Understanding Brix, Plant Health & Insect Behavior with Dr. Tom Dykstra

In this episode of the Whole Farm Podcast, Michael Pisciotta and Les Riley from CHONEX sit down with Dr. Tom Dykstra to explore the connection between plant health, Brix levels, and insect behavior.

Dr. Dykstra breaks down what Brix really measures and challenges the common belief that insects avoid high-sugar plants. Instead, he explains how pests are drawn to unhealthy crops with incomplete proteins, and how Brix can serve as a simple, real-time indicator of plant health in the field.

This conversation reframes insects as indicator species and shifts the focus from spraying pests to improving plant physiology.

Key topics:
- What Brix actually measures
- Why insects target unhealthy plants
- The truth behind the “12 Brix rule”
- Using Brix as a field-ready diagnostic tool

Tools Mentioned:
Refractometer (Brix meter)
- Affordable models: ~$20–$50
- Digital models: $100–$300+

Coming Next
Part 2 of this conversation will focus on practical, in-field strategies growers can use to improve plant health, increase Brix levels, and reduce pest pressure naturally. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss this conversation!

See More of Dr. Dykstra's Research and Talks at: https://dykstralabs.com/video-presentations/

Learn more about CHONEX at: chonex.ag

To learn more about CHONEX, explore additional resources, and receive future episodes to your inbox, visit chonex.ag. If you found this episode valuable, subscribe to the podcast and share it with someone in your network.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Whole Farm Podcast brought to you by Chonex, where we explore soil health, nutrient management, and the systems that help crops and farms perform better over time. Each episode features conversations with growers and industry experts focused on practical insights you can apply in the field. Whether you're managing nutrients, building healthier soils, or looking for data-driven ways to improve outcomes, this podcast is built to support real decisions and real results.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Welcome back for the second episode of the Whole Farm Podcast. I'm Michael Pescato with Chonex. We have uh Les Riley, who's one of our sales agronomists in the Mid-South area. And we have a very, very special guest today. And so I'm super excited to be uh asking some questions with Les to Dr. Tom Dykstra. And so I'm gonna turn it over to Les to give a brief intro of Dr. Dijkstra, and then we're gonna get into some pretty fascinating conversations.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Well, uh Dr. Dijkstra, thanks for coming. Uh I'm gonna read part of your bio off your website just to kind of lay the groundwork, but uh want to get right into it. Um I uh I heard about your work last year and have been fascinated by it. Michael and I have talked about it a lot, and we're really excited to share it with the broader ag community. So uh Dr. Dijkstra received his BS in entomology from Cornell in 1990. He then went to the University of Florida and received his MS inomology in 1994. Then he investigated neurophysiology of pherome production in MOS, then continuing the University of Florida, he received a PhD in bioelectrical magnetics under Dr. Philip Callahan in 1997, and then uh began uh Dodgster Laboratories which more broadly investigates uh bioelectromagnetics ranging from bacteria to humans. Predominantly he studies insect insect olfaction, how insects smell from a uh standpoint of bioelectromagnetics and has developed a new theory based on the fusion of biophysics and neurophysiology. So thank you for being with us, Dr. Dykstra. And uh, if I butchered the pronunciation in those words, forgive me. I'm just a Mississippi farm boy.

SPEAKER_03 2:22

Thank you for your Mississippi farm boy pronunciations. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

That's awesome. Thank you, Les. All right, Dr. Dykstra, we're gonna jump in. And so, you know, this episode is gonna be really focused on the science. And obviously, you're a scientist, but we're gonna be talking to a lot of farm topics today, and one of those farm topics that you know you have a kind of a focused thesis around, if you will, and you've proven in the field, is around bricks and how uh insects relate to this topic of plant bricks. And when I say bricks, I don't mean we're building a house, uh, it is a B R I X situation. And so if you could do kind of a science uh explanatory brief conversation around bricks, what what is bricks, Dr. Dykstra?

SPEAKER_03 3:17

Okay, bricks is a measurement. Uh you they use a refractometer usually in order to uh to test it, at least we do now. Uh they had some different devices back a hundred years ago, but bricks is a using the refractometer is now a measure of the bending of light. That's really what it is. And so when the light bends, we can measure the degree of bending and therefore get a bricks reading from that refractometer. That's in essence what it is. It was named after uh Adolf Bricks. Uh his last name is Bricks B-R-I-X, as you mentioned, Michael. And that's that name has stuck. So anytime we use that, uh we do have to capitalize it. Uh so anytime we have a BRICS refractometer, the the B is capitalized, and that's the game that we play. But uh, this has been around for a long time. What is it? It began in the in the 1950s, really. So it was long before I was born. And uh Kerry Reams is the one who really started investigating it at that time, and it was probably about 20 years later before it really started to develop. So it was in the 1970s with Kerry Reims and a few others uh who were uh on the uh the boat at that time started investigating this phenomenon of bricks, and that is measuring plants using the bricks refractometer. What are they measuring? Oh, it's really simple. They would just squeeze uh plant parts and get the juice out, and and that's all this was about. And so while squeezing these plant parts, they would get two, three drops. That's all you needed. And then they would get a measurement. And this measurement told them something because it was actually measuring. See, when you're measuring, if you're measuring motor oil, that's different. You can get bricks reading from that. But if you're measuring plant sap, or at least the juice that comes from it, it's predominantly sugar. 85 to 90 percent of it is going to be sugar, and therefore you will often hear when people mention bricks, you will hear things like, Well, you're measuring sugar in the plant. And from a practical standpoint, that is true. From the technical, absolute standpoint, we're just measuring the bending of light. But because we are measuring predominantly sugar, we often use this synonymously and say, Yeah, we've got a bricks measurement, we're measuring sugar, and uh that's what we do when we are measuring plants. So that's in essence what it is, how the name came about, and uh, and where we are uh based upon the question that you just asked.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

Okay, well, as we um get through this, we're gonna talk about uh how that impacts plant yield and and particularly how it relates to your background uh with insects and what you've discovered. But uh tell us a little bit more about your uh primary research focus in insects, and then you know we'll move to how that got to bricks.

SPEAKER_03 6:16

Okay. Uh primarily I'm interested in uh insectalfaction. Uh so I have been involved in looking at how insects smell and how they taste. And this is something which has been, I have to say it's partially been in the back of my mind since the 1990s. It started to develop and became more important, and it's now one of the main parts of my uh research here at the laboratory is to decipher the insect olfactory codes for various insects. So I've got a host of insects that I have analyzed, taking a look at their chemoreceptors, and while analyzing this, I'm now able to tell what the insect is smelling, what the insect is tasting, and the degree to which it is smelling something, and the degree to which it is tasting something based upon uh spectrums that I have been developing some of the proprietary software. So that is a little bit what I do. Now, this does tie into bricks because the insects are very, very interested in keying in on unhealthy plants. That's where they're smelling and tasting. They want to be able to smell an unhealthy plant, they want to be able to taste an unhealthy plant, and in order to do that, they have to be able to taste and smell effectively, and that's where I kind of kind of came in. It was a bit of a back door. But in the process of taking a look at this, I did have to look into, and I was asked a lot being an entomologist about this whole bricks thing. And back in the 90s, I didn't know a whole lot about it. But I did know about the magic number of 12. And I was bothered by that because being an entomologist and a scientist, I thought 12 bricks is it? This is all we have after decades of of research that Kerry Reams is doing back into the 50s, and now we've got charts on the internet, and all we have is 12, and and 12 is anything higher than 12, the insects don't attack your plant. Anything lower than 12, insects do attack your plant. And I think you could imagine, as I did, I thought, okay, so so 12.1, no insects attack your plant. 11.9, every insect on planet Earth attacks your plant. This cannot be possible. And I figured there have to be degrees. What uh what happens when you hit 13? Are they less even less likely? What happens when you're at at 11 or 10 or 9? Do they become more and more? And as as I was looking at this question, I I ran across something unexpected. It wasn't just a matter of getting lower and lower on the brick scale. I actually noticed trends. And these trends or trend lines showed me that it was actually specific insects that were attacking the plants at specific uh bricks uh levels. It wasn't just a matter of being above 12 or just uh underneath 12. There were there was a whole continuum of bricks levels that showed me that uh this phenomenon was going on. And so I mean, I was looking at this for 15 years and then I was asked to do a presentation in 2012. Holy smokes, uh, it is amazing what has happened since 2012. So even though I am very much involved in insectal faction, after that presentation, that presentation really took off. There was a lot of interest developed around it, and I've had to develop the whole concept of bricks to understand it, put it into chart form, been presenting all over the world. And that that was the those were the humble beginnings of making this connection between the insects and the bricks and the plants.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Wow, that is that is incredible. So that there's just a lot to unpack here. You know, thank you so much again for explaining a little bit more about bricks. You know, even I was under the impression, you know, working in fruit agronomy, you know, I'm always you know, squeezing fruit and getting, you know, samples, and we always think about that as an analog for sugar content, but really there's so much more to unpack there. And we're gonna get into that in a little bit. But you know, you mentioned that this thing has really took off as far as conceptually and to field validation. So, my question is you know, you knew this number existed, you had heard about it, you wanted to go in, bring out some of these nuances, really understand differences, you know, differences in insect species versus crop speciation. That's right. And so, how did you kind of start testing this from a lab level into field validation? Tell me about that process, Dr. Dyson.

SPEAKER_03 11:03

Well, that process is uh very, very slow because I was uh uh doing some of this research at the beginning on the side. And so because I was doing it on the side, we didn't have a chance to actually develop the way that I'd like. Later on, farmers would ask me to come uh establish bricks levels on the farm. And at this point, it became a little bit more practical because I started to uh make some of these connections. And when you're on someone's farm, you see all types of insects, and you realize that there are certain trend lines. And so when I saw a particular insect, let's just say I was looking at leafhoppers attacking a plant, these leafhoppers were attacking it, but I didn't see some of the other insects that I'm used to seeing. I would go on another field and I would see completely different insects, maybe even attacking the same species. This is how this slowly, and I mean slowly, started to develop when it came in to and it became focused at this point. So when I had the uh the refractometer and I was taking a look at the BRICS readings, these trend lines started to develop over time, and I realized that not all insects are equal. And that is some of them are able to attack, dare I say, you can get in trouble for this, more healthy plants, still unhealthy, and other plants, far very poor uh uh health plants, other insects were attacking them, and some of the uh the insects that went after a relatively high health plant were not touching it when we had a much, much lower bricks, and vice versa. And so because we had this relationship developing, I was starting to put things together and a chart started developed, a very easy-to-follow chart that I have put up on the internet. I presented my presentations, and this has now broken down the different feeding guilds of insects and where they fall on the different bricks levels. And so it's not just above 12 and below 12. Now I've got different readings which usually give me about a two-bricks window, which allow me to understand where the insects are going to go. So this is kind of how it develops. As far as doing the research, a lot of it was done out in the field. I would record the information. Uh, a lot of the virtually everything I do, 95% of what I do is proprietary. So I'm not allowed to publish, as um some of some of the, I think the viewers know, uh, this is something which has has bothered some. It doesn't bother others. But when you are doing proprietary research, you are not allowed to bring out specific information. However, it was the trend lines that was not proprietary. And so because these trend lines were not proprietary, I started to realize, okay, here's information right now, which I could talk about. Should I talk about? Because right now I've got other things to do. And at that point, I realized, you know, this is back in 2012. And I thought, you know, am I gonna die without getting this information out? And I thought, is it really going to affect my career? Is it going to help me? Is it gonna hurt me? Do I need to bother about this? And I thought, no, I think I probably should talk about this. I think, I did not know, but I think farmers would find this information useful. So I I I pushed the presentation uh for that first time and gave it. And uh I actually gave two presentations at that one particular conference. I can honestly tell you, I don't think a single person remembers the other talk that I gave. It was completely ignored. No one wanted to discuss it anymore, and it was all about this insect and bricks thing. And uh, as I said, this has kind of snowballed. So this has slowly accumulated over time. Since 2020 twelve, I've had a chance in order to uh establish things and I've been able to uh fine-tune some of the bricks levels so we can understand the insects a little bit better, and I'm trying to uh split hairs as far as I am able. It's not easy uh to split hairs, but before the hair that we were splitting was above and below 12. So right now the hairs that I'm splitting are are a lot better uh than above and below 12, but I can actually break it down to you know the difference between uh an 11 and an eight bricks. Uh there is a relatively large difference between them and the insects that attack an eight bricks plant will be different than ones that attack an 11 bricks plant. So that's kind of how this all developed. All the information comes together. I've had a chance to look at the data, the trend lines appeared. I turned it into a chart, tried to make it as easy to understand as possible. Why? I want it accessible. You know, you don't want people scratching their heads thinking, uh I have no idea what Dr. Dijkster is talking about. I just that just went right over my head. And so I want to be able to say, look, this is what I've got, this is how easy it is to do. The measurement takes about a minute uh to do, and it can be done out in the field and it doesn't cost you anything. So I thought we've got a cheap way to test this, and um it it's immediate. The farmer doesn't have to wait a week, sometimes two weeks, uh, for the data to come back. It doesn't have to spend$85 to$150 in order to get a test done. And this information is telling them a lot. Originally, I didn't think the information was that extensive. Now that I've had a chance to look at all the bricks levels, there are clear physiological differences between the plants. And that is when I started splitting hairs and breaking it down and saying, wow, there are some clear differences. I can actually um get a reading from a plant and tell you certain things about it without doing further testing because the bricks has now told me so much about the plant. It doesn't tell me everything, uh, but as far as inexpensive uh tests, uh you can't beat it. And as far as overall health, you can't beat it. This tells you the overall health of the plant. And so it has now come to the point where it is turned into something, it has morphed into something more than it was certainly in the 90s, and even more uh than it was in 2012 when I first presented it.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

Well, um I I think we're um you know, I only have a little bit of time left in this session. We've got another episode we're gonna delve more into some of the practical applications, but uh two um kind of related questions that that this brings up is is one, um uh can you explain briefly why so when we think of a high brick score, if we if we know about bricks at all, you know, like Michael knows that if fruit's higher brick scores, humans are gonna like it better. And if you've got livestock, if your forage has a higher brick store, then livestock's gonna be ready to eat it and benefit from it. So why A are more unhealthy more unhealthy plants, more desirable for insects? And then uh B essentially what you're saying, when we think of uh entomologists in in the ag space, normally we think of a guy that goes out and says, Here's the bugs you got, here's what you need to spray to kill those bugs. Yes. What you're telling us is that you can give us the strata of brick score that will tell us at this point this insect will stop eating. And then at this point, this insect will stop eating. So rather than what insecticide do we need to spray, the question becomes, how do I get my plant healthier? So if you can elaborate on that, it'd be helpful, I think.

SPEAKER_03 18:39

Yeah, I'm not even sure what the question was uh that you just said. Sorry, but sorry. But yeah, there are uh there are a lot of things to look at. So when you are looking at these bricks levels, there is a lot of information that comes out, there is some physiology, so you don't want to go into how much how much how technical do you want me to get uh right now? What would you like me to discuss first?

SPEAKER_02 19:02

Yeah, yeah, uh yeah. If you can just tell us why insects like unhealthy plants.

SPEAKER_03 19:08

Okay. What levels that's a good that's a good thing. That's a good thing to start at. Uh, I should tell you, since 2012, I have been trying and failing miserably. I have been trying to say that it's not about the sugar that the insects don't like. This has been totally ignored by almost everybody on the planet. Everybody still keeps coming out to me. I still uh see stuff on the internet saying, well, insects don't like high sugar, uh, and therefore they're avoiding the plant. And uh I never said this at the beginning, uh, but I did say that there is a correlation between high sugar, and so people have just said, well, they don't like sugar, which is total BS because we have uh nectar, which is coming in at about 30 bricks. Insects love it. Uh we have honey and black stratasses coming in at about 70 bricks. Insects will crowd around that in a second if you happen to drop it. And I have, you know, sometimes it drips and something goes down and the insects come in. And if you put out pure small cubes of sugar, the ants will come in and carry it back to their nest, which is a hundred bricks. So I just want to make it clear right now, and I realize I'm trying really hard right now, and I failed since 2020. I don't expect this to make any big difference, but this is not about sugar. It is about something else, and that is about the complete proteins. When you have a healthy plant, you have healthy proteins that are made. These healthy proteins are complete. That means the amino acid sequence code is complete. They are exactly formed the way that they should be. They exactly fold the way that they should. These complete proteins cannot be digested by insects. They can be digested by vertebrates, they can be digested by you and me, they could be digested by deer, by squirrels, uh, by uh birds, and things of those sort. But the insects cannot break them down. They do not have the biochemical machinery in order to break down a lot of these healthy proteins. They need broken stuff. This broken stuff is what they are tuned to. This is what their digestive systems are tuned to. So when we are testing bricks, we're actually using it as a proxy for whether or not we have incomplete or complete proteins, because we understand that's what the insect really is looking for. That's what it can smell, that's what it can taste. And when a plant is not producing healthy proteins, it can't digest all of that stuff. And so, because it can't digest it, it doesn't eat it, and it moves away and it goes to another plant. So the sugar is an indicator that we use in order to determine whether or not. The insect is going to be interested in a plant because in order to measure a complete protein or an incomplete protein, oh my, that is expensive. Very, very expensive stuff. You just can't go out into the field and start using expensive equipment in order to test this, but you can test bricks. And since bricks is an indicator of how healthy the plant is and how healthy the proteins are, that then tells us the level of health and what kind of insect we're going to see attacking it. So that's really the key. So we look at bricks, but the main focus is on these proteins, these broken down proteins, because that is what the insects can digest. They always want broken down proteins. They want partially digested, unhealthy plants that are not doing a good job of putting things together. And these broken down plants are eat more easily digested by insects. That's really the key. So I think that answers the question that we are looking for. So that's a great question.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

That is wow. Okay. That is really, really interesting from my standpoint, because you know, I think you mentioned the word broken, which implies that we can fix it. And so I know that we're we're gonna break this conversation down into two different parts, Dr. Dijkstra. And the second part is gonna be a lot about practical advice for farmers on fixing it. But I kind of want to know a little bit more about these insects, because obviously they can sense this. But you know, I I guess you know, there's one school of thought that might say, well, let's just do something to take these insects out. But I would kind of want to just kind of wrap up this interview because I know we Chonex is a little bit in the insect business. Uh but tell me some good things about insects. Like tell me something interesting that we can wrap up because you know, this next conversation is going to be about kind of fixing these broken pieces or things and steps that are practical for farmers. But but tell us something good about insects from your perspective. You spent your whole career on this and know a lot about it, obviously. And uh so what's your take on insects?

SPEAKER_03 24:21

My take on insects is that they are indicator species. Anytime I see an insect attacking a plant, it indicates to me, one, that the plant is unhealthy, and two, the degree of unhealth of the plant. That is what I find so fascinating about insects, is that all of these insects, over one million species, and that's that's the good news. That's the good news uh from my standpoint. It may not be the good news that everyone's thinking about, because I know what some people are thinking about with good news, but I'm talking about the good news from the scientific standpoint, where we've got insects which are now telling us something. And if we read what they are telling us, we can learn a lot. Now, sometimes you could tell just by looking at the insect, I've gotten to the point where I can kind of get an idea of what the problem with the plant is just by the insect. But when you have that refractometer, you can put a number to it. That's so cool. And it's it's even it's even beyond getting a seven or an eight bricks. I can come out and say with my digital refractometer, oh yeah, this is a 7.4 bricks. And this impresses people to no end because they're like, wow, that's really exact. But that's what the refractometer tells us. We can get very exact measurements. And so if you're trying to move up on the brick scale, I always say we want to go at least 0.5 bricks. So if I'm at 7.4 and we we put something down, a product, we can measure it again 24 hours later. If it goes up to 7.9 or above, then that that means the plant is doing better. That means it's photosynthesizing better. And these insects, these indicator species, are telling us that. That, to me, is good news to know. And because this is good news, I would love to get this information out. That's what I was thinking way before 2012. And when the opportunity came, and it has now been well received uh by so many uh farmers, is to be able to reach them with this information and teach them about this. It has been uh very fulfilling for me and uh would love to do you know many more years uh if uh if this is what uh if this is what people want.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

That's that's great. I'll I'll turn it over to Les for the last question because we got about three minutes left in this first kind of session. But is it fair to say, Dr. Dykstra, that you mentioned insects as an indicator species? When you walk that field, you can take a brick score with a refractometer, you can look and see if there's pest pressure. Is it fair to say that this is like if I'm driving a truck and I have a dashboard with lots of different signs, signals, indications? I mean, I I would not drive a truck without a dashboard with knowing how fast I'm going. I could guess. I could maybe, you know, look under the hood, check my oil levels, have a thermometer, check, you know, temperatures. But to me, this sounds like a way better thing, right? I mean, this is a dashboard conversation. Way better.

SPEAKER_03 27:26

It's much, much faster. You don't have to stop the truck, pop up the hood, and start looking at things. You can just look at your dashboard, you know exactly what the temperature of the engine is, you know exactly how fast you are going, you know exactly uh how many miles you have left before your tank goes empty, all of that information now, especially in the new cars, massive amount of information on your dashboard. And so when you have all of that information and you can determine it immediately, as little as a minute, uh that is powerful, powerful uh information for a farmer to have.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

Awesome. Okay, well, to wrap up this uh this first uh segment or first episode, um you've referenced a couple of times the uh the charts that you've published. Um where can someone find that chart uh if they want to look it up while we're uh after they watch this episode?

SPEAKER_03 28:21

Uh there are a number of videos online that have that chart. There is one video that has just the chart uh where it has me l mentioning just the information on the chart. Essentially, it's an excerpt from one of my um usual hour-long presentations. There are a number of presentations online. I can't even, I don't even know how many uh there are that have that chart. I bring it up a lot. And so you can find it easily by looking for Bricks chart, you know, Tom Dykstra. Uh these type of searches that will usually get any one of a number of talks, and that should then lead someone in the right direction in order to find the charts that I'm referring to. But it's more than just the chart. Remember, I have a description with that chart. So I could just put up the chart, and that's one thing, but I do describe the chart so that we can understand it and I fill it out as I'm presenting so that everyone understands what I'm referring to uh when I'm talking about bricks, specifically the leaf bricks, which is what that chart entails. Well, hopefully we can uh put a link in the show notes. Sure, that'll be fine. That'll be fine.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

That's that's it. That's uh that's why we wanted to do the podcast, because the show notes, obviously, we can direct farmers to do things, we can direct them to go get a refractometer. You know, does it have to be something fancy, Dr. Dijkstra? Do you have any recommendations? Because we know we're gonna get that question.

SPEAKER_03 29:53

Oh, yeah. Um, you're you're talking to the wrong person as far as fancy. Uh, because if you said, should I get something fancy? My answer is absolutely yes. I want bells and whistles, I want neon lights. This is what I want. So uh there is an inexpensive refractometer on Amazon. You can get it for less than 20 bucks. Almost all of the refractometers are about the same. So if you want to spend, you know, 20 to 30 bucks, you can certainly find those. They're all about the same. Those are the ones that I do not use generally. I have several of them in my repertoire when I'm out there, but I don't like to use them because I prefer the digital refractometer, which gives me the points, you know, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6. It's easier for me to clean. It's very quick to move when I'm doing lots of measurements. So I like the bells and whistles. And I know what you're gonna ask, you know, how much does it cost? And I said, well, the good ones I don't think are less than 120. So if you want a good one, mine is 300. Uh, so if you want a good one, uh, I I would be thinking in the three figures, and uh, those are some of the ones that have worked out well for others. The one that I bought for$300, I bought uh it must have been 30 years ago, 20 to 30 years ago, and it's still working just fine. So they're I think worth the money. Uh if you're used to buying uh a$400,000 tractor, this is not a lot of money to you. Uh so I don't think anyone should be breaking the bank by even if they wanted to spend$100,000,$200, or$300 on a nice digital one. But if you want to go, if you want to go cheap, uh you can definitely do it for less than$50.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

That's really great advice. Also, I would say get a great case uh because they're gonna fall out of your truck a bunch. Uh that's just what always has happened to me.

SPEAKER_03 31:44

Uh they do come with cases. Uh some of some of them do come with cases, yeah. If not, yeah, put it in one.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Yeah. That's awesome. Well, we are gonna wrap up part one for this interview with Dr. Dijkstra. We got some show notes coming your way. I know a lot of curiosity is gonna be generated by this first part. We're gonna have a lot of your videos in the show notes that we can direct related to that chart and your explanation of it. Uh, when we come back for part two, the focus is gonna be practical things farmers can do to uh manage what they're seeing as far as their testing and actually them going from field to field and trying to understand and put some uh practices in place. But thank you so much for your time, Dr. Dijkstra. Thank you, Les. And we're gonna wrap this episode up and we'll come back with the next one uh in the next week.

SPEAKER_03 32:35

All right, fantastic. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Les. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

Thanks for listening to the Whole Farm Podcast by Chonex. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to subscribe and share it with someone in your network. For resources or to learn more about Chonex, visit choneux.ag. Thanks again for joining us, and we'll see you next time.