Building Soil Biology with Cover Crops, Vermicompost, and Rotational Grazing

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Green Cover Podcast where we have really interesting conversations with some of the top farmers and experts in the regenerative world. Join us as together we learn how we can steward, share, and regenerate God's creation for future generations. You know, my guest today has a really interesting background. He spent the early part of his career at Rockwell and Boeing working on the main propulsion system for the space shuttle program. And today he goes out and checks on hundreds of thousands of worms, thousands of grape vines, and hundreds of sheep. And somewhere in between these interesting and varied careers he spent 20 years as a science teacher. And I think as you listen to him talk, you'll understand that he's never stopped being an engineer or a scientist, especially when it comes to the soil. So our guest is Mr. Patrick Kavanagh. Patrick, welcome to the Green Cover Podcast.

0:54 Thank you. Glad to be here. Yeah. So, you know, not a lot of people have that type of resume. Talk to us a little bit about how you got to where you're at, why you went from, you know, the space shuttle, the teaching to where you're at now, because I to me and I spent 10 years of my career teaching as well. So, I could certainly appreciate that part of your career. But just tell us briefly about the space shuttle program.

1:21 Well, I wanted to when I was growing up in college, I wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to fly jets is what I wanted to do. But I ended up working out of college. I got my aerospace engineering degree at the University of Virginia and found a job with Rockwell out in California where we were building the last of the space shuttles, Endeavor. So, I popped in right the last three years of building Endeavor out there and it was a blast. I learned a lot. I ended up moving to Houston, working on the shuttle for another 10 years after that in the engineering director down at the Johnson Space Center supporting NASA again working with Rockwell and Boeing. And while I was there, I met this gal actually playing ice hockey. She and I both played ice hockey. And but anyway, she also worked at the space center. We got ended up getting along getting married. So most of you know or have heard of Laura Kavanagh, Dr. Laura as she is now.

2:41 Yes. And for those of you that don't know her, she is a great scientist but a great teacher as well. We had her on one of the early episodes of the podcast and we'll talk a little bit more about her work later on as well.

2:54 Yeah. So I blame most of where I am today of course on her. It's worked out okay. We've been we've been pretty good team. So anyway, she was working at the space center as well and at towards the end we both were seeing the eventual spool down of the program and we started looking at other options. She decided to go back and get her doctorate and at that point we moved to North Carolina and I needed to find a job. So I was looking for engineering jobs. Not a whole lot of aerospace up here in North Carolina. So started reaching out a little bit and I also happened to be a coach. I was a lacrosse coach and I used that as first of all just to get a little bit of work one year and they was doing substitute teaching to support that. We had just had our first son as well and decided to make that a full-time job. So I went and got my teacher certification here at UNC Chapel Hill. Kept teaching, did that for 20 years, coaching the whole time. Until just recently, three years ago, three, four years ago, retired from teaching and went to fill in at Union Grove doing the job of soil director of soil health, vine health with the vineyard that Laura had been working at prior to her taking the job at advancing eco agriculture as their chief science officer. So just kind of filling in there. So I'm retired technically, you know, a couple times. Not that that has anything to do with anything because we're still working and working on the lab with the spin-off from AEA and our lab, the joint venture, Gentrek Labs. So we're keeping we're keeping busy in all respects.

5:18 Yes. Yes, indeed. And I've been to Union Grove Farms a couple times. We're going to be coming back there soon for the regenerative nexus. We'll talk a little bit more about that later as well. But, Patrick, tell us a little bit about the vineyard there because it's it's pretty unique. You know, I work with a lot of vineyards. Most of them are in California and most of them are growing wine grapes. You are neither one of those. So, tell us a little bit about.

5:43 What's unique about Union Grove? Well, first of all, the grapes themselves are very unique. They are unique in that first of all they are not your standard vinifera grapes which are the wine grapes that most people grow for either wine or the table grapes that you get out of California and Chile and in most of the grocery stores. The grapes that we grow are a hybrid between the native muscadine grapes of the southeast and a variety of vinifera that are seedless. Thompson seedless is a pretty standard table grape.

6:43 One of the a breeder who happens to live here in Hillsboro and used to be at NC State has been developing through traditional breeding practices that take forever, crossing the native muscadines with the Thompson seedless to produce a seedless variety. It's taken a long time. His name is Jeff Bworth and he's an awesome fella. He developed these seedless grapes and at some point I think about 2017, 2018-ish I don't know the exact date, he crossed paths with Greg Bolan who is a venture capital manager who lived here in Chapel Hill and they started chatting. Greg had a small farm at the time that he was looking to do something with and thought that planting grapes would be a good use for his property.

7:49 So he looked into that and asked Jeff to start putting in some different varieties on his farm, his personal farm there. They were successful. They grew well. They were testing a bunch of different varieties and Greg also decided was working with some folks who introduced him to the concept of regenerative farming. And he thought that it was something worth putting time and money into. So he started looking at opportunities to grow from his own personal farm to something that was more akin to a commercial operation. They purchased a couple different properties nearby, one of which happened to be right around the corner from where Laura and I live near Hillsboro, and we ran into Greg and the manager of the operation at the time, Martin Crampton, and hit it off.

9:00 Laura had just retired from Senta Corp working in microbial research for Sententa and basically explained to them that this was the type of work that she was interested in and would love to work together. So she started working with them to develop the basis for their regenerative operation—building out the compost operations, working on improving the metrics of soil health and all the other things that folks will hear about more. But it ended up being a several year job for her which eventually allowed her to move on. But the vineyard itself then acquired a dairy farm that was closing down and was being put up for sale near between Hillsboro and Chapel Hill and right around the corner from where Greg lived. And so they purchased that property and we have been building out that property mainly because it's good agricultural land ever since.

10:14 We have just this year pretty much filled up all of the property from the Maple View Farm as it's called with the plantings and are actually starting to move into some of the ancillary properties that we have under operation as well. We're about 140 acres now. So we've gone from 3 or 4 acres at Greg's initial property to 140 acres at three different properties now in 4 and a half years. It's been a crazy amount of growth. It's been very challenging both from an operational standpoint as well as a monetary standpoint. A lot of money goes into building out a vineyard. I won't say we're doing it on a shoestring, but we're not doing it in any kind of luxury either. We're trying to keep the price down, and that's tough to do in North Carolina when most of your vineyard equipment and materials have to be often times shipped from the West Coast.

11:29 And very often there's not a whole lot of folks around in this area who are used to building out vineyards. So we're learning on the fly as we go. We've hired a vineyard manager who has been working out in Paso for years, Tim Linquist, about a year and a half ago and he's

11:50 Been awesome helping us to focus and work on things to improve the operations as we're getting there. But the folks involved are awesome. They're really dedicated to the process. They work like dogs when the time requires it. And it's been successful. The vines are growing really well. At least one variety is, one's not. Those are challenges that come with the nature of pushing the boundary and these new varieties are, like we said, something completely different.

12:32 They're delicious and we think people are going to really love them, but they have their challenges.

12:38 Any type of agriculture does, but you know, especially vines, which you said, four years to get to where you're at. And some people may go, well, that didn't sound like that much, 140 acres, but so labor intensive and so financially intensive. And I have been there and I've seen some of the soil that you guys started with. Some of that's pretty rough.

13:04 We're not even in the rough. We're not even planting in the roughest soil yet. And some of even some of that was rough. But the actually one of the fields at the original home site was some of the roughest soil that I've seen in terms of trying to renovate it and get it into it. And we just after four years of working it, we just planted last year the first batch and this year we filled out that particular field and those vines are doing wonderfully. The effort and the work that we put in those four years has paid off and we're hoping it'll continue to pay off as we turn those areas that were we knew were going to be challenging. The vines are actually stepping up to the process.

14:04 That's one of the important things about regenerative agriculture is the fact that you can use an agricultural process to renovate a degraded ecosystem and a landscape.

14:22 And you can turn it into something that's not only productive from an agricultural standpoint, but also use it to improve the insect population and the bird population and it can be beautiful. And all those things that come with the ideals of regenerative agriculture, whether we live up to them perfectly or not, we know it's a process. We know we're always having to try to do a little bit better. It's innovating. It's very, it's something that makes you want to go in and think about it and do some more work and try to make it better and think about what can we do with this other piece of land that's even worse. And the interesting thing about the grapes is grapes are native to the area. They have adapted to the soils of our area and the challenging climate.

15:28 We'll get into some of those challenges of the Southeast that make it challenging for regenerative agriculture, organic agriculture, whatever the label you want to put on things. The Southeast has some unique challenges that make doing those things difficult.

15:52 You have to put in a little extra effort. You have to be a little smarter to make it happen. And you know what? Sometimes it still doesn't work. And you got to recover and try to do something different. We've been through that multiple times.

16:08 I love that. And the challenges as well as the tools that you're using are not unique to growing grapes. They're there for any crop that you're growing and really any region. Your challenges are unique. The practices that you're using are somewhat unique as well, but the principles of regenerative agriculture remain the same. And I want to go back to something that you said earlier, Patrick. You said that when Laura first came to Union Grove, she started this program that would be the basis of the regenerative program essentially.

16:45 And that's really highly biological. I want you to talk a little bit about the composting operation, the verma compost, the extracts that you're making, how you're utilizing cover crops and now you have integrated livestock, you got Katahdin sheep there that you've integrated into the whole operation as well, all of which are biological processes. So talk a little bit about why biology is the underpinning of your whole program and maybe even how that is true for whatever crop you would grow.

17:21 Biological processes are the underpinning of regenerative agriculture because biological processes are the underpinnings of nature. It's really that simple.

17:33 Are not trying to reinvent how nature works. Yeah, we're trying to figure out what nature has been doing for millions of years to make ecosystems work. No, nobody was out fertilizing or applying pesticides or herbicides or anything else into the forest that made up the southeast before the 1950s. You know, they were applying manure. Sure, there was manure.

18:07 They were using fire judiciously. They were tilling, manually tilling. All those things that come in, but ultimately it was nature that was providing the nutrients. It was prepping the soil. It was fighting off pests or using the ecosystem to allow the plants themselves to survive.

18:35 And I'm not going to say it was perfect by any means, you know, in terms of your picture postcard type of farm where you see everything is perfectly the same row after row. No, it's not that. And that's part of the. But that's not what nature looks like either. Yeah, exactly. Nature is by its nature a bit random and it's a bit rough and there's always those changes and every single season I've been working directly on the farm now three years, every single year the weather patterns have been distinctly different.

19:20 We've had wet seasons at various parts of the year. We've had extreme droughts two out of the three years for almost three months of our growing season at different points in the season though. So every year we haven't been able to repeat anything. We've got our lessons learned at the end of the year. We think we need to do this, we need to do Y, we need to do Z. And we get to the next year and the challenges are completely different and X, Y, and Z really needs to be Y, Z, and X in terms of the way that we go about it.

20:02 And there's something and there's some other new challenge. You know, we're just waiting for folks on the East Coast, if they're listening, will probably know what I'm talking about. The spotted lanternfly, you know, one of an introduced pest. We're just waiting for the spotted lanternfly to get closer to us and we're terrified of it because it's incredibly destructive to grapes. It's they are its second favorite feast. We know it's coming.

20:33 We're trying to prepare to make the vines as healthy as possible, but at the same time, we have to fight off the Japanese beetle and the aphids and the grapefruit bores and all the things that have been here forever. And we're doing a pretty good job of it. I will say we're managing those issues that are new challenges. We're managing the challenges of getting new plants in the ground in the middle of a drought. We're learning lessons about what we do and don't do. You know, you absolutely cannot put the vines in the ground without having water ready to go at the fields. That's a no-no.

21:18 And it seems kind of basic, but there are lots and lots of different kinds of restrictions and challenges when you're getting that stuff happening. So yes, we're constantly doing it and the biology as we get back to your basic question, the biology builds that resiliency and that ability of the ecosystem itself to meet the challenges that the plants see when they see it.

21:49 I like to think of, you know, I may be a smart guy, but I am not as smart as the plant itself when it comes to determining what they need. So I would always defer to the plant telling the soil what it needs to be healthy. I can help it out. I can provide nutrients if I know the soil is deficient in something. I can make sure we've got lots of organic matter. But most of all, I can help that soil get to the point where it has plenty of the bacteria, plenty of the fungi, plenty of the micro invertebrates that work within the soil to help move that around. They are all working to make a resilient ecosystem.

22:48 And we do that in a number of different ways. You talked about the vermicompost system. We started with the vermicompost system for the simple reason it was extremely compact and Laura in her work studying soils previously had pretty much decided that from a bang for the buck standpoint, vermicompost is one of the best biological amendments that you can possibly get. It's not targeted, but it's diverse. It's not highly fungal, but it's got some fungal aspects to it, and it's very rich in the bacteria that naturally work in soils and work with plants together.

23:43 Now, then you can use that especially for soils that don't have a good biological basis. And a lot of the soils that we were starting with were heavily rowcropped and chemically treated. They were no till for some 20 years, rowcrop corn, soy, wheat mixed in various rotations, but lots of herbicide. Glyphosate was sprayed. They were poor biologically. They were fine nutritionally.

24:17 But they were poor biologically and they were kind of heavily compacted. And so we had to work with those aspects which farmers across the country I've seen fields out in Nebraska that put ours to shame in terms of the color and that nice chocolate coffee color soil that you've got that's 6, 7 feet deep and I was just drooling looking at that because ours is red and then goes to pale clay in some places. But yet you had compaction 18 inches down in that beautiful soil because of challenges that you had in that area. So we're all dealing with that.

25:02 We've got those issues and so we use the verma compost and then we're like, okay, how can we effectively get those microbes out to the fields in an economical manner? We can take verma compost and you can sprinkle it in your garden or a small organic farm. Just taking the compost itself is probably the most effective way. It's very effective. But when you're trying to do it to even 15 acres or 140 acres or 500 acres we aspire to, that's not going to work.

25:38 So we started working with a fellow by the name of Todd Harrington who was using extracts and we managed to acquire some equipment from an old Campbell soup factory. It was some sort of soup factory and bought the equipment off of an auction for cheap, moved it to the farm and set up a facility where we could extract the materials from the verma compost and the bacteria and use those extracts and they're quite effective at getting the biology, our first dose of biology into the soils and we use it in a number of ways. It's our starter. It's our sourdough starter.

26:30 Now, over the last few years, we've also broadened into using Johnson Sue reactors, bioreactors to produce a more fungal dominant compost, and we mix that into the process to try to improve the fungal part of it. We of course take the extract and we inoculate our bulk compost process. We have we make a lot of bulk compost using leaves and wood chips from the towns nearby and all the arborists and folks that we have in the area who are always looking for a way to deal with their waste. It's not waste. It's product that they need to dispose of and we help them out. It's a win-win for everybody involved.

27:28 And we make our bulk compost biologically active and healthy. And we use it both as finished compost as well as mulch that we use to apply to the wind rows to provide soil protection. It uses some weed suppression. I won't call it certainly not elimination, but suppression. I'd like to use more of it, but that in itself is a challenge with manpower and equipment. So it's big and it's bulky.

28:00 And then but then we get to our once we get those things established, then we go we bring in your expertise with the cover crops. Ultimately, you've got to have those plants. You've got to have this plants doing the work. I like to look at it as an engineer and I was a physics kind of guy working with stuff. I think of it in terms of energy that if you're going to do work and the microbes are going to do work in a physics sense, they're going to move things around. They're going to build molecules. That requires energy. And the only source of energy we have out there is sunlight.

28:44 And the only way that we capture sunlight and turn it from thermal energy hitting the ground and making it hot to actual physical work and the stored energy within the system of the ecosystem is through the plants.

28:59 And it's free. That energy is free. It's free, but it's not unlimited. So you've got to capture what is given to you every single day for every single hour that you possibly can. You've got to have photosynthesis going on in that soil. And every inch of ground that you do not have capturing sunlight striking the ground is for the most part wasted even in the winter time. And down here we're lucky enough where we don't get a hard freeze. And so the biological processes don't pretty much come to a standstill. We can be capturing energy and sunlight.

29:40 And our winter covers can be doing that work in the winter time, packing in energy into their roots and putting it into the system. In the summertime, we're our limiting factor is water. So we're trying to make sure that we're getting as much infiltration of the water as we can. And I want to make sure from raising my vine standpoint, I want to make sure I'm keeping the soil cool enough and turning that energy into sugar rather than turning it into heating the soil up to 100° and killing things in it.

30:20 Yeah. And that's a very real thing. When you leave bare soil in the environment of anywhere south of the 30th parallel at some point during the year if it's bare soil you're getting hot enough at the surface to kill the microbial life in it. You're sterilizing it and that's not healthy for the system. No, that's not going to make the system work. And you know you mentioned the cover crop seed that we send out. In fact, I think we're working on a shipment to get out to you here this fall for your fall and winter plantings, which will be grazed by those sheep.

30:58 Yep. But we're introducing additional biology just with those seeds as well. Absolutely. As many of the seeds that we sell, we try to either grow in a regenerative environment or at least have seeds grown with regenerative practices that helps that plant store a lot of biology right in the seed. You know, the amount of microbes in the seed, I think, you know, Christine Jones, you know, it's a staggering number. You know, six, seven billion microbes just in a single seed. It's astounding.

31:37 The understanding that we have developed over the last decade of the extent of the microbial environment within a plant all throughout its life stages on the leaf the phyosphere the rhizosphere along the root surface. Dr. James White and all of his work with rhizoagi and how the microbes are actually farmed and harvested by the plants themselves in the process. The microbiome that's carried in a seed as you mentioned, nobody was even thinking about that as a biological inoculate 10 years ago. And now we realize, well, it's a major part of what a plant in its embryonic form of a seed brings with it. It's not just the genes and the function of the seed itself. It's those microbes that are riding along with the seed throughout its life, bringing it into the soil so that they can help the seed do what it needs to do.

32:46 They're just like the microbiome that a child receives from its mother through nursing to see the gut biome of a child. There really is a parallel there that is amazing. And it's almost amazing that we didn't think about it sooner because when you look at it in hindsight, it's blindingly obvious that you would expect that to carry on.

33:14 Yeah. And it's also sometimes blindingly arrogant to think that we could somehow strip those two from each other and still have a successful ecosystem and actually be able to survive as an ecosystem or as a species. I remember when I was growing up reading Isaac Asimov. I don't know if anybody's a science fiction guy, but one of his tropes was that when you went to space, you would be free of all those microbes and all those diseases and things moving out into space. And of course, I didn't think twice about it at the time, except as a literary driving force of a plot in a series of stories.

34:02 Looking back on it, as I've gotten involved in this, I realized, you know, that was really silly. I won't say a harsher term. It was really a silly idea that you could somehow take millions of years of evolution of species and think that at some point you're going to be able to separate those out. They're going to be absolutely key. So Elon, if you're listening, if you're listening to me, make sure that as we build out to Mars, we're going to have to take biological systems with us to make it work.

34:35 It's a big for Matt Damon to survive on Mars without microbes. Bring your own biology with you. Exactly. Yeah, that's such a good point and the biology just drives everything and so glad that you pointed that out to folks. Talk about Patrick, talk about how the sheep, you know, that's another source of biology, another way of processing.

35:04 The plants and cycling the nutrients. Talk about what role they play in the operation. Well, they're both what I would refer to as the pinnacle of biological inoculators because they're taking the biology of their rumen and they're applying it to the soils directly to the soils along with concentrated nutrients. Their urine, their fecal matter contain all those nutrients that they're recycling back into the system and most people are aware of that. They're aware of the value of putting manure on soils both from a nutrient standpoint as well as the biological standpoint.

35:52 But then there's the aspect of how plants have evolved to respond to the process of grazing. The fact that as a grazer, a sheep or a cow or a bison or whatever the case may be, comes by and actually disturbs that plant, it's stimulating it chemically and physically to grow a better root system to grow and build up more biomass so it can continue to do the work of capturing that sunlight.

36:32 And that response is inherent in the system. If we look at healthy ecosystems around the globe, there is not a single healthy ecosystem that doesn't have some sort of large or intensive herbivorous component to it. You look at the Serengeti, you look at the steppes, you look at the plains of the Americas, there have always been herbivorous animals going through and doing that renovation, disturbance, and recovery. Ecologists and ecological studies over the years have shown that that is absolutely necessary to the long-term health of those ecosystems.

37:23 If you don't disturb them, they'll turn into different types of ecosystems. Then they get disturbed in their own way. But disturbance is a fundamental process of nature. And our sheep do that. We try to do it for a couple of reasons on the farm. One of which is we're disturbing the soil. We're capturing that biomass from the fields and the covers and we're putting it back into the system with the biology and with the nutrients. Because we're doing that, we're also capturing economic value out of it. We're taking those sheep and we are selling those sheep and that is a profit center for the farm. And that's really important for a farm. We're in a business.

38:18 And if we're not making money, these farms that we're trying to keep agricultural in Orange County, North Carolina, that has a lot of pressure to constantly build new houses. People want to live in this area. North Carolina is one of the fastest growing states in the country. People are moving here. But there's a lot of pressure in this area to be turning agricultural land into something else that's no longer agricultural.

38:53 We're trying to keep that from happening. But in order to do so, we're going to have to pay for it. We've got to pay for that land. The taxes in Orange County are not zero. And even agricultural land is not zero. So it has to be paid for somehow and we want it to be productive. Greg will talk a lot about how the capital will go to where there is a return. Money will go where people need to be able to make money. They need to be able to make a living and people who have money want to put it where it's productive.

39:37 We want this to be a productive farm and we want to be able to make money with our grapes obviously, but we want to make money with the sheep. And if we can take something that is naturally healthy and it is built into the system naturally if you do it right and does good both ecologically as well as economically that again that's a win-win and we're all better off for it.

40:06 We sell every single bit of lamb that we raise and most of it's usually sold ahead of time. It is some of the best lamb that you can possibly get because it is grown on 100% natural forage, diverse forage, and we don't use any, we use minimal amounts of any sort of medicine whatsoever, no parasiticals and things like that because we don't need to because we're constantly moving the sheep. We break again using nature and the way that these organisms in the case of our sheep have naturally evolved. They're not static animals.

46:46 Fungal species to see if they've stuck from inoculants that we've put into the system and just trying to measure. Like you said, we're trying to provide some sort of measurement in that soil health aspect year after year. And we've been lucky. The farm sees the value in that.

47:14 So we're trying to be as judicious as we can with the investor's money, but give us data that we can then use to be actionable at every place that we're going. So it's so far it's been successful. We've been able for instance to target some of the fields that just have poor biology, even though superficially they might appear they're but they're not diverse.

47:46 And that's mainly because they've just constantly been cropped as hay or as rotating through the no till rotation and others where the biology is actually not bad but nutrient levels have been depleted over time. We have that issue. It's not just biology. Sometimes it is nutrients and you've got there are certain nutrients that you have to put in some targeted amendments either foliar sprays, fertigation or in the soil prior to actually planting the vines. So we've used those tests to make those decisions in the process.

48:32 And then we're doing what every farmer does. We're looking at the health of the plants. We're looking at how are they progressing growing from, you know, the tiny 6-inch seedlings that we get from the nursery to a full up mature vine over time. And people laugh, you know, the guys at the farm kind of laugh at all the spreadsheets I create with all of that data on every single plant in the entire farm.

49:00 You know, I'm not sure they see the value in that. But when it comes time to figuring out, okay, how many did we actually lose? Where do we need to apply stuff, they come in handy and it's worth the time and effort.

49:13 We're trying to move into we've purchased some drones to start doing large scale scouting and use them for other tools. We'll probably we're planning to get a spray drone so we can do some targeted assess minimize the amount of things that we need to use from input standpoint in the next few years.

49:38 And also we have a big issue with soil compaction in a vineyard. You're running through the same track year after year and our soils are susceptible to compaction to begin with being heavy clay, red Carolina clay for the most part. So we have we're trying to minimize the amount of traffic that we see especially with big tractors through the field.

50:08 So if we can get nutrients, insecticides if we need it, fungicides if we start seeing an outbreak, something like that without running a tractor through the row or we can get out where we've had recent rain and you just physically can't get the tractor into the row, then that's a real positive and we want to use that technology wisely.

50:36 Yeah. So Patrick, you've mentioned the lab a few times here and Genrak labs that you and your wife Laura are running there. Tell us a little bit more about that. It's you do mostly metagenomic type testing, right? DNA.

50:53 Yeah, it's all it's all microbiome of one sort or another. So we're doing the term that is used mostly is shotgun genetics. We're taking the DNA from whatever sample you might have, soil, compost leaf root seeds and extracting the DNA from it, which is sometimes extremely challenging.

51:19 Taking that DNA then sequencing it through a Oxford nanopore sequence and using then a computational and analytic analysis to identify species that are present.

51:41 So those sort of processes then give you an assessment of what kind of species are present in the microbiome that you're looking at. And the beauty of it is it can look at the entire soil food web. We can look at bacteria, we can look at fungi, we can look at any sort of eukaryotic life form whether we're talking nematodes or microarthropods. If it's present in the soil and the genome has been logged in a database somewhere, we've got the ability to identify it at least theoretically we can identify it. It's still computationally challenging sometimes.

52:23 And and that includes like disease type organisms too, right? You can detect the presence of we can detect pathogens. Yeah.

52:30 Now, you know, the thing that always keep in mind, we talk to people who send samples in, especially soils or compost.

52:39 Don't panic when you see a pathogenic organism identified because well, you take a scrape off your skin and you're going to find a pathogenic organism on your skin. That's the nature of any microbiome. The key is what else is present there to keep that under control, in check. And the manner and the amount and you have to tie that back into the way that your site, your plants are behaving. And that's the beauty of the fact that we're actually applying this in a farm environment. We're working with partners who are applying it in farm compost environments.

53:25 And Laura has that experience of working in those environments to kind of bring some of that expertise and judgment into making analyses and recommendations that come out of there. There's a lot of information sometimes you know as a society we have a glut of information and it's what are you able to do with that information? How can you sort out what is distraction and not related to your actual problem? So you've got to be very judicious.

54:07 Yeah. So if people want to learn more about the lab, do you have a website that they can check out to see if they want to send us? It's a genre. G-N-T-R-E Klabs.com. So all one word. Gentrelabs.com is our website. If they have samples, they can especially if you've got just a few samples you wanted to order, you can order them online. You can always send us an email, contact us through the website, and we'll get back with you. And if you're a regular, somebody who wants to do it on a regular basis, we'll set up something where we're not using credit card fees, I'll be happy to do that.

54:55 The website has a summary of what we do, how it works for the most part and what we can share anyway. And then if you have testing that is not described there, you have an idea for something you want to test, give us a call. We work with researchers on custom studies and looking at microbiomes as well. A lot of Laura's time is actually spent customizing tests and processes for people who are doing something unique.

55:35 So it's challenging. Trying to build a business out is always challenging. But it is fun. It's just like working at a farm. I wouldn't do this if this wasn't fun.

55:47 Yeah, that's great. So Patrick, as we kind of wrap things up here, let's talk a little bit about the regenerative nexus event that we're going to be doing there in North Carolina. You've been to our regenerative nexus events that we've had across the country before and you know that it's really a place where farmers can come together, where they can gather together, share the successes, share the failures, the struggles, the challenges, but really build a network of being able to visit with each other. So maybe just share a little bit of your personal experience with when you've been to these Nexus events before and then we'll maybe just give people an encouragement to check out coming to this one in North Carolina.

56:34 Well, I would encourage, I would definitely encourage if you're anywhere in either in the southeast or you're involved in crops that are similar to a vineyard, to look into coming and seeing our seeing the one in November. I understand you've got a vineyard one coming up in January, too, and I would attend that, but I'm going to be skiing with my sons in Colorado at that time. So I just found out about that and I'm a little missed at you for scheduling it during my ski trip.

57:06 Sorry. Should I check with you first? Yeah, I know. But we'll make up for it some other time. I definitely want to come to the if you have another one out there to see all the vineyards out in California would be very cool. But anyway, the two that I have attended I attended one of your field day events in at Bladen, which was awesome. Nicole Masters was there talking and learned so much from her and then the one last year at we went to Scottsdale last year and all of the information that comes out of the presentations is wonderful, in some cases unique. But the biggest value added to me was meeting people who are facing similar challenges to your own and appreciating the unique ways that they go about meeting those challenges that you may not have even thought of. The one guy that really sticks out with me from Scottsdale last year was I forget his name and I apologize to him, the farmer from Saskatchewan.

58:28 This guy is what, 18,000 acres, some ridiculous amount of acreage up in central Saskatchewan. Challenging environment. I mean, incredibly challenging environment to farm in. And yet they are doing an incredible amount of work regeneratively, growing their own inoculants, getting the material on in a timely manner in a way that the logistics of it just boggles my mind.

59:01 And he came down and after he spoke, we managed to have a quick conversation with him and he was like, I had no idea that there were so many people who were trying to do the same thing that he was doing. He felt like an outcast in his home environment of Saskatchewan, but knowing now that he has a support structure and people he can call from all across the world to share, commiserate, and learn. It's really innovative. It renews your soul to know that you've got people who are trying to do good in a way that is good.

1:00:01 You know, you're trying to do these things to support your family, the people in your community. Most farms are in small towns. So you're trying to renovate that, keep that town healthy, not just your farm, and you want to make this something that's going to last. You know, our goal is to have these vines still producing in 40 years. That's our goal. When we sign leases with folks, they're 20, 30 year leases because we know that if we do it right, a vineyard—I've been to vineyards in Italy that are hundreds of years old. We would be happy if ours get to 40 years old. I'm not going to be here, but somebody's going to be working that. And I want what I did at the very beginning to make a difference in making that possible.

1:00:57 I would hope that every farmer who goes out in whatever form of farming you're doing wants that land and that ability for that land to continue to feed people and serve people as part of that process 40, 100 years out there. That should be our goal.

1:01:17 Yeah, for sure. And you know, you're exactly right, Patrick. The information that you get at a conference is great, but the true value, the things that you can't get anywhere else—you can't get it on a Zoom call, you can't get it by watching a YouTube video—it's those personal connections. And it's not necessarily from someone who's right next door to you or even growing the same crops you are. And so just because we're having this nexus in North Carolina at a vineyard does not mean that a corn farmer, soybean farmer, wheat, livestock—you all can learn from each other because it's set up for you to teach each other, to encourage each other. And for some people, you're going to be encouraged by them. And for others, you're going to be the one that's doing the encouraging. And you need both.

1:02:09 I think you do. I think that's a big part of it. You're giving encouragement and the very nature and environment that you're in in one of these meetings breeds that you want to encourage. Even if you're not doing it perfectly, you can help somebody be okay with not being perfect. And just continuously improving.

1:02:34 I'm thrilled that you guys are doing this event in the Southeast because the Southeast is an extremely challenging environment for regenerative agriculture. We have the challenges of having overly productive ecosystems, which is not something you see in the Midwest for the most part. You get a long rest period. We don't get that. And we're dealing with unique crops in many cases, some of which haven't even sniffed at the word regenerative. And you start talking and you get the look from your sweet potato and your peanut farmers and our friends, the Kales down in Oklahoma who do their regenerative cotton and we love them dearly and they're doing a great job. But you talk to cotton farmers in North Carolina and the word regenerative—they just give you the side eye like, what have you been smoking? But then you go and you describe, okay, this is what we're doing and it works. It does improve things over time. So there's all of those aspects and to be able if we can make

1:04:04 My goal participating in this is to make that small push of expanding in the Southeast and helping people who have had challenges incorporating regenerative principles onto their farms in the environment where why do we need it? We got things growing all the time, right?

1:04:32 You know, let's we could use a little less pig weed, please. But it's not the same thing. So it's to be able to bring that out. Primarily right now, regenerative in the Southeast is almost all rotational grazing. It's animal husbandry, which is great. Will Harris down at White Oak is great, but or Herb Young who does grows regenerative citrus in Georgia, you know, very unique, but to be able to make a tiny inroad into some of those really challenging fields and products would be something I think in the long run we'll have a type of investment payoff. And I would like to see more crops. If anybody is who anybody has a crop other than what we've been talking about, please do not think that just because you're coming to a vineyard that that's all we're going to talk about.

1:05:34 It is not. It is not going to be that. We're going to be very very general and try to share out whatever we can.

1:05:42 Yeah. So folks, it'll be November 10th, 11th, and 12th is the dates for this event that we've been talking about. It's going to be just outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, right on the Union Grove Farm. We're going to be out in the fields. We're going to have a three-hour workshop with Dr. Laura Kavanagh. There's Patrick and his farm team are going to be giving tours around the farm. And not just tours, but really looking at the soil and talking about how the things that we've been talking about here, how that's changing the soil. We're going to have Greg Bolan and myself will be talking and we're going to be talking about the economics and the finances and the technology. There's going to be local farmers sharing their stories and all of that's going to be great. But again, the biggest impact that this can have is going to be the people that you'll meet, the relationships that you leave with, and then it's going to be up to you to make sure that that learning continues long after you leave Union Grove. And so, you can sign up for this at our website. You can go to greencover.com. There will be a page there that talks about the Nexus events. We're having this one in North Carolina in November. We're doing one, Patrick mentioned it. We're doing one in Paso Robles, California in January. We're doing one in Omaha, Nebraska in February. And then also one in Leach, Texas in February as well. So we're going to be busy. And we hope that one of those is close to you or one of those appeals to you and that you can make it. We would love to get you more information about any of those. So don't be afraid to call Green Cover and talk to any of the team here. We'd love to visit with you and I really hope encourage you to come. The Union Grove team, Greg and Meredith and Patrick and the whole team has been very gracious and I'm looking forward to coming. It's going to be a great event.

1:07:34 Well, we're looking forward to having you having you and your gang out. And we're looking forward to all the folks who come in from wherever you come in the country to come see the farm and share out and learning from you because I know I've learned a lot going to the two events that I've been to and I highly encourage anybody to attend.

1:07:57 All right, so folks, thank you for listening to this episode of the Green Cover Podcast. We're thankful that you took some time to spend with Patrick and I. And Patrick, thank you so much for sharing your story, sharing some of the successes and challenges there at Union Grove. And folks, everyone have a safe harvest and we'll see you next time here on the Green Cover podcast.

1:08:18 Thanks a lot, Keith. Have a great day. My brother and I started Green Cover in 2009 because we understand what it's like to be a farmer starting out on the journey to improve soil health. We saw the power of plant and biological diversity on our own farm here in Nebraska. But we found that it was difficult to get the right cover crop seed mix. We also learned that there was a big learning curve in successfully implementing cover crops. That's why we build green cover so that farmers like you can access the highest quality cover crop seed put into the right diverse mixes along with the technical advice and the educational resources to help you successfully implement cover crops on your own operation. So contact us today and we'll help you with the right cover crop mix for your farm or ranch so you can regenerate your portion of God's creation for future generations.