Measuring Nutrient Density in Food and Soil with the Bionutrient Meter

0:22 All right so we'll wait for people to kind of stream in here. All right.

0:53 I'm going to go grab Noah real quick. Gotta make sure we get this streamed on Facebook. Yep.

2:05 All right everyone I think we are going to go ahead and get started. So just a couple disclaimers before we get going if this is your first time on a green cover webinar just know that as an attendee your mic is muted and your screen is hidden so that we can devote all of our energy to our presenter today. If you do happen to come up with questions go ahead and utilize the question and answer feature down at the bottom of your screen. You can submit those questions during the presentation and then we will get to those after the conclusion of our presentation.

2:37 So my name is Sophie I'm on the education and marketing team here at Grain Cover and I am super excited for today's presentation with Steve Groff. So Steve is one of the pioneers of the cover crop movement in the U.S. He brought the tillage radish to fame and really helped launch the soil health movement as we know it today. He has been a tireless proponent of cover crops and soil health and we consider him both a great friend and a mentor.

3:04 Today Steve is going to be sharing with us his nutrient density journey. This is a talk that I think a lot of us are especially interested and excited about as we continue to explore the impact that soil health has on plant health, human health and ecology. Many of us feel intuitively that food is medicine and that the quality and nutrient density of the food we consume does in fact matter. This technology is moving towards actually being able to prove that intuition. So special thanks and gratitude to you Steve for making time to come on to chat with us about your work today and I will go ahead and pass it on over to you.

3:41 Well thank you so much Sophie and hello everybody. Good to be with you today. I would just say in response to the introduction which was great by the way, so if you appreciate that, is you know, I think Keith Burns and I have known each other for it's well over 10 years, maybe 15 years. And we've kind of had this somewhat you might say parallel track and in cover crops and so forth. But you know what's really interesting, almost all of us who were buddies back in the day, all we talked about was no-till and cover crops. We barely even mention that anymore. And today you know I'm not going to mention that very much. I never dreamed that I'd be talking about human health. Oh yeah soil health we're into that of course but now we're taking that a step further and I really think it's cool that those of us in this movement, whatever you want to call it, regenerative agriculture, there's all kinds of different names, I'm not big on labels, but you know really what we're trying to do is, and I'd like to say it this way, we're trying to help people. And we're trying to help the planet as well and be a good steward of what God has entrusted us. And I know I share those values with Green Cover Seed. And now that's just what makes us a good friends and also you know trying to do some similar goals.

5:10 So anyway a little bit about me. I'm a third generation farmer literally living in the house that my grandparents bought in 1935. I've been all over the world helping educate farmers and those who influence agriculture. And historically it's been about no-till, cover crops and those type of things. But more recently, I think you could say I pivoted a little bit because I see the future. I see what the future is going. I wrote a book, you can see it there on the right-hand side of the screen, 'The Future Proof Farm.' Keith gave a nice testimony about it. And that's really encompasses a lot of what I'm going to be talking about today. I talk about the nutrient density meter in that book. You can get it at stevegroff.com.

5:57 So I believe the future of agriculture is growing nutrient-dense foods, but it doesn't stop there. It's not just about doing that and measuring it and all that. We want to enhance human health and well-being. And sometimes we talk about health and everything and health is such a broad topic, but it's not just about the physical side of things, there's emotional things as well. All this can go back to food and how food was grown. All that could impact our human health. And so I think that's quite profound when we think of that because most farmers these days, that doesn't enter their mind. All they want to know is what's my ROI on these cover crops. That's all they want to know. But I think we're seeing a shift to more and more farmers are seeing the future and where it's going. So that's really what our topic is today and I want to share with you my journey, my journey in being able to learn more and more about nutrient density.

7:14 So my nutrient density journey first started some tests back in the year 2000 that's 22 years ago with a guy.

7:23 From the USDA. And I'm not sure how we met but I sent him some samples and he analyzed them for me. It would have been some of my squash that I was growing. And at the time I tested higher in nutrients like calcium and magnesium and things like that they were kind of interested in with human health. And my squash tested higher in 13 different nutrients that were tested minerals then the USDA average. I didn't say standard because there's no standard to this day there is no standard. We don't know what a butternut squash has the potential to do. We're learning but we do know what the averages are. And so that's what we have to go on so if I'm doing better than average that was encouraging and so that was great.

8:18 And then about four years ago, three or four years ago, I heard about a nutrient density meter, something that you could measure the nutrients and the minerals in crops, in foods we eat. And the idea that really piqued my interest was this meter. If it can be calibrated and figured out, it's confident enough in it, you can literally go to the grocery store and buy your tomatoes based on the nutrient density or the nutrient values of the various brands or various tomato selections that you have there on the grocery store shelf. Well, you know, I immediately know and I think you guys agree that'll be a game changer if it could ever happen.

9:15 Well, there has been some progress. And I don't want to disappoint everybody because I'm not trying to do clickbait here or anything like that but that meter is not quite ready yet for public use. But I got one here. This is version two. Now there's a picture there on the right hand side of your screen and I have just gotten this literally two weeks ago and then I had to get the accompanying tablet which I just got several days ago. So I haven't had much time to play with it. I did play with the original one and it was stated when it came out that it wasn't ready to go yet but they want to get database and so they can refine it and make it more consistent and so forth. So that's kind of where we're at right now. We're in version two and there'll probably be one or two more versions as I hear before we really get something that is going to be fit for the public.

10:19 So there is about 300 of these around the nation. You have to be a member of the Bionutrient Association. You can go look at the Bionutrient Association by foodassociation.org, look it up, read about it and you can understand a lot more about what they're trying to do with that. So there's quite a few of us who are working with this. And one of the things that I do appreciate is the thoroughness of it. I think we're all a little frustrated that it's not going faster but the thoroughness of it. Like what we're doing is we're taking some tests. We're also sending in samples. Like last fall I sent in butternut squash that I grow. I'm a vegetable farmer and they asked me to take soil tests literally underneath where the vine was that that squash grew because they wanted the exact measurements of the soil to help determine and see if there's correlations there, what they can measure in the soil and then actually what gets into the squash. So I can really appreciate the thoroughness of this. There are tens of thousands of data points in the database. And if you go to the Bionutrient Association and look at their website, dig around a little bit, and you can see some of the data that they have in that.

11:43 So I'm going to advance to the next slide and you'll see a picture of woods. And I'm live in Pennsylvania so Pennsylvania, Penn's woods. That's why it's called Pennsylvania. It was almost 100 percent woodland when William Penn found it 400 years ago. Now here's the reason I'm showing you this picture. When you look at this picture, what do you see? You see green growth, healthy, looks awesome, right? Well, you look really close and you honestly can't see any nutrient deficiencies, at least I haven't seen any yet. That being said, no fertilizer has been applied to this woods ever. And so the curiosity within me made me go and take a soil test. I wonder what the soil is like there. How does this work? It must be a perfect soil. Well, I don't know how many of you took a soil test of your woods or maybe I should say since some of you are from more open land and prairies and so forth, an undisturbed area I would encourage you to do it sometime even if you have a piece on your farm.

13:01 Fence row or something that you know wasn't disturbed for maybe ever take a soil test there and just see what it reads. So for me my soil test came back there was a few things that were what I thought was fairly normal. Now again taking a soil test now is in the context of usually growing crops so what a crop would need versus what a woods would need could be different but what was very very interesting to me is like for instance my base saturation for calcium normally we like to see that 70 percent or higher in our fields in my woods 29 and we would say nothing could grow there. Even in the woods you would think that why does this work well I'll just say in short it's the biology. It's the biology. It's the microbes and all the living life there that's what makes this work that is the way life was designed to function no matter how you look at it the biology.

14:06 So what can we learn from this is the question. No I'm not suggesting we go out and forage for berries and nuts I'm not going to say not going to do that but what can we learn from this and this is my whole point here. When we talk about nutrient density how does it work when man humankind leaves things alone things seem to work just fine without many problems. How can we grow our food in a way that is healthy to our bodies and we can have better health.

14:40 You know it's interesting when you think about it we are living longer today than ever before but I would argue we're sicker than ever before as a society particularly with chronic diseases and autoimmune issues and stuff like that. Why is that I'm not going to get into that today but what I want to say is eating better eating right and the way we grow our foods it's not just the foods you eat although that's a large portion of it but how we grow our foods can make a difference and I think a lot of you are going to be quite pleased to know that we are going down the right path here with cover crops low soil disturbance no soil disturbance diversity all the things that we in the soil health movement which I'll call it that now are doing leads up to better food I think theoretically. We always were hoping that that was the case but I'm going to show you some data here soon and some examples of what I mean by that.

15:47 Well let's start with my situation. These are some butternut squash that I grew a couple years ago on the left hand side you see seven beautiful butternut squash on the right hand side you see some that are getting rotten. So I grew both sides here. Now on the left side you can see the notation underneath there is from my fields long-term no-till cover crops diversity pretty pretty good mix of that. The story on the right side is a neighbor called me up in February and said hey can you grow I want you to grow I guess they rented they wanted to rent it to me to grow squash and so I used my variety in other words these varieties are the same that field had been conventionally farmed number it had been moldboard plowed up until recently and it was corn on corn or corn for who knows how long. Well it's February so I decided as soon as possible to plant a mix of peas and oats which is a good late winter early spring cover crop and then I no-tilled into that in the beginning of June.

17:05 So the point I want to make though here is even though that year I used no-till and that year I used cover crops it was literally like two months three months before the crop was planted. In the fall I took samples from both put them in my the gra in my garage in my house and in December I started smelling something and I thought wow something's going bad and I looked and sure enough the ones that were grown in a conventional tilled situation no diversity pretty much no soil life were starting to rot and this was like wow my goodness this is really really really insightful. So I think this shows us what is possible with healthy soil this is a very simple thing that I did on my phone. Now I kind of wish I would have took samples of that and got them analyzed at a you know nutrient mineral level just to see what the differences were but it you know this is probably good enough to convince you that there is a strong difference.

18:13 Now I also grow some hemp and I just want to tell another little story on that before we get back to the nutrient density meter. So I grow CBD hemp and one of the things that I like to I'm not afraid to try new things and you know to my knowledge there's I'll just put it this way not many farmers who are no-tilling CBD hemp using cover crops particularly in a long-term no-till situation so those of you who are not from the

18:50 Penn State Medicine is well known for a lot of their research and they're very much in the national scene. They happen to have a research facility dedicated to cannabis, and they're studying CBD hemp and the CBD product that comes from hemp. Without going into all the details, I got involved with that and I got a phone call one day and I felt like I was being interrogated and I wasn't sure where this was going, but they're like, what are you doing? How are you growing this CBD?

19:35 I came to find out that of all the CBDs they tested, the one I that was grown on our farm was showing the most effect on killing colon cancer cells and killing some melanoma type cancer cells. And they also stated that the CBD was the equivalent of Tylenol in pain management. And so I'm like, whoa, wow, okay, that's awesome.

20:10 So that was three years ago. So the past two years we've been doing research here where we're comparing hemp grown on my best fields, my longest term, my healthiest fields, and I'm doing soil health tests and all that, so I have a good background here knowing where my healthiest fields are, where my healthiest scores are and all, with some of my I'll just say not as good fields. And I do have a cooperating neighbor, full disclosure, he knows what I'm doing, comes from more of a conventional background. So we've been growing hemp in that and then we're testing it to see the differences. It's the exact same variety we're testing.

20:49 Once this season is over, if our numbers continue to go as they were, we'll be able to publish a paper on this. And as you'll see later in my presentation, one of the taglines I use for CBD is better soil, better oil. So I know that's a cute, catchy thing, but we're able to back it up. And so I just wanted you to understand that this is beyond theory now. We're starting to put some research behind it.

21:28 We can go to the lab and we can test everything, but boy, when this nutrient density meter gets ready for the general public to use, it's going to be a game changer, I believe. So at the risk of you guys thinking that I'm self-promoting, I guess I am a little, but these are our products that we grow, manufacture and sell on our farm, CBD products. But we're using our story: good health grows with better soil. We're telling our story, and I'm saying those of us who are in the regenerative agriculture movement, soil health movement, we have a story to tell.

22:08 Whenever I'm talking to non-farmers, without fail, everybody loves what I do. You need to learn to tell that story. You need to tell your story. What is your story? And I know that we all don't have all the data and everything to back it up, but just tell them, you know, we grow cover crops, it keeps the soil covered. You know, in the prairies, arsenal doesn't blow when it's windy and you know, multi-pile multi-car pileups from the interstate. I'm from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and that's been kind of a hot spot, you might say, for looking at agriculture pollution and so forth.

22:51 When people in my region say, what's a cover crop? I'm like, I plant a cover crop so that I keep the nitrates and the fertilizer out of the Chesapeake Bay and also your well water too. And that hits home with that. And then I can tell that story and it's always, why aren't more farmers doing this? And so we have a story to tell and I'm going to connect some of the dots here a little bit later on, coming up here, about the whole thing. To get to nutrient density, you're going to have to use regenerative agriculture practices.

23:31 Let's look now to the human health. What's our culture like today? You go visit the health practitioner and the health practitioner says, you have a disease caused by your diet. And the patient says, should I change my diet? And the health practitioner says, oh no, not at all. Here is a pill. Right? Isn't that what's going on in our culture? Isn't that what's going on today? I would argue that's just treating the symptom, offering a solution that keeps you dependent on products and services.

24:12 Now don't run with me too far here. I'm not against pills. I'm not against drugs in a prescriptive manner for certain things. Not against hospitals, I get doctors, nurses, no, no, no. But we've depended way too much on treating the symptoms rather than treating the problem. The problem is when we offer a solution that you don't have to be dependent on products and services.

24:41 That's what we're talking about with nutrient-dense food. And it's not like you're gonna eat the best food in the world and never get sick or never die. We're all gonna die and we probably all will get a little sick once in a while hopefully, but you understand my point. We want to set ourselves up to be healthy and we have to grow our food in the right way to do that.

25:10 This is a really dramatic graphic from the Kiss the Ground folks. If you haven't seen Kiss the Ground movie, I'd encourage you to do so. It's quite thought provoking at the very least. You know, not everybody's gonna agree with everything that's portrayed, but it's really overall really, really good. And you know, here on the left-hand side is kind of depicting conventional agriculture, full-scale tillage. It's like farmers get up and it's like what am I going to kill today? That's kind of the mentality that farmers have, rather than how can I put more life in my operation? That's how the right side there is depicted, and I think we in agriculture need to think about that more.

25:59 You solve one problem, there's going to be more problems coming up. It's not easy, trust me. It's not easy to be in regenerative agriculture. I have failures every year. I try not to make them too big, but we learn from them. And I'm not going to get into the whole part of that, but I'm telling you that this is the direction we're going from left to right in that picture there. I don't so much care where you're at on this picture, but I do care in what direction you're headed. And if you're not headed to the right side there of more life, more biodiversity, all that, I think your farm could become obsolete someday. And I don't say that as a threat, I just say as a heads up, because this is where we're headed, I feel, in agriculture.

26:44 So with that, let's get up to date here a little bit. Here's a closer picture of the meter itself. And right now, and this is just an update here, it's from the Bionutrient Institute. And you can just look them up: bionutrientinstitute.org. And you know, spend an hour or two on their website. There's a lot of data you can look at, a lot of information where they have taken all kinds of different things and tested them in a lab and are now trying to do what we do in the lab with this meter here.

27:20 That's just a little bit updating the meter. You might want to know how is it going to work? Well, I just copied and pasted this right on the website so I wouldn't get it wrong. The Bionutrient Meter is a handheld spectrometer that works through the principle of spectroscopy. The Bionutrient Meter has lights or LEDs that emit light at a very specific wavelength and then bounce off objects. There lists a bunch of them there, even soil.

27:54 Actually, I was told here just last week we had a webinar on this that they're looking at doing a sap analysis at some point. That would be really cool if you could actually go out in your fields and test the sap like you kind of do with our Brix with our refractometers, and get a bunch of more readings. So that's on the agenda anyway. But anyway, a light sensor and a device reads how much light bounces back for each wavelength very quickly and multiple times to a given measurement.

28:27 So here's a little diagram that might help you understand a little bit better. And I don't know if you can see in this unit here, not much to see, but when you turn them on, there's all kinds of lights burst forth. It is kind of cool, kind of cool looking when you do that, but anyway, this is just a quick you know. So if you wonder how it works, you can go up to an apple, tomato, wheat grains, greens, whatever, and it's going to give back a reading.

28:57 Now you kind of wonder, well, why can't they get this figured out? Well, there's so many nuances. There's so many that the way this meter works is it has to be connected to the internet. And I have over here a tablet that I gotta connect it to, or you can do it to smartphones, and it has to be connected to the internet to be able to take these readings and then compare them to the database online. So now you understand it's a little complicated. It's not just like a refractometer. A refractometer is so freaking simple that you just look at and you can see the Brix levels, which by the way, a refractometer is a very good thing to use if you know what the ranges should be in a given crop. This device here is like taking a refractometer to a whole new level, but for goodness sake, get a

29:57 Refractometer and play around with it yourself. Now that's very reliable. Now you can go and find hundreds of examples of what all it means, but I would just encourage you to do that if you're furious with something like that.

30:12 Now let's get into the little bit of the science. So the readings that you're seeing on this chart here, nutrient variation is huge. These are the laboratory results, okay? These are results in a laboratory which shows you the need for this meter to be functional.

30:34 So if you look at this here, the wider the bar of any given one, like you get down here you see kale, that green bar there, that's that bread there means that there's very wide differences on the nutrient values. In this case we're looking at calcium in all the samples they tested, and usually it's a couple hundred. But you know, it's interesting you look at something like tomatoes and peppers, blueberries—there's not so much difference between all the different ways they're grown. That is fascinating.

31:15 What it can do is if you're a consumer that cares about your health, and particularly with calcium—and we know you can look at 10 or 12 other ones too—some of these vegetables, there's not as much variation. But what's nice about the database that is being developed here is it goes against also where the produce was grown, how it was grown, and a lot of other variables. And if you can get into the dashboard of the bio nutrient association, you can ingest almost any different type of product out there and you can understand some of the variables behind it.

32:02 So I want to show you one here that I think most of our audience today can relate to. Any of you who grow wheat and any of you who are a no-till farmer, this is one chart that was fascinating to me because I guess you could call me a die hard no-tiller because I haven't tilled anything in my farm since 1996. That's like 26 years. I started in 1982, so I have some fields not no-till in 40 years. So yep, I'm admitting it—I'm a die-hard no-tiller. Also used a lot of cover crops in the last 20, 30 years.

32:41 But look at this chart here. The zero in this case, the zero represents no-till. And the blue bars represent light tillage, which is like disking or shallow field cultivators or whatever you call it in your region. Heavy tillage, more like chiseling or moldboard plowing. So they looked at these different things here: antioxidants, polyphenols, proteins, magnesium, calcium, iron, potassium, sulfate, so on. And look at the shift here, and essentially what this means is where these other practices were held, we had lower nutrient density, lower nutrient density.

33:28 So it begs the question, why? And this has been one thing that keeps coming up in the data—keeps coming up tillage has an effect on nutrient density. And so you start asking questions, why? And I'm not going to get into this deep here today, it'd be a whole webinar in itself. But we probably are all familiar with mycorrhizal fungi. Mycorrhizal fungi is responsible for taking nutrients from the soil into the plant roots. Mycorrhizal fungi is killed or destroyed with tillage, so that's my simple answer—it's the mycorrhizal fungi. Now it's bigger than that. You know, earthworms have a hard time with a lot of tillage, and a lot of other microbes for that matter. But I'll just maybe leave it there. This is interesting data, very interesting data, and it kind of supports the whole concept of low or no soil disturbance.

34:32 I'm going to start wrapping up here and I want you to get your questions ready here in a couple minutes. And Sophie, you can start lining them up for me. But here's some key takeaways. And again, this is the kind of talk that would take hours to really get more thorough on it. Nutrient deficiencies are directly related to microbe deficiencies. And we're finding that out, you know, when you look at the data here. So there again, tillage is a factor. Also, cover crops diversity—you mentioned cover crops. If you build it, they will come, the microbes. I just heard yesterday, I was talking to an agriculture consultant who was working with some farmers in California in almond orchards, which if you know anything about almond orchards, they pretty much grow them like.

35:37 Like they're in a parking lot they want not a weed in sight, nothing, nothing underneath those almond trees. And it's just packed soil basically.

35:49 They started working with the farmer incorporating cover crops and more of a system than ever before, and earthworms started showing up. The question was asked where did these earthworms come from, because they did not see them. Some people have done, they did not put them there. Where did they come from?

36:09 I've also seen myself by using—I use, I still use some herbicides on my farm. I'm not organic, so just in case you were wondering. Since I've been reducing herbicides, I've started to see things like red clover appear in my fields. I haven't planted red clover even as a cover crop. I don't know. I'm 58 years old and I've been on this farm all my life. Where did that come from?

36:40 Where do earthworms come from? I was myself in 1999. I go back to California, quick here in the San Joaquin Valley. I called home and told my wife I don't know what I'm doing here because in 1999 there was all it was was brown. I should say soil, but I'm going to call it dirt. It was pretty lifeless everywhere. In 2004, five years later, I went out and I was out digging around with some of the farmers there, and we actually found an earthworm. You would have thought they hit the lottery. That's the first earthworm they said they saw in 30 years. And I didn't think about it at the time, but where did that earthworm come from?

37:19 I'm just going to put it out there. I have no proof, but I think there's possibly that somehow in God's great design there's been earthworm eggs, there's been microbial eggs that have been just waiting for the right time to come forth. Now again, not a scientist. Maybe I'm totally wrong. But to me, if you build it they will come. And I'm going to tell you here again, nutrient deficiencies are directly related to microbial deficiencies.

37:48 So we need to step back here. What is the path to health? Notice I didn't say soil health or human health. I just said path to health because I'm talking about everything. We need to create a habitat for microbes. That's what green cover seed is doing. That's what cover crops do, that's what lessened utilities does, that's what diversity does, that's what animals do in their rotation.

38:10 And then here's where we're with this. This is the direction we want to go. This is our goal. Vitamins and minerals will become available to plants. Pause. Vitamins and minerals become available to plants, and then the animals and or people who eat those plants will benefit. It's a loaded statement, but that's really the crux of what our talk is today—getting nutrients in the right form into a plant.

38:39 And I'll just say kind of as an aside here, you want to get the right nutrients and I'm not saying that just because you all of a sudden grow a cover crop that all of a sudden all these minerals are going to magically appear. No, some of them have been farmed out. We may have to get them jump-started. And I'm not against those products that do that. I want to be clear on that. So there is a transition to get back to that.

39:06 I love this chart here. A guy named John Frank put it up and I'm not going to go over it a whole lot here, but I want to make a point. As you read across that chart from left to right, you know, from the very poor to the very good and excellent, what is really, really, really interesting is—and I think this is a take-home message from today's topic—if you can grow plants that are highly nutritional, high mineral, high vitamin content, you will have to use soil health principles to do it. You will have to.

39:47 If we historically, we as farmers, have been kind of told that you need to grow cover crops for the environment, which is true, and I'll just leave it at that. Now I'm saying we need to grow cover crops—I'm excuse me—we need to grow food for our own human health benefit. But in order to do that, the environment will take care of itself because you have to employ those practices. So I think this is a really interesting thing on the very bottom there. Look at that bottom there. Look at the disease and insect susceptibility versus resistance. That's kind of like a bonus. If you grow plants with nutrients in them, they're not going to be susceptible to disease and insects like the picture I shared in the woods at the beginning. Remember that?

40:36 At some point here we can definitely reduce our inputs. This is 2022. All of our inputs have gone up. Who knows where we'll be out a year from now. But I'm on the bandwagon of reducing my.

46:26 Geographical and climate differences. Regarding the use of herbicides, I kind of answered that question in my first line of defense on weeds is cover crops. But I have to plant certain cash crops at certain times and sometimes those cover crops aren't big enough with their biomass to adequately suppress all the weeds. And so that's where I'll say it this way: some herbicides come into play.

46:58 So I try to be judicious in that. For instance on corn, I have not found a way yet to consistently grow corn without any herbicides, but I shy away from residuals. I don't use residual herbicides. I will work at using the cover crops. I have a cover crop roller, which I think you mentioned in the introduction. But then again I'll come back with post emergence with drop nozzles and just spot spray. I'm full disclosure, I'm a small farmer in the context of corn, so it's not like thousands of acres. So my strategy again—remember I said context for me is what I do.

47:35 I want to mention really quickly that there are some very interesting herbicides being developed that I believe could show some promise and I'll put it in the category of being able to limit the need for glyphosate. So that's something that is coming down the pike and I think there's some hope for that.

48:12 So invasive species—the first thing that kind of came to my mind was slugs. In the east here we deal with slugs. Slugs are the weirdest animal. There's some years—in 2018 it was terrible. Even on my farm it was bad. I had to replant some corn. I hadn't done that for a long, long time. And then the next year, sort of similar conditions but not quite, not many around. And ever since, not many. We had a fairly wet spring again this year in our area. I don't think I saw any slug damage and nobody did.

48:58 As far as other invasive species, we've had like the spotted lanternfly come through here. It's marching westward about 50 or 100 miles a year and went through here last year. They were everywhere. It didn't really affect me too much. They were a nuisance because they want to land on your neck, literally right above your collar. Like you'll have to swat 30 or 40 of them away a day and I kid you not. This year they're all west of us and I just literally just saw two or three today. That's the first I've ever really seen any. So I don't know. They're considered an invasive species, but to answer your question, I haven't really had to deal with anything that was detrimental on a scale that I had to react to.

49:46 You're utilizing diversity on your front and I think that those conditions aren't as welcoming to the invasive species that come in large swaths and end up finding themselves in monoculture fields where they found exactly what they want. It's easy picking. So when you have diversity, that's a way to combat that.

50:11 Absolutely. I grow pumpkins and squash and we have our field driveways and we plant that into pollinator type plants. And like right now the buckwheat's flowering, sunflowers are coming out. It's beautiful. Along the woods I plant pollinator and habitat species because that land is not productive anyway, so why not plant something there that benefits and gives the diversity. It's just a way of thinking. But sometimes, you know, farmers just got to be given some of these ideas and they'll do it if they understand the big picture.

50:46 Yeah, it makes a lot of sense when that clicks in your brain like, okay, creating that habitat will actually build resiliency into my farm with actually very little effort.

50:57 So this question is interesting. They asked if you're seeing an increase in markets where farmers and ranchers are capturing higher premiums for their products that may have a higher nutrient density. Like you said, for example, with your CBD, you are working with the university on paper. So I'm curious if you were able to leverage that information in your product.

51:23 Yes, I have. I've had buyers contact me. For instance, it was a restaurant chain—and I mentioned this in the book actually, another plug for the book—a company called Sweet Cream. They're here in the east and then also on the west coast.

51:43 They're high-end soup and salad. I mean just think Subway but think soup and salad, that's the way they do it. They're really looking for nutrient dense foods, and so we grew for them for a couple years. I didn't this year—just things didn't work out kind of in both our size, but I'm planning to next year.

52:04 I grow for Whole Foods, which I'll just leave it at that. People ask me, you know, do you get a premium growing for Whole Foods? I'm like, no you don't get a premium, but I will say they pay very fair. And then people say, well I can't afford to shop there, and I'm like, that's why I sell there. But all that being said, Whole Foods have been really good to me. They've been fair. They like my story, they like what I do.

52:35 I'll just tell you really quick what got me into Whole Foods. When I said I have cleaner pumpkins—I don't, there's not, they're not dirty because I grow them on cover crops, and that was like, what, 17 years ago? We send like 25 tractor trailers in there a year to the distribution channel. Why? Because of cover crops. So yes, clearly yes to your question.

52:59 I've been doing this for a long time, and I think that gets lost. Some of us are out there publicly speaking. You can't capture—I'm just saying—at the cliche blood, sweat and tears we went through to get to this point. And I would just want to give that reality check out there. Those who are just getting into this system now have our shoulders to stand on, and I'm proud to do that. I'm glad to see this younger generation coming up and doing better than me in certain aspects and so forth. That's awesome, I love that. But it takes tenacity, it takes business savvy. You tell someone you grow cover crops, they're not going to just throw out the welcome mat, probably, especially now if you're growing corn and soybeans. Who cares? I think they will someday. But I think that may not be too far off. But that being said, it takes a lot of time and effort to get to the point where you start getting markets.

54:05 So this next question, they're asking if you're doing any water infiltration testing in your fields, and then they're also asking if you're measuring how much soil is created per year.

54:18 Water infiltration—that's been done once in a while with my soil health study. I'm part of a Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture soil health benchmark study, I think it is our fourth, maybe growing our fifth year, where we take the exact spot in the field. I have three fields following—I mean, we GPS and we're within several feet. Every year we come back and we follow the soil health parameters using the Cornell Soil Health Test. That's what they use for that. Last year they took water infiltrations. I think a couple years before that they did. I don't recall what the numbers are right now, but it's a double ring infiltration, which is a good measurement.

55:11 They were asking about whether you're measuring soil accumulation, like organic matter accumulation. Yes, so organic matter from my fields that I started in 1982, 40 years ago, they've gone from a low two percent—it's like 2.2 percent. I have the numbers on that—early 1980s, and now they're flirting with six percent. So they've almost tripled. Not all my fields are that high, but we're continuing to go up. I think it's slowing up a little bit in the last couple years, which stands to reason. But I gotta tell you, Sophie, my goal in my woods, the organic matter is at zero to four inches, is eight percent. And that's my goal, because my farm, obviously up in Pennsylvania, it was wooded when it was turned into agriculture. So I don't probably won't hit it in my lifetime, but that's my goal. If I can get it to eight percent, and I'm trying some more stuff now. There's some new things I'm learning to be able to do that in my situation here that I think is going to help. So that's my goal. So we're not measuring the actual soil being built. That's a little difficult to really do.

56:36 I can tell you this: in my 40-year no-till fields, our fields around here are hysterically very stony with small stones and so forth, but in my 40-year no-till fields, the top two inches is pure soil, pretty much pure soil. So it's not really that I made all that soil because the earthworms are churning up, but it's pure soil. And that's always a fun thing to show people when they come to the farm.

57:03 Instead of removing biomass from the field, which is the typical scenario, you're actually adding biomass, and that goes a long ways, especially the accumulation over years.

57:14 So this next question, which I think we're probably all wondering, and I sat in on a presentation from Dan Catridge at a Green America conference several weeks ago and I was really just kind of blown away at how much research there is to be done in order to calibrate the bionutrient meter and how much we don't know. He actually brought the term, I believe it was, nutrient density dark matter, and I was like wow. It definitely needs a term because there's so much that we don't know.

57:53 One of the questions that he really asked was, is there variation? And yes, there is variation. You brought up that graphic and showed that. And now it's a matter of correlating the practices to the variation and then working from there to understand soil health on a deeper level. But this question they asked: how would you define nutrient density and which nutrients, whether elements or compound substances, are we to focus on increasing? It seems like this can be a rather broad topic.

58:28 I'm going to have to be very general here. I would define the whole concept of nutrient density as we're trying to bring up the available and I'm going to say absorbable nutrients in the food that we grow, that we as humans or our animals can absorb into our bodies. So it's to increase that. None of us even know what the benchmark or what the standard is. We know what the averages are, so let's just increase it from the average.

59:01 My definition of nutrient density is simply just to get more nutrients. As far as which ones, I'm not a nutritionist, and to tell you which ones are going to be the best bang for your health, I'll say because every one of us is created differently. We have different circumstances, we have different genetics. And my simple farmer mind would be like, well, I want to raise them all as much as I can because maybe I need to have more calcium for my body. My wife might need something else and we eat generally the same thing. We don't know.

59:58 I'm drawing some of my response here on the CBD side. We talk about CBD all the time, but there's all kinds of other cannabinoids that are in hemp: CBG, CBN, CBA, and I don't want to bore you with all the acronyms and numbers. What we're finding out though is it's not just about CBD, which is kind of a dial. It's about the entourage effect. It's kind of like taking a multivitamin instead of just one single vitamin. Yes, sometimes your body needs more vitamin D or you know we know that certain ones help us with immunity: iodine, zinc, selenium.

1:00:42 When COVID was going, those of us who were kind of tuned into this stuff was like, okay, I'm going to make sure I got enough selenium, iodine, those type of things. That was our hedge against immunity. So I think there is no specific answer to that.

1:01:02 I think in the future, the way medications are prescribed today, it's like okay, you take this pill and then usually what happens, oh there's a side effect I don't like, okay now take this other pill that's about the same or take this other pill and it'll mitigate the side effect. That's a negative example, but I'm getting to my point. If someone has a situation, they go to nutritionists and they say, well, you should eat fruits and vegetables and antioxidants. Okay, let's stick with blueberries, the ones that have deep rich colors. I think we should get prescribed fruits and vegetables based on what our body needs are and we should get tested differently. I've gotten my blood tested to see where I'm at in the spectrum of what I should have.

1:02:01 I guess I did get a little long-winded there, Sophie, but it is complex and we are nowhere near being able to give prescriptions. I'll just again point to this: we get this dialed in, where we can adjust things a lot quicker than sending things off to the lab and all. It's going to be very beneficial to humankind.

1:02:29 So we'll do two more questions as we are about to go over time. This person is asking if they can get your email address. Yeah, I'll just tell you, it's Steve at stevegroft.com. Can you get any simpler than that? That is pretty simple: stevegroft.com. Easy to remember.

1:02:48 I can't promise I'll get back to you today. I got a lot to do this afternoon, but I will get back to you.

1:02:55 Awesome, and then this person is asking: they're in a crop rotation with corn, beans, small grains, and peas, and you're looking to see how they can work in some type of hemp. They're thinking that they'll probably be in the industrial hemp market.

1:03:12 Yeah, funny you ask, because we're actually cutting our first fiber hemp, which I think is probably what they're referring to. We're cutting that today. Matter of fact, I can look out the window here. I'm not saying he's back here cutting yet or not, but my son is out there. That was the intent.

1:03:28 I'd have to know where they live and so forth. I'm going to caution: make sure you have a market before you plant one seed of hemp. The industry has been—if you know anything about it, it's been a little crazy. A lot of promises. I like to say that we all know that hemp used to be grown everywhere, you know, 80 to 100 years ago before it was banned. It can grow. That's not the issue. But because the whole thing was shut down, I like to use the analogy: the cars are built, but there's very few roads to drive them on.

1:04:03 We can instantly get into hemp. Any farmer can grow it. It's not that hard to grow. But you have a market—a trusted market. That's my biggest piece of advice: do you have a trusted market? And go slow. I can tell you stories, and you know that. I'll just leave it at that: a trusted market and someone that knows and can give you some good advice. It's not that hard to grow.

1:04:34 Okay, one last question because I found this one that's pretty interesting. They're asking what you think of a soil health gap analysis where the microbiological activity, including mycorrhizae colonization, is measured on the cultured soil and compared to a virgin soil based from the same land.

1:04:55 Well, let me just say that would be interesting. I've never done anything quite like that, so I'm not familiar with it. But I love to see, you know, as you heard in my talk, my premise is: what can we learn from nature? We've kind of abandoned these principles. I'm not against technology. I'm not against man-made stuff. There's a reality here. God gave us minds to live. But I think we've gone too far in a lot of these things in agriculture and the way we grow our food. Large corporations have, we've become slaves. And I think for those of us who are maybe alert to what's going on in the world these days, boy, things are getting a little bit uncertain. And you know, if it comes to the point where we have to literally grow our own food, I think farmers could. But this whole thing that we're talking about today is important, I think, for consumers to get a little closer to how their food was grown.

1:06:15 Because if the consumers will demand nutrient-dense food, farmers will respond. Right now it's kind of like pushing a rope a little bit. You asked about there's a premium—well, not so much. But I could see a day coming when there'll be companies that sell retail that will demand that you come up to a certain standard of the way you grow your food, or does it pass the nutrient meter test? Farmers have not gotten paid for this. They've not gotten paid for packing their corn with nutrients. They get paid on yield. And you know, hence we kind of have a messed-up food system because of that. When you look at it from the context of health, because yield is not always the healthiest way to get that yield that we get paid for. I'm not faulting anybody. I'm just acknowledging what I see as our current reality.

1:07:19 So yeah, am I bucking the system? Yes. But I know there's a lot more people that are right with me in that we're a small, small minority at this point. But I see that's where the future is going, and I want to be right there. I want to learn, and I certainly have a lot to learn yet. I want to learn. But that's why I'm so glad that you guys are doing a webinar like this where we can learn together.

1:07:48 So that's where I'm at on it.

1:07:51 Awesome, thanks so much, Steve. You guys can visit his website right there and the Bionutrient Food Association as well. I'm sure they're going to be coming out with more information, and we'll maybe be able to answer some of your guys's questions in a little bit more detail.

1:08:07 Next week we're going to have Aaron Martin and Jimmy Evans on, same time, Tuesday at 12 o'clock Central Standard Time. They are going to be talking about prescribing food as medicine, so a very similar topic, just a different angle next week. We'll look forward to seeing you all there. Thank you guys.