How Regenerative Agriculture Builds Pollinator Populations and Farm Profits

0:00 And I think that was more fun than. I mean, yeah, I like that bush. See some country and now it was great.

0:11 Yep, I really like that style of things for sure. You know, in talking about adapting to this new world with COVID or whatever, I've been given webinars and presentation Zoom presentations and stuff. And just like how you kind of adapted and ended up finding a much better way of communicating than some, at least on a level right, with just going from farmhouse to farmhouse. We had one and it was they were like, you know, we've got YouTube videos of you, John. What I think we're gonna do is just do like an interview and you can just talk and we'll have a back and forth thing. And it was I like that ten times better. I mean, nobody wants to listen to me for an hour. But it was very insightful questions and it got a little bit deeper than just the stump speech that oftentimes I think you hear from people on the circuit.

1:17 Well, speaking of the circuit, we're gonna kick things off here. I've got the floodgates are open, so we've got people starting to tune in. Thank you guys for welcoming or thank you for tuning in. Welcome to our. This is our third season now. It's crazy that we did this. That was the adaptability of, you know, we would have been at a bunch of conferences right now or have several of them under our belt at this point, but Keith and I were looking at how many were just canceled. And thought, well, there's still got to be information out there and we still need to have some interaction from people, whether that's virtual or hopefully it'll be in person at some point. We are still planning on having our conference in Iola, so if you want to connect and interact in person, we are planning on doing that March 5th and 6th. You can register for that on the website. But in the meantime, we're going to kick things off on our website with one of the most requested topics that we've had, honestly, for the last two seasons, which was somebody needs to talk to us about pollinators, tell us about beneficial insects. And there honestly is only one person—well, there's several people that come to mind—but only one person that really seems to be on the forefront of talking about beneficial insects and bold enough to share that in the findings that he's got. So we're gonna have Jonathan Lundgren with us tonight. But before we get into that, I'll let you guys know we're going to let Jonathan go for about 45 minutes until about 6:15. And after that, we will let you guys ask your questions. So just like Jonathan said, some of the best part of this is the interaction and the questions and feedback. So feel free to type those questions out in the chat or the Q&A portion when we get to that point, around 6:15.

3:09 So with that, Dale, do you want to go ahead and introduce our speaker?

3:14 Well, there are some speakers that are infamous enough they don't need a lot of introduction. We've got one with us tonight. But so I won't belabor it. I think most people are familiar with Dr. Lundgren. That's why they're on here tonight. It's why we have so many people signed up for this evening. And there are not many people in agriculture that achieve folk hero status, but we've got one with us. And standing up to the government for what you believe is right, even if it costs you everything—I mean, we've got somebody here who refused to bury your research findings and hide them. And at some point, I think the whole world may owe you a debt of gratitude for that. So, and if you want to expand upon that story, feel free. If you don't, that's fine too. But it's all out there on the worldwide web if people want to dig into it a little more. But welcome, we're so glad to have you here. And I'll just turn it over to you, and you can take off.

4:36 Okay, well, thank you, Dale. And yes, infamous is the word. Sometimes we'll see how much time there is, how the night is going. And yeah, we can get into whatever we need to get into. Yeah, some of this is about pollinators, I guess a lot of it's about.

4:57 Insects and a lot of it is about where insects fit. And sometimes we put our blinders on and just think okay entomology, we're going to focus down here right. That doesn't tend to be what I do. I tend to focus on where insects fit into the grander system. And so we're going to give some different perspectives on things tonight. Also if there's questions that are very specific to pollinators, don't shy away from those okay, please ask at the end and we can dig into that a little deeper if I'm not touching on what you guys actually tuned in to listen to.

5:36 With that I will share my screen and hopefully that'll work. All right so we're going to talk about science. We're going to talk about transformation of agriculture okay and where bugs fit in all of that.

5:56 So I'm John Lundgren. I'm a scientist, agroecologist, entomologist, but I'm also a beekeeper and I'm also a farmer and rancher. And I run Blue Dasher Farm up here in eastern South Dakota and the Diceys Foundation which is our research arm and that's housed here. So this is my farm. The clover crop a couple of years back was alive. I just love seeing that. I got up in front of the beekeepers. They had me keynoting at their annual meeting one this year was 2020 and one of the last meetings that I did in person.

6:42 And I got up there and I said when's your bees start dying? 2008. I said okay. How much money have we spent on the bee problem? And they kind of looked around. Millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. And I said okay, how'd your bees do last year? And the room got real quiet because we lost just as many bees last year if not more than we did 10, 12 years ago right. The bees are dying at a pretty alarming rate. But it isn't a bee problem okay. And the reason that they're still dying is because we were treating it like a bee problem. And there's a lot of powers at play that wants you to think this is just a bee problem and it's much bigger than a bee problem.

7:35 We're losing life on this planet. We're living through one of the worst mass extinction events that the planet has ever experienced right. We're not just losing species, we're losing habitats. We're draining the wetlands right. Much of that's gone now but we're losing entire insect communities, spurs, bats, bees, butterflies, all of these things. The FAO likes to cite a lot of people like to cite this statistic that we've got about 55, 60 years left of topsoil. But what they forget is that we are losing species at a rate that in 50 years most of life on earth is going to be gone. So it's not just a soil thing, it's all life. And where goes the life on this planet, so go we. We've got there's a real sense of urgency right now. We gotta make some changes.

8:33 Green cover seed is a part of that solution so is a Diceys Foundation. Central problem is not soybeans and sometimes how we produce soybeans, that's the problem. Agriculture has become too simplified okay. We've got to be diversifying our food systems. Large monocultures where the goal is to eliminate a lot of life from your farm. But what we forget is that that life does things. Biodiversity and species aren't just good because we like species, it's because life does things. It controls pests. It restricts plant communities, so it allows or it regulates weeds, fertilizes the plants, it cycles nutrients in the soil. It's where soil comes from right. That's what life does.

9:33 And when you eliminate the life from your farm you have to replace it. You have to replace it with a jug. And the more you use the more you need. So when you have a monoculture there's really only one way that you contain the productivity of that monoculture over a long period of time and that's by buying agrochemicals. And these things are having adverse effects on your system. And you don't have to hate agrichemicals. I don't. I don't use them. I'm just too cheap. I don't want to spend the money on something I don't need. And so I'd rather do it for free.

10:16 That's how we run blue dasher up here. So there's consequences of the ways that we're maintaining this monoculture in ways that we had no idea. For instance, insecticidal seed treatments, neonicotinoids. You guys have probably heard this name. You'll see trade names like Poncho, Cruiser, Gaucho. These sorts of things are seed treatments and it has insecticide. But insecticides don't just hurt insects. They're not just killing the bees. What we're finding is that they're getting into the water and they're getting into the soil and they're getting taken up by plants that were never treated before.

11:06 Several years back, a friend of a friend contacted a colleague up on campus, John Jenks, and said that they were having problems with white-tailed deer in Montana. 70 percent of these deer had these weird jaw deformities that they've never really seen before, and the male genitalia of the deer was also deformed—about 70 percent of them. It was a huge issue in this community. So they asked us to investigate a little bit. We got a graduate student, Elise Hughes Berheim, who did an absolutely wonderful job on this, an incredibly difficult study to run on many different levels. What we decided to test was whether neonicotinoid seed treatment insecticides were hurting white-tailed deer in captivity. So we raised these deer, we administered neonics imidacloprid in this case to the deer in their water, and we monitored their health and progress over this period of time.

12:25 Some of the things that we found: the dead fawns ended up having a lot more imidacloprid in their spleens, and the spleen was the magic organ in this study. It seemed to correlate extremely well. The amount of neonicotinoid in the spleen was a really strong indicator of many different fitness parameters that we were observing. The more imidacloprid that you found in the spleen was associated with a lot of different detrimental things in the whitetail deer. The fawn body weight was significantly reduced. Fawn organ weights were reduced. Fawn thyroid hormone levels were reduced, and those hormones are really important. They have a lot of downstream effects that we're not expecting and they're really difficult to predict. Fawn jawbone lengths were disrupted. And the deer slowed down. The more they had in their stomachs or in their spleens, the more imidacloprid, what's a slow deer in the water in a while? It's a dead deer, right?

13:41 We got a little pushback on that. Everybody wanted to know, well, that's in captivity, right? What's happening in the wild? I mean, you force-fed those, right? So this is what we were able to generate under controlled conditions. This was the quantity of imidacloprid that we were able to generate in the spleens of our deer. North Dakota sent us a whole bunch of deer, hundreds of deer from their hunters, and they sent us the spleens. We looked in those. They had three times the level that we were able to generate and producing all of those adverse effects in our deer. Minnesota just sent us 800 deer spleens. Between 60 and 100 percent had neonicotinoids in their spleens. We just got bobcats, fishers, river otters from North Dakota. Between 15 and 30 percent of these top predators had neonics in their spleens. They're working in incredibly low quantities. They're having adverse effects that we couldn't predict with any risk assessments, and they're affecting the environment.

15:02 The current approach to how we're raising crops, yes, we can grow this. This corn field was near Green Cover Seed. It was part of Claire Lakan's study that was one of the first things that brought me down to Bladen, Nebraska. We can grow 14-foot corn fields. But look at the soil underneath that. This wasn't Keith and Brian's field, by the way. It looks like the face of the moon down there. It's like there's nothing growing in that soil, right? That's corn grown on chemotherapy. It's not. It worked for a while.

15:41 Our current approach to applied science isn't working anymore. It's giving us incremental gains to a broken system. Our current approach to food production is starting to break down. This whole idea of large monocultures and commodities rather than growing food is really important for us to rethink now.

16:12 Our current approach to beekeeping isn't working. Some of the biggest beekeepers in Nebraska, good friends of mine, all pulled their hives out of Nebraska. They said most of them die. We aren't putting our bees in Nebraska anymore. We have to find places where crop land isn't quite as pervasive, and that's where they ended up putting a lot of their bees. This isn't the hobbyist. This is the commercial guys. They can't keep in business in places like Nebraska anymore.

16:48 I worked in the system for a long time. My research at USDA was used to search for that next three bushel yield bump to try to keep the corn soybeans working, and I was working for farmers and I thought I was doing a good job. Then I drove from eastern South Dakota down to Iowa. I was giving a talk, and it's like, what we've done here—there's two plants: yellow is corn and green is soybeans. There's two plants out there in hundreds of miles. That's wrong. I'm not saying the food production is wrong. I'm not saying the farmers are wrong. I'm not saying the corn and soybeans are wrong, but how we're producing that is having effects on things that we're never supposed to be affecting. We need to rethink that a little bit.

17:47 This is almonds. This is where I'm heading in about three weeks. That is the central valley of California. Almost all of it looks like that. Science has to rethink. We have to rethink how we're where scientists fit into that community again. We need to figure out how science can be applied not to incremental evolutionary steps, but to macro evolutionary steps. We need an asteroid to hit, and science needs to be applied differently.

18:27 We need to stop focusing on incremental progress and symptoms, and we need to develop new systems, and that's how we're trying to apply our science up here at ISIS Foundation.

18:41 Funding for science—there's a smaller and smaller pot of money for funding innovative research in agriculture, and more and more hands are reaching into that shrinking pot. What it ends up doing is it leaves the only sources of easy money coming from large corporations, and large corporations end up controlling naming rights on new university buildings and they control the dialogue by dangling the money and the scientists chase after it. This is a problem. We need to reconnect or fund the kinds of science that we need done in order to drive social change.

19:36 One of the things that we've been really passionate about at the DICE Foundation is we need to rethink how scientists measure their success. I worked in that system for a long time. The scientific infrastructure, the matrix was damn good. I could list all of the ways that I could tell you I was good at it. I had scientific peer-reviewed papers, hundreds of them. Millions in grants. I got patted up and down my back by my chain of command. It was wonderful. Half of that money ends up going into the bureaucracy. It doesn't go to the research. I had a puppy mill. We were pumping out students, post docs. It was great. How many committees I was serving on. I was so involved in so many different aspects of the scientific infrastructure, and then I kind of looked back and I looked at this list and I'm like, how many of these things do farmers care about? Zero. So the metrics of success for farming are much different than the metrics.

20:58 That's for science. And our science is produced for other scientists and not so often for the farmers anymore. And that's a huge problem, but the only way that you get a job in science is by adhering to that. We end up science and agriculture, I think, kind of perpetuating. But so for us, I got out, I quit. We started the dice as we started Blue Dash of farm. We will science that would change the world. There has to be relationships, connections. We have to become farmers, and when that happens, it changed all the different questions that we were asking and how we were asking them. We're focused on acres changed. Yes, we still have period science, but it's how we communicate that science that really matters to us. And it's not communicated to the scientific community as often as it is making darn sure that the farming community can use it.

22:09 So the solution to the problem is that we really need to change the whole culture of food. Anything less and your bees, your insects are going to continue to die. But what's so unheartening is that there's a lot of farmers that are doing that. They're doing just that, and I'll bet a lot of them are on this call right now. They didn't know it at the time, but I started meeting these wacko farmers, and they didn't call themselves regenerative at the time, but they really were the forerunners of the regenerative movement. This regenerative agriculture is really driven by the farming community, not by the scientists, not by policy makers. We're trying to catch up. Farmers are leading this one. Anyways, change is happening. It's happening very rapidly. Change to science is happening very rapidly.

23:07 This is Blue Dasher Farm. Act Isis Foundation is housed right here. So if you're ever in the area, stop by. We'd love to show you around. What we wanted was to kind of do a national scale scientific project to derive regenerative ag supply the sorts of data that are necessary in order to change our food culture. And we've adapted, we've evolved, we've grown. And our identity is clear, clearer than it ever has been before. And the need for what we are doing has become more and more clear, at least to us.

23:54 Regen, what is? First off, stop tilling the soil. Reduce or abandon agrochemicals—I think is another one that's not on this list. I don't think you need them anymore when you go regenerative. Never leave bare soil. I'm always have living roots in the ground. Cover crops are really central part of this. Some plant diversity is better than none, and more plant diversity is better than less. And then we also need to be integrating livestock back with our crop plant. We partitioned our food system into livestock ranches and crops, and those belong in the same place. There's a lot of ways of doing that so we can make agriculture friendly to life again.

24:42 This was a really important study Claire Lacan did this back in 2018. And actually, Bladen, Nebraska is represented in this study as one of the sets of regen regenerative farms. In one day, this study kind of went to the top one percent of all science ever written in terms of social media. Why? Well, because it was systems focused. It was best management focused from a farmer's perspective. It was the first time in the peer-reviewed literature, the primary literature, where we ever tried to compare regenerative and conventional agriculture to see what was happening with it.

25:42 So with regen ag, those systems vary in the practices that they employ to attain those principles. And so the practices on these different corn fields were different, but they were unified in a few things. Number one is that none of the regenerative agriculture farms had had insecticides used, and all of the conventional corn fields used genetically modified crops, BT corn to control insect pests. And they were all treated with neonicotinoid seed treatments, so they all had insecticides on them. So here's some of the results. That's not results yet. We went out there, right? We looked at all the insect community that we could find. We sucked up, we cut down plants.

26:34 Sucked up any insects that we were finding on the plants themselves. We got down on our hands and knees and sucked up any insects on the soil surface, and then we drilled down into the soil column and pulled up and found any insects that were living in the soil too. Then we looked at yields and profits on these different corn fields.

26:59 This was a while ago. I want to say 2015, I think is when we did this work. You can look at the meteoric rise of cover crop adoption. Things have changed a lot. We've learned a lot in the last five, six years in terms of all of this stuff. This was pretty early on for these farms.

27:27 Insecticide-treated corn fields had 10 times more pests. That wasn't supposed to happen. We were investing in pest control because we were told that pests were inevitable, but that wasn't the case here. They didn't. The regen farms didn't just abandon their pesticides. They replaced them with good farming management practices. They used diverse cover crops. They got plants into their environment, and by doing that they were able to reduce their pests below anything that we could do chemically.

28:35 Profit cornfield, but profits were twice as high. Why was that? Because number one, the regen folks reduced their seed costs substantially. They reduced their fertilizer costs substantially, and they also marketed their products a little bit differently. Some of them just sold them to the coop, but a lot of them would sell the corn to their communities or they had animal operations that they would sell directly to. So they eliminated the middlemen, and that was driving down their profits.

29:13 That makes it a good business decision, doesn't it? That regen isn't just an ideological belief system that drives us. It's because a farm should be a business, and yields are not the focus. Profits should be. We looked at it. There was no correlation between yields and profits on these corn fields because guys were chasing yields so hard that they were spending a lot more money in order to attain that, and so their profits were actually lower.

29:53 What did scale really well with profit was how much soil organic matter they had generated on their farm. We should be giving awards for that, how much soil you've grown on your farm, because it pays for it.

30:15 Corn fields, it works in all of the different systems that we've worked in. We're working from Saskatchewan down to Kansas, from Michigan out to California now, and in all of these instances we see very similar results.

30:34 California almonds. Most of the nation's bees head out to the almonds to pollinate them. They drive them out there on trucks. So anything we do to save the bees up in the upper Midwest where they spend their summers is completely negated when they go out to California almonds. There I was standing next to some hives that one of my friends was operating out there. The almond orchard paid him a pretty penny for all of his bees, and as we were watching, there was a helicopter with the spray hosing down and killing his bees just as we were standing there, spraying fungicides on them. Yeah, that's a different perspective, isn't it? That's a very real thing. The pesticide impacts on our pollinators is very real.

31:31 We asked whether or not there was a better way. Tommy Fenster entered in. We're just submitting his paper from this work right now. He's just about got his master's degree, but he asked a simple question that was very difficult to answer: Is our regenerative almond system superior to conventional almond systems? Many people when we talked to them out in California about regen ag and regen almonds said soil health might work where you live, but it doesn't work in our system. So we had to prove it.

32:11 We focused on two systems in the northern half of the central valley, and this is not photoshopped.

32:19 This is actually two farms in our experiment. One on the right is a conventional farm, this is what most of the central valley of California looks like: bare soil and trees. So that's a monoculture, right? On the left is a more regenerative operation. There's no pesticides used over there. They use perennial ground covers to always have living roots out there. They use compost and compost teas, and then they also, some of them even integrated livestock: sheep or cows or chickens.

32:54 Soil organic matter was 30 percent higher on the regen almonds. Water is so important in California right now. Each almond requires one to two gallons of water to produce each nut, and they're growing them in a desert, so water is a huge issue. Water infiltration into the soil was six times faster in the regen fields.

33:30 Life was just crazy in these fields. There was so much more life out there. This is just the biomass of critters on the soil, but pest populations were exactly the same. When we presented this to one of our conventional producers, he kind of looked at the data and he's like, 'I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I did everything I was supposed to do. I followed the best management practices laid out by the universities in the state, and my crop advisors all told me, and I sprayed insecticides on my trees five times. Cost me tens of thousands of dollars. What you're telling me is the guy right across the road from me who didn't spray at all had the same number of pests.' And he wouldn't believe it, but we got through to him, and he transferred 160 acres over to regenerative almonds this year. In fact, he'll hopefully be part of our study that we're expanding this work out on now to include the transition phase and how quickly you can get to regen.

34:46 Yields were exactly the same in the two systems, so you didn't get a yield drag in almonds just by going regenerative. So no matter what, even if the price premiums aren't there for regen, you still will see the same profit as you did before. But the profit on the regen was actually twice as high, just like in corn. We're seeing this pop up again and again.

35:26 Why is it that regenerative agriculture isn't the mainstream? Why isn't everybody just doing this, right? Well, what we're talking about is a paradigm shift, and change is hard. And then also, I think just like I was outlining earlier, is that science is kind of misdirected on agriculture right now. It's being used to support a broken system rather than innovation.

36:00 Yeah, I mean it's not always easy being a scientist. We were watching my kids and I were watching Cosmos, and they were, you know, it's this Neil deGrasse Tyson show, and they go through the history of science or whatever. And so, you know, he discovered that light refracts in a certain way, and it really changed the way we think about the sun and the stars and where we fit in the universe. And it really advanced our understanding of telescopes and stuff. And so they killed him and chopped off his hands and burned him at the stake. And my kids' eyes just get wider as we're watching the show. And every episode is like that, right? Whenever you've got these paradigm shifts, usually there's martyrs involved. And there's really no incentive for sticking your neck out and investigating controversial scientific issues.

37:00 Science quite frankly isn't perfect, you know? It's fallible, but it is the best thing that we've got. There is no perfect study. A perfect scientific study has never been conducted. And I personally was really interested in finding truth about my own life and about the world around me, and then I turned to science for that. And I discovered that science doesn't do that. Science provides understanding, but it doesn't always provide truth. That's proof. That's math, that's not science. And so science is gray. Science isn't black and white.

43:17 It's not black and white. They said come on out and watch our bees die, then you tell us that the science there, that this data isn't conclusive. And they were right. I came out, I went out and I watched the bees die, and the pesticides were killing the bees. So we started publishing on that, and that got a lot of people upset in my chain of command. They didn't care for that, and they were getting harassed by industry.

43:52 And then finally we also started to question the whole system. We said, you know, maybe this is actually over investing in one crop isn't a good idea. It's nothing wrong with corn, but let's look at this and think about it because it could be a real national security threat. And they said no, you got to take your name off of that. You're not allowed to say anything bad about corn, and you're not allowed to say that the bees are dying because of pesticides or the monarchs are being killed by pesticides anymore. Don't talk about that anymore.

44:27 And finally I said enough, enough. I quit and we started something totally different. That's what Blue Dasher Farm is. It's meant to be the kinds of science, the ask the tough questions that other people aren't allowed to. And it's having more of an impact in the last five years than I could have ever dreamed of having within my old position. So really exciting times.

44:58 All right, I think I'm just about towards the end here. I would not be here if it was not for just an amazing group of enthusiastic colleagues that continues to grow. It's crazy. And if you'd like to learn a little bit more about us, Blue Dasher Farm is on Facebook and I'm on Twitter. And ISIS Foundation is our 501c3. This kind of work doesn't fund itself. If you want to see this kind of science being done more, consider making a tax-free donation.

45:31 With that I will stop sharing my screen. We can discuss things a little bit more if there's questions or thoughts. My gosh, there's a lot of people on there. Holy moly, did I just get myself in a whole heap of hot water maybe? I don't think so. We've got, yeah, if you guys have your questions that you want to get in, you can start typing those out in the Q&A or the chat. I do have one through email. Was: do you have any suggestions for managing cucumber beetles in market garden setting?

46:01 And that was something that obviously wasn't touched on in this presentation, but if you want to have kind of address that real quick, sure. Let's see, so cucumber beetles, they are specialists on cucurbits. Get some polycultures going out there, get covers on the ground. Do not have bare soil. That's the first step in this process. And planting trap crops, things like that, that you can remove, would be another option. There's certain pumpkin varieties I think that are really attractive. Getting flowers out there for natural enemies and just increasing the diversity in and around your cucumber plots is a valuable thing.

46:48 Market garden, so is that like a community garden kind of scenario? Because a lot of times they don't understand cover crops and they kind of start getting a little upset about that, but we need to be indoctrinating them into that. Yeah, for sure.

47:07 And I'm not exactly sure what the context of this question, Jody, so there might be a follow-up, but Jody asks: I'm doing a cover crop study and would like to add a pollinator component. I was reading some articles for methods and saw a five-minute observation time and counting number of beneficials. Your thoughts?

47:26 Yeah, let's see the, so for assessing pollinator populations, how we roll with that is, you know, the five-minute direct observations, we don't get the kind of numbers that we like. Some people use them and they do a great job for them. We ended up going, we like sweep samples. We like B bowls, so you end up using different colored bowls that you put out there with a little detergent in it, and then any bees that come calling and end up coating into those. There's also things called blue vein traps that we really enjoy using. Those are good for larger bees like bumble bees. Can get a little expensive if you're doing them in mass, but all of those are good pollinator approaches.

48:14 Okay, on Facebook, May asks: are you looking for more farms to be a part of?

48:20 Your research hub is something that you're always looking for. We're embarking on what we're calling the thousand farm initiative where we want to be on a thousand farms demonstrating full site inventories across the nation in different areas. So yes, reach out via email if you're interested in that. That would be a great opportunity.

48:44 I'm going to leave the question about arid land in the air at southwest with the green cover guys because they kind of know what seeds are available and how much they cost. But in general, what you're after even in the arid areas of the country, you are after diversity. You want flowers of different colors, different sizes, shapes, structure within that plant community. All those things are really important.

49:17 Dale, do you have any insights on that one or do you want to leave that for a different time? Do you want to address beneficial insect habitat cover crop species for zone nine in the arid areas?

49:35 Well, I mean you can jump in Jonathan if you want to. It depends on whether it's warm season or cool season. Phacelia, any of the clovers, things that flower, buckwheat in zone nine. Buckwheat probably works either cool season or warm season. Flax is pretty good. The sweet clover spectrum, sweet clover is very effective at bringing in pollinators and bees.

50:14 Jonathan, help me out here. What am I omitting?

50:19 You know, I think something that we often forget is how important grasses are. We just published a study that showed that grass pollen ended up being about 78 percent of the pollen DNA within a honeybee's stomach. And that's been echoed now time and again over the last several weeks or months in the scientific literature. It's this weird cluster of papers that's like no, bees need grass pollen, bees need fungal spores, things like that. They don't just go to flowers.

50:53 Yeah, that was pretty crazy. 78 percent, something just astounding how much of the pollen that came from grasses. I was floored. You know, that's not what we've been taught for years.

51:10 No, it's not. But I do think it speaks to that diversity, doesn't it? A friend of mine was down in Arkansas as a graduate student who's just finishing up, and they found when corn is pollinating, that's one of the dominant pollen sources that comes into those hives.

51:31 We had a question, and I had the same question actually, about squash bugs. Those things are the bane of my existence whenever I try to grow pumpkins or squash.

51:45 There's some pumpkin varieties that are less susceptible to them or more attractive to them. You could use those as trap crops for your squash bug infestations. I don't know how many people actually incorporate covers into their squash and cuke plots, but I do think that's really important.

52:11 What about natural predators of squash bugs? Anything? Wolf spiders, crab spiders, all of those things like to eat them. Generally as predators, I don't know the natural enemy community specifically for squash bugs, but I do know that there are things that eat them. We just have to figure out and give those animals an opportunity to kind of take hold.

52:38 I see someone was asking about a pecan orchard. We're going to hopefully be working in pecan soon in a regenerative model. But I wanted the landowner to stop the harvester from the practice of spraying. I had the landowner on board, but the harvester told them spraying pesticides and fungicides are required. Pecans cannot be grown effectively organically.

53:09 That's a load of crap. We have heard pecan specialists at university extension say that very same thing. I have no doubt. Until you meet farmers that are doing it.

53:25 So we're really interested in exploring this is one of our next systems where we look at cons in Oklahoma and Kansas and see whether or not regenerative pecan orchards can be as successful as every place else that we've done.

53:47 Just to add on to that, on the number of fruit and nut trees, it seems like incorporating pigs or chickens or some livestock eliminates a lot of the need for spraying because the insect infested fruit falls on the ground and gets eaten, right? So ground cover is really important.

54:12 Ground cover is really important in orchard systems, and that's your first line of defense you need life in your soil. A lot of the orchard pests and you know, they force the fruit to abort in a lot of cases. That abortion of the crop is the tree's attempt to void itself, right? It would get that nut out of there. It's got the pest in it because underneath those trees there was things like pigs and chickens and other animals were foraging under there, and so that was easy pickings for them. But when we eliminated livestock from our systems and our orchards, the pests were able to just keep on cycling and cycling and cycling. It gets back to that notion of eliminating life on our farm and then trying to replace it with some technology, you know. And life is just really good at that.

55:14 Just reading the book Restoration Agriculture, and the author was talking about how he worked at an apple orchard when he was younger, when he was a teenager. And the guy raised McIntosh apples and he was the only person around who could successfully raise McIntosh apples without it being just torn up with scab. And the way he did it is he pastured hogs and cattle underneath the trees. And the pigs ate the scab-infested apples and the cows ate the scab-infested leaves. And they also trimmed the trees up as far as they could reach so that the scab organisms during rainfall splash would never hit on the leaves were up too high because the cattle trimmed them up. And I thought what a beautiful system. Not only do you get internally apple flavored bacon, but you don't have to spray for scab either.

56:21 Yeah, it's a great opportunity to increase the resilience of your whole farm.

56:34 Stewart says, speaking as an organic farmer certified through the Regenerative Organic Certification Program, I'm finding a challenge to balance the rise in perennial weeds with a reduction in tillage intensity. It seems easier to incorporate these five regenerative principles with selective herbicide use. You have any thoughts on that?

56:55 At Blue Dasher, we contend with a lot. I mean, we plant our annual crops into perennial warm season grasses. We basically farm the prairie, and we don't use herbicides and we don't use tillage, so we don't have a lot of tools at our disposal, do we? What we end up doing is, unfortunately, too often the case in organic systems that they don't have a livestock component, and those livestock are really important, especially in organic systems in order to regulate the plant community. We also use fire in our system, so once every three years we'll burn a field and then that allows us to get in there. And then we also don't annually, we don't crop every single field every year. Some of those fields are given a year-long rest or raised for just a year. And so that gives us opportunities for using our ground. So I guess I would urge the use of covers as competitors. I would urge the use of livestock, and in our case fire is also another really important tool.

58:16 Here's something that I hear all the time: spraying sugar. I always hear that insects don't have a pancreas, so they cannot process sugar. Can you address that? I hear that about spraying sugar will kill alfalfa weevil because that's sugar.

58:42 No, I don't think that's true. Sugar does a number of things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. We tried it for soybean aphids and it really didn't help, but other people have shown that it.

58:56 Helps in corn if you're spraying sweet corn or something like that with sugar. What it does is it can affect the physiology of the host plant a little bit, and so it might affect the nitrogen balance of that host plant. But it also attracts a lot of natural enemies, so things like ants and lady beetles all come in to get the sugar, and then they stick around hopefully and eat some of the pests. But no, the idea that insects can't eat sugar is not correct.

59:35 Gray gas is the neonic treatment on non-GMO corn still detrimental when using finger pickup planter? Yeah, yep it is. You don't need it either, it's not helping you in any way, so ditch it. Can save a lot of money.

59:55 We have a problem with leaf hoppers as a vector of a virus in our hemp crop. Any suggestions? Oh gosh, I haven't worked much in hemp yet. Covers, you know, I mean I hate to sound like a broken record, but these principles really work in a lot of these different systems. Intercropping, I don't know the hemp system very well though, so I'm not sure how it's grown, what kind of row spacings and all that. And yeah, it's not perennial, is it? I don't believe so, but we'll see if she responds back.

1:00:34 I will take this last question here. I know we're at 6:30, but Mike McDonald said John, we drilled a 15 inch pollinator strip around 100 acres soybean field this year. They incorporated various sections on marginal lands using green covers, pollinator mix as well as our hunting mix. What is happening to the bees and the beneficials in this buffer during November through April when that cash crop, which was beans without treatment in 2020, well we have corn or we will have corn, we're trying to find non-treated corn, but in 2021 thus planning for the second year?

1:01:10 Good presentation. So I think the question is basically what happens to those beneficial insects that you had in that buffer kind of during the winter time in November through April. So if it's a 15 footer, then you know there's a lot of overwintering that goes on in there. And not everything is going to overwinter in there, but I think it's good habitat. So leave it if you can. The more perennial habitat that you have in and around your farm, I think it really benefits a lot of species. So yeah, whether the bees are overwintering in there, it'll depend on the soil structure and all that. Those would be the native bees, primarily not the managed bees. Unless you've got honeybees there, I'm not sure.

1:01:56 So you can hear from your mic. Been a long time. You mentioned that it was a 15 feet, maybe wide enough. Do you recommend wider strips, longer? Is there any kind of preference on when people are putting in those pollinator plots on what that should look like, or does it really make a difference?

1:02:13 Plant as much as you can. That's what I always advocate for. So if you've got, yeah, if you're farming marginal areas on your farm or something, little low areas that normally even think about draining, don't do that. Plant it to pollinator mixes and stuff like that, and back off on your insecticide, using your adjacent acreage to make up the money that you're losing from that marginal piece of ground.

1:02:42 Okay, well with that we'll wrap up. Thank you guys so much for the questions, for your time Jonathan. We really appreciate that. It was a fantastic presentation. We did record it, so it will be up on YouTube and on our website here later this week. In the meantime, we've got Keith Thompson and Josh Lloyd next week. We're going to do kind of a farmer panel, so hope to see you guys all next week. And with that Jonathan, do you have any final words for us?

1:03:11 No, no, it's an exciting time. You know, there's a lot of gloom and doom that gets put out there, but it's also a very hopeful time. So be part of the change.

1:03:24 I might just add for anybody who joined after the introduction, we are still planning on having our March 5th and 6th conference in Iola Kansas. We got the indoor cover crop plot planted over the weekend, so we will have green, live growing plants, barring any screw up of mine between now and then. So we'll knock on wood there.

1:03:52 All right, well thank you guys so much for your time. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and we'll see you all next week. Thanks, take care. Thank you very much.