Ep 13: Regenerative Agriculture, AI & the Future of Farming with John Kempf

What if healthier plants could lead to healthier people?

In this episode of Homestead & Heal, we're joined by John Kempf, founder of Advancing EcoAgriculture, to explore how regenerative agriculture has the power to transform not only our farms, but our food, our health, and the future of our planet.

John shares the pivotal moments that challenged conventional farming practices and led him to discover how plant nutrition, healthy soil, and thriving microbiomes can dramatically reduce pest and disease pressure—without relying on chemical inputs. Together, we explore the fascinating connection between plant immunity, soil regeneration, and the idea that truly nutrient-dense food can become a powerful form of medicine.

We also dive into:

• Why healthy plants have their own immune systems—and how to support them.
• How soil can regenerate while actively producing crops.
• The relationship between plant health, animal health, and human health.
• The work Advancing EcoAgriculture is doing to support regenerative farmers around the world.
• Kind Harvest and FieldLark, AEA's AI-powered regenerative agronomy platform.
• Why John believes technology should enhance human wisdom—not replace it.
• Growing up Amish, his early reliance on conventional agriculture, and the complete shift that changed the trajectory of his life's work.
• The importance of community, stewardship, and thinking from first principles.

Whether you're a farmer, gardener, homesteader, or simply someone who cares about where your food comes from, this conversation offers a thought-provoking look at what's possible when we work with nature instead of against it.

Connect with John:

https://johnkempf.com/

Connect with Lindsay & Scott: 

To learn more about our retreats: www.homesteadandheal.net

Connected with Lindsay: https://www.instagram.com/lindsaycourcelle/

Connect with Scott: https://www.instagram.com/alchemygardens/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Homestead and Hill. I'm Scott.

SPEAKER_02 0:05

And I'm Lindsay, and we live with our three children on a farm in Vermont. Our lives revolve around growing food and medicine, working with the body, and trying every day to live in deeper relationship with the earth. And now we're welcoming guests to our farm for intimate retreats where they can slow down and feel deeply into this earth-body connection.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

This podcast is about remembering something many of us have forgotten: that we're not separate from the natural world. Our bodies are part of it. Our healing comes through it. And when we reconnect to both, our purpose often begins to reveal itself.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Through conversations with herbalists, farmers, body workers, and people walking unconventional paths, we explore what it looks like to step outside the modern paradigm and build lives rooted in connection, healing, and reciprocity with the earth.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Hello, welcome back to the Homestead and Heal podcast. We're so excited to have John Kempf with us today, founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture. I first became aware of John's work. We had Dan Kittredge on on episode four, I believe. And I got introduced to all sorts of amazing agronomists, Jerry Brunetti and folks that weren't practicing anymore, Kerry Reims and all sorts of interesting characters. And amongst them, somebody that was still practicing and still is, John Kempf of Advancing Eco Agriculture. And from really early on, what I appreciated in pursuing this work of really better growing, better quality food was John's, I guess I was impressed by the way you seem to approach problems and think about things. The depth of your curiosity is impressive to me. And I'm a type of person that always wanted to get to the bottom of just doing things better on the farm. And even though my knowledge only goes so far, the things that I learned from Dan and the things that I learned from John Kempf in pursuing growing better food, even to understand some of the foundational pieces really drove the quality of our food so quickly. We were operating on another farmer's farm who had been tilling the land constantly for 35 years. For some reason, he's still able to be fairly successful there. There's something magical about his silty loam soil.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

And growing organically.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

Growing organically, but it was like a major boot camp for us because every disease pressure was present, every pest pressure was present. All of the weeds, we could grow gallon soda, like you can't even imagine on this overly tilled soil and lamb's quarter and pigweed. And very quickly, when we started adopting some of these principles, even with a surface level understanding, we saw amazing things happen on our farm. I've told the story on episode four, but we planted our zucchinian summer squash 20 feet away from the farmer that was growing there mostly. And we planted them a day apart, and his plants got three inches tall and three inches wide before they got totally turned into lace by striped cucumber beetles. We planted ours 20 feet away. And our understanding prior to this was that if there was that level of presence of pests, we were going to experience a total loss ourselves. But we saw just the opposite. Our plants got two and a half feet tall and three feet wide before they even considered pushing any flowers. And we could find a cucumber beetle here and there, but we had virtually no damage and then a stellar crop. And so at that moment, I was totally sold that there was something to this world that you're promoting, John.

SPEAKER_00 3:53

That's an amazing experience, Scott. That's a that's a light bulb in the face moment where you don't have a choice except to acknowledge and recognize that wow, something different from what we've been indoctrinated with is going on here. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 4:06

Yeah. We'd if you are willing, we would love to have you introduce yourself and your work and perhaps the company, however, you want to go about that.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for having me on. There's so much. Where do I begin? I grew up on a family of fruit and vegetable farm, and we had an experience similar to yours, except in our case it was with powdery mildew on melons, on cantaloupes, and we had this very sharp knife-line boundary where there was a former field border where on one side plants were susceptible to powdery mildew, on the next plant side they were completely resistant. Plants that were literally separate planted two feet apart had completely different outcomes. And as you can imagine, that really caught our attention. And from that experience, I started doing a lot of studying and researching, trying to understand what the differences were in those two plants and the in these two fields. And that led to a series of realizations that were connected. The first was the discovery that plants have immune systems. And they actually have the capacity to be resistant to diseases in insects when those immune systems are supported with nutrition and with their microbiome. And it was quite interesting for me to realize that there's not a quite a direct analog, and it's challenging a bit to make a claim for relative strength. But when you really dig into the biophysics and the biochemistry behind it, I think there's a strong argument to be made that plant immune systems are actually more robust and they're stronger than mammalian immune systems because they don't have legs, they can't run away. And so that was fascinating, just this realization that all of our plant nutrition work and all of our agronomy work up to that point, we had no consideration for plant immune systems. It wasn't even a part of the conversation. We didn't even know such a thing existed. And then from that, in parallel with that discovery, was also the realization that when we produced these incredibly healthy plants that were resistant to diseases and resistant to insects, two other things happened. The first was that soil health began regenerating while we were growing a crop. We had kind of this assumption or what we had been taught was that the process of growing a crop by somehow by its very nature is inherently extractive and we're going to remove things from the soil. And that if we want to regenerate the soil, we then have to grow other plants called cover crops or service crops to regenerate the soil. And it was fascinating for me to observe that we could actually regenerate soil by growing any plant, a tomato plant or a sweet corn plant, equally as much as a cereal grain crop cover crop. So that was the second realization. And then the third was that when we grew plants that had these robust immune systems, they also had the capacity to transfer that immunity and these immune compounds to the animals and to the people who consume them as food. And we could start having a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine. And as you might imagine, the combination of those three things combined has the capacity and the potential to solve so many of our collective ecological challenges on a macro scale. And that was an incredibly inspiring vision for me. And so what emerged out of that, I started a consulting company called Advancing Ecoagriculture, and then we developed some specialty plant nutrition and microbiome support products that weren't really available in the marketplace. That's still a team of amazing agronomists and people that I work with to this day. We work on millions of acres of crops around the world. And that led to a social networking platform called Kind Harvest. All the data that we collected in the growers that we were working with led to a data set that eventually led to an AI called Fieldlark that was designed to be a digital, would democratize access to information, the things that we had learned with our team. And it seems like there's probably a few more things that I'm that I've got my fingers in as well. I'm executive editor of Acres USA magazine and I do some other stuff.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

But I didn't realize that.

SPEAKER_00 8:18

Yeah. And my hobby is beekeeping in a research greenhouse. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

And you have a family.

SPEAKER_00 8:24

And I have a family, yes. We live here in northeast Ohio in the snow belt south of Lake Erie, about 25 miles from the lake, just about an hour east of Cleveland.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Nice. And near to where you grew up as well?

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Yeah, I'm 10 miles from where I grew up.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Oh, that's great. That's cool. And I should mention that I got introduced to Field. When did you launch Field Lark?

SPEAKER_00 8:43

I don't remember. Roughly a year or so ago. Last year.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

Yeah. I guess I had seen some post about it or something. And then you gave an interview about this LARC project that you're working on. And I was, I didn't know very much about AI. And I had some nervousness or skepticism or worry about this. But you made a really compelling sort of argument as to basically the what it boiled down to for me was that these AI tools have the capacity or ability to maybe serve as the world's best librarian. In the history of the world, humans have certain types of capacities. And these AI, this computing power of AI has a different sort of capacity that actually fills a gap really well to be able to pull on amazing amounts of information if it's fed the right type of information. And I think that was a particular thing that really caught my attention. And so I started playing around with Field Lark and was like, oh my goodness, this is incredible. And so I've been using advancing eco-agriculture products for a long time because I found them to be really effective, a handful of them. And I don't know, maybe I'd I don't want to say that I'd plateaued in my growing because I am a very curious person and I'm always looking at what's going on. And we we've had a lot of successes on our farm. We grew a lot of beautiful, high-quality produce. Ed told Dan that we one time had a bin of storage carrots that got pushed to the back of the walk-in cooler that we found two years later without any carrots in them. Whoa, that's awesome. I don't typically achieve that. I've got some rotting in the cooler right now. But at times we have achieved that sort of thing, which was like there is something going on there that is so compelling.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

The other thing is just the flavor. And I'm sure you know this. But anytime we have to eat vegetables, even from other local farms, it's like an entirely different food. The potatoes, the carrots, it's just the berries, even it's like an entirely different experience. Our kids don't really understand it. They're like, how could this taste that different?

SPEAKER_01 10:54

But they always notice. Yeah. They're like, these aren't nice carrots, sort of thing. Which I appreciate. It makes me feel good about what I do out there. Where was I going? Oh, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Talking about the carrots and storage, just to offer an anecdote, you mentioned Carrie Reims in your introduction. There's this story. Carrie was an innovator in this space and an aspiring pioneer for many people. And there's this story of him successfully winning the, I forget was it the county fair or the state fair, but successfully winning first prize at a fair four consecutive years with the same watermelon.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Oh my gosh. No kidding.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Wow. Oh wow. That is incredible. Yeah. One crop that we have that typically performs that way are spaghetti squash. They just have a glass, the skin is just like glass. They'll go a couple years, easy. But oh I was talking about field lark. And so not that I had plateaued, but starting to have the ability to tap into that resource, I was so sold so quickly because all sorts of little nuances and things. We were practicing a handful of things in my so now we just we're it's a homestead. I'm not growing commercially. I grow, I try to grow enough that even in a bad year, we have plenty for our family of all the produce that we grow. It which means in an excellent year, I've got a bunch of surplus and we can sell some to neighbors or through an online market that we're still a part of and that sort of thing. But being able to so sort of the foundational things that we do, we always inoculate all of our seed. We often inoculate at transplant time too. We always give a transplant drench. And we've reduced tillage as much as possible. And when I have time, I give foliars as needed. But some of those things that I'd settled in on, the systems of how I approached those protocols, was into a groove. And I wasn't necessarily changing it up very much, or I wasn't always exactly sure. I had some general sense of the purpose of all of these things that I was doing. And I could more than anything, I could see that I generally worked quite well. But having the ability to talk to Field Lark and say, hey, this is what I'm seeing on my blueberries, and this is what I am thinking of doing. What's your take on it? And what I've found that it's actually helping me to do because it points out so specifically the very nuanced truth of what is happening developmentally in the plants throughout the season, I'm foliar feeding more this year because it's reminding me of the critical nature of some of these things and helping me to again understand better what is functioning at a deeper level. So that's been a really amazing gift.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

I think as anyone who I think most people who are really conscientious about how they engage with technology and the way they allow technology into their life. I come from the Amish culture, which this is a very big thing for us culturally and also for me individually. Sure. I I have substantial reservations about AEI and where AI and where it might go in the future and and how it could misguide and misdirect people who become used to easy answers. Sure. And who don't exercise critical thinking. And so and I still have those, but I also I do see the strengths and the values. The technology is continuing to evolve so rapidly, and and field arc is continuing to rapidly get better as as the overall field advances as well. But one of the things that I thought at the beginning that probably wouldn't be able to have happen, and this was with where the technology was a year ago, was there is something very human. When you ask a human uh who is an expert in a certain domain a question, sometimes the answer will be you're not thinking about this correctly. What you really should be thinking about is not A or B, but it's X, Y, or Z.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

And I didn't expect that AI would be able to develop that capacity quite that quickly. In the early days, it answered the question that you asked, even though it might have been the wrong question. Sure. That's already changed. Wow. It's already able to redirect you and say, Yeah, that's a great question, and here are some things you might think about. But actually, you should also think about these other things over here. They might be the foundation. So that was one aspect that I found really intriguing. And the other that I'd say I suggest probably the most common feedback that we get from Field Lark is how it connects apparently disparate dots in people's minds that it might say, actually, the agronomic conditions that are leading to your virulent gallant soga outbreak or pressure, are also the same foundational causes that are contributing to cucumber beetle pressure, and here's how. And you go like, wow, I didn't know those two things were connected.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Yeah. That's so cool.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Yeah, it's been interesting for me, just again, like you said, for people that are intentionally using technology to just I think the the important thing in my mind is that we're in inquiry around all of these things, how to use these tools in a way that in a way that feels right. And as I said to you, I'm a body worker. I work with energy. I'm often feeling into things. And I can just tell that Scott's interactions with this AI system are really beneficial for him because he's it's not putting him too much in his thinking brain where he's just then beginning to overthink and override his intuition. He's still just able to meet the land in the way he always has, but with a little bit more of this background knowledge, which is really cool.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Well, I spend a lot of time architecting the brain or the morals behind Field Lark and guiding it to analyze and to think from first principles and to connect from a first principles perspective and to have an ethical framework and to have a moral framework. And it was quite interesting, and it was something that required a lot of soul searching for me and thinking deeply about how we engage with technology and what the optimal relationship is for us as humans to engage with technology. Because I think I actually I wrote an article, it's been published a couple of places online, about the the potential of AI and human relationships. And there's a few things that are worth pointing out. One is that we are historically tool users. We use lots of different tools, and I think one of the pieces that we've failed to appreciate is how those tools influence our consciousness. There is an aspect of we adopt the consciousness of the tool. If you ask someone to go prune a fruit tree and you give them a hand pruners versus a saw, you will get two completely different pruning outcomes, even though it's the same person and the same tree.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

But the tool influences the job that's done. And the same with your clearing land, whether you have a bulldozer or a chainsaw, it's you get two completely different outcomes. So there is an aspect of which in in which the the tool influences us and the choices that we make. There's a number of things for us to, I just think, be very mindful of and just use technology mindfully.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Yeah, no, absolutely. And like I said, that interview, I forget the name of the name of the episode, but you had a long conversation about this whole area. And you were talking about the Amish community. And I think you were speaking specifically to your Amish upbringing and talking about looking at technology, like where technology misses the mark or causes problems, is where it displaces the human human lens or human aspect.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

That was my other that was my other thought, is that so frequently technology is designed and it's intended by its creators to replace people. Sure. And I'm of the persuasion that particular in agriculture and the pursuit that we're pursuing, the the highest and best use of technology is not to replace people to but to help those people be better. And one of the things we're we're also we have crop scouting tools and technology that we use internally within AEA. And so that one of the ways that we have been using these technology tools is to uh improve people's observational skills when they're out in the field, ask better questions like what exactly are you deser observing? What is what is the plant phenological expression look like? What does a corn's kernel shape look like? What does a leaf expression look like? How severe is this disease actually? And using it to prompt all these types of questions that inspire better observations, and then those observations get fed into the database and improve the capacity for better future observations. So that's designed with the intent of enhancing the things that only people can do, and that that intuitive feeling sense of feeling and observing what's happening, what's going on in a field.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

I love that. That's great. And that really does change my willingness to engage with a tool like this, knowing the level of I don't know, intentionality. Yeah, intentionality that went into developing it. So that's really cool. I if I think now we would like to take a step back a little bit, and I'd be really curious to hear a little bit about your childhood. If you could see the makings of 2026 John Kemp in in yourself as a kid and your upbringing, connection to the natural world.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Oh, let me see what what aspects should I bring forward? There's so many. Growing up in the Amish community in a family that was relatively conservative in our community. I grew up only two and a half miles from town from a local bank and post office and grocery store, and yet even in that environment, or being in having such close proximity, going to the grocery store was a major highlight. I couldn't say exactly, but if I had to remember back, I'd say we went to the grocery store two or three times a year. Yeah. And we for quite a number of years, my parents bought salt and pepper and coconut oil and spices and the things that you couldn't grow on our farm at home. And and in terms of uh foundational food ingredients, we grew the vast majority of it or sourced it from neighbors who were growing it. So that was actually an incredibly rich childhood from a food perspective. And then of course we always had large gardens. We had our own family dairy cow, we had our own beef, we had our own poultry, we had two ponds in which we grew fish. We had honeybees, we had maple syrup. And so I developed my appreciation for honeybees quite early. I was nine or ten years old when I first I loved it so much that I actually took over taking care of the honeybees from my father at about that age. But then my father started growing vegetables to sell wholesale when I was around nine years old. And that quickly grew. By the time I was mid to upper teens, we were at 15 acres of vegetables. And I suppose it's also worth mentioning that I was the oldest of nine children, and there was a substantial amount of food processing that happened, as you can imagine. We didn't have freezers, and so canning was the primary means of preservation. Okay. Our target for various types of tomato sauces and ranging from pizza sauce and pasta sauce and et cetera, et cetera. Our target was 400 quarts for the van. And my brother, I had a brother who was just a year younger than I, and two of us were the oldest. We helped mom a lot in the house. And so we got we were in charge at a past a certain age point, I'd say in our lower teens, we were in charge of making all the tomato paste and everything. And not just the tomatoes, but also when we processed turkeys and we made turkey sausage and everything else, we would process 30 to 40 turkeys for the family in a period of a day or two. And an hour.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Not to interrupt, but with no freezer, you were you how are you preserving?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Pressure canning or yeah, cold packing for the most part, but cold packing and pressure cooking where necessary.

SPEAKER_02 23:36

I'm sorry, did you say processing 30 turkeys in a couple days span? Just you and your brother?

SPEAKER_00 23:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

That's an an incredible amount of work.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Just we do pressure can some meat, but yeah, just to clarify, it would be the the actual butchering of the birds themselves and scalding them, plucking them, and so forth, that would be a family project that would last for a couple of hours. Sure. And then all of the all of the further processing over the next couple of days would be a couple of us being in charge of that.

SPEAKER_02 24:05

I'm still amazed by that, just based on the amount of pressure canning we do.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

It was we had the right size setup. So our 400 quarts, if things went well, we could do the 400 quarts of tomato juice in a day. And our approach, of course, you have to remember we're growing an acre of tomatoes commercially. Okay. And so when we're running our grading line and our packing line, we have lots of tomatoes that don't qualify that get graded out. So we would have five-gallon buckets filled with fairly large-size tomatoes that we're selling commercially. And our foundational to cook things down and to cold back, we had two iron kettles, a 35-gallon and a 45-gallon iron kettle.

unknown 24:49

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

And so we would be running both of those in parallel. At first thing in the forenoon, when we started, we would be cooking tomatoes in them and turning them into paste. And then the moment the paste was done, everything would get ladled out, put into crock pots, or when one of us would start running the Victoria strainer, and we would immediately wash out and clean out the kettles and fill them with water and rebuild the fire. And by the time all the tomato paste was through the Victoria strainers, it would go right back in and be cold-packed. And we could do two cycles a day like that.

SPEAKER_02 25:18

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

Industrious.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Yeah, I'm curious about your trips to the grocery store as a kid, your two or three times a year trips. Did you I'm curious about your curiosity around what was sold in the grocery store?

SPEAKER_00 25:39

It was more bewilderment and amazement than curiosity. What is all this stuff?

SPEAKER_02 25:46

That totally makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

And was that also coupled with maybe curiosity or bewilderment about how the rest of the world lives?

SPEAKER_00 25:55

Not at that age. No, it was. Then later on, when when my father started growing vegetables commercially, he also was one of the original founders and founding members of the local produce auction. And he also served as an order buyer at that produce auction for a number of years. So we got to spend a lot of time with him transporting things to the produce auction. Then three days a week, we would be, we would spend half a day at the produce auction interacting with other buyers and helping load vehicles and load trucks and and all that kind of work. So yeah, we had a lot, we actually had a lot of interaction. And then also when we started growing vegetables commercially, I we had a roadside market, and I ran that roadside market from age nine to 14. So I had a lot of fun with that as well.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:43

I'm curious, just as I think about and don't know much about the Amish community. And in the interview that I've heard with you speaking about this community and how intact it is, it seems just so amazing and so wonderful. And we're very lucky where we live here in Vermont. I feel like communities are some communities at least are very intact and it's so important and such a critical piece of health, I think, really to be part of a community.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

I'm wondering something that we talk about on this show sometimes with people is the times when they've they weren't necessarily disconnected from the earth, but they've felt a disconnection. And this is my own story. I had a period of time where I just, it was like amnesia, as one of our guests, Pam Montgomery said, you just forget that you're connected to the earth and it can lead to a lot of sickness, whether that's physical, mental, emotional. I'm wondering if that's ever something that comes up in Amish communities, this forgetting that how connected we are with nature, or does it just remain intact for most people?

SPEAKER_00 27:49

I'm not certain how to answer that question. It's it's interesting that I think we have these fascinating polarities within the Amish community collectively, and actually it's probably true within communities at large, but it's not confined to the Amish communities. But we have this intriguing dichotomy where historically the Amish community came from an incredibly strong agrarian culture. The reality is when the when the Swiss Anabaptists were driven from Switzerland for their religious beliefs, they were welcomed into certain regions of Germany following the 30-year war for one reason and one reason only. Their renowned capacity to regenerate farmland. And they were invited into some of the valleys and mountaintops that had been destroyed during the Thirty Years' War and were asked to regenerate them. And they did so so successfully that they they engendered a lot of enmity and jealousy from the people who were in the region that also then created its own problems. Actually, people came in and just took farms away from them in a number of instances. And so there's this long history of, and you could even say this epigenetic memory of the knowledge of how to regenerate farmland and how to regenerate soil and how to interact and how to be connected with the land. And so there are very strong remnants of that within the community where even though the primary livelihoods of people for the most part are no longer agricultural-centric, there is still a very strong culture of gardening and growing a lot of your own food by certain segments, but not by everyone. And then you partner that, and particularly for the people who've become less connected to that, and there still remains this extremely strong work culture. And so there is a segment of people, a group of people, who bury their loneliness in work or bury their disconnection in work, I suppose I might say, or they bury it in social activities, and there there is there certainly is a lack of connection there, and that is becoming increasingly evident in people who are drowning their sorrows in medication or just they're not really addressing root causes of challenges anymore.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

And I guess that kind of leads me to a question around connection with your body. And I know you said your wife is a healer, or I don't know exactly how you would describe her, but working with healing is that do you have memory of obviously food was very much a connection to your body, and work is a connection to your body. I'm so curious now that you mentioned these medications, is that how do you how does the Amish community kind of view connection to their body? And as we've talked about maybe before the interview started, just that there's no separation there, body and earth, really.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

Again, there's there's strong polarities within the community.

SPEAKER_02 30:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

It's quite interesting. You have this maybe one way of describing it would be to say that we have this this strong heritage, this strong agrarian heritage, and that there are certain segments of the community who are moving away from that. I once described the Amish culture as and it's not just Amish, I think it it stems back to the German and Swiss forebears. There's a similarity in culture that they tend to be fairly intense at whatever they choose and whichever direction they go. So if they chose to be a regenerative farmer or an organic farmer, it is all in 110%, no holds barred. And vice versa, if they go in the direction of adopting chemicals and genetically modified organisms and everything else, it is the same story. It is all in, no holds barred. There is very little, I suppose you could say in some ways, there's very little moderation. And there is this similar phenomena culturally where people who have gone away, who've moved away from having their own gardens and producing their own food, like they've just they've gone 100% in the other direction.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

Interesting. That kind of leads me into another question, which is around, I was listening to an interview with you recently, and you were talking about conventional wisdom and how sometimes conventional wisdom is something that's been passed along without a lot of scrutiny. And I'm curious in your story, like having that type of work ethic, having that 110% driven towards whatever you're looking at. Your upbringing Okay, one question. Was your family using chemical as you were doing your commercial veggie business? Were you using modern technologies and chemicals and that sort of thing on the farm?

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Very intensely.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Very intensely. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:43

Very intensely. I was a licensed pesticide applicator when I was 16 years old. My father was a pesticide distributor for the local region.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Okay. I felt like I remembered you saying that your father was like some sort of chemical consultant, or he he helped other farmers understand how to buy these things.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

Well, he had a supply business. We he supplied all the seeds and fertilizers and equipment and everything that went with growing vegetables commercially, and was he was actually asked to start that business or to host that business because he was somewhat centrally located within the community.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

And that that business grew and took off and eventually became a pesticide distributor as well. And because of that, we were the first people to try all the newest, latest, and greatest stuff. And when we smacked our heads against the figurative brick wall in the early 2000s, we made a clean shift in one winter, the winter of 04 and 05. We he continued with the rest of the business, but chemical distribution completely stopped. It was like no more chemical. We didn't sell any chemicals, we didn't have any of them on our place anymore, and we no longer applied anything on our crops. It was again, I suppose, an expression of that, just a complete radical shift.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Wow. So that was like that must have been an extraordinarily steep learning curve for you to have been doing it in a certain way and totally shift gears towards something different.

SPEAKER_00 33:59

Yes, it was, and that was a positive. And also what we had been doing was no longer working. So why keep beating a dead horse?

SPEAKER_01 34:06

Sure. I think that's where I was trying to get at with my question is what do you think it was that allowed you to really have you always had a pretty open mind, an ability to pursue things that you're unfamiliar with, or like a type of curiosity that allowed you to change things up and take a new sort of direction?

SPEAKER_00 34:27

Yes. Okay. Yes, very much. And I owe a debt of gratitude to my parents and to my father in particular for providing the space and the permission to question why are we doing things this way? My brother and I both we challenged many things of why we were doing things in a certain way. We were constantly looking for greater efficiencies, more effectiveness in in our work and the things that we did. And so there there was that that grace and that that permission to have that mindset and that curiosity. That was a very important space to be able to be to up to operate within. And then, yes, it's accurate that I've always had that perspective. And one of the things that empathy is required to be able to really connect with people, to understand where they're coming from, and to help move them in the direction that they want to go in or that is better for them. And one of the things that I struggle with the hardest, that is the most the space that's the most difficult for me to connect with other people around is people who feel stuck or trapped in growing a certain crop. Okay. Or doing things a certain way. That's one of my biggest personal challenges in connecting with people because we had all of this fluidity. Of course, we're growing annual vegetable crops, and if one crop doesn't do well in our conditions or a market emerges for another significant crop, we would pivot, we would change from year to year. Yes, we had some constants, but we're constantly the farm was constantly evolving in the crop mix that we were producing. And that then I managed an organic vegetable farm for a couple of years. And that thinking just continued. We would we were constantly adapting to the market. And even for perennial crops, I'm I I also have so many connections with farmers who they do a unique crop very well. There's one farmer that comes to mind that I was doing a thousand acres of corn and soybean crops, conventional crops, but then he does 20 acres of strawberries. He makes more money on the 20 acres of strawberries than he does on the remaining 980 acres. And I can literally name 50 examples like that right off the top of my head. Yeah. And so when people do those things, and then other people come along and they say they are stuck. They are trapped. They say, I can't grow anything other than corn and beans because I have all of this capital investment in equipment and infrastructure. I have all these loans on the land, I need the crop insurance, I need the backup. I'm trapped, and I can't change. Maybe you can't change 4,000 acres, but you can change 40. Sure, sure. And it's so it's that type of thinking where people assume that they are stuck. That's probably one of my most difficult frameworks to empathize with.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Yeah, that's interesting. And I appreciate your mentioning the empathy piece because that's that is another thing that I've appreciated about your show, is real empathy for the state of farmers and the place that they find themselves in this modern moment of relying on the chemical companies and Roundup and the whole deal and these huge, sort of elaborate systems relying on things that are quickly showing us that they're just diminishing returns and poor results.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

And when you look at the whole ecosystem and the way it has been vertically and horizontally integrated, when you look at the cargills and the ADMs and the four big food process uh meat processors and everything else, the only reason farmers are needed in the system is to hold the risk that no one else wants to hold. That's it. That's the bottom line. Because the vertical integrators have already, they have taken advantage of every place they can get a penny from. And the only thing they need is someone else to offload the risk they don't want to carry. That's the only reason farmers still exist in this vertically integrated world.

SPEAKER_02 38:34

It's big, but big and heavy. And I'm just so curious about this. You've identified this piece being challenging for you when people feel trapped. And I was just thinking about similarities for me in my own work, just certain things like when people are afraid of their emotions, for example. And I'm like, but that's just it. It's like you have to feel your emotions, or people that are afraid to touch their body and heal themselves, or things like that. So I guess I'm curious, do you foresee that over the years you will I don't know. Do you feel like this is your work in the world? Is to be able to hold the space for these farmers that are feeling so stuck. Or do you see it as yeah, I guess I'm curious. Do you feel like you're getting better at being able to empathize with them over the years?

SPEAKER_00 39:23

Yes and no. Yes, in many other areas, no in that not that particular area, and I believe that's a strength.

SPEAKER_02 39:29

Yeah, good.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

Because there are different types of coaching and development. I've been asked to come in into challenging situations as a business advisor in a number of different enterprises to help them solve and resolve family disputes or major business decisions related to a transition or purchases and or selling a business. It's I've been involved in a number of situations as an advisor. And what I've uh observed my strength to be and what is really needed in many of those cases is speaking uncomfortable truths. It's speaking uncomfortable truths. It's not in in many of these situations, having empathy, yes, having empathy is important, but having empathy to the point of not being willing to say what needs to be said is actually the barrier in many interactions and in many human relationships. And so I see a foundational part of my role in many ways is yes, to have a connection with people, you have to have a foundational relationship so that people can hear what you are trying to communicate. But then I think a part of my role is to speak uncomfortable truths, to say the things that people know deep in their hearts is true, but would rather not acknowledge. And so there is that aspect of coaching as well, is just to say, you know what? You seem to really be enjoying battering your head against the brick wall. When are you going to move in a different direction?

SPEAKER_02 41:03

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

I think that's a great distinction. Yeah, an important one. And it I wonder about this as a larger pattern for the sort of like state of farmers and farming community, like being stuck. Like I feel like anyone who tries growing in the ways that you're describing and the work that AEA is pursuing pretty quickly starts to show you that there's some real wisdom that can really move the needle. But like the resistance amongst farmers at large is just perhaps being in a generational system of like not being willing to question those big things or not being not feeling able to pivot, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

Or just fear, fear and there are layers and layers. And I've studied this for 20 years. I've studied the psychology in general and the psychology of farmers in particular in as much depth and detail as I've studied agronomy for the last 20 years. And there there are layers. First of all, I'll just mention a few. One of them is age. The majority of the current commodity crop producers are 65 and over. They're not at the age where change is appealing to them. Sure. That's one factor. Second is many of them do feel many of the farmers who are not in that age bracket, who are younger, are truly trapped in a system. They are dependent on financing. They're dependent on bank loans and operating loans and mortgages. In order for them to keep those operating notes and to keep those mortgages, the banker requires crop insurance. In order to qualify for crop insurance, they're required to follow the mainstream agronomy recommendations for pest control and for fertilizer applications. And there you go. They want to try something regenerative? They can't. They don't have the choice, at least not an entire farm scale. Again, they can go change 40 acres, but they can't change the entire farm. So the older guys don't have the desire or the the willpower capacity to change. The younger guys, who often have the desire to change, lack the freedom to change because that they're constrained by. When things break in a catastrophic manner. We came right up to the edge of that during COVID when we had supply chains collapse. But that was just that was the tip of the iceberg about what could conceivably happen from a whole number of there's a whole number of weak points in the overall system. I hope it doesn't happen, but the system is vulnerable enough that it's reasonable to expect that at some point we will have an energy crisis, we will have a fertilizer crisis, we will have an aging farmer crisis or a skills crisis. There are any number of things that could happen that could cause our food supply chain to just crash for a period of a couple years. And that I think would facilitate a real wake-up call.

SPEAKER_02 44:46

Absolutely. Yeah, and I'm curious, I kind of like to shift the conversation a little bit back to thinking of this time before things shifted, before the chemical inputs actually just going back to your ancestors and curious about if you had relationships with grandparents, I'm guessing you did, or great-grandparents. And if you even remember witnessing some of the shifts within just within your family or within the larger Amish community as well.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

Yeah, there certainly were shifts. And yes, I grew up participating. I had the privilege of growing up directly across the road from my grandparents' farm, my my maternal grandparents, and just two and a half miles away from my paternal grandparents. So family and being on those, both of those farms was an important part of my childhood. We helped with, we were, of course, growing vegetables, but on those farms we helped with grain harvest, we helped with the threshing, we helped making hay, we helped corn silage and harvesting corn and all the things that would typically happen on a small mixed dairy farm. And so that cultural and community connection and family connection, I think, is one of the foundational when I look at what is happening, what is beginning to happen in some ways within some parts of the Amish community and what has happened with mainstream society, I would suggest that the fracturing of family is at the foundation of a lot of our cultural collapse generally. It's when it became more important to pursue a career and people could fly across the country and be six or ten hours or more away from the rest of their family, that work and other pursuits replaced family connections. And that is what has led to the decay of so many different things. So I don't know if it really answered your question or not.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

Oh, absolutely. And we 100% agree, Scott, our children are seventh generation, right in the on Scott's side, right in the area where we live. But I don't have those sort of roots, and I can feel, I can actually feel it in my body that I just don't have that rootedness. That there were periods of time in my life where I felt quite lost because I just didn't, my my family moved so much and going back generations. And obviously that's a story for so many people today, but for us, especially with our children, we're really trying to cultivate a sense of place for them and connectedness and obviously connection within Scott's wider family as well. And so yeah, I guess that that is my question. You answered my question. And I'm also curious if I don't know if you would speak about your own children and your own family, but just I'm curious what you've brought from your childhood and/or what is different from the way that you are raising your own children and family.

SPEAKER_00 47:36

Yeah, that's an interesting question. We have we have one little one little girl at this point. She's six years old. And yeah, her her the first six years of her life and mine could in some ways almost not have been more different. Um, in the sense that I was a very popular figure within the agricultural community. I traveled a lot. And I to some degree where possible, I took the family traveling with me. Okay. So she's traveled a lot. She's very familiar with hotels and with traveling and with being in public spaces and being around other people. And at my age, I was completely isolated. So there's quite a strong contrast there. But aside from that, in in terms of the the cultural and the family connection, we spend three weekends out of four with family, with grandparents, with cousins. And so there is that richness. And it's not just the weekends. There's I mean we have interactions, I'd say three to four interactions per week where we get together in an evening, get together and play games, sit around a campfire and visit, help each other with work. Just there's all kinds of things that are happening socially on an in fact, if there's any critique that I would have, I recharge by being alone and my wife is a social butterfly. So we have that dynamic between us, but there are a lot of activities constantly going within the Amish community. I imagine that many people who are like myself who would prefer to have more alone time, uh, they either have to opt out or they're gonna get their batteries drained. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:21

We've got just a couple more questions, but one thing that I'm hearing, and you're describing this, is just, and that I'm always curious about is the work piece. So when you're working to feed your family, or when you're working to improve your farm, or just working around the home with your family or your close neighbors, I feel like that is part of the the real missing piece, the dissolution of family, like you mentioned. But also, I feel like what I see is so few people where we live, anyhow, in Vermont, there's a lot of people that are interested in good food and homesteading and local farms and all that sort of stuff. But I would still say the majority of people are really not involved in working, like doing work that feeds them on their in general and with their family. And I feel like that is to me, if I could change something, it would be to encourage just more people. I always say that even if I could inspire people to grow enough that one time a year their family got to eat a meal that came from their garden or that they had a hand in being involved with, I feel like that would start to really shift the dynamic because it just changes our relationship with the way we operate as people living on earth. And I so I just feel like I feel like that's an interesting piece. That not knowing much about the Amish community, the little bit that I do know, whether it's made up or not from what's out there to know, is that seems like a critical foundation to what's really a strength of that community is that that necessity of people coming together to work together.

SPEAKER_00 51:09

Yes. And the way you've you ended that, the phrase that you used, the necessity of coming to work together. I'd like to I'd like for us to rethink that just for a bit. There is there has been the tendency there was the tradition within the Amish community, still exists, the tradition of uh coming together to help each other work on projects. And we have this word for it. It's an English word, but it's been adapted to have a different meaning within the Amish community. We call it a frolic. Okay. We have a frolic. When we get together to uh make your supply of firewood for someone who isn't able to do it on their own, there'll be twenty, thirty, fifty people show up, and we call that having a frolic. Wow. When we get together to build a building for someone, when we not so often anymore, used to have a lot of get together and have corn huskings for someone, those were all different versions of frolics. Some of them were shorter term, some were longer term, but people would get together and have fun. It would be a social event and a social relationship event. And over time, as the wealth of the community has increased, people have become more independent, and they do less and less of that, and they just do more things on their own. Or they hire people to do them for them. And what is growing now, there there was this that that there's been this clear trend over the last 20 and 30 years to have fewer and fewer frolics. But what is happening now is some people increasingly are recognizing that this is a challenge and they are choosing to not be as independent and to do things together, even though it's perhaps not as convenient. But they're choosing to do that deliberately for the community and the relationship aspect. So it's not by necessity as much as it is by choice that if we want to have strong relationships, we should choose to do these things. And it's it's very easy to uh or many people find it easier to go help others than they do to accept help.

SPEAKER_02 53:21

Right.

SPEAKER_00 53:22

But uh in order for this to really work, uh you have to have people on both ends of that spectrum. You have to have people who are willing to accept help and the people who gladly contribute and volunteer. And then the other aspect of this is that you also have for people who participate, you have to have the willingness to sacrifice some of your time and energy to go help other people. And I think that's been perhaps perhaps one of my foundational realizations over time is that a community that has this type and depth of collaboration relationships is not a reflection of what you receive, it's a reflection of what you contribute. You shouldn't think about community in terms of what it is you're going to get out of it. You think about community in terms of what you're going to put into it. And when everyone engages in that way, you have a truly incredible interaction and relationship on a community level.

SPEAKER_02 54:17

And it just mirrors the reciprocity of the earth, really, us with the earth, which is so important.

SPEAKER_01 54:25

I love that reframing and I love that term. I've never heard it, and that's gonna be we're going to fancy frolics. I love that. I'm gonna we're gonna try to incorporate.

SPEAKER_02 54:34

Is that okay if we absolutely know?

SPEAKER_00 54:37

It's yes, please, please do. A friend of mine, I described once the different the different archetypes of frolics. There's kind of three different archetypes, and he suggested that I write a book about it. That hasn't happened. But there what is fascinating about a frolic is that there is no boss.

SPEAKER_01 54:56

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 54:56

There is no there there is a leader in the sense that there are several people or someone who knows what's going on and knows what needs to be done. Okay, but everyone just shows up and looks around and observes to see what needs done and pitches in and does it. And so there is no there's no social hierarchy at that. And and particularly for a lot of the for a lot of the firewood frolics, you get a lot of young men in their 20s and 30s involved, and you know exactly what's going to happen. There's instantly this level of masculine one-upsmanship of everybody trying to demonstrate, particularly if the ladies are around, how hard they can work and how much they can get done. And you could get an incredible amount of work done in a short amount of time if everyone pitches in and contributes in that way.

SPEAKER_01 55:49

Yeah, put that masculine leaning to good work. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 55:56

I love that so much. I think it's just such a great idea. And I still see in our community, there are maple syrup, sugaring parties, and our friends that dug out their cellar, and there are little bits of these frolics that are happening, but not quite super regularly.

SPEAKER_01 56:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 56:15

So more, more.

SPEAKER_00 56:17

Yeah. Maybe it just takes you to organize them.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

Yeah. I was just thinking very specifically. I went and saw an elderly friend yesterday. He's a chef by training and really incredible at his trade. And he is really interested in growing. He has just his garden is incredible. Tons of azaleas and rhododendrons and odd stuff, a lot of stuff that we're not supposed to be able to, it's not appropriate for our zone quite, but he has successfully grown. He's got an interesting sort of microclimate. But he has had this issue. He's in his 80s and his balance has just fallen apart. He has just lost his, he's using two canes now, just all of a sudden and falling over. And so all of this work of his, you know, 30-year garden and just climatis growing all over his azaleas and rhododendrons and things. And I was thinking, I don't know if he would accept. I would love, I I told him that I want to go over and help him reclaim some of his garden. And I would love the idea if we could get a dozen people to go out there, we could transform his place in the course of an afternoon. But maybe bringing this lens to it will help.

SPEAKER_02 57:24

I think if we call it a frolic, he will absolutely be for that. 100%. We're doing it.

SPEAKER_01 57:30

So yeah, just being conscious of not burning up too much of your busy time.

SPEAKER_02 57:34

Just basically one or two short questions.

SPEAKER_01 57:37

Yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 57:38

One is just the advice that you wished you would have gotten earlier on in your life. Is there anything that comes to mind?

SPEAKER_00 57:48

There is nothing that comes to mind. One of the things I've tried to be mindful of, of course, coming from a Christian worldview, trying to reflect and constantly evaluating myself, my decisions and choices and actions. And asking the question of what the best way is for me to show up in a certain situation. Every week every evening at the end of every week, I like to reflect back on the day and the week and and ask myself the question what's my phrase? I don't think I don't think of it as a question, but I like to be able to think to look back and say, in that moment, I did the best that I knew. Today, five years later, ten years later, twenty years later, I might look back and say, Oh my goodness, you really should have done this, you should have handled this quite differently. But in that moment, I truly did the best that I knew with the best guidance that I had. And with that comes a lot of freedom and liberation from future judgment. Because yes, we can always, we're always imperfect. We can always look back on our past selves and say, we wish we would have done things differently. But in that moment, if we did the best that we could come up with, then that self-judgment and scrutiny does not serve us. It doesn't help us. We just need to look forward and continue doing the best with what we now have learned today.

SPEAKER_02 59:25

That's so powerful.

SPEAKER_01 59:26

That's amazing. And an amazing full circle sort of response because that's something that Lindsay often isn't that a phrase that you often use with folks in your practice?

SPEAKER_02 59:36

In my healing work, just helping people come around to remember that they were doing the best that they could.

SPEAKER_01 59:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 59:42

It's just that acceptance that so many people they get stuck. They get stuck and they need to accept that they did the best that they could at that time.

unknown 59:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 59:53

And just and very last thing, just anything that you'd like to share as to where people can find you and the work that you do and connect if there's many places you can just search for me.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:03

My kind of the central spot and repository where most things are connected to is my my personal blog at johnkempf.com. Then there's the company of Advancing EcoAg. They can find Kind Harvest. There's Field Lark. There's a bunch of stuff. But JohnKenf.com links to most of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:19

Perfect.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:19

Excellent. Thank you so very much for your time and this wonderful conversation.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:24

It was such an honor to speak with you. I'm so grateful. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:27

Thank you. Thanks for the work that you're doing and blessings, and may you have an awesome growing season and awesome interactions and community.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:34

Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Homestead and Heal. If you loved it, please help us spread the word by subscribing to this podcast and leaving us a review. For more information about our work, visit homesteadandheal.net.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:48

We're wishing you the life of your dreams, one that feels deeply rooted, fully alive, and connected to the earth beneath your feet.