Johnson-Su Compost Extract: Building a Bioreactor and Growing Farm Biology

0:00 Good afternoon everybody. Welcome to our second webinar of this biological webinar series. Just a few housekeeping rules: everybody is muted. If you have questions, you can type them into the Q&A box and we will answer them at the end of our presenter's presentation.

0:18 So with that, Keith, would you like to introduce our presenter today?

0:24 Yep, sure will, Dylan. Thank you and thank you for your help in organizing all this, folks. It's my pleasure today to introduce Jay Young from Western Kansas. Jay's one of our favorite people to work with because he is just a bundle of energy, a bundle of passion around everything that he does, but in particular soil health and regenerative agriculture. You'll find very few people who combine both the knowledge of what he's doing because he's doing it on his own farm. This isn't theoretical stuff. What he's going to be telling you is things that he's done on his own operation, so it's real stuff. So combining that knowledge and experience with the passion and the enthusiasm that you will see come out of him. So we've known Jay for many years. I've worked with him on seed and stuff across the years, and now we are excited to be able to be a sponsor of his YouTube channel, which he'll be talking about. And I may even be sharing some of the links of some of the videos that he mentions off of his YouTube channel. If you aren't subscribed to his channel, please go do that because he puts out great content. You're not subscribed to the Green Cover channel? We would encourage you to do that as well.

1:38 So Jay is going to be talking about kind of all things soil health and regenerative agriculture, but specifically around the Johnson Sioux composting method because this is a great place for people to start because it's something you can do yourself on your own operation. So Jay, we're excited to have you. We appreciate you being part of our webinar series, and I'm going to let you take it away from here, buddy.

2:04 Well, thanks a lot. I'm going to get my screen up here. Okay, can you see that guys? Perfect. All right, so a lot of what I'm covering has been covered in presentations or on my YouTube channel, but I added some stuff in there at the end because I feel like the biggest takeaway for you guys is the opportunity there is within Johnson suit not only to save money but to also have a second income source on your farm. So I wanted to make sure that I added something to this presentation that hasn't been seen before from my YouTube channel or from any one of my presentations, so I hope you guys enjoy this. We'll get rolling here.

3:01 I started in with cover crops or understanding cover crops in 2016. So before that, in 2015, I farmed eight quarters of ground that I rented for my granddad, and then I was a full-time employee working for my dad and for my granddad. And we didn't do any cover crops. I had no cows. And we would run stalkers, and our rotations were pretty much corn fallow or wheat corn milo. And all eight quarters that I had were no-till. And it was around that time that Dad was transitioning out of no-till because the cost of killing weeds was so expensive. And so I was, even though it was costing me a lot of money, I wanted to stay no-till because I just thought that that made sense, even though I really didn't understand the full depths of why no-till was so important.

3:59 So in 2016, I was at a friend's house, and his daughter was talking about what she was learning in college about cover crops, and I said, 'What's a cover crop?' My friend was shocked and astonished and offended that I did not know what a cover crop was. So instead of playing card games that night, which was what I thought I was at his house to do, we watched an hour-long video on grazing cattle on cover crops, and that was a pivotal moment in my life. Because I've always wanted to raise cattle and like a cow-calf operation, because I love the stalkers more than I love farming on my own operation. And so when I watched that video, I was hooked. I was like, man, I'm going to figure out how to do this. And so I took a lot of time and studied, and I guess I say a lot of time—it was a full month before I presented to my dad that I was going to run a cow-calf operation on cover crops.

4:57 So that started in 2016. I bought my first cover crop in April of 2016 from Green Cover Seeds. I talked to Brett Pleshke, and Brett helped me put that together. And that's kind of where we went from there. So in 2022—or I guess now it's 2023, thrown off by the year even though I'm six months into it—we have 140 cows, 30 bred heifers, 80 replacement heifers, and we're running 155 steers. And we'll have a bull sale on March 30th and we'll sell roughly about 35 bulls. I bought into my granddad's half of Young and Son, and most of what we pretty much no-till everything we do. We had three quarters of ground that we did sweep, but everything else is getting no-till or is in the hotel with biologicals. Most of our acres are getting cover crops in some way, shape, or form.

5:56 So the shift for me—I had that journey where I was doing cover crops, and that was the biggest beginning to my mind shift and change. And so I got into cover crops.

6:11 As I went down that journey, I have dyslexia and so reading is tough. For most of my life I've kind of seen myself as someone who if I'm in a room of people, the majority of people in this room are probably smarter than me. That just came from not getting good grades in school, not scoring well in the SAT, and just having issues learning. It was more of an issue of not knowing the best way for me to learn, but because of that happening to me, it took me a long time. I had a paradigm shift in my learning processes.

6:50 When I found out about cover crops I was all in on the cover crop aspect of it, but just to raise cattle, the science of it really held me back from being able to go the way that I needed to go as far as the regenerative agricultural path. Because you have to understand the biology in my opinion to really be able to utilize and understand what you're doing with regenerative agriculture and with healing your soils.

7:18 I was at a conference and Dr. Christine Jones said that if you don't eliminate phosphorus from your operation you'll never get where you need to go because phosphorus hinders exudate development. Red exudates are necessary in building aggregates. If you don't have aggregates you don't have soil structure. You can't have a water cycle. You can't do all these things.

7:43 I raised my hand and I kind of regurgitated what I thought she was saying and she confirmed what I just said. So I realized that I was in a lot of trouble because my dad was in a position where he was excited about eliminating phosphorus from the operation. I didn't know how to do it because even though we were doing cover crops, because of how dry our environment is, it's a long process in healing the destruction of tillage and the detrimental things that we've been doing in agriculture. In Western Kansas it's not like other areas where you get a ton of rain and you can heal the system quickly because it's raining. We have long dry periods and those dry periods are killing the biology that's in your soil, and years of tillage is keeping that biology held back.

8:36 When I heard that I realized I had to make a change. It was almost perfect timing because I'm pretty sure she was at the same conference where Dr. Johnson was talking about the Johnson Subie reactor. When I heard him speak about the Johnson Sue bioreactor and he talked about how they'd reduced nitrogen inputs for this farm—I later found out that this farm is located in Turkey—they reduced their nitrogen by 85 percent and eliminated phosphorus, and they were the most profitable in that system of cutting back to 15 percent of nitrogen use and no phosphorus. I was sold. I thought he was crazy. I didn't think there was any way that would work, but I was sold.

9:23 I was all in on wanting to build these Johnson subioreactors. Before I kind of get into that, the Johnson Sioux bioreactor is a fungally dominant compost from what I've seen. I haven't had anybody or found anybody that boasts of a more fungally dominant compost than Johnson Sue. The reason it is so fungally dominant is because it takes a year to make.

9:49 You make this bioreactor that you see on the screen here and you fill it full of primarily a carbon-based product, but I found that it's good to mix and have greens and carbon in there. You want a high carbon source and a nitrogen source. You fill it full and then once it's full, in a year it breaks down into fungally dominant compost. I've got YouTube videos that show the building of this process and then I talk about the ingredients and why your ingredients matter. I'll make sure Keith gets the videos I think are pertinent to you viewers who are watching this.

10:32 If you are new to Johnson Sue, it's just too much information to get in on this webinar. For the guys who have been doing it, I want to get the information to them that would help them because I think if you've been doing Johnson Sue there's some real opportunities there for you to grow as a business and have extra revenue streams on your farm.

10:59 We're going to move on here. This is what it looks like when you're building it and this is how we build it. Dr. Johnson builds it slightly different, so if you're a gardener or you don't have the opportunity to build it this way, there's opportunity for you to be able to build Johnson Sue the way that they did, but this is how we do it. You take the shell off of an IBC tote, you line that shell with weed barrier mat, and then you want to evenly space the PVC pipes in there. It's kind of hard to see with the way our webinar series is, but you have five PVC pipes in there and that evenly spaces the pipes so that you have airflow going all the way through. That's the key to these compost because you have airflow going through the entire time and you never have it go anaerobic because of the airflow.

11:48 You wet your ingredients and you put them inside this bioreactor. That's what the bottom looks like so the air gets through. You can see on the right or the left that's a full Johnson Sue bioreactor that we just.

12:06 It's been filled so the next day we would go back out and we would pull those pipes out. And then the iteration that we've come up with—and I've been a while since I've been doing this, I think I came up with this idea but it's possible somebody else had this idea, I can't really remember nor do I care—but you can break these sections apart and once it's broken apart you can see on the right that as it breaks down it's easier to access the compost. And I really like doing it that way because I like having good access to the compost. So the left shows you what it looks like when it's right when you build it in there—that one's the corn stocks, grass clippings, wood chips.

12:52 Horse manure and yeah those four: corn stocks, grass clippings, wood chips and horse manure. And so anyway, this is like the right hand is the exact same bioreactor as you see in the left and that's only in the middle of the summer. That's how well it breaks down. It still takes a full year even though that looks like compost that you can use and you can use it early but you're short changing yourself. If you're in a pinch you want to use it in six months go ahead but you're not getting the full spectrum of biology. And Dr. Johnson explains that in the interview I did with him in the YouTube live why you want that to go a full year.

13:38 So anyway, we made our Johnson Sue in 2020, so in 2021 we're ready to apply and I, Dad and I discuss how we want to do it. And we had a difference of opinions on—I wanted to cut nitrogen in half everywhere and eliminate phosphorus on everything, and Dad was okay with eliminating phosphorus, I don't know why he, but he, I got him on that one, but he was like no we're not cutting back nitrogen anywhere. And I said let we'll give me five acres, so he gives me five acres. And we did three five acre test strips.

14:17 The whole field got 180 pounds of nitrogen and no phosphorus. On our test strips we had test strip A where we got 180 pounds of nitrogen and 40 pounds of phosphorus, so this is the only strip that got phosphorus and it was the nitrogen was the same on that strip as it was everywhere else on the rest of the field. And so we, that's test strip A and we came up with test strip A because that's what our agronomist said that we needed to get our yield goals of 200 plus bushel corn if it rained, what we, what our County average is and for what our irrigating purposes are.

14:54 So test strip B had no nitrogen, no phosphorus because I wanted to see how effective it was in it, you know, in doing it. And then test strip C had 90 pounds of nitrogen and no phosphorus. And all these are eight gallons an acre of extract in-furrow. To make an extract I have a machine called the BioS5 Machine, we have YouTube videos on that as well. But basically what you want to do is you want to put, you know, if I'm doing 500 gallons, if I'm going to make 500 gallons of extract, that's what we make when we're making stuff in-furrow. We'll take 120 pounds of compost, we'll put it in our extractor. It extracts for 20 minutes. And then once we have that extracted we run more water through it and fill up the 500 gallon tank.

15:45 And so that is giving us a ratio of one pound of compost for four gallons of water and we're doing eight gallons an acre in-furrow. So this particular test strip did not have any seed treatment on the seed and it didn't have any foliar application later on. This is just one treatment of Johnson Sue in-furrow when we're planting. So test strip B had the eight gallons, test strip C had that the 90 pounds of nitrogen and eight gallons. Neither B nor C got any phosphorus and we didn't put any phosphorus anywhere on our farm.

16:23 On the corn, the milo in 2021, so in 2022 or so that year we did milo or we did, or we had phosphorus but this year in 2022 we didn't apply any phosphorus on any of our farm ground. So this is what it looks like and this is why the biology is so important and this is why it's important to move off of synthetic fertilizer. So if you look at the corn on the right, that is the corn that got the full rate of nitrogen and phosphorus. You look at the corn—sorry I said right, I'm saying it wrong. The corn that looks taller out of the ground and has a crappy root structure, the one on the left, that's the one that got nitrogen and phosphorus. The one on the right that has the deeper root system, if you look at the soil you can even see the soil is darker on that, on those spots which blows my mind that the soil is darker just in that one treatment. But you can see also that it's lacking the nitrogen to have the full explosion. So you need to think of it in terms of, it's like synthetic nitrogen and synthetic phosphorus is like giving your corn crack or meth. It puts all the energy into growing the plant immediately but that plant is devoid of other macronutrients like manganese, zinc, copper, iron, like whatever you're not putting out, it's not going to have it because it put all of its energy into growing up immediately. The other plants are putting all their energy in putting out exudates which are building aggregates and those aggregates are building soil structure and then it's creating a rhiza sheath around your corn. And so when we see the beautiful rhiza sheaths that we'll see later on in my presentation like that's a system that's taking place that is healthy that.

18:12 You have to have if you're going to heal your system. If you keep putting phosphorus into your system you're going to hinder the exudate development and you're not going to have aggregates. So if a plant has to put out, secrete the exudates to attract mycorrhizal fungus and bacteria and other funguses, the saprophytic funguses that are developed in the Johnson Sue, they have to have those funguses and bacteria to bring the plant the macro and micronutrients it needs. So it needs manganese, coppers, zinc, iron, boron, all the macronutrients it needs. All those, you do not get that with synthetic nitrogen because it takes all the energy and put boiling those up and then it does not secrete exudates. And so then the plant can't get them from the soil that it needs to have a healthy plant. And so that's why the Johnson Sue is extremely necessary in these systems and that's why he heals the systems and this is why it works.

19:24 So if you look at this test strip here, so on the right, I love doing presentations and saying which one had was test strip A and which one's test strip B. And the crowd is never in full agreement and this is funny because I kind of wasn't paying attention that much during the growing season until I started at tassel and then it dawned on me. I'm like, 'Holy crap,' like the stuff that got no nitrogen and no phosphorus, like I can't tell. And so people would come out to the farm and I'd be like, 'Hey, come with me and check this out,' like whether it was a seed salesman or a grandma or another farmer. And I'm like, 'Check this out,' and they're like, 'What am I looking at?' And I would tell them, 'Has 180 pounds of nitrogen, 40 pounds of phosphorus. The other one has no nitrogen, no phosphorus.' And most people would not believe me. They would tell me, 'Crap, there was lying,' or whatever. But I was just so excited, you know, during this process. And so I knew that we had something going on even before we harvested it.

20:23 Harvest rolls around and we had 238 bushels an acre for test strip A that had 180 pounds of nitrogen and 40 pounds of phosphorus. Then test strip B was only 200 bushels an acre. So on the corn prices from that year and with corn prices this year, you would still be more profitable where you put down the full rate of nitrogen and the full rate of phosphorus. And then you come down to the 90 pounds of nitrogen, we were four bushels an acre better where we didn't apply any phosphorus and we had a half a rate of nitrogen and added the biology. This is why the biology is so key. So we're a hundred dollars an acre more profitable with the Johnson Sue.

21:12 And this is the problem I have as I've shared this and as this information has blown up my YouTube channel and people want me to speak at conferences because of this information. This information does ultimately not matter because your mindset is in the wrong place if you're excited about Johnson Sioux compost because of all the money you're going to save. Your mindset needs to be, 'How can I have the healthiest crops possible? How can I have the healthiest soil possible?' If that is your goal, then you're going to be successful because you're going to have healthy crops that people want to buy. You're going to have healthy soil that's going to produce healthy plants. But if your mindset is, 'How can I raise the highest bushel and make the most money?' your mind is in the wrong area and you're not going to be as successful in regenerative agriculture because you're asking the wrong question. The question that you're asking and wanting to get to is, 'How can I be the most profitable?' The question you should be asking is, 'How can I be the most sustainable and how can I have the healthiest soils and grow the healthiest plants?' Because this generation wants to be buying organic, whatever, and regeneratively grown, whatever. That's what they want.

22:25 So if you're going down this path of wanting to provide your customer with what they desire and what's going to be best for the environment, what's going to be best for your health and everybody else's health, that's when you're going to be successful. And that's the one thing that I wish I would have done a better job of, you know, in promoting this stuff in the beginning because I'm wanting to get people all excited about doing this. And yeah, I feel like I'm doing a disservice because we're still promoting bushels. I'm still being the one that's championing how much money you're going to make. And that can't be your ultimate goal, in my opinion.

23:06 So it isn't just us. If you guys watch and I'll try to remind Keith to get this in there too, Corey Miller had a video made about what they're doing. It's probably the best shot video that shows Johnson Sue. It's got the best cinematography. It's got the best storytelling and it just shows how much Johnson Sue's helped Corey Miller. That's a great video to watch. And then Dr. Johnson's latest presentation, if you go to his page, he goes through a bunch of farmers who are doing this that have been successful. He talks about the guys in Ukraine, Planet Freeze and Luke Host in Illinois. Bio Ag Management is their company and they're killing it with what they're doing. And what they're doing needs to be replicated across the United States. They have a local business where they make compost extracts. They take soil samples.

24:00 And they find out what you're lacking in your soils so they make the extract add the macro and micronutrients to their extracts and they apply that in-furrow when you're planting corn. But they did a test strip just to show the benefit of the compost extract and so all they're applying on these test strips is nitrogen and compost extract.

24:22 So on the bottom it doesn't really track well with the green and the red, but if you're following that where they did 200 pounds of nitrogen, they did not apply any compost extract. So with 200 pounds of nitrogen they raised 252 bushels of corn. Where they did 150 pounds of nitrogen and the compost extract and I believe they did eight gallons an acre in-furrow as well, but they raised 263 bushels an acre. And then if you keep going to the right and following me on the bottom there, they had 100 pounds of nitrogen and 237 pounds. I need to slow down, I get too excited about this stuff.

25:06 Far right, 200 pounds of nitrogen yielded 252 bushels of corn, but that's with no extract. The next one had extract, so 150 pounds of nitrogen yielded 263 bushels an acre. The next one was 100 pounds of nitrogen, 237 bushels an acre. And then 50 pounds of nitrogen, 257 bushels an acre. Zero, 223. So their most profitable was 50 pounds of nitrogen and that follows what Dr. Christine Jones said in the webinar that you guys did either last summer or two summers ago. I've watched that webinar series with her multiple times. It's actually what gave me the idea for the nitrogen myth and the phosphorus problem that was on my YouTube channel. And so that's a great webinar series, but that matches what she said on that webinar series that you guys did with her. And so 50 pounds of nitrogen was his most profitable setup.

26:07 I talk about this in a YouTube video from this year where we raised 207 bushel corn in 2022 without in our test strips and I go through all of our test strips. But my data wasn't all that conclusive because I did multiple test strips and I seen multiple results from all the stuff that we were doing.

26:26 So how is this possible? We have more micronutrients and macronutrients in our soil than we realize. We make it impossible to harvest them in traditional agriculture. Meaning when we put down synthetic phosphorus, when we till our soil, when we do all these things, tilling destroys the fungal communities and a lot of the bacterial communities. And then phosphorus hinders extra dates like I said it before. So you're really not getting what you need. When in traditional agriculture you need to be doing the five soil health principles and you need to be adding biologicals if you're in an area like me where it's really lacking. And so we have access to the macro and micronutrients in our soil when we do the soil health principles and regenerative agriculture and when we're using the BEAM approach. BEAM stands for biologically enhanced agricultural method.

27:24 This is a complete or this is a total nutrition digestion report I think I'm saying that right, that RegenAG Labs does. And so I sent off a soil sample on all of our irrigated fields to RegenAG Labs and that came back. And how they explained it to me is if you look here, we have 336 pounds of nitrogen in our soil. That's organic nitrogen, that's not plant available. We have 1,200 pounds of phosphorus available. That's not available because it's tied up with all this ton of calcium that we have in our soil. So depending on the pH level of your soil, your phosphorus, as soon as you put it out, is going to get tied up. In our soils it gets tied up with calcium. So that's why we have a ton of calcium and phosphorus in our soils because we've been applying 40 pounds a year every single year that we're planting a cash crop. And as soon as we apply it, it's tied up. 85 percent of it. That's the other thing that drives me nuts about this whole farmer's not being willing to give up phosphorus.

28:37 How many people would go to an investor and say I want to invest my money and they're like okay, we're going to lose 85 percent right off the bat, and you say great, here you go, here's my money? Like that's stupid. I don't know why we think that we have to be applying a ton of phosphorus. If we do these tests, total nutrition digestion test, call RegenAG or other labs, they both do them and have the test done. If you have this much phosphorus in your soil, you don't need to be applying phosphorus. You need to be applying the biologicals that are going to get your plants access to it. So this is the equivalency of 5,000 pounds of P2O5, 5,000 pounds of P2O5 is 130 years.

29:24 When I made the phosphorus problem and the nitrogen myth video, people were like, oh, well you're going to deplete it in a couple years, you know, make a video in 10 years when you tell us what a fool you are because of this. I'm like, okay, well I'll do that in 130 years and I'll tell my grandkids to make it and tell us what happened in 130 years when I have no phosphorus in 130 years.

29:45 So that's why when we're applying the biologicals that it works. Let's get to the biologicals. Um, just for time I'm going to skip this slide.

29:54 Here's the nitrogen. This is the test I sent off to, I believe it's BioMaxx. But I have a YouTube video that I go over this test and this was the big aha moment for me. This is when I understood.

30:09 Why my Johnson Sue was working so well. This test showed they we sent it off to do a DNA analysis on my compost. The DNA analysis on my compost showed I had 305 species of fungus and 367 species of bacteria in my compost.

30:27 Of those 670 species, 83 percent of them made inorganic nitrogen or made organic nitrogen in a form that the plant can take it up. All right, we go over here to carbon. 61 of them fixed carbon, meaning that they're taking atmospheric carbon and then getting that put back into the soil through the exudate. So 61 of them do that. If I'm saying that wrong and somebody's liable to be like hey that you're wrong on that, go ahead and comment because I think that's right, but I'm open to being wrong.

31:04 On the next one it shows down here the phosphorus and potassium. They're both 49. So for you guys who are applying a ton of potash, you can like if you do that Total Nutrition digestion test and you find that you actually have the potash, then you're not, or potassium, then you're not going to be needing to apply potash. That's one of the most common questions I get: you know what do you do for potash, are you not applying that anymore? Well, if you go back to this, I have 7,000 pounds of potassium in our soil. That's the value I have, so I don't have to worry about that either. We've never applied potash. So anyway, if you go down to phosphorus 49, potassium 49, so that's why I'm not needing to apply phosphorus anymore because I've got over 300 species of bacteria and fungus that I'm adding that are going to access the tied up phosphorus in my soil and make it plain available.

32:05 So the things I want you guys to take away from this webinar is that you need to not be intimidated by the science of these things. I didn't understand exudates and aggregates in 2020. I didn't understand them at all, didn't want to understand them, didn't feel like I needed to understand them. And now that we have all the information that we have from Dr. Christine Jones, Dr. Elaine Ingham, I always say her last name wrong, Dr. David Johnson, Dr. James White, Toby Keith, it's like we have the information that we need to understand these things. And now that we know how much money we are saving because of these biologicals, there's no excuse for you to have whatever limiting factor that you have in your brain that tells you you can't acquire wisdom and knowledge and understanding to be able to understand some of these things. There's no excuse for that. If I can do it, anyone can do it. When I watch a YouTube video, if I don't know what they're saying, I write down what the word is that I don't know what they're saying, then I go do a Google search, read about it, and then I go back and watch the video again. That takes a long time. It's tedious, and most people's mindset is I want to watch as many things as possible. What good does it do you to watch or to like John Kemp's a great example? I go through too many of those podcasts when I should just listen to the one podcast, write down all the stuff I don't understand, go find out what it is, and go back to that one. If I can teach somebody else and if I can understand it well enough to teach somebody else, then I have it. But if I just listen to that podcast that he has with Nicole Masters, and I will walk away from it, or J. Fear, or any of the good like he didn't want Dale, it was really good too. If I go away from those without understanding what I just heard or what I just learned, like does me no good, okay.

34:01 So we want to be a people that are acquiring wisdom and knowledge and understanding. You need to start your Johnson Sue this year, okay, and then you got to decide if you want to start it or buy it because there's a bunch of places where you can buy compost as good as Johnson Sue or actually buy the Johnson Sue. And then there's huge opportunities for you to save money kind of like what we already talked about with how much money we're saving, and there's huge opportunities to add revenue to your farm.

34:26 Hopefully we can get some of this stuff for you on the. We're going to be putting away too many notes. It's like system overload, but these are the scientists that I like to follow. I've learned a lot of what I know now, especially from Dr. James White and what he's doing at Rutgers. Dr. Toby Cures, I listen to her stuff this summer, and so I've been trying to get people aware of what she's doing. And some of the stuff she's doing, I haven't heard anybody else doing any kind of research even similar to what she's doing, and it's amazing what she's discovered. Other people, Dr. And then I put her out there because I know a lot of people that have gotten a lot of stuff from her. I haven't been studying her as much as I should because my focus is on Johnson's two compost and she does a thermal aerobic pile and there's turning involved. I was going to learn that last year, and then I realized I need to make sure I know my ingredients while in Johnson Sue, and I want to test some other things on ingredients on Johnson Sue. So I just get that. So I think that there's a point there too where you guys decide which avenue you're going to go and what you're going to do. But if I would go ahead and watch your videos and decide which type of compost you want to make, because Dr. Elaine Ingham's method, where she turns it, it's ready way quicker than Johnson Sue. Doesn't have the fungal count, but it's got. It actually has more from what I've understand. It's got more.

35:46 For the Love of Soils I highly recommend this book. I'm having my 11 year old son read it right now. John Kemp's podcast and his YouTube channel, Advancing Eco Agriculture, that's great stuff. Jay Fear, Ken Hamilton, Green Cover Seeds, like all these are great resources. Acquire wisdom and knowledge and don't stop learning. Don't ever arrive and think, oh I've got it now and I'm going to have a system now. Don't want a system, want to be learning what the like to get a better system every single time.

36:20 The biggest problems we have is our mind. So some of you guys that are watching this, it doesn't work, it's not possible. The problem that you have is you're not humble enough to learn and to want to question whether or not something is possible. And that's something that I've tried to do with myself. If anybody challenges me or says that I'm wrong in something, I want to consider what they're saying. I don't want to just automatically dismiss them and say that they're wrong because they challenge me. Like who am I to say that I have all the answers? And that's the thing I love about Dr. David Johnson. He's really humble. Nicole Masters mentions in her book when she was with him, he's not offering information about how smart he is and everything he's learned. When he's around other people, he's quiet and asks questions and wants to learn. He's a scientist that is brilliant and is doing a lot of amazing things. If we're going to be people who are acquiring wisdom and knowledge, we need to be along the lines like him, keeping our mouth shut and asking questions and learning regardless of how wise we are and how much information we have to offer.

37:25 I'm going to skip that part because we're running out of time, but I talk about the five soil health principles. Understanding the five soil health principles, like everything the five soil health principles is doing, is keeping the microbial life alive. So you need to understand the microbial life better. For the Love of Soils has an entire chapter on the microbial life within your soil. So I encourage you guys reading that and understanding why you want to be keeping these populations and these microorganisms and keeping them alive.

38:01 The thing that you need to ask yourself right now is, do I want to do Johnson suit? If you want to do Johnson suit, you're going to save yourself a lot of money. My encouragement to you guys is, watch from this summer on, watch all my YouTube videos. Don't watch the stuff I made in 2020. I really didn't know what I was talking about. I was just super excited and wanting to get the information out there. So watch my YouTube videos from this summer and beyond, or there's some good stuff in 2021. 2020 is just not a great year.

38:35 Make four different ones, at least a minimum of four Johnson Suit reactors, all with different ingredients so you can see what breaks down the best and what's going to be the best to do. I really encourage you, watch a bunch of Dr. Johnson's stuff and write it down and then re-watch it because I was in his presentation, I watched his videos multiple times, I watched other videos, and I still made mistakes. So make sure that if you're a passionate person like me and you're excited and ready to go, don't think that you're not going to make mistakes. You're going to make mistakes.

39:13 The next thing that you need to question is, do I have the stomach to learn all this stuff? And if you don't, then there's some great places to purchase it. You know, we all have to be able to know what our limitations are and what our time limitations are. You're not limited by your understanding or your brain. There's information out there that you can get. It's just, do you have the time to make Johnson Suit? And if you don't, or you want to just purchase it, there's some really affordable products out there that you can purchase.

39:41 Where you can buy it: you can buy it from Fed and Happy, SoilWorks, Elevate AG, Dave West, or Don Laurie. Fed and Happy is not Johnson Suit. He's got a composting system that's similar and his is very affordable. SoilWorks has I think 40 different strands of fungus in it, so there's less fungal counts on the SoilWorks but there's a lot of humic and fulvic acid in SoilWorks products, so it's a great product. Elevate AG has a great product that's already in liquid form that you don't have to make and extract, but it's more expensive. David West and Don Laurie are both making Johnson Suit compost that they are selling. So those are places that I recommend to buy Johnson Suit compost.

40:28 If you buy biologicals from anywhere else, you have to ask these questions: What is in your product? If they just tell you it's full of microbes, ask the next question. What is the fungal to bacterial ratio in your product and how many living fungus and bacterial organisms are in your product? Are they currently living? Are they active? If they're selling a jug, unless they're Elevate again and we grow with, unless they're those companies and they're working together, I don't know anybody that has living fungus in a jug. I don't think. I think Ryonos is the only one I'm aware right now that has cracked.

46:55 Compost because you can buy it from Don, David, or Fed and Happy or Soilworks, and then apply, make an extract and apply, and sell that extract to farmers. So there's huge opportunities there for you guys to make money.

47:10 I don't really talk about the extraction process in this presentation, but that's on my page and I'm hopefully going to make an extractor on our farm so that I can teach people how to make an extractor, because Soilworks makes a great extractor that we have and I think they're a year and a half out on how many people are wanting to buy their extractors. So that concludes my presentation for you guys and I'm excited to get into you guys' questions and answers.

47:38 All right, well thank you Jay, that was very, very nice. We have a lot of questions to get to here.

47:49 You kind of alluded to the fact that you do apply it to the seed. So Jeremiah here is asking about seedlings, alfalfa seedlings. Do you have any tips to applying to small seated?

48:08 I think you would want to get a sprayer pump that you could carry around your farm and spot spray weeds. You'd want to get an extract and make an extract for that. Soilworks' extractor is really good for that, but you're going to have to find a way to strain. I don't have them, but if you look online there's those mesh bags that are like 50 mesh bags so you can put compost in that and dip it in a bucket. As long as you got that strained well where it's going to go through a spray system, you can be applying it to your seeds that way.

48:46 Keith, have you guys done anything like that with seed treatment or anybody else that has done alfalfa seeds?

48:58 Not a lot. We do pretty small seeds in our seed blenders and we can pump liquid up in there, but it has already been filtered many times before it gets to us. So the key is just going to be in really, really good filtration.

49:18 Another question here from Doug. Will Johnson Sue eliminate fungicides? Have you any experience with that, Jay?

49:28 Maybe in a seed treatment or just overall throughout the growing season. Does he mean like, so you got to think about it's two completely different things. So fungicides are killing funguses and the beam is adding funguses. So if you go back and look at that picture that I had on my screen, both those seeds had were treated. So you're killing some of the biology with the seed treatment, but the biology that you're adding is so strong that your plant's still having a response.

50:12 We have a problem with some kind of a worm, I'm guessing it's a wireworm or something that's eating our corn seed. In 2020 I did Jimmy Red. In 2022 we did a non-treated GMO corn, so it was a gene wild corn but it wasn't treated, and I bet we had a 50 percent stand like it was terrible and that was on four acres, so that really hurt. We were trying to see if we can get by with non-treated seeds. Elevate AG has a product I've been talking to them about called chitin, and I think it's kaitan or I can't pronounce the name of the product that they're selling.

50:55 So I'm planning on using that product to see if that helps out. But we don't have any seed treatment fungicide on our wheat for that purpose because I want to be feeding in that biology. So if you want to start examining ways to get rid of the fungicide treatments on your seeds.

51:16 Marlin is asking when do you add the worms to your bioreactor? Great question. So you want to have a thermometer and test the temperatures your bioreactors are going to get. Hopefully get up to that 150 range, could get a little bit hotter. Dr. Johnson told me that he had one that was 160 I think for 18 days, so they can stay pretty hot for a long time. But yeah, you want a thermometer. Once it gets down to 80 degrees, you can add your worms. Fed and Happy cells the red wiggler composting worms, and right now I only have earthworms. So I'm going to be adding the Fed and Happy worms, and according to Dan, they live together in harmony, so I wouldn't have a problem using both worms in your system.

52:12 Typically for Dan, typically how many gallons can you expect from one extractor?

52:19 So there's 600 pounds. They say roughly, and I'm going to try to weigh my compost to our compost to see what they weigh and how they're breaking down. So anyway, if you think 600, then it's going to make 1200 gallons of extract. And on a foliar you want to be applying 20 gallons an acre. On a full year you want to do eight gallons an acre in furrow. And Dr. Johnson on that farm that he did with turkey, they were 20 gallons an acre, but they were only one pound for that 20 gallon, so his extract doesn't is.

53:03 Biologically is going to have less for the amount of water it's in, but he still was successful with that, and I'm guessing I probably need to play with how much, you know, and cut back and see if I can get as much results with one pound of compost for eight gallons instead of two pounds for eight gallons.

53:24 Okay, and I think here's a good question to maybe follow up with that: how many applications of the Johnson Sue do you typically do in a year? Is it just on the seed, is it infero, two, or foliar? What's kind of your method?

53:39 That's a great question. So most of it is all one. This year it's going to be more on our with our corn, because on the irrigated stuff we're going to do an infuro. I'm probably going to do a seed treatment beforehand as well, and then we're probably going to fertigate with nitrogen. We're going to build a fertigation system, and once we get that irrigation system going, then we're going to actually add compost extract as well.

54:11 Andrew here is asking about the importance of local fungal or bacterial or bacteria in your compost compared to buying commercially made compost, so you know, products are materials from your own farm versus maybe buying it from somewhere else that's making it with other materials.

54:33 Andrew, that's a great question, and there's a lot of inconsistency out there as to what people will say. So Zach Wright, who I respect a lot, and Ryan Knox, who I respect a lot, are on the idea of shares much compost from different areas as possible, and your soil gets to decide what's going to live. And I've heard that from Ken Hamilton, I think, was the one that was talking about it, but he was talking about foliar applications. And that when you do a foliar application of Johnson Sue and you picture that biology falling on the leaves of the leaf of the of the plant, the plant, as it secretes exudates, feeds that biology. Actually feeds the biology that it wants to keep alive and allows what it wants to come into the bottom of the leaf, as far as I understand it. So having a diverse amount of biology is better because the plant knows what it needs and it feeds it. Now, that's for the stomata. I don't know the way it works within the rhizosphere.

55:38 I do know on Toby Pierce's research, she was pointing out that the plant, it's either the plant or the I think it's the the plant, so the plant knows. Sorry, I gotta re-watch. See, I gotta watch the video again, but anyway, one of the two of those, so like, either the, I think it's maybe it is the biology, but anyway, the the, but I think one of the two of them, like the plant will secrete and feed the biology that is going to, or no, that that's what it is. So the plant, if you have a multi-species cover crop, the fungus and bacteria knows which plant is secreting the most carbon from its soil, and what's going to feed it the most, and so they'll discriminate between which root systems they want to bring micronutrients to one another. But with the mycorrhizal fungus, those plants can share the micronutrients amongst themselves within that. Now, go watch that video from Toby Pierce and find out what part of that I misremembered, but there's there's something crazy going on there with her research that's just really, really awesome and get pretty in-depth with some of that biology for sure.

56:49 Molly here is asking, says since the compost weight is highly dependent on moisture, how do you measure moisture content?

56:58 That's a great question. I should have asked Dr. Johnson on that, because he was saying, like, if you grab it and squeeze it, you know, it'll be so many drops of moisture coming off of off of your finger and or fingers on your knuckles. The way I do it is I watch the bioreactors, and I go by his rule of one gallon per day on each bioreactor, but once you get the water coming out the bottom, like one gallon is too much, so you just cut back based on that. And right now I'm down to where I'm watering every other day, and it's it's basically I water on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

57:41 So yeah, I've been trying to find on my computer here the presentation where I show the video of us applying it onto the seed, but I'm going to keep looking while you guys are asking questions. But I think the best way to do that would be to, I can't remember who was telling me this, I'm going to have to, I've talked to him. I think it was Corey Miller, but he was saying we should be just measuring the moisture content, and there's a way to do that. There's there's some kind of something that you can measure moisture content. So if you can find something that measures moisture content, that's the best way to do it is make sure it's 70 percent moisture by volume all around your bioreactor, and that's that's the easiest way.

58:23 Okay, well, I think, you know, we're past one o'clock here, but Jay, we still have some questions to go, so if if you're okay, I'm fine continue to answer a few questions.

58:34 Norman here is asking about the variability of the Johnson Sue and what experience you have with that. I don't know, maybe if you want to elude, I know you've taken some B crowd tests on your Johnson suit. Have you done that multiple times to see if there's any variability in that or?

58:56 Yeah, so it's like from when I'm taking the B crop. Or do you understand that, Dylan? Like, is she saying at what point that's taken, or like through the season, or are on just on different?

59:08 I'm guessing the way I'm understanding is maybe on different types of, you know, from one reactor to the next. So you made this mix and then you made this mix and then you made this mix.

59:20 Yeah, so the year that we did that it wasn't a B crop, it was the full one, and the full one's like 400 bucks if you just do it. And I think the way to understand that is if you do the 400 one, you're basically testing it three times, and that's like you're doing that so you can sell it commercially and you have the company say what is in my Johnson suit. If you just do the B crop, it's only doing time, and I think that's what I'm going to do going forward.

59:50 But the problem with the B crop is it's only giving you the fungus and bacteria species. So if you think of Johnson Sue as you have like mine, I had more bacteria species, but according to Dr. Johnson, he believes that my fungus populations were way higher than that. And so it's not a good assessment of how much life you actually have in there because it could be like, you know, if you just picture it as something like sheep and cows, right? I may have, you know, five different breeds of cows and I've got 20 different breeds of sheep, but then I actually in my field, my whole pasture, I might have twice as many cattle as I do sheep. But the difference of species is there's less on the cat. That's the way you kind of need to think of that Johnson Sue test I had did. And so that's why the B crop is a little bit limited because it's only giving you the difference of bacteria and fungus species that are within your compost. You're not getting a total count.

1:01:01 And so I think you need to know how to do microsby to be able to get that count. And so you can take courses, you can take Lane Ingham's course, that's not something I'm interested in doing right now just because, that's it's great information and it would be handy to know, but there's about eight other things I'm doing right now with our farm that are brand new things for me. And I've got to be able to limit what I can put on my plate and do in an amount of time.

1:01:34 So another question from Harry here: where do you get the extractors from? Great question. So bio5 makes a great extractor. The one problem with the bio5 is it's meant to clean out the bio5 product. It's not meant to clean out Johnson Sue that has a lot of unbroken down wood chips in it. So when you clean that out, you're gonna plug it up. If you just open the valve on the bottom, what Corey Miller does is he's got a screen that he scoops it out of the bottom first. I mean, it's a—if you have the bio5 machine, it's made for the bio5 product, which is a great product and it's still a great machine. But if you're putting Johnson Sue in there, you either need to screen it beforehand and screen the bigger wood chips out of that and then put your compost in, which is a tedious product, or you need to look into making a new extractor. I'm gonna, I'm looking into making a new extractor.

1:02:36 Gosh, Clint Freeze with BioAg Management, who I've mentioned three times now. Clint's got an amazing extractor, but it's I think they're up to like 25,000 on their cost, and it's great for bigger farms. And if you're covering, you know, if you're covering as many acres as I'm covering, it's worth—it's worth the 30,000 check that you're right into that because you're going to save, you know, the 200,000 in input. So what do you care about a 30 or 25,000 machine?

1:03:02 So that's the one way to think about it. And then if you search compost extractors, you're gonna find something that works. You're just gonna have to put a little time and research into finding it. And that's how I've gotten my idea for mine. We'll get it made, we'll see how it works, and if it works, great, great. If it doesn't, then it won't. And then there's a company that I'm working with, possibly demoing their product or their extractor to see if it's going to be an extractor that I want to recommend to people to use.

1:03:32 Emily here asks: so if all those hundreds of species of fungi grow in the Johnson Sioux, then they must have been on the materials that went into the compost on day one. So why does it take the special compost to grow them?

1:03:48 Great question. Yes and no. There's hundreds of thousands of fungal spores in the air at any given time, and I just said that and I'm not 100 sure the actual number, so I may be exaggerating or maybe under, but there's lots and lots of fungal spores flowing through the air. So when you think about this fungal spores flowing through the air, like you're gonna have fungal spores land in your Johnson's too. So mycorrhizal fungus cannot grow in Johnson Sue because mycorrhizal fungus needs a living root to grow. But Dr. Johnson has found mycorrhizal fungus spores in his Johnson Sue because the spores landed in his compost. And also, once he applied the compost to his ground or in their test strips, that they had 20 new species of mycorrhizal fungus in the soil. So what that told them was that the adding of the Johnson Sioux compost to your soil, even though it's full of saprophytic funguses that bring plants down, it actually—

1:04:52 Created an environment that mycorrhizal fungus could flourish once those fungal spores landed back into your soil. That's one of the reasons why when you're doing Johnson Sue that you want it to grow an entire year because you're going to be adding more and more fungal populations. When you add the worms, there's going to be the fungal component from their gut biome and the bacteria. Also, like when you add your worms, you're going to be adding new microbiology to your system because the worm's gut is just one of the most fantastic things in the world because it's adding a ton of micronutrients to your soil but it's also adding a ton of the bacteria and fungus and other like worm castings are full of nematodes as well. So like they're just a huge benefit to it. So that's one of the reasons why when you think of Johnson City, you wanted to go an entire year because it's adding the biology over time from the fungal spores coming into it.

1:05:55 I think we'll go for one more question here Jay and we'll wrap it up. You alluded to the fact in your presentation about how the biology correlates with all the soil health principles. A question asks what differences the cows made for you on your operation.

1:06:15 That's a great question. We've seen dung beetles come back. I found one two years ago and this year I found six, and so I'm excited to see how much that population continues to increase. You think about their gut biome, it's the same thing. They're adding the microbiology from their gut biome. You know, you can heal these systems naturally with cattle with rotational grazing with cover crops and all that stuff. Our problem is that our ground is so depleted of micro or depleted of the biology. You think about Nicole Masters, talks about this in her book 'For the Love of Soils,' and then she mentioned this at the conference I was at with her but we really talked about it at that conference a lot. But kosha and pigweeds are two weeds that we fight terribly here. Neither one of them have a relationship with mycorrhizal fungus. So if there is a large population of mycorrhizal fungus, you're putting them in a position where they're not in a healthy situation for the fungus and bacteria also. Synthetic nitrogen like those two plants love synthetic nitrogen and they love large amounts of it. So when you're adding the synthetic nitrogen, you're creating an environment that those plants love. Whereas when you add this biology back and you're able to bring back the populations of your saprophytic funguses but also the mycorrhizal fungus, you're able to create an environment that's not conducive to the pigweed and the kosha.

1:07:55 To answer your question, for us the cattle have been great and I love the biology but the biggest changes in our farm have come from Johnson's Sue. It's just they're all pieces. If you're going to till the crap out of your ground and you're adding the synthetic fertilizer, then Johnson Sue is not going to benefit you as much as if you have a system where you have the cattle, you have no till, you have armor on the soil, you have the diversity of species. Like all these things are working together. The idea is keeping the biology alive. So anything you can do to keep biology alive, the better off your system is going to be in the long term.

1:08:37 Well Jay, thank you and on behalf of Green Cover we appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to have this webinar with us. I want to thank everybody else for attending and remember, if you have any more questions on the extractor or building it, Jay has a lot of videos explaining how he builds them and his process so you can check that out on his YouTube page, Young Red Angus.

1:09:04 Yeah, and I haven't built one yet but we're going to build one this year and then I've got stuff on the bio5 extractor. If you look at that extractor, I'm not very good at building things and I feel like somebody who knows how to build stuff can see the bio five extractor and be like, oh yeah, I could build one. So like, if you do research on YouTube, you're going to find a way to build an extractor. If that intimidates you, overwhelms you, and you don't want to do it, then pay the extra money to have the Elevate AGS product that has the foundational fungus in it, that has mycorrhizal fungal spores in it. So even if you're wanting to build your Johnson suit piles, I would recommend using that foundational fungi as a product in the beginning and then right before you apply your Johnson suit, adding a little bit of that because you're going to be adding the mycorrhizal fungal component.

1:09:56 Yeah, and I know we didn't get to all the questions. We will try to answer as much as we can. We'll also have this webinar posted on our YouTube page along with all of our other webinars for you to go back and review later. Next week, you can join us. Next week Wednesday same time, we'll be having another webinar with Elevate Ag and some customers and some testimonials that they have. Again, Jay, thank you, appreciate it, and everybody—well, that was a good transition then with Elevate mentioning their products. So yeah, watch next week to hear about Elevate. You all have a good day then. All right, thanks a lot, man.