt wild game and ultimately, after seeing this, I've always thought of wild game as being healthier because they're eating from the land. Although I'm living in North Carolina right now, I am from Texas and have lived there my whole life and that's where I've done all of the hunting that I've ever done and these deer are feeding on corn there's lots of agliens that they're feeding from and then they're being fed corn in many cases and ultimately, it just made me really think about how much of that I'm getting in the wild game that I'm eating and that's one of the tragedies of looking at parts or reductionist thinking and not looking at the whole.
Speaker 2:We looked at we want to kill this insect, so we designed a chemical that would definitely kill the insect. We didn't look at the repercussions further down the food chain of using that chemical. So what he found in this study? He described it as a very complicated, very expensive study because they actually raised deer from fawns in a controlled environment and fed them a small amount of aminocloprid and studied what happened to these deer. And he saw all of the things that were just being randomly reported by hunters who sort of alerted them to that. They were like what's happening to these deer? They're stupid, they don't run away, they're easy to kill, they have short jaws. What's going on? So he saw all of those things in the deer that he was feeding these small concentrations of aminocloprid to.
Speaker 2:When the study came out he got a lot of pushback saying, oh well, you overdose these deer, they're not getting that much in the wild. So he reached out to wildlife conservation people all around the United States and had them send the spleen of roadkill or deer that were shot by hunters, sent them into the lab. So these were not in his controlled study. They were out in the wild, some of them not even in areas that were heavily ag areas, using conventional methods, and what he found was the concentration of aminocloprid in the spleen of these wild deer was three times the amount that he used in his study. So just that one species wild deer, three times the amount that he used in his study to get the same results. I imagine there are listeners on this podcast who have intolerance of certain foods, allergies. You probably know somebody who's had fertility problems, can't have a family, endocrine problems. We're talking cancer, other things that are really devastating to our health and all the health of the creatures on the planet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is just one of many endocrine disruptors, right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:By no means in isolation, absolutely yeah, we have a lot of endocrine disruptors and we're wondering why people can't get pregnant and have to do all these costly fertility treatments to get pregnant.
Speaker 2:We have dramatic allergies to common foods that we've been able to eat throughout our history and now, all of a sudden, there's a dramatic rise in gluten intolerance and peanut allergies. All of these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right, so we've presented one of the problems here we have. This is a significant problem, and it is unfortunate because this is the status quo. This is what the majority of farmers are using in some way, shape or form. Maybe not all of them, but a good majority are using some type of neonicotinoid. There are other types of insecticides out there as well, but this is a big one, and so let's talk about some solutions. Let's talk about what people can do to make a shift in their farming that could help move us away from the use of neonicotinoids.
Speaker 2:Right. So in the other study oh, I got slightly off track there. So Jonathan Lundgren after the publication of that paper he received so much pushback in and of course, the chemical industries and big ag industries that make a fine living off of selling these chemicals didn't like it one bit. And then his words they destroyed his career by false information and just talking about him frustrated him to the point that he left academia and started Blue Dasher Farm. But that's when he started doing studies comparing regenerative farms with conventional farms, because he realized that, okay, all this hardcore academic science that he's putting out there is great, but it's not getting to the people that need it.
Speaker 2:How many farmers have the time to sit down and read all these reductionist scientific papers about minutia when they have to get the corn in at the right time to get it to go to market?
Speaker 2:So he started approaching farmers and talking to them directly, and one of the things that came out of his research working directly with farmers was that the number one way to destroy your soil and reduce the health of the food that you create it's not pesticides, it's not fertilizers, it's tillage. And that's kind of when you think about oh well, it's obvious, we have to fertilize our crops. It's obvious we have to till the soil. When I started a farm, I had that mindset as well, because that's what everybody said, and it wasn't until I sat back and looked at the results of the soil. And that compression occurs because, as you are going through and tilling up that soil, you're introducing oxygen, and oxygen is heating up the soil and it's causing a loss of that organic matter which is then breaking down the aggregation that creates the porosity in the soil which allows water to move through and air to move through.
Speaker 1:And when you break down those aggregates, what do you get? Compaction.
Speaker 2:Compaction. That's exactly right and that was. Another great presenter at the Acre Conference last year was Dr Chris Nichols, and she was responsible for discovering glumlin, which is a sticky glue substance produced by fungal hyphae or just fungus in general, and that's a critical component in holding your soil together. So when an earthworm passes through it, that little channel that he makes stays open. So when it rains the water has a place to go and that water actually helps the soil breathe, because at soil exhales when you get it go to rain and then as that water dries out, it inhales and you get a natural flow of oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of the lab. And that's a critical component in holding your soil together. And one of the great things about that is that when you get the soil it inhales and you get a natural flow of oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of the soil rather than this crushing disturbance that we cause using mechanical implements in the soil.
Speaker 2:So that was a pretty big take home from Lundgren's talk as well is that in his research, tillage is the number one way to wreck your soil, because when you kill the fungal hyphae, those 300 miles of fungal hyphae in one little gallon volume of soil. They don't have the ability to work with the plants, they're not producing any gloamalin, the bacteria is not there to get the nutrients from the plant through the fungal hyphae network and you break down the micro ecosystem that occurs in your soil. Once that breaks down, there's nothing to hold it together and you get that compaction that prevents water infiltration, breathing in the soil, root penetration, all the good things that we need to happen to produce crops.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I think it's important to state here that no till is a direction that we need to move. In a lot of areas of farming, there is also a lot of different regions of the world, and cover crops can work more easily in some regions than others, and so we're not just saying that this is a blanket go no till straight off the bat and that's all there is.
Speaker 2:I'm so glad you brought that up because that sort of leads us into. Farmers aren't evil. They didn't go out there putting insecticides and fertilizer on their crops because they want to destroy the land and poison the people that eat their food. That was not the goal. We were proceeding with the best information that we had and, in some cases, perhaps misled by salesmen and big ag that wants to make a profit. There are opportunities that we can leverage to our own advantage, and they're not easy. But farmers are clever people. They're some of the smartest people on the planet. You've got to be a plumber, an electrician, a mechanical engineer. You've got to know soil science. You've got to know plant science. You've got to know animal science. Farmers have so many skills and a lot of them don't have a formal education, and that's fine. Some of the smartest people I've ever met inventors, highly profitable farms. They didn't make it out of high school.
Speaker 1:Some people are too smart for school.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right I definitely want to give a shout out to farmers. They're incredible in what they do every day and it's easy to listen to somebody that says hey, I've got a solution that will fix your problem and it doesn't cost that much. And if it fails, well, you've got insurance to take care of it, so why wouldn't you try it? The reason you wouldn't try it is because you're jeopardizing the long-term health of your soil. Also, to your point, when anybody asks me a question about farming, I already know the answer. The answer is it depends, because every farm is different.
Speaker 1:And so many people get so frustrated by that response. But there really is no other response because it's all contextual.
Speaker 2:Everything is contextual. Every farm is different the slope, that aspect, the soil type, what's been on it before. Do you run animals in conjunction with your crops or not? There are so many variables that the only way to answer them is to get down, dig a hole, look at the soil, find out the status that it's in now, experiment, try new things and then dig at the hole in the same area the next year and see if you've improved or not. And that's really, for me, the shift between outcomes-based farming versus practice-based farming.
Speaker 2:A lot of programs say, well, you have to do this, this and this, and you have to implement these practices in order to get funding or in order to get insurance or do these various things. Well, those practices might work on some farms because they fit the model that they were developed on, but every farm is different. So when you look at the outcome as opposed to functioning under a practice, you've changed the paradigm. Some things that work on one farm might destroy the soil on a different farm. So, as long as you're monitoring that soil every year, doing a visual soil assessment and seeing if what you have done on the farm has improved the outcome year upon year, that, to me is the definition of regenerative agriculture.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have spent quite a bit of time doing webinars and some workshops with Alan Williams and he is a partner in Understanding Ag, which is an Ag consulting business that focuses on regenerative agriculture, and he always says regenerative agriculture is principle-based, right. So we're focusing on mostly the six soil health principles. I mean there's other aspects because in regenerative ag, you're not only taking into consideration soil health but you're taking into consideration which is the environmental piece, but you're also taking into consideration the social aspect and the economic aspect. We base regenerative ag on principles that are going to pull people and the environment and the economics that fuel many of those processes together so that they can function in a whole right, absolutely Not be moved into parts. Okay, well, let's go ahead, peter, and talk about one of your other favorite talks at the conference. Why don't you go ahead and share who that?
Speaker 2:was Sure. Another great talk that I went to at the Acres Conference in December 2022 was by Jimmy Emmons. I went to that one with a little bit of hesitation because his scale is so much bigger than mine. Our tiny little farm is a vegetable farm no chickens, even though it's got that funny psycho chicken eco farm name. We chose that name because we wanted people to smile when they heard it and that it does.
Speaker 2:That's right. We wanted to bring some fun and some joy back into our operation by default. That's why we named it the silly name. But yeah, jimmy's operation in Oklahoma is, I think it's around 2000 acres and he integrates livestock with the row crop systems. I think he's focused on corn, soy and other small grains. I'm not sure about that either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not sure either, but they are row crops and he is doing rotations of row crops and integrating cover crops, right.
Speaker 2:But I'm a big fan of cover crops. We cover crop everything we have at our tiny little farm, hearing the stuff that he had to say, it was great to just be in front of somebody who's actually doing it, running a profitable operation without the need of all that excessive chemicals. And I don't think he's a certified organic operation. I could be wrong about that as well, but you can look him up Jimmy Emmons, oklahoma.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's great, and he also integrates livestock into the system, and so that's another piece of the puzzle that he has found to be incredibly beneficial. So, while he has his row crops and plants the cover crops, he then brings the livestock in to eat and graze the cover crops, right.
Speaker 2:Especially on that scale, when you can have a couple of hundred animals and move them around. Not only do they help support the soil life underground, but it gives you sort of an insurance policy, which is something that I can't do on our scale. We've got a total of 17 acres out here and the vast majority of that is wooded, which we don't try and grow on. We're moving into some forest products, but mostly we run a tiny little vegetable operation on just a couple acres in a hoop house. So it was out of scale and I was like, hmm, I'm going to go check this out anyway, and I'm really glad he did, because he's such a great speaker. He's so down to earth and personable, very generous. He just laid it out. What he's doing and being in front of a producer that's successful and profitable, using regenerative systems, for me is just super inspiring. And, like Gabe Brown and even here in North Carolina our own Russell Hettrick, the integration of livestock into their crops gives you that insurance policy which I started to talk about. If you've got a crop failure, you've got a drought and you don't get a corn crop, you can always put the cows out there and they'll come back and take all of that biomass that didn't finish to a marketable product for your farm and they'll turn it into beef and at the same time, they'll increase the biological diversity in the soil. If you do holistic, adaptive manage grazing, you can use their impact to improve the soil. You have multiple rotations, small quarters, and move them through the field. You know far more about that than I do, but it was just really inspiring. And one of the things that he covered was in always keeping a living root in the soil and if you can green plants up top by choosing your cover crop species well for the season that you're going to plant, you create soil organic matter. You build the percentage of carbon in your soil every year, year upon year, and that has dramatic impacts on the productivity of your soil, especially in drop stricken areas. I believe the number in general, for every percent increase in soil organic matter that you have, you have the ability to retain 20,000 more gallons of water per acre, which is massive. That's huge. Yeah, nicole likes to joke.
Speaker 2:She tells a story about a farmer. Somebody asked him how much rain he gets and his reply is all of it. And that's what you want. That's what you want. You might have a severe rain event where you get 8, 10, 12. These days not uncommon to have 20 inches an hour. If your soil can only absorb an inch an hour, what's going to happen to those other 19 inches of rain?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we realize that there's probably not a lot of soils out there that could take in 20 inches in an hour.
Speaker 2:Gabe Brown's camp.
Speaker 1:His camp, his camp.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I love Gabe's story as well. I'll diverge away from the Acres Convert a little bit and just talk about Gabe's book, which, if you haven't read it, I don't care what scale you are. I'm at 17 acres practically two to grow on and I read that book thinking, hmm, how much is this going to apply to me? And it was just so interesting to hear his story of how he learned about regenerative agriculture through observation and through circumstance.
Speaker 2:He didn't go off to be a regenerative farmer or an organic farmer, but he came to farming without any experience, so he wasn't stuck in a paradigm of, oh you have to till, oh you have to fertilize, oh you have to do A, b and C. He went out there and was like, well, I'm going to try these things because that's what people are telling me. But when they failed he was willing to try something else that everybody thought he was crazy to do, and now the diversity of plants on his soil is higher than anything else in the region. He can retain I mean, his soil, can, I believe the last. If I'm remembering it right in his book, he said he could absorb 18 inches an hour of rain.
Speaker 1:It's massive.
Speaker 2:That's astronomical. It's astronomical, I can't absorb that here in the Appalachian Mountains that I'm not in an arid landscape.
Speaker 1:No, and your soil is beautiful, right.
Speaker 2:So stepping back, taking a look at the bigger picture, using your powers and skills of observation and thought and thinking about outcomes and how you can prove this doing the experiment. One other presenter at the conference and I can't remember who it was, but one of the big takeaways was if you're not failing at something at least once or twice a year, you're not trying hard enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, our failures are our biggest teachers.
Speaker 2:You've got to get out there and experiment, because if you're afraid of failure and don't try anything new, well, you're also not going to have the possible advantage of when something works. So as farmers, we have to get out there and try new things and see what happens. Take the risk, do it in an intelligent way. Don't put 1,000 acres into a trial that has never been done before. Put 100. If you only grow on two, like me, I'll put 2,000 square feet into a trial, because that's what I can afford to lose.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is applicable in small farming environments as well as large farming environments. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And that's one of the cool things about farming you can scale it to your context and your situation. Only take the risk that you can afford and maybe that risk will pay off and you'll have 10% more product to sell. Or maybe it'll fail and you won't have that 10% of product at all, but you can take ahead of 10%.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I just want to go back for a second to the adaptive, multi-patic grazing and integrating livestock into these larger cover cropped and row cropped systems. The word adaptive means that you're not following a rotation that is set in stone, so adaptive means that you're observing which we've talked about earlier in the conversation.
Speaker 1:You're observing, you're looking at the grasses, you're looking at the soil moisture, you're looking at the animal performance, probably first and foremost because, as a livestock producer, you're not going to make any move. That's not going to be profitable, unless you're kind of hobby farming and you're using the livestock as a tool to regenerate the land, but you're not as concerned with how much weight they're gaining on a daily basis. But ultimately, as we integrate and do this adaptive grazing, we're moving the livestock through the pasture, we're condensing them into a smaller paddock so that when they're in that field they're trampling with their hooves. Their hooves are clothed and so ultimately, their hooves are digging into the soil and creating little pockets that also grab onto moisture when it rains and hold that there so it can then be infiltrated into the soil. They're breaking up capped soils, which often happens in more arid environment. That capping prevents moisture from going into the soil. As you integrate that livestock, you decrease capping, you're getting a little bit more pugging and aeration that comes into the top of the soil and then, last but not least, you are getting massive amounts of microbes coming in as the dung goes down onto the ground from the ruminant gut. The ruminant gut is just chock full of microbes, and so those microbes are going to literally act as inoculant into the soil.
Speaker 1:So in land areas that your microbiology is degraded or non-existent, you can come in with livestock and use them to re-inoculate the soil and microbes kind of grow out from a specific spot where they start to build. They will then grow out from that spot, and so, by way of making the livestock grays in smaller paddocks, you get more coverage of their urination and dunging, which can then inoculate the microbes into that soil. And there's a lot of moisture in a cow pat that will sit on top of that soil feeding those microbes, because microbes need moisture. Microbes do not do their work without moisture. They senesce, they don't necessarily go away, but they will just shut down. And so ultimately, as that urination and the dung comes onto the pasture, you're going to get profound growth of different microbes, which is what is going to create that interaction between the soil and the plant root and make all those different transactions that Peter was talking about earlier viable. And so this has been a huge loss, because we used to farm with livestock on the regular.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And that is a exception, which it is now Very few people are integrating livestock into their row crop environments and so ultimately, that's an art we've lost, and actually a lot of laws have been put into place that are discouraging livestock to be integrated into row crop systems, especially vegetable farming systems and things like that, and that is one of nature's way of creating fertility in soil, and so ultimately, when a producer makes a decision to reintegrate that livestock and create that symbiosis, they can have big, quick shifts in their soil. And many people have been told oh well, you can only increase soil organic matter 1% in however many years, I don't know what a decade or something like that.
Speaker 1:But these producers that are doing the cover crops, doing the integration of livestock, doing no till, they're watching their soil organic matter rise from 1 to. In Texas we have very low organic matter, right From 1% to 2%, maybe up to 3% to 4% in a three-year time period or a four-year time period, and that is like you mentioned. That can be 160,000 gallons of water.
Speaker 2:Absolutely it's. One of the tragedies of specialization is that we've lost the integrated small farm before. I don't know the specific numbers on this, but before World War II, the vast majority of farms in the US were smaller. They did everything they had an orchard, they grew small grains, they had a vegetable garden, they had a market garden, they had livestock. That was integrated into all of it and all of those things work together to help build the soil rather than depleting it.
Speaker 2:Because we've been focused on economic efficiency as opposed to energetic efficiencies, we've found ways to produce large quantities of food very cheaply, which I'm not saying is necessarily a bad thing but we're not including the external cost of that production. And external cost is a concept that we learned in environmental economics back in my days at UNC, asheville. And external cost is something that the consumer doesn't pay for when they buy a product and the best example I can think of of that is fossil fuels when you fill up your tank you pay $2, $3 a gallon 20 years ago yeah, 20 years ago is much cheaper. But what we don't pay for is the asthma that the pollution caused by the car exhaust gives to the children in the region, or the climate change heating effect that burning those fossil fuels, putting excess carbon dioxide into the air, causes. That's an external cost. It's borne by all of society, everyone on the planet, but we don't pay for it directly.
Speaker 2:By not looking at the energetics or the whole cost of a particular approach, we've sort of shortchanged ourselves, and we can make an incredible amount of food in a concentrated animal feeding operation or CAFO, for example, where we truck in the feed. We put animals in a small area, we force them to eat where they can't run around they don't need a lot of land and then we truck them out Very economically efficient From an energetic standpoint, though it's not because cows have legs but we're not utilizing them. We're forcing them to stay in a small area. We use fossil fuels to bring in the food that they eat, the corn and soybeans. We've used fossil fuels to produce the fursalizers that produce those feed for the cows. We then truck the cows around. They were born in one place, they grow up in another place, they're slaughtered in another place and the result, unfortunately, is we have lower quality food at a reduced price, being able to shift our mindset from, yes, all farms need to be profitable to make a living, but if we can take into account the energetic efficiency of our operations and utilize techniques that don't require large amounts of energy to produce the same amount of food. Ultimately, when you take in a regenerative price, you're going to have at least the same amount of food, if not more, and it will be healthier for not only the people that eat it but for the land that produced it and the environment around it. You don't have the runoff from the chemicals. You don't have the pollution from the fossil fuels. In some cases you're going to be producing far more than you would under a strictly conventional context.
Speaker 2:Russell Hedrick, who is right here in North Carolina, just about an hour drive away from here in Asheville. He just broke not only the United States corn yield record but the global corn yield record using regenerative practices. He still does use some conventional fertilizer, but primarily he's integrating animals. He's using intensive cover cropping. He's crimping that down as he seeds his corn. So one pass with a tractor instead of multiple passes. So he's reducing the amount of fossil fuel he uses. He used to measure it on his forearm, but his corn ears have gotten so big now that he uses his leg to measure how long his corn is Femur corn, femur corn. It's just incredible what this fellow has achieved using regenerative agriculture and natural ecosystem services to produce more higher quality food than can be done with chemical dependence.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That reduction is such a big piece of this. Even if a farmer cannot, due to his context, go into full on elimination of chemicals, it can greatly reduce both fertilizers, insecticides and fossil fuel usage. So that's a big key takeaway here.
Speaker 2:Insects are the garbage collectors of the planet. They're out there to consume unhealthy plants and get them out of the way so other plants can be healthy. They don't have the gut that can consume sugars. If you have healthy soil, your plant is going to have a high concentration of sugars in its sap and insects actually won't go to them. So you say that's fine, peter, but what do I do now? I have an infestation of insects that I have to get rid of. I have to use these chemicals. Well, as it happens, you can actually use your chemical sprayer to go out there and spray five pounds of sugar dissolved in 20 pounds of water per acre, and that will increase the BRICS level of your plants to the point that you're going to eliminate your insect problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you're spraying that on fully early and ultimately, brics is the measure of different sugars in plants and it's a very simple tool that you can buy for about $150. You basically take it out into the field. You take some garlic press or there's some five scripts that are adapted specifically to pull plant sap out, and you use one of those. You pour some of the plant sap onto the plate of the refractometer. You put a little cover over that plate and then you hold the refractometer up to the sky and it's going to show you basically the level of BRICS, reading the level of sugars in that plant, and if you have a high BRICS level, then insects are not going to be attracted to that plant. It's used in viticulture and winemaking and that is kind of, I think, where it began, right because you got to test the sugar levels and the grapes Test the sugar levels of the grapes, but now people are using it all across the board.
Speaker 1:We use it a lot in the pasture environments to look at how sweet the grasses are right To the cattle. You're going to get lower BRICS levels in grasses than you will in specialty crops like vegetables and fruits and things like that, but it still has those BRICS levels. You can also use it as an indicator of other issues. So if you have low BRICS levels, that can be an indicator of nitrates. And ultimately, if you've got nitrates and you're grazing certain animals in those fields, you don't want to graze them in those nitrate-rich fields because they are going to one attract insects, because nitrates attract insects but they're also going to be problematic in the ruminant gut and cause issues. So it's a great little tool. Highly recommend it. I'll also put in the resource section a video to a webinar I did on how to use a BRICS refractometer and all the different things that you can look at, not just nitrates and not just sugars. There's many other things that I will tell you.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah. It's a cool tool that gives you an insight that would otherwise use really expensive equipment to test on your leaf analysis, and you can just do it within a refractometer, for and I've found the cheap ones work just as well as the more expensive ones you can find refractometers for under $50 now.
Speaker 1:Oh great.
Speaker 2:It's a great tool to learn how to use good stuff. Your BRICS levels in your plants increase with your soil health. So you might not be there yet, but if you're focused on your soil health, you do intensive cover cropping. You always keep living roots in the soil and green plants coming up as long as you can. If your context will allow it, You're going to improve that soil health. That was another thing I wanted to mention. The increase of your organic matter is both a combination of what's on the surface and breaking down but, more importantly, what the plants are exuding into the soil. This is sort of a good segue into the next follow. I'd like to talk about Dr White. But plants in some instances exude 60% of their photosynthetic capacity back into the soil to feed the soil life around their roots 60%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know that some people consider that inefficient right. They consider it inefficient for the plant. But when we're thinking of symbiosis and what that is getting back, Right.
Speaker 2:So the plant, because it's involved in a whole system, it knows the more it gives to the life around it, the more it's going to receive in return, whereas that is something to take with you in all aspects of life. All aspects of life. It's so true, and nature has figured this out. Before we jump into Dr White's talk, which to me Was worth the injury fee for the entire conference, I would agree it blew my mind.
Speaker 2:So we've been talking about soil health. This is what you have to do to have a functional and profitable farm. And Then the question has always lingered in the back of my reductionist brain why I get it? I believe that soil health is the key to a profitable farm that produces healthy food that supports our existence on the planet. But why the question? Why, why, why? Why do plants exude sometimes up to 60% of their photosynthetic capacity? Imagine taking your salary and just taking 60% of what you made every month and Spreading it on the soil around you. That'd be a hard giveaway, right?
Speaker 1:We kind of do that.
Speaker 2:So Nature has evolved this system over time, where the byproducts of photosynthesis, which are oxygen plates, don't want oxygen, they release that into the atmosphere and Carbohydrates, which is how they store the energy from the Sun. The byproducts of that photosynthetic reaction are the starting material for Things that respirate animals, bacteria. So there's primary producers, which produce Carbohydrates and oxygen through their natural life cycle, and then their consumers, which respire, we breathe in oxygen, consume Carbohydrates and we exhale carbon dioxide and water, and those are the two key ingredients that plants need. So animals and plants on a chemical level, even on a chemical level, are meant to be together. Remembering that there is this balance between animal life and plant life on the planet Is a sort of grounding concept for me. When I think about what's happening in the soil around me, I know that soil health is dependent on the products of photosynthesis, which can only happen if they're living roots in the soil, and green solar panels coming off those plants to absorb sunlight right.
Speaker 1:So the phrase as above, so below right. As we are thinking about that, each time we put our foot down on the soil we are stepping on. There's 10 billion viruses and one teaspoon of soil. So in our bodies we have one part human cells to 10 parts microbiology cells, right? So ultimately we're almost more microbes than we are humans, and we fail to remember that we're also doing the same thing when we put our foot down on the soil. Right, when we step our foot onto one little chunk of soil, we're literally Stepping on more microbes than there are stars in the universe. And so ultimately we have to realize, like, the significance of what's going on here.
Speaker 1:Dr James White, who did a talk at the acres USA conference on the rhizophagi cycle, was really an amazing. Everybody walked out of there just kind of eyes wide open because he had all these videos From his research that he's doing, that's showing the interaction of Bacteria in the soil and how they actually populate into the roots, which is called the Rhizophagi sector of plants. Right, it's the area where the microbes in the soil interact with plant roots. Ultimately he did a talk on how this is working and he is at Rutgers University and he's studying this cycle, and so I'm gonna let Peter kind of delve into that a little bit more right.
Speaker 2:His talk really blew me away and, like I said before, I Believe in soil health. You can see it when you have healthy soil and you dig down into it. You can smell it. It smells right, plants respond to it. You get high quality food that tastes amazing. But I always wanted to know why. What is it about healthy soil that makes our food taste so good and be so healthy for us? And Dr White pretty much laid it out in very specific, microscopic detail, literally, literally microscopic detail and Walking out of that conference, I was like how come people don't know about this?
Speaker 2:And I was relieved to find out that it wasn't just me being ignorant, which is not a bad thing, because you can cure ignorance. Yes, the Rhizophagi cycle was only first discovered by a group of Australian scientists in 2010, and His published work that he was reporting on in the conference was first coming around in 2017, so this is very new information the mechanism of why plants exude so much of their frozen the capacity back into the soil and how bacteria interact with that. So it's everybody knows or most farmers know, I would say that legume crops fix nitrogen and they do that through a very specialized structure in their root. That is the perfect environment for a particular type of bacteria to fix nitrogen from Free nitrogen in the air and convert it to a form that plants Gandalf. What a lot of people may not know is that there's a ton of free living nitrogen fixing bacteria out there that doesn't require the little rhizomes on the roots of legumes to do their work. So, and according to Dr White, all plants Take bacteria into their roots, which really blew me away. So I'll say it again all plants Take bacteria into the roots and there's a region right behind the root tip. I'm a biochemist, not a plant guy, so I don't know all the names of these structures, but right behind the root tip there's an area, and they don't know the mechanism of how the plant invites these microbes into their roots, but they do. Bacteria penetrate the root, go inside and Live inside the root.
Speaker 2:Now here's where things get really interesting, and it, to me, elucidates the mechanism of how bacteria can feed plants Exactly what they need when they need it. So plants are full of phytochemicals and all the good things that help keep us happy, and the reason they are to some extent, is that they use a burst of hydrogen peroxide to dissolve the cell wall of these bacteria when they enter the plant root. So remember, prokaryotes bacteria have both a cell membrane and a cell wall. So the plant puts out just enough Hydrogen peroxide within their vascular tissue to dissolve the cell wall on the bacteria that they want and, amazingly, just enough to kill the bacteria that they don't. So if there's a pathogenic bacteria that they don't want in their root, those get killed by the peroxide burst that comes out of their vascular systems, but the healthy bacteria that they want to keep in there survives.
Speaker 2:Now Roots have, near their tip, little buds, all along the tip and along the I'm not sure how long it extends, but along the very end of a growing root tip there are little buds that can extend into what they call root hairs. Interestingly enough, if there are no bacteria inside the root, those root hair buds won't elongate into hairs. But if there's bacteria present, the bacteria actually release signaling molecules that encourage the elongation of these root hairs. And those root hairs are Beneficial to the plant because they help absorb nutrients and all the other things they create more surface area, much more surface area for the plant.
Speaker 2:But here's the really interesting part. These bacteria, without their cell wall but with their cell membrane intact, enter the root hairs and replicate. So the root has become little baby Bacterial nurseries where these bacteria are replicating the bacteria the plant wants. So the back of the plant is feeding them sugars from their photosynthetic activities. The Bacteria are reproducing within these root hairs and eventually, when they reach the right concentration, the plant will actually inject them back into the soil. So a plant root is a nursery for beneficial bacteria to enter back into the soil.
Speaker 2:Once those bacteria back into the soil, they regenerate their cell walls and they go on about their business interacting with fungi and all the other creatures out there. They're eaten by earthworms and micro earth pods and all the good things in the soil that we need. This part of this cycle and the plants are responsible for really keeping those bacteria alive. So that ties into another thing. When you put fertilizer down on a plant and it's like, oh, I've got everything I need, is it still gonna invest up to 60% of its photosynthetic capacity to support other life in this oil?
Speaker 2:Nope it doesn't. Yeah, so without that, when you put this fertilizer down, not only does the fertilizer directly kill bacteria and microbes, but it de-incentivizes the plant To create conditions for those bacteria to reproduce in its roots. Because it thinks it has all it needs. It's not gonna invest that photosynthetic capacity.
Speaker 1:Well, the types of plants that you put into the ground, and especially in pasture environments, for example, you know, if you've got an annual, you're gonna be calling in different types of bacteria. Then, if you've got a perennial system right, those chemical messengers between the bacteria and the rhizophagi of the plants, it is very Dependent on, yeah, what kind of plant you're dealing with yep, and that speaks directly to the importance of diversity in your biological systems.
Speaker 2:If you just have an annual that's killed at the end of the year with frost or you know, however it happens, those bacteria don't have a place to go, whereas if in a pasture system You've got a nice diversity of all the different grasses and forbs and annuals All of them orbs, grasses, shrubs always gonna be a living root in the soil to help carry over those bacteria that you know.
Speaker 2:They might thrive in grasses, but they're gone for half the year or quarter of the year. So you've got these other plants there to support them and they can repopulate the annuals when they sprout. So this takes us to another point, because plants are injecting hydrogen peroxide directly into their vascular tissue to To oxidize the cell walls of these bacteria. Plants have to protect themselves from that harsh chemical. They're using it in a particular way and we use it too in our immune system. When our killer T cells envelope an invading pathogen, our body kills that pathogen by injecting hydrogen peroxide within that vesicle. Now, in our bodies it's very tightly controlled within a confined space, but in plants, according to Dr White, they release this hydrogen peroxide directly into their vascular systems, which kind of blew me away, because hydrogen peroxide can be very destructive to biological structures.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's one thing I forgot to say. When you dissolve the cell wall, what's in the cell wall of a microbe? Well, it's got proteins in there. So you're releasing those in amino acid forms, the building blocks of proteins directly utilized by the plant, so they don't have to spin that extra energy, converting some chemical form of nitrogen or phosphate into a functional form that they can use. It's already in a biological form that the plant can use and when they hit it with that peroxide it breaks the proteins up into amino acids, tears the lipids apart Again something the plant can use to build its own cell walls, get energy from it's plant-available nutrient. Ready to go Right. When a plant uses hydrogen peroxide within its vascular tissue, it needs something to help combat that so it doesn't digest itself. Those are called antioxidants, the plant phytochemicals that give us all the healthy properties of the blueberries and the leafy greens and the wonderful vegetables that we eat.
Speaker 1:These are the phytonutrients that we were talking about earlier, that's exactly right. Things like lycopene and anthocyanins and phenols and various things that act as anti-cancer agents and heart disease prevention.
Speaker 2:So the plants produce these phytochemicals as their own defense against the hydrogen peroxide that they're putting into their vascular systems to digest these bacteria, wow, wow. So when we remove the plant's need to invite bacteria into its roots by providing fertilizer, what do you get? You get a plant that is not full of antioxidants because it doesn't have the need to produce them. Plants are very efficient. They're the best chemists in the world. They can make molecules that humans can only dream of making, but they're only going to do it if they need to. So even if you have an organically grown blueberry and you taste and you're like, hmm, it doesn't really taste like a blueberry, you can bet that that plant was over fertilized, even in an organic context, with external inputs, rather than letting the biology in the soil provide the fertility for that plant and that's what I get excited about is biological systems taking care of the nutrient needs of plants.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we'll put these notes into the resources. But I highly recommend going to Dr White's website and looking at the videos that he showed in this, because he's literally taking video of this full interaction that's going on between the bacteria moving into the rhizosphere and you can see it all going down. It really does just give you a whole other outlook on what's happening below your feet. It is fascinating. It's fascinating. Here we're talking about really the importance of keeping the soil covered.
Speaker 1:Keeping the soil covered, keeping the soil covered keeping the soil covered, and here we're talking about, really, the importance of keeping the soil covered, keeping continuous live plant root in the ground. Even when you're in a winter environment, right, and you might not have huge amounts of activity going on, those roots are still interacting with the soil to a certain degree and as soon as that warmth comes online, spring comes on, just as it is right now. You're going to start getting all of that activity going to boost the growth as soon as it can for those plants in the beginning of the season. So really, really amazing stuff. I think we've covered a lot here today and I know we're coming up on time, but I want to thank you so much, peter, for sharing all this information.
Speaker 1:With your background in chemistry and biochemistry, you have such a good way of explaining things and I know that for some people this might be a little over your head to begin with, but that's okay, because the point here is to introduce the topics right, and we know that everybody who's listening. Some people are going to be producers, but we are also hoping to get the message across to consumers, right, conscious consumers who really are trying to make a difference with the foods that they eat for their health, but also for creating sustainability and regeneration in their communities. We want to share this information with everybody so that the more people who begin to grasp these concepts become connected to them right Each time they take a step, they think about what you just shared.
Speaker 2:Sure, and I'd like to add that this is what's really cool about regenerative agriculture when you're looking at the outcomes, it really doesn't matter how you get there. So for me, it was a revelation to see how biological nutrition is absorbed by plants through the dissolving of the cell wall of the bacteria. Do I need to know that to be a good farmer, to be a profitable farmer that produces high-quality food full of tasty phytonutrients that I get excited about eating? No, I don't need to understand the biochemistry or the biology. It's okay to treat that as a black box, as long as you look at the outcome.
Speaker 2:When you do a visual soil assessment once a year, look at your soil and make sure it's improved. If you want to get nerdy about it, send it off to a lab and find out how many species of bacteria and fungi and crazy things you have growing in there Great, that's another marker that you can use to gauge the quality of your soil and make sure that you're improving your soil health year upon year. That's really the point. You don't have to understand the science. You don't have to understand that. Use your imagination, use your creativity, experiment with things and verify the outcome.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and from a consumer's point of view, you may just want to take the extra action of asking the farmer oh, what do you do? Can I come out to the farm, can I see what you have going on there and just make a relationship where you can see some of these things in action? Or maybe you just eat the tasty food.
Speaker 2:Look for the tasty food. That's the key, and I didn't mean to bash organic farmers earlier. I hope it didn't come across that way. Organic standards have been weakened over time, but they are the best that we have presently. The Rodale Institute is attempting to start a regenerative organic standard, and some people are buying into that. The certified naturally grown standard is another very good one. It's slightly more stringent than organic, and farmers are doing the best they can, and maybe they just don't know about biologically based nutrition for their plants, because it's a real thing. It's been happening for eons, long before we were here, and we can reinvest in that paradigm of farming and use natural systems to provide the fertility we need to grow the crops that will then support our own health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just to make a very important statement here, regenerative agriculture is not new and we need to go back to our ancestors.
Speaker 1:The native people living on lands all across the globe use these practices from the inception of farming, and only over the course of the past 150 years have we chosen to literally forget them and erase them somehow from our consciousness, to get into the place in which we are today, which is a pretty dismal place in terms of the quality of food that we're eating.
Speaker 1:The nutrient density of the food we're eating, the health of our ecosystems all across the globe are degrading. These are big, important things to be thinking about, and it takes everybody not just the farmer, but also the consumer thinking about these things to make the changes and ultimately really paying respect to the fact that all of our ancestors across the globe practiced these methodologies as just a way of being, and not only did they not know the science that we've gone deeply into today, they intuited it into their ways of being, and it was so much more than just this act of farming, but it was an act of deep gratitude, when practicing agriculture, of receiving the food and the nutrients that came from it. Coming back full circle to that, when you get a little bit more involved in understanding how this works, it can really create that awe and inspire a lot of gratitude in terms of putting that beautiful food into your mouth.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. That comes back to it. It matters what you measure. If your bank account is your primary guide for your farm, you're probably not going to make the tastiest, healthiest food out there. Now. Your bank account is important, like I've said, but you can skip your fertilizer bill, you can skip your chemical bill. You can reduce your fossil fuel bill dramatically by running a farm that uses a biological nutrition approach for the plants and regenerative agriculture. Watching the outcomes Outcomes based farming that's where to go.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely Alright. So we've given y'all a lot to take in here. We are going to put a lot of different resources into the show notes, so be sure to check those as you are listening. And, ultimately, I am so thankful for your listening and we look forward to hearing back from you guys. If you have any comments or questions about what we've shared today, please feel free to reach out. I'll put how to reach out into the comments. Look into that resources for that as well, because we want to hear from you and we also are open to hearing ideas of what it is that you'd like to learn more about. Again, peter Bresne, thank you so much. This has been really fun.
Speaker 2:It's my pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. So we're signing off. May you have a beautiful day. Well, my friends, there you have it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Land Food Life podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show and gained some true gems of insight that will enhance your quality of life. If you're looking for personalized guidance on holistic health, nutrition or running a regenerative agriculture business, visit LandFoodLifecom to explore my virtual and in-person coaching programs. You can also join my mailing list at LandFoodLifecom to receive exclusive perks and discounts for email subscribers only. I appreciate your valuable time spent here with me and if you're digging this content and you're finding it helpful, please share it with your friends and others in your network. You can post a screenshot of the podcast thumbnail, tag it on social media and rate the show on your preferred podcast platform. I am very much looking forward to our next chat in two weeks. Same time, same place. Bye for now.