Bringing Biology Back to Soil: A Revolution in Agriculture

0:04 Can you hear it? There's a revolution happening under the ground around the world right now. The most revolutionary thing we can do is take the power back for our food, for our communities. The fact you guys are serving local food here for this event, that's a revolution. And it's a very exciting thing to be part of, and I feel very privileged to be here with you this morning.

0:30 I'm a little intimidated looking through your bios. The level of knowledge in this room could solve the world's problems, right? But part of what industrial agriculture is doing is creating a monoculture in the mind and a monoculture in communities and getting rid of diversity and getting rid of thought. How simple can we make a system so that you don't need to think? You're just going to punch it off. This is the calendar. This is the product. Don't think, give me your money. The minute that you start to buck that, you become a revolutionist.

1:07 But also, diversity. And first of all, I want to apologize for the fact that you guys speak funny. So if you don't quite understand what I say, I give you full permission just to ask me to say it again. You're actually helping your friends. So please interrupt at any time. I have no qualms. Ask questions. If you agree with everything I say in the next two days, that's not the point. I want you to disagree at some point, right?

1:40 You guys have heard Green Cover have brought some of the most incredible speakers to this area. It's quite intimidating following in the footsteps of who's been here already. You're going to be building a matrix of all these different ideas for what's going to work well for you. It doesn't really matter what I have to say. It's what difference it's going to make on your own operation in your context. So I've been very lucky to work in different areas around the world.

2:18 I started out really in horticulture, avocado production, commercial vermiculture. So if sometimes it might feel like I think every answer comes out the back end of a worm, because it does, right? But I'm very passionate about worms. And I think in 2006 was my first client and he said, 'Look, come to my place.' He ran an incredible vineyard. And I said, 'Look, I don't know anything about vineyards.' And he said, 'You don't need to. I do. What is it that you know about soil? Let's get together and see what we can do.'

2:54 And that first client gave me so much confidence. And what he taught me was the difference between coaching and consulting. And what we see in the world and what we're coming out of is the end of the consulting era. I'm sorry those of you are consultants. There's another level really which is how do I work with somebody else, walk alongside with them to find solutions that are going to work on their property and not just expert all them. So there's a lot of experting that's been happening. We have enough knowledge now. It becomes how do I implement this? How do I make a difference? How do I really change something?

3:32 That's all very well that it works in New Mexico or something works in New Zealand. How do I make it work here? So I feel a lot of the time that I'm totally out of my depth. Like, I know nothing about corn and soy systems. I don't even understand how the whole corn and soy thing happened. If someone wants to explain that to me one day, that would be great. But what I can talk to you about is how do we bring life back? How do we increase the quality? How do we reduce pests, weeds, and diseases?

4:01 Before COVID, I was working with around 2 million acres and that was intensive cropping in Canada and in Australia. Horticulture, viticulture, you name it. If you've got soil, we've probably worked in it. And a lot of the time I feel like, wow, you guys are phenomenal. The knowledge that you have, the ability that you have to solve these problems. In New Zealand, we call it number eight wire, which is that the number eight wire thinking is you can fix anything with a piece of bailing twine and a piece of wire. The innovation that's within a community is phenomenal. Let's harness that by sharing information.

4:41 So this is the operation. My father worked for Cathay Pacific and I left university with a degree in soil science. So I knew everything, right? So we were good. My dad looked at climate maps. We sat down with climate maps and we looked at where is the best soil in New Zealand and where is the best climate and we found a property that was just on the edge of what would have been considered good avocado growing. He brought the property and I left university with an immaculate conception and returned to this property. Historically, it had been sheep and—

5:27 Beef and dairy for a while. There's actually a dairy barn. Is this no, just confuse it. In the middle of that photo, that white shed is actually a dairy shed. I converted that into a worm farm. We filled the pit with concrete so I could ride my bike down the middle, feed worms on either side where the cows had stood, and then put worm farms out on that platform that the cattle would have stood on.

5:56 And we started our journey studying soil science. No one had mentioned that soil was alive. The textbook that they teach is still the same textbook today. It has four pages of biology. At no point was that mentioned. And Elaine Ingham came to New Zealand in 2002 and she said soil was alive and my whole world fell apart and rebuilt just in that moment and realized if we can bring biology. So the vermicast that I made, I had a high fungal vermicast that I was selling to avocado growers. I had a more bacterial one that I was selling to marijuana growers. They know a lot about soil and a lot about nutrition. In fact, if you look up nutrient deficiencies of any plant, the first plant that's going to come up is going to be marijuana, right? So if you want to learn something, talk to the marijuana guys. And what they wanted was a product that they could plant their crops into where they wouldn't have to come back and check them, which is important when you're not allowed to grow your crop and wouldn't have to worry about fertilizer or water. So they taught me a lot about water holding capacity, about nutrient availability, and also paying top dollar for a good quality vermicast. I was selling some of that vermicast for about $1,000 a ton, right? And we've seen vermicast in the States now being sold for as much as $1,600 a ton. Top quality vermicast made out of your waste products, straw, manure, cardboard, whatever, is turn that into a high value product.

7:21 So what dad and I did is we planted up the wetland, we planted up the stream. So if you see here this big patch, we planted 700 avocado trees. You can only see a portion of the property right there. But what we realized was really just by excluding and allowing land to rest, we changed the fungal to bacteria ratio and native bush sprung up. And now when you go to those areas, there's actually a standing forest. And it wasn't because of anything that we did, it's what we stopped doing, right? And that altered it. And I was like, 'Oh, wow. This is really easy. We just have to get out of the way and forests will grow.'

8:00 These are some of the best, most deepest, darkest volcanic soils in the world under incredible rainfall, regular rainfall, temperate grassland ecosystem. So moving to Montana has been a little bit of a shock. Just saying.

8:18 But I learned a lot through this process and I continue to learn a lot. So these days since when COVID hit, we realized I was actually in the process of trying to hire consultants because I wanted to hire potentially 40 consultants because we were working in Australasia, North America. Now we work in the UK and Kenya and I'm like we need a team and what I discovered was there are not people that are trained to read soil, plants, animals and be able to walk work with human beings. Like they can be really good with soils, you just don't want to hang out with them particularly, right? Or they're really good with people and they don't get the technical piece. It's like how do you round people out? So instead of getting big and running a big organization, I decided to pivot and shifted towards developing educational programs. So we now run a program that we call create. Brandy, are you in? Where's Brandy? Excellent. So there's a create graduate in the house and also Wyatt. Wyatt Ball. There you go. Right. So there's two create students in the house. You can talk to them about the create program. It's a 34-week agroecological coaching school and we put people through a gamut of personal and professional development because if we don't get some of this personal stuff worked out, we're not going to work out what's happening on the land. There's no difference in my mind. If you think you can't or you think you can, you're right.

9:44 And working with people and realizing that the biggest barrier to success on farm and on ranch is your mindset. And it's the hardest piece, right? It's much easier to buy a new piece of equipment or make up a brew of biologicals, but miss the timing and be super stressed out and overwhelmed and go home and yell at the kids. That's actually easier than actually addressing what are some of these mindsets, what's slowing me down, what stops me from being successful. And what I found in farming communities is there's a lot of negative stories about what hard, how what does it look like to be successful? And for most of you, would you agree to be successful you have to work hard? Is that something you were raised to believe? What's that cost of working hard, burnout.

10:31 Overwhelm, human health, right? All of that stuff is underpinning farming communities wherever I go in the world, right? So it's the piece that we really look at addressing. So we're very excited. We will bring the next one to Australia. We're on our fifth iteration and graduates now are working alongside 2.4 million acres in 16 different countries. So really, really pumped about this.

10:57 What we're seeing is it's people in their communities that then have that positive influx of what's happening. So the impact of people like Keith, right, is you have someone in that community who's really passionate. And then see all you guys are here. What does it look like to have people that are willing to speak their truth and communicate about what they're doing and start inoculating and pollinating our communities? Right? So what do you want? Tell me what is it? Why are you here? Why do you care? I'll write some of these things on the board. Hopefully you can see them. What do you want for your life? For your business?

11:41 So why do you want that?

11:49 A small scale. If you want a good living, right? Excellent. Harmony. Very nice. What does harmony look like to you? Equilibrium systems working. Okay, good. What else you want? Healthy food. Why do you want healthy food?

12:32 Yeah, I think in this country by the time you're 60, you're on at least five different medications. Terrifying. Some of you are like, 'Oh, is that all?' No. All right. What else do you want? A future. Yeah, let's do that. Clean water for your grandkids. What else? Yeah. What does resilience mean? Very good. So, adapt and overcome. What else you want?

13:20 Yeah. What's the average age in farming and ranching in the US right now? 60, 60, is it 80? It feels like it. No. So the average age in regenerative farmers in Australia is 37. It's how we get the young people back, right? Get them connected to this stuff, right? What else?

13:52 Okay. So you want to manage weeds without chemicals in a dry environment. Can I call that just reducing inputs? No tail. Okay. And reduce spray. I'll just say that. What else you want? Food ecosystem. Yeah. Oh, farming without debt. But that, so that your grandkids or your kids could profitably farm. Okay. Freedom. Yes. Save our farms. Doesn't quite have the same ring, but anyway. Yeah. Save our farms. Yes. Let's have some fun.

15:12 Yeah. We had a student recently who was very suspicious we were starting a cult. She was like, 'No one has this much fun. There's something wrong here. Why are you laughing? You're so jovial.' Is we bring back the fun, right? Because there's a lightness of being that starts happening when we reconnect with each other. When we become present, when we connect to land, fun starts to happen. Right? Anything else you're like that really needs to be on the board?

15:47 Okay. Right. Ameliorate. So this is how you spell it. Ameliorate CO2. All right. Excellent. Beautiful landscape. But why you want to ameliorate? Why do you care? CO2. Who cares? But why do you care?

16:10 Right. So in let's say stability of climate because it doesn't really matter where we go right now and it doesn't really matter what you believe. Climactic systems have become incredibly unstable, right? Flash flood, drought, flash flood, drought, hot, freezing. I did not dress adequately for this week at all. All right. So what does it look like to have stability? And I used to say climate's out of our control, but actually it's not true. Found some really cool data out of looking at California and California influences 7% of the rainfall that lands here. So if they're paving California or creating chemical fellows and taking management off those landscapes, it's actually influencing the entire continental USA. Interesting. Right? So there's things that we can do for climate, right? I work with producers that can actually show how they have influenced local climate and I'm going to show you that as an example with this right.

17:16 So this is called an innovation distribution curve. Some of you might have seen it before. So the idea is you have those early innovators, those 'I have a dream,' right? Those people that you probably were like they used to wear sandals, they eat lentils. I wasn't going to talk to them. Right? That guy down the road, he was probably doing this 40 or 50 years ago, right? Then we get some of the early adopters. And I would say some of you in this room are those early adopters, right? You're like, 'Oh, that looks interesting. I'll try it.' All right? Not so risk averse, not so frightened. And then we get that early majority who's like, 'Okay, right. Seems to be working for everybody else. I will try it.'

17:59 You get the late majorities who are still a little cautious. Is that a good idea? And then what we call the laggards. Why do you need toys when a stick will do? Now some of you know them. Some of you are related to the laggards. Like innovation will happen one death at a time is what happens with the laggards. Right? So I'm less concerned sometimes about trying to convince a laggard or trying to work with them and make them see the light because it's never going to happen for them. Not interested. Right? But there's an interesting piece of this curve that's not talked about which is called the chasm.

18:40 Right? And what's happening in the chasm is this: you see people will marginalize those that are trying new things. So you might have heard this: 'Well, you know, it's all very well that it happens at your place. You get more rain, right? Or it works for you because your wife has five jobs, right?' Then they ridicule you, right? 'Oh, well that—haha—sandals, lentils, whatever that is.' Then they'll criticize you and you're like, 'Excellent. I'm getting criticized. They're taking more attention. Oh, there's no literature to back that up. Show me your peer review data for that. You're just blinded. It's just a good season. Whatever that might be before they reach acceptance.'

19:27 This is a critical piece of transformation in communities. What is the most powerful agent for change in any rural community? Well they look at your success and go, 'Well that's all very well because your wife has five jobs.' Maybe. But do they really think, like if you think of some of the most successful producers that we have in the US, are all their neighbors doing what they're doing? Just no. Motivation. The need. The need for change. Yes. So we can be forced to change. All right.

20:14 And so we see when I wrote the book, I actually intentionally only interviewed people that were not motivated by a health crisis. Because when I started out 26, 27 years ago, a lot of my peers had been motivated because of a human health crisis or their children had died, like leukemia, early childhood leukemia, or there had been some heavy chemical exposure. Like quite a lot of my friends had used to be chemical applicators until they could not be around it because of multiple autoimmune. So they were forced to change, right? And I really hope that that isn't what happens. I hope we're not going to just be forced to change. But the most powerful influence and agent of change that we have in farming communities is peer pressure.

20:59 The social squeeze we call it because peer pressure is negative but the social squeeze. So I'm going to show you this example of the social squeeze in action. So this here is Roger Indrland. Roger and Betsy actually were my first US clients. So 2013 they had reached that point in terms of finances where they were like this system is no longer sustainable. We can't keep this up. They're an Angus stud. Indran Angus is the name of their business. This photograph was taken during a Native Energy. They were the first, I think, US ranches to receive credits for carbon.

21:40 And what's cool about them is he's in the Republican party. He has a different belief system than I. He's on the cattleman's board, the Angus board, very well respected within their community. These are what we call the opinion leaders. When someone like Roger and Betsy start to look at things differently, the community is like, 'Oh, that's interesting. What are they doing?' So I'm going to share a little bit of some of the things that we've done. But probably within about 5 years, this is called their farm ground and it's next to—it's not actually far away from where they have their bull handling facilities. There's but historically it had been farmed, right? So what you see growing really is 80% of it is fanweed or a yellow alyssum. It's non-microbial. Who's familiar with microbes? Who's never heard that word before? Cool. Good.

22:43 Non-mycorrhizal species. So that's telling us these plants don't have a relationship with beneficial fungi. Very low production. And he decided they were never going to do anything. But after 5 years, he's starting to see all the improvements on the rest of the ranch. And he was like, let's give it a go. So what we applied was vermicast. So worm castings. We put in a small amount of, in this case we used Epsom salts. So 10 kilos of, or 10 pounds of Epsom salt. So magnesium sulfate. We put a little bit of trace element.

23:20 When I talk about vermicast, we're using vermicast on rangeland at about 30 pounds an acre, right? We're not putting a lot on. We are tickling the system. How little does it take? That season the system blew to life. And I'm not kidding, that what we saw were species that hadn't been seen in Roger's entire memory, right? We're seeing native flowering species. Alfalfa came away. He's like, 'Where would alfalfa come from?' They actually sewed a trial with a hairy batch. So we put in two seeds, fall seeded, and then the following spring we came in and did a biological, and that system came to life.

24:02 Now there had been good moisture. This is one of the seasons, it was a big sweet clover year, but that farm ground fired to life. He now had something that he could graze. And now that system looks after itself. It was a single input to get that system firing up.

24:19 Now 2021, were you guys dry? Guys are real. Okay, anyway, in that year, I drove. I didn't come all the way down here, but went down through like Salt Lake City, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, then came up through Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and on 24 ranches I was on, every single one of those was on their knees, right?

24:50 The grasshoppers, that image there is not rain. It's a meteorological image of grasshoppers, the grasshopper impact that hit these regions. So people were planting cover crops and it all of it was getting munched. And I was driving through these regions and there was a dust storm followed by smoke that was coming. I think there was 600,000 acres on fire to the west of me in Oregon, just in Oregon.

25:27 And a thunderstorm came in. There were so many grasshoppers on the road that the road was slick. A wind came in and it had blown a truck on its side and power lines over and I was like, Armageddon's here. I'm here to witness it. And I had that moment of depression, right? I try not. I don't get depressed a lot, but that sinking feeling like we are really stuffed. And then I drove up to Roger Indulin's place and what they had was very little grasshoppers, but you could find grasshoppers, but what you found was spiders—billions of spiders. That ecosystem had restored itself to such a point that it was resilient against the impact of the dry spell and pests by just having that biodiversity in the system.

26:16 So where are our spiders? Where are those natural controls? So to be asking the question, if this is the problem I have, how does that work in nature? And that's what these guys are doing. And it's super fun to work with them. So part of what's happening in Montana, and it's part of the reason I live there. So when COVID hit, I was on Kangaroo Island south of Adelaide doing fire recovery. So on that island, they had lost 100,000 head of livestock in some mega fire, which the firemen had said did not act like any normal fire. It was walking against the wind. It was creating tornadoes. Farmers were burying each other's livestock because there was so many dead animals. And they said, 'Do you want to do a soil health workshop?' And I'm like, 'I think we just need a hug. Can we just have a hug?'

27:04 And so COVID was coming and I went, I'm going to go somewhere where no one's going to tell me where what I should do or what to do. So I got on five planes as all the borders were shutting and arrived in Montana and went, 'Phew,' because COVID didn't happen in Montana.

27:24 But what's interesting about Montana is there, it's one of the least legislated and least regulated states in the country. And what we're seeing is people are coming together as communities because soil health is the right thing to do. Not because someone's going to punish you and not because someone's going to reward you, but because it's the best neighborly thing we can do. And so communities are working together. And what's cool is I think nearly every one of these organizations has sent someone to my CREATE program or they are students that sees the vital connection of communicating with farmers from a farmer's perspective and not telling people what to do. Who loves it when you get told what to do? No one. No. It just doesn't work. Stop telling people what to do and instead be an invitation for change.

28:17 Organizations all have the same message and they work collaboratively in terms of how do we build resilience into farming or ranching systems or we're not going to continue to be here. Right? All the billionaires in Montana anyway are going to buy all the land and just lock it up.

28:34 So one of the things that we see as an outcome of this approach is what we call ecosystem services. So you're here, have you heard of ecosystem services? Right? It's kind of a word that started to get bandied around. I think the carbon markets are short for this world. The next one's going to be ecosystem services, so offset scheme. An ecosystem service will be anything from natural medicine to nutrient cycling, diversity, space for wildlife, healthy soils, pollination, water quality, erosion control. All of these are ecosystem services. You could really just life support, right? This is the reason we get to live on the planet. If you want to go to Mars, just go. But the rest of us, this is what's going to keep us being able to live on this planet.

29:27 And what's fascinating to me is as we transition to a more regenerative soil health focus and reframe these as life support systems. This research was done in New Zealand in 2008 and they compared a poor industrial dairy with best practice industrial dairy with regenerative dairy. And what they found was that industrial model was providing as little as $62 a hectare in ecosystem services. That includes the milk, which is bizarre to me. So they're actually a net negative. But even the best practice industrial is what are we doing with water quality, greenhouse gases, nitrous oxides, CO2, food quality. The regenerative is providing a hundredfold increase in ecosystem services.

30:16 Farmers shouldn't be expected to be carrying this alone. This is a service to the 98% that are living in the cities. We need to engage the consumers in terms of what are we doing out here. We need to tell our stories more powerfully because this is our ability to continue to live here, right? And I think things like dust storms, just very irritating when it gets in the air conditioning unit in my office, right, is people are starting to see the impact of land management in the offices or in their cars when you can't drive on the highway, right? We're starting to see those impacts.

30:58 Now, I want to show you something that I think is incredibly exciting. So the gray dot here is Indrin Ranch. This is a 16 mile diameter. Within six years, over 40% of this land area is now being managed using adaptive regenerative practices. So they've changed their mindset to think about how do I integrate with nature? How do I increase diversity? If I have this pest or weed or disease, how do I bring in that natural control? And they've altered their relationship to these landscapes.

31:32 And I was out on a branding and it was a very traditional branding, but looking around there were 16 producers there that were all running their own ranches using adaptive grazing. And while we're doing head and heel traditional branding, overflies a helicopter. And I said to the land owner like, 'What's with the helicopter?' And he said, 'Well, we're putting algae on our hay fields.' I'm like, that's wild. So here's some of your most traditional management with some of that cutting edge microbiology, new science in terms of how do we bring back more quality into their food production or into their hay production.

32:13 When we see this and so the ecosystem services we estimated went from about 1.2 million to just under 10 million in ecosystem services in that six year period. Someone's got to be engaged in these conversations, right? That's outside of the ranching community. But what I see is what's changed is people's relationship, right? Relationship to the landscape is how do I fit within this landscape and make it work instead of how do I control and tell my land what to do, right? How do I fix it? How do I reduce it? How do I make and force it to do what I want instead of all right here's the system that I'm working in. How do I make that system work for me so I could actually have a holiday? No one said holiday on here by the way. Rest. Rest. We know how important rest is.

33:08 That says minus 35. Do I have to finish talking? Can we have a timer that supports not jumping off the stage? Okay.

33:29 How do you define regenerative agriculture? You just in your tables, we're going to take a few minutes. I want you to discuss this at your table: how do you define regenerative agriculture, right? Can you do that? Talk to your neighbor.

33:49 All right, let's hear it. Drum roll, please. How do we define regenerative ag? So it needs to be just a little bit better.

34:04 Okay, all right. So something that's on a cycle of improvement. You want to say that, right? Yep. What else do you want? What should it look like?

34:22 Lovely. So the expert is those that are on their own bit of land. Yep. So it involves farmers. Cultivating life. Yep. Aligning with God's original design.

34:54 What if people don't believe in God? I'm not saying that to be troublesome. I'm just saying like how do we be inclusive? So sometimes if people don't, I what I like about this is it's inclusive. So if we use, so aligning or mimicking so with nature, life, energy, God, whatever your terminology is for that, like but that aligning and bringing more life to.

35:58 So absorbing your neighbors and exploding them with oxygen, taking their nutrients and pooping them out. Yes, I'm down with that.

36:32 Yeah, that whole you can't be in the green if you're in the red, right? So we need profitability needs to be part of this conversation. Yeah. Anything else?

36:47 Yeah. So everyone, how do you define it? Because we started using this word like I'm a regenerative farmer. What does it mean? Additive management. Yeah. So additive or virtuous. Yeah. So we think of virtuous upward cycles as up or vicious or compounding down.

37:29 Rebel. Yeah. But then what are you going to do? Because now it's becoming normalized. Right. So if we're over 40% and this is what I got when I left my hometown. I was farming in a place called Hawks Bay and no one was interested in what we were doing. We were the wackos and then pretty much the week that I left I heard that they were talking about us at the pub and it was in a positive way. I was like change is happening, right.

38:09 So I was out at Commodity Classic this past March and stumbled across a quote that was really good and it goes back with what you were saying earlier about other people's view of probably regenerative agriculture as a whole. And it says, worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for your reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

38:35 Yeah, that's a really good quote and very true. Very true. We like to put labels on things. Can you define conventional agriculture for me? Managing parts. Managing parts. How it's, it hasn't always been conventional, how it's recently been.

39:02 So we looked at best practices in New Zealand dairy farms. So looking at who was using best practices as put out by Dairy and Zed and what we found was in the whole country only 5% of farmers were doing best practice. 95% of them were doing them right. To define something by its processes and to try and put it in a box I think is impossible. We can't define conventional. We can't define regenerative.

39:32 The only thing that I can tell, so I used to be an organic auditor and one of the things I would do would be open people's kitchen cabinets and look at what food they were eating. It's quite indicative to, are you really thinking about this organically or are you looking for a marketing opportunity, right? If you've got Froot Loops and what are they called? Hot Pop. Hot Poptarts. It's like American language, like no idea what these things are. Is an indicator.

40:03 So what we would say is, is my relationship the world to fit to me? This is my definition. Are you trying to make the world fit and reduce the chaos and reduce the unknown because what's happening is we're frightened, that fear is driving our decisions and we're being reactive. Is I'm going to make the world fit to me. I'm going to put that this fertilizer on then I'm going to use this pre-emergent then post-emergent and then a bunch of fungicides and some pesticides and my world is good, right? That's fear driven in my mind instead of really thinking about the root of this issue lies in our relationship to the world around us. Am I at the top dominating controlling or am I part of the ecosystem? And that's what I see with the most successful producers that I've worked with around the world is they've altered their relationship to the world around them. It's not then about control. It's how do I fit to the world? The world is speaking.

46:28 Exactly. Yep. We've dealt with our anxiety. It's very true.

46:36 Okay. So our context is decisive and this is the important thing I found with traveling is people find different solutions to similar problems. They find their own solutions based on their context. But also I find people are trying to do Joel Salatin is fantastic in terms of what he's doing. But what I find is people come their first year into farming and they're going to be Joel skeleton. And I'm like, do you want to have a heart attack or a brain aneurysm this year? Is that the intention? I'm like, just totally overwhelm yourself by trying to stack everything of like until you understand what Joel Salatin's context is. How do you replicate that?

47:18 So I want to know what is your risk factor? What's happening financially for you? What happens climactically? Can you graze like that guy when you're on three inches of rain? Well, hopefully no one's on three inches. But understanding that context before you look at a case study and go, 'Oh, well, I can just do that at my place.' Is you need to understand what kind of things are going on in the background because sometimes it can be quite shocking finding out what people are doing is it wasn't on the brochure. Or you go and visit people and you go, you didn't talk about the fact that you're a gambler and every five years you lose everything and you sell a block of land, but you just talk to people about how much money you made this year. Like there's a lot of that you've got to actually be on ranch or farm to see what's going on.

48:03 I met a wonderful gentleman in the UK who is quite famous in England, amazing speaker, doing all this incredible stuff on his property. And then I went to visit him and I found out he works five days a week as a consultant and it's his wife that fully manages everything and she gets none of the credit. And I'm like, hm, interesting. Is how often are there things going on in the background that we don't always see? Who's the tallest drink of water in the room, do you think?

48:38 Who we got? No. Yeah, maybe Ryan. Who's up the front? Who's Keith. Keith, pick on someone. Then it's your fault.

48:58 Come on up here, Kip. Thank you. We appreciate your volunteering. Right. So, we're just going to do a little bit of revision. So, Kip here is the plant here. What's Kip's job? Photosynthesis. So every day you. Oh, you are a tall drink of water. Okay. He's capturing sunlight. What does he do with that sunlight? Converts it into sugars. All right. What's he doing with the sugars?

49:32 Huh? See, some of it gets fed to biology. So let's imagine this is your plant root. Keith, come up here. That random people come just it's fine. It doesn't hurt. We can make it hurt though if we want. Yeah. Thank you. All right. So, he uses some of those to grow roots and some of the sugars to grow leaves. So, he's going to grow a bit taller. Very good. So, you can pass some of the sugar. There you go. Stephanie, I'm going to use you in a minute. Right. So scientists have known this since 1880 is the plants are doing what with those sugars?

50:19 No, that not even that far. They're just you just they got to come up leaking. Leaking. I'm a big you're a big blood. If you move along, grab the end of the route. Sorry. Yes, Lonnie. Very good. Okay. So, you send the sugars down. Actually, I'll get you Stephanie to get up on the stage and be part of that root. All right. So, they're sending those sugars down and they're releasing them out the roots. Now, it's not just sugar. All right. Depending on the type of plant that you have, there's different types of things that they're exuding, lipids, secondary metabolites, which is what we're using to communicate with microbes and each other, fats, right? So, really, really critical in terms of feeding fungi, right? So, they're sending down those sugars to all right. Let's see here.

51:12 Can you catch? No. Not if I throw it like that. That's correct. All right. One of you guys. Excellent. So, we have a bacteria. You guys come up here. Right. So, the bacteria are going to consume these sugars. So the plant sends it down, takes some of those sugars. Lovely, lovely. So I want you to imagine these two lactobacillus.

51:47 You've just had one of the best parties ever. Everyone's been here. We all been celebrating. It's great. It's like after midnight. You want to turn the lights off. Everyone's leaving. And these two order pizza. Like what? So no. I picked well. They picked well.

52:08 Right. So no matter what happens in this game, these guys won't leave the party. There's also nutrients in the system, right? So they're consuming, you got a bit of phosphorus, you got a bit of nitrogen, they're consuming that and they hold it in their bodies. So imagine the bacteria are like a bag of fertilizer sitting in the shed unopened, right? Who's going to open the bag?

52:38 Protozoa. Very good. Do you remember like in maybe when you were 15 you studied biology and you studied paramecium? You're like, 'No, I blacked those years out.' Yeah. All right. So you're going to come up and you're going to eat those bacteria. Very good. So you just take the nutrients. Lovely. Delicious.

53:08 And then, so the bacteria is still here, right? They don't go anywhere. But now you've taken up more nutrients than what you need in your body. So you're going to poop it on the root. So poop the nutrients, give the nutrients to the plant. Lovely. Yes. Very good. And then the roots pass it up to the plant. Lovely. Good. And then what's Kip going to do?

53:37 Grow. Get a little taller, which we just don't need you to do. No. Okay. So he's going to get a little bit taller with that process. Yeah. More sugar. More sugar. Yeah. Very good.

53:51 All right. And then we have some other guys. So this one, what's this? An amoeba. I was in an event in Ohio and I walked into this gimmick store and they had a whole wall of soil microbes. And I like oh my god. And the guy at the counter was like, 'What the hell's going on?' And I'm like, 'This is the most excited I've ever been in my life.'

54:17 Okay. So we have these microbes. We also have who else is missing from the story? We have these two. What's this nematode? What's this bad nematode? Can I get a boo? All right. Can you do kung fu? You're about to learn. Yeah. Okay. So we have beneficial nematodes. But 95% of nematodes don't have names. 5% have names. Who are the 5% that are named?

54:56 Bad. All right, Fred, come and be the bad. You can handle it. I can see those shoulders. You're fine. All right. So the bad nematode, what's he going to do? What does he want to do? Want to eat the roots. Now, Garrison, your job is to fool him back, back to the back of the room, right? Right. So you don't want your food supply to dry up, right? So you're going to push him all the way to the back of the room. Go do it.

55:23 That was really violent. Going to push him. Push him. Keep them going. Keep going. Yeah, you can. It's I know teenagers. We can do it. All right. Go. Get him.

55:42 Very good. Right. So there's another microbe that's critical in this system. Who's that? Mycorrhizal fungi. So that's not you down here with Keith. Yeah. Oh god. That would be an endotype, right? So we talk about endophytes. They would join. Well mycorrhizal fungi are kind of endophytes, right? They live inside that plant, that some of that sugar.

56:09 So what we see with these mycorrhizal fungi and this is to scale, is they travel down through the soil environment looking for nutrients and while they go, now this is illegal in New Zealand what I'm about to do. If it lands in your coffee, not all right. So the mycorrhizal fungi will actually travel down here. Kade, it's fiddly, you go, you do. Yeah. Grow. Keep going. Okay. So along the way, he picks up a bit of phosphorus, right? Yes. Throw it. Don't hurt anybody. Okay. Excellent. And what he's finding right down here might be phosphorus. It might be some zinc. Might be some nitrogen. Excellent. You can stop about there. You stay, Kade. Thank you.

57:06 All right. So that transmission, so it's taking sugar and nutrients at the same time and it'll bring those nutrients back up to the plant. So if you're seeing zinc deficiencies in your plants, it generally is a mycorrhizal problem, right? What do we need zinc for? Immune, right? The same as you do in your own human body. All right? Nearly all rangeland operations I go into, they have zinc issues. All right? And some of it might be subclinical, but we're seeing zinc issues. When we're testing rangeland, we're finding zero mycorrhizal fungi. You should be very concerned. In cropping systems, zero mycorrhizal fungi in part because we've bred wheat and oats to no longer communicate with their microbial partners, let alone some of the other cultivars that we use have stopped this communication. What will stop that communication?

58:02 Tillage. Let me get another. I'll get you to stand here, Britney, if that's all right. So you can just be a protozoa. So come along and eat some bacteria while you're here. Make it worth your while.

58:19 Okay. So we can take some of that nutrient. You take some. Well, we run out of nitrogen. Just imagine, right? You're taking some of that nitrogen, but instead of pooping, you're going to vomit. Just vomit like that. Yeah. Oh, very good.

58:34 So critical in that nutrient cycling is we've now released the nutrients out of that bag of fertilizer and now we're doing things to disrupt it. So we tillage. It was a very short moment for you, but you can sit down. That's great. All right, we got some tillage. What else could we do?

58:54 Yeah. So an insecticide might take out another proto. Off you go. Go sit down. What other things might you do?

59:04 Overgrazing, herbicides, monoculture, very good chemical fellow. Oh gosh, we've just talked about everything in our toolbox of industrial agriculture, right? Breaks these pathways. Soluble phosphorus, right? The minute that we let go, yeah, you're not that strong, right, Kade? You can roll that up. Thank you. Is what we end up with.

59:42 So mean. All right. Is we're breaking down this system. Something like a neonicotinoid. So seed dressings all 600 genes in the plant. 600 genes. And many of those genes are responsible for communication and plant disease suppression and pest suppression. All right, good nematode. You've left the house. So, come over here. Back to your seat is fine. Thank you. You can't keep the toy though.

1:00:09 So what we're left is what we call this is typical of what we see on a biological soil test. Very bacterially dominated. These guys are holding on to the nutrients in their bodies. All right.

1:00:24 And who else is in the mix? Who's at the back of the room? And number two, this is your moment to shine. Come along. Oh, now I find all my things. Can I get a green cover crop representative? Come on. Get them. Just get them. Get the roots.

1:01:06 Okay. All right. So, the roots guys can sit down.

1:01:19 All right. So, we end up with a very damaged root system. So, roll those roots up. Very good. Right. So, how you feeling, Kip?

1:01:29 Weak. A little weak. That's all right because I've got the solution for you. Bring it on. What's in your bottle? What do you got? What tools have we got?

1:01:45 Beneficial things, fungicides, pesticides. Yeah. Yes. What else you got? No. What's this guy got for you? Excellent. So, pour it on.

1:02:06 And what I find really interesting in all of this, and we've done, has anyone got an EC meter, electrical conductivity meter? Yeah. Yeah. Cool. And what we see is there's a direct correlation with as your EC goes up, your root feeding nematodes go up. To the point was we worked with Perth Golf Course. They were spending a million dollars a hectare on all their inputs. And what they found was they had six and a half thousand root feeding nematodes in a cup of soil and they were using nematicides every week and they could not control it and their EC was off the scale incredibly high. So, your electrical conductivity could be driven by nitrate fertilizers, nitrogen fertilizer, and fungicides and pesticides. All push that EC up and now we're in trouble, right? So, this is conventional agriculture, right? Do we want this? Who's winning?

1:03:09 Yeah, it's doing very well. So, thank you everybody. Round of applause. How we going? Five minutes. Very good. Okay. So, any questions about that? Thank you. Sorry, no beer or pizza. Next time.

1:03:29 What are you seeing in your own piece of land? Are you seeing that you're getting balance with fungi to bacteria? Do you see more bacterially dominated environments? If you've got insect pressures, typically we find you're going to be more on that bacterial side, right? We've pushed that system so it's out of balance. Those plants are not able to get the trace elements or the metabolites that they need. So thinking about some of these secondary metabolites through plant breeding, we've disrupted that. And working in New Zealand, we're seeing that cropping operations are actually getting together and going, how do I alter the epigenome of what I'm producing so that I have plants that have adapted to communicate.

1:04:12 To microbiology and that we're keeping them generationally on. Right? So what you see with epigenetics and we're seeing more, are you guys thinking about this within green cover? Some is, how do we have plants that are prepared for the extremes—hot, dry, wet, cold? Are they able to communicate to their microbial partners, or is that pathway broken down? The only way that we see those pathways being restored is through having adequate nutrition. Right? Do they have the zinc? Do they have the manganese? Do they have the molybdenum or the boron in order to be able to have that communication happen, or is something broken down?

1:04:51 Right? It's not unusual for me to find operations that are not able to build soil carbon, and when we go and have a look, they don't have any boron in the system. Why do you need boron? What's boron doing? Moves the sugars. Right? So this whole scenario with the plant and communicating with microbiology—without adequate boron, we won't see that movement. Who's got a refractometer? Very good. So there's enough in the room to share.

1:05:22 Is it one way to find out if boron was missing? You'll see that your bricks, or the amount of sugar in the plant, will stay the same through the day. So measure it in the morning, measure it mid-afternoon, measure it in the evening. It should fluctuate with the sun, right? But what we see is if you don't have boron, sugar's not moving, you're not building soil carbon, right? Really simple.

1:05:46 Any questions about what we've just touched on this morning? Because we're going to have a break, I believe. Yes.

1:06:06 What would be the next step? Stop killing them, right? Whatever is disrupting, look at what am I doing to disrupt it, and then what could I replace it with energetically? Right? So if you are using a lot of nitrogen, how can I buffer and reduce some of that nitrogen? Or if you are using a neonicotinoid, how can we switch that out with a beneficial microbial? Right? We just had this problem working in Kenya. We got them, everyone really pumped up, the three largest producers in Kenya, to get them. They all decided they wanted to take neonicotinoids out, but they didn't have a plan B. What's next? So figuring out what your plan is going to be individual, right?

1:07:23 So, questions about pH. Bacteria make alkaline exudates, right? That was loud. Okay. So, I again, just for my example, I'm thinking more of like a western Kansas versus an eastern Kansas type situation here. So, like in northeast Kansas, we battle diseases more than insects. Whereas western Kansas, it's opposite. They don't fight as many diseases. They're more insect driven.

1:07:58 I'm just, I guess in your context of, you know, in a bacteria-rich soil, you have more insect tissues. How does pH come into play here? I guess is more my question.

1:08:09 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So where pH comes to play is if you imagine that this is the plant root. We hope that we have a rhizo sheath. Do you have that coating of soil and mucilage around a root? So, this is something you can immediately go home and do—is dig a hole and take a look. Do I have that rhizo sheath development? Is there soil, and it might be stuck just like this, but is it hard to get off? And you're just going to wash that root gently. That rhizo sheath, the microbiology in this, can alter your pH by as much as two units.

1:08:49 So, you might have a soil out here, it's nine, which would be extreme, but it's seven here. You might have a soil that's five out here, but it's seven in there. So, the problem is the rhizo sheath and that microbial communication. Is it happening? And what we find in most systems is it's not. And this is part of looking for health—if you see something diseased all the time, you think that's normal. So being able to see operations that are really working, and what drives this rhizo sheath is not microbes, which is interesting. It really is around bricks and nutrition of that plant.

1:09:31 We do find it changes through the season, and you can find it changes depending on soil type, but I've seen big rhizo sheaths in clay soils as well as sandy soils. And different species will form different rhizo sheaths. So asparagus, alum, the alum family, don't form big rhizo sheaths, but you'll see your barley and your oats and wheat really do. But look for that, right? So pH is an outcome of all the different interactions in the soil, and microbiology play a key role in that.

1:10:11 Break time. Okay. Yes. Let's give Nicole a hand for all that great information here from this morning.