MycoGreen NPK: How Mycorrhizae Work in Your Soil

0:00 Thank you for joining us today for our biological webinar series. We've got a great guest today and I'm Jake Burns and you're probably used to seeing Dylan kind of be hosting the webinars but I'm filling in for him today as he had a family thing to attend today.

0:22 So we're excited this is the last webinar of our biological webinar series so we're going out on a very strong note. And with that I guess the only thing I'll say before I hand it over to Keith is we may try to wrap this up at 12:55 or right at one or maybe a couple minutes early for Sean to get to other priorities.

0:48 Keith why don't you go ahead and introduce our guests.

0:51 Yep thank you Jenkins and welcome everybody to our eighth I believe this is number eight in our series eighth and final one in our biological webinar series. It's been a great series when we first started putting this together we thought well maybe if we can pull together four of these we'll be doing pretty good but we kept coming up with great ideas and speakers that were willing to share their information and expertise so we just kind of kept adding on to it. It's been a great series and like Jake said we're excited to have Sean.

1:20 Sean Moti is he's been a friend of Green Cover for a number of years. Sean's background is in microbiology. Sean actually came to the United States way back in his college days from the little country of Guyana, South America so Sean actually still has a farm down there travels back and forth so he actually farms on two different continents but he came from Guyana over to the University of Minnesota and went to school there and really never left so his home here in the states is still in Minnesota.

1:59 I asked him I said you know it doesn't make people think you're very smart if you came from a nice warm tropical country and you moved to Minnesota but he didn't have to stay there through the teeth of the winter so it's exciting to have him on and have his expertise not just in the field because he owns a farm in Minnesota he owns one in South America but the majority of his career has been working as a scientist and as a businessman and as a business development leader for a number of different companies across the biological spectrum.

2:35 Most recently he and Dale Strickler, many of you know Dale, Dale's no longer with Green Cover but was with our team for many years and really helped us get to where we're at now particularly on the biological. Sean and Dale worked together at Valence and they worked on the mycorrhizae applications line of products and so that's kind of where we got to know him. We've continued to get to know them. Many of you are familiar with their Michael Green NPK our new mycorrhizae product from a company in India called Umahare and Sean is kind of working as an advisor consultant to them on developing some of those products and helping us with those here in the states as well.

3:17 Lots of background, lots of interesting connections that Sean has and so I've asked them to come on because mycorrhizae have been referenced by I think just about all previous seven of these biological webinars Sean because they're such a keystone species and so I'm asking to talk about that at least part of that but I want Sean to give a bit more of a robust introduction and background and then I say he's not just a scientist but he's got a great mind for business, does a lot of training, a lot of education as well and so we're going to let him talk a little bit about some thoughts he has around sustainability and regeneration and then Sean and I will kind of jump into a bit of a discussion about mycorrhizae and some of the things associated with that.

4:07 Sean with that I'm going to let you take it away.

4:10 Thank you Keith. People always wonder if when we start this out do I speak English yes I do. Thanks for the introduction. You know apart from other microbiology and stuff I am basically an agronomist and soil scientist. My career started out way back in the 60s when I was a chemistry and science teacher and so I had a science background for way back. I kind of got away from science for a while got into business management and global business management and stuff like that.

4:43 I still farm in Minnesota. Do corn and soybeans. I go back to South America and we do rice farming, but my farm in Minnesota is basically one big research farm. I try a lot of different things and my goal basically is to practice. I take a holistic approach of sustainability. Now that's a very very big topic.

5:05 One thing I do, I'm an author. I write. I publish books and I'm in a process of writing a book and taking a holistic approach to sustainability in what it is and what does it mean to the world as a whole.

5:17 You know, my farm is sustainable. It's powered by solar. I got, you know, polander gardens and honeybees and by farmers between two lakes so we have water filtration systems. But the number one thing I try to do on my farm is I try to be very efficient on my input costs and wanted to input things. I try to manage is support laser and this is where this topic comes in about bikerizer and soil biology as a whole. How can we be more efficient in our input costs?

5:53 And a lot of times I ask people before you do anything, get a soil test. Because if you don't know what you have, how do you correct the deficiencies? And we talked a lot about nutritious food because that's, you know, what we do. We grow food. We grow crops for food or for whatever purpose. But if the soil doesn't have it, the grain can't have it. And we try to explain that not only the NPK is but also the micronutrients and all these other things and it all wraps up with these microorganisms.

6:32 Now there are a lot of microorganisms in the soil, different kinds, everything from algae to bacteria, fungi, whatever the case may be. And somebody estimated one time that if we take one teaspoon of soil, there are more microbes in there than there are people on Earth. And now I don't know who counted them, but it's an estimate, estimation. There are a lot of microbes in there and they do a lot of different things. And we're, you know, we don't have all the answers. We're learning. I started this whole process back in 1983, and we made a lot of mistakes.

7:09 For example, you know, we talk with mycorrhizae and I remember once upon a time when we first started introducing different formulations of mycorrhizae to different companies who would put them in liquid solutions and put them in public warehouses. And what we end up doing, we sold a lot of dead bugs. I keep making fun of that because we didn't know. We didn't understand the whole process. And so at one time when I was at Valent, we had some products stored in a public warehouse in around Fargo, North Dakota. And of course, between the freeze and the humidity and whatever else, summer, winter. After six months we analyzed some of the product and we're less than 50 percent viable.

7:51 And when that starts happening it goes downhill fast. So we've learned that we have to do these things a little bit more scientifically and store them in some better places. So on my farm basically in kitchen I talk about this. I have a temperature control room. If I have product I put them in there. I try to maintain it, you know, between 50 and 65 degrees year-round. And so the product doesn't really. The bugs don't die, put it bluntly. These organisms, they're live organisms. And so we have to make sure.

8:26 So when we made this formulation, this micro green NPK, we made it with the understanding that if properly stored, I mean it's good. The shelf life is two years. That's what we claim on it. We know it has two-year shelf life. It doesn't mean that after two years that they're all dead. It means that we start having declining. Just like people, as we get older, you know, the people get older, they become weaker, they die, whatever the case may be. But the product is good for two years. And after two years, you know, with decision time, we want to rework it. What do you want to do with it? But most people would buy the product within two years. They'll use it up.

9:01 This product, you know, it comes in a dry formulation. And you can put it in a seed. You can put it in furrowed with liquid fertilizer. It's pretty pretty universal what you can do with it, the handling of it. But you know, to go back to sustainability a little bit, this whole process is part of sustainability, sustaining not only the soil but sustaining the food source that we get. And as we go on, I'll talk about something. And I just my terminology, I call it luxury consumption. And we have to first of all understand things like cation exchange capacity and base saturation because you.

9:47 You have to have this exchangeability, this cation exchange capacity, but if it's all it can only hold X number of pounds or grams of something, it can't hold more than that. Once you're saturated, you're saturated. So if let's take nitrogen for example, if our soil can only handle 200 pounds of nitrogen and we're putting on 250 pounds, it goes without saying that the soil can hold it. It becomes waste basically.

10:18 My point of luxury consumption is that if you put too much fertilizer on there and the plant has all the food it needs, they don't rely on the microbes to do anything for them. The microbes could do their thing, but they're not relying on them. So we have to understand what is optimum rate, and that's the key part. What is optimum rate? What rates of fertilizer do we have to put on there, for example, to get maximum benefit?

10:45 I know most of my friends are farmers, and I know we always like to sit at the coffee shop and brag that yeah, we got 280 bushels of corn this year. It's good to raise whatever number of bushels you're striving for and whatever the case may be, but at what cost? There's a point of diminishing returns, and we have to try to understand that if we're putting too much out there, is that the more efficient use of our resources or money? Or can we do it better? And sometimes we have to get to the mentality we can have our cake and eat it too.

11:24 Putting in these types of products in the soil, there's a lot of benefits. And as before we enter, I want to try and summarize all the benefits that we can get from them, and we're discovering more and more benefits all the time. But when we go to sustainability, we talk about food, we talk about energy, we talk about environmental concerns, about pollution, too much plastics, what's happening with the pollinators. But this got the discussion going off on a tangent. I'm going to try and keep it to talk about soil microbes, and we're going to try and focus on this formulation Keith is talking about.

12:03 I want to reiterate, anytime you want to start something, we start with a soil test. We have to know what the soil is deficient in or sometimes what happens is that too much is not so good either. For example, there are some micronutrients that antagonize each other. If you have too much of one, it could inhibit the uptake of another. So it is a very complex process here that we need to put some type of understanding and correct any deficiencies or excesses that we might have.

12:39 We can talk about mycorrhiza, we can talk about bacteria, we can talk about a whole bunch of different things. But if we look at one nutrient, let's talk about phosphorus, for example. We'll talk about phosphorus about the big picture, but if we get to a smaller nutrient, if we talk about something like magnesium, let's say your soil is deficient in magnesium.

13:13 This is a very critical subject we need to understand. Soils, and I don't want insulting about its intelligence here, but I'm just going to get back to the basics. Magnesium is a key component of the chlorophyll molecule, and the chlorophyll molecule is what triggers photosynthesis. If your soil is deficient in magnesium, it can't have adequate amount of chlorophyll, and your whole process suffers. Now you can put all the NPK you want, you can put all whatever the case may be, but if you're deficient in magnesium and the plant cannot photosynthesize to its capacity, then we're in trouble.

13:50 We must understand photosynthesis a little bit too, because I want to think that mycorrhiza does help the plant to generate more chlorophyll, and that's one of the benefits of using mycorrhizae. But our plants, for example, let's take a soybean plant. A soybean plant is probably only about three percent efficient on its photosynthesis. And that's because we go back in history a little bit to understand photosynthesis. When the cyanobacteria traveled to the water to start photosynthesizing, we had a lot less oxygen in the atmosphere, and so the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen was very different. And so the enzymes that do this.

14:30 This conversion sometimes gets into trouble with more carbon dioxide, more oxygen. Now because when the enzymes are trying to trap the carbon dioxide, by accident it grabs the oxygen molecule every once in a while, and that's where the inefficiencies come in. So this is something that we want to clear up a little bit, that we must understand photosynthesis. And so there are scientists and universities working and trying to get better photosynthetic capability. But one of the things that mycorrhiza does, it does increase the amount of chlorophyll in the chloroplasts, and that's a benefit. So when we're talking about efficiencies of photosynthesis, this is one benefit we can get with that.

15:15 The big picture, why the biggest thing that this mycorrhizae does, is it's getting things like phosphorus and potassium and nitrogen from natural sources. When we put this product in the soil, for example, it starts to sporulate. And there are two tips to it, obviously. And around these tips there is bacteria hanging around there with their secret enzymes, and it's a very complex process. What happens then is one of the tips, in fact the roots—let's take a corn plant for example—it grows directly through the cell wall and into the corn plant. The corn plant then, or whichever plant we're talking about, the plant would then feed the fungus, give them carbohydrates or sugars, whatever it needs. And the fungus would grow. It starts out as a hypha, and more than one hypha, and a collection of hyphae become a mycelium. These mycelium, they're really tiny, they're about one twenty-fifth the diameter of a human hair, and they get to the nooks and crannies and places where the root hair cannot go.

16:36 I've heard people make statements that well, yes, we have more root system where we are, bigger roots, whatever case may be, and that might be true with some product. But mycorrhiza doesn't exactly do that. What the mycorrhiza does is it becomes an extension to the roots and it gets into these areas where the root is too big to get into. And with the help of the bacillus, different bacteria, the secret enzymes, they solubilize the nutrients. For example, if you take a soil test, you know phosphorus, you'll give it a P1 and a P2. The P1 is available, the P2 is unavailable. Or somebody calls it the Bray and Olson test, whatever. We have a lot of phosphorus in the soil, it's unavailable. A lot of it stays in forms like calcium phosphate or something like that. What these organisms do, they solubilize the phosphorus, for example, make them usable form. And the mycorrhiza traps this stuff and transports them back into the corn plant like we talked about that infected the corn plant. And so people say, well, why would the corn plant, why would the plant share its nutrient with this fungus? And this is what we call synergism. There's a very good synergism here because the plant feeds the fungus, the fungus feeds the plant.

18:00 What happens if there is a period of stress, and there's different types of stresses? These fungi can work in salty type soils or environments. But what they can do, and I've seen this happen time and time again, is if there's a marginal drought, they would bail you out. Nothing works under extremely dry conditions. I know last year we had, we were very dry in Minnesota. And I looked at my neighbor's corn, I looked at my corn, I mean we all had, we suffered from the dry weather last year, no question about it. And I was at least happy to see at the end of the year that my corn actually did under 60 bushels per acre because I thought that was amazing. But that was one of the better years out here. And what's interesting is that I only put about 70 rate fertilizer on my farm. And so this is what we're talking about, having your cake and eat it too, where under these extremes of condition the mycorrhizae would bail you out with a marginal drought condition. And it gives you the option to be more efficient with your resources. I keep repeating these things because I know we're going to explain this over and over what exactly they do in the soil.

19:21 The other thing we have is that apart from them going in and extracting nutrients in it, they build our soil structure. The little lumps and collages they break.

19:33 In Minnesota we grow a lot of sweet corn, a lot of sugar beets and stuff like this, and we have these semis up and down the field. Sometimes it's a little bit marginally dry or wet, whatever the case may be, we have soil compaction. Years ago we used to go in there with subsoilers and try to break up the hard band they call it and minimize compaction. And all we do is move the compaction layer lower and lower down. It still does not settle and have another compaction there.

20:07 What I found out and we need to do some more work on this, we're trying to figure out what's happening with the mycorrhizae because they're so small they get in this compacted area and they can loosen them up. We need some more work on this, we really think that there's something there that we can expand upon. I can't conclusively reduce compaction but it'll minimize compaction.

20:32 So basically when you put your product out there, you put the microgreen product in there, it grows in a plant and it starts extracting. One of the things we put into this NPK product for green cover seed is we put in these bacteria that converts atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, and that's a big deal because we talk about side dressing and stuff like this. There's different companies that have different bacteria, but they do the exact same thing. They take atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into ammonia. Now the ammonia form does not leach, it stays. The nitrate form leaches. And so we're putting in, we're spoon feeding all year long the right kind of ammonia out there.

21:26 Now people see they put anhydrous ammonia out there, which is true, but I get in trouble with the fertilizer company and I say this, but I know for a fact when we apply anhydrous ammonia sometimes it is not very friendly towards the soil microbes. In fact, it kills them. And so we're defeating the purpose. Anhydrous is efficient, it's cost effective and stuff like this, but it has some adverse effects with the soil organisms.

22:03 We do get this question quite a bit. When you put that anhydrous on, it's going to kill everything in that strip where you put it. How far do you think those deadly effects move out from the strip? Is that moving out six inches, eight inches, ten inches from either side of that strip, or is that just kind of a guess at this point? It's a guess, we don't know. But we know that most of the microbes are concentrated in the top six inches of soil, and when you put it in there, commonsensically it'll tell you that we're having adverse effects.

22:39 I don't want to get an argument with the fertilizer company, I'm just making a scientific statement here that it is probably not the best form of nitrogen, but it's convenient and it's cost effective. So sometimes we have to ask the question, what are we doing to gain what? At this point, Keith, I would like to take a quick pause and see if there's any question or confusion before I continue.

23:11 Yeah, I've got one point I want to follow up on, and I'll give people a chance to type it in either the chat box or the Q&A box there if they have a question. But I really like what you said about our soils tend to have a lot of these nutrients in there, but they're just not available for plants. In the example of magnesium, for example, so what you're saying is that if we have the right biology, a lot of what's not available can be made available. So we don't have to buy extra magnesium, put it out there. If we have the right biology, is that correct?

23:46 Yeah, that's right. The reason that works is that it might be available, but it might not be available to the plant because the root hairs are too big. They can go into these little tiny areas and extract it. The bacteria and the fungus, they get in there and secrete different types of enzymes, and that's a whole different thing which enzyme does lots and stuff. But from a very basic standpoint, we just put it out there, the microbes do their thing basically, and they extract it. And the mycorrhizae is...

24:22 Like a transport system that gets it back into it. Now people say how much, how far does the how far do they go, these. The mycelium, these hyphae, they will go for miles on the ground. I mean, they just keep on growing and growing and growing, and as long as there is living roots out there to sustain them. And this is where cover crop really, really helps because if there's no living roots, we have the mycorrhiza will not survive out there. They have to have living roots to survive on.

24:56 Keith, maybe you want to just explain that a little bit further, talk about your cover crop a little bit. What are the different ones? But before we do that, I want to make one quick point here: that mycorrhizae does not colonize every plant. There are three things there are three that we know for sure: sugar beets, canola, and brassicas. And I know people had made claim that they've seen increase in sugar beet yield, and I point blank to them, you're lying, because it does not work in sugar beets. So that's the ignorance of this whole process. You know, we got to be careful when people start making claims like that.

25:36 Yeah, well, you know, and that's why we love the mixes having the diversity out there because we can put any of the brassicas—you know, the radishes, the canola or rapeseed, turnips, mustards—we can have those as part of our mix. And even though the mycorrhizae aren't necessarily going to colonize those, if we have that mixed with oats and peas and flax and sunflowers, all of which are fantastic hosts for mycorrhizae, you know, then my populations are going to be just fine. But if I was to go out there and just plant (and we did this, a lot of people did this in the early days) cover crop, solid field of radishes, well, that leads to multiple problems. One would be the mycorrhizae depression, and the other one would certainly be you'd have no residue left after that stuff broke down and started cycling in the spring. So that's the value of having the mix: is that there's always going to be something in there that the mycorrhizae are really going to attach to, and it will really support those populations.

26:39 So you know, we have over 100 different types of cover crops. So there's something that's going to work for almost every situation, and most likely it's something that can be part of a mix where we can bring together multiple things there.

26:53 Yeah, and mycorrhiza are such an important part, and they're difficult to get established, or at least you have to make sure you're creating the right environment to get them established. And so once you get them, you know, we've always felt that it's really important that you try to keep them because they will go from generation to generation, or planting to planting to planting, if you keep something growing out there.

27:16 So my understanding, Sean, is that the things that are really bad for mycorrhizae: one would be a long fallow period. One would be tillage because that disrupts that network that they're building. And then the other one is if we're putting too many synthetic nutrients out there to where the plant no longer has to try to call on the mycorrhizae for help. It can just call the free phosphorus or the free nitrogen that we've put out there in a synthetic form. Would you say those are correct?

27:48 That's absolutely right. And that's a good point, and we'll continue on there. For now, you mentioned that when you do your mix, you know, you got your brassicas, you got your canola stuff in there, and the mycorrhizae will not colonize them. But the mycorrhizae will do, they say, take the peas or whatever else you have in there. They would work on those plants. But when they increase the soil structure or stuff like this, all the plants benefit from it. So there's an indirect benefit. Although I mean, even sugar beets, for example, most of the sugar beets are planted with cover crop because, you know, if you plant sugar beet cover crop, obviously the wind blows them out, stuff like this. So a lot of people plant oats or something like that or different cover crop to get their sugar established. And you know, they eventually come and kill the cover crop off and let the beets take over. But even those initial applications of (if you put mycorrhizae with it) it starts to process and starts improving your soil process. And so it's a holistic approach to the whole process that even when it does not colonize the particular crop, it also makes it. The benefits are so many.

29:02 That you can't afford not to put them out there. And so I want to take this thing a little bit and talk about what's optimum and what's optimum rate for fertilizer. And I actually don't know, I mean it is what it is, but I do the math every year in my own farm because I want to make money on my farm and I want to be efficient but I want to get optimal yields and stuff like this. And I've experimented with 10, 20, 40, 30, and this past year I put 70 rate fertilizer and I was questioning my sanity when it got dry. I thought my God, it really paid big time. It got dry, so whatever fertilizer costs, you know, last year fertilizer cost was expensive, it was very expensive.

29:55 And so I made the decision like on my phone for example, I'm gonna cut it down 30 because I don't want to pay that much for fertilizer. I think my farm is in good shape. I got reserves in there. I rotate my crops and stuff like this and it doesn't mean I do everything right but I try to do a few things right at least. And so you know, it's like a bank account. You know, if you keep making deposits and you got a few dollars in there and you become unemployed or something, you're at least going to go back and live on your savings for a little bit. And that's what these things will do—they would build the soil up for you that in the event you have a price a year like we had last year with drought or something, the benefits outweigh some of the costs. And so that's something that I can talk until the cows come home about different benefits.

30:44 And I want to make just one more point to that, and this may not necessarily be a popular point but I think it's valid. Is that what you're talking about is exactly right. Many of us make those decisions on how much fertility to put on based on economics. The more expensive the nitrogen is, you know, the more we tend to cut back. But the problem has been over the years is we've had relatively cheap nitrogen, and so that economic factor wasn't there to kind of slow people down, and so we tended to have a lot of over application and we're paying the price for that now. Yeah, with the nitrogen pollution in our water sources. And it's not just AG, there's many different industries that can contribute to that, but we need to be making some of those decisions not just based on the economics but also on the environmental impacts. And again, this is where the biological mechanisms come into play. Because when we can get those, you know, we just don't need as much and so we're both saving money as well as doing less heavy nitrogen get away from our farm and get into the water sources.

31:57 Absolutely, the other one is phosphorus. You know, well, first of all, we have a lot of unavailable phosphorus out there and we keep putting more and more. The concern we should have is that I think we have phosphorus in our deposits in the United States maybe for 30, 35 years. And after that, we might have to go to Russia to buy it or something. You know, so we have to think about conservation and using what we have. My farm in Minnesota where I live is between two lakes. And if you go in Minnesota in the summertime, we have so much algae bloom out there. It's a direct effect of too much phosphorus in there, and this is built up over year and years and years of too much.

32:49 And so I had to work with about six government agencies to build a water filtration system because the water goes from one lake to the next and there's this little stream that goes right across my farm. So we put this big filtration system in there to trap and test the water sometimes and see exactly what's in there. And it's amazing how much purification that does. It goes through a cattail swamp, go through filtration stuff like this. And I'm just sharing that because we need to be careful with too much phosphorus out there because nitrogen is bad enough but phosphorus can be really bad for you. And you know, I like to go fishing once in a while. Sometimes I don't want to put my boat in the lake because it's so green and everything looks so, you know, you got to come and wash your boat now. I'm getting off on a tangent here, but it is a direct result of too much phosphorus. And so most people don't recognize that we're putting more than we actually need and we have unavailable phosphorus out there. The mycorrhizae is a master of doing this, and this is a number one, I think it's a number one benefit of mycorrhiza. It gets in there and there's an enzyme like phosphatase or whatever.

38:51 Contamination, and this is where a lot of I'm not picking anybody, but I'm telling the story the way it is. What happens a lot of time, people grow them in large fields in the soil. When you harvest them, you're also harvesting the pathogens with it, so you don't have pure product. You're having all kinds of contamination with there.

39:13 Before I get off too far into it, I want to talk about some of the benefits here. I know some farmers in Florida, and I've seen their farms that they used to use a lot of soil fumigants over the years because they have so many diseases. And when you fumigate your soil, you'll kill everything. So we started these guys many, many years ago trying to look at things like mycorrhiza, trichoderma, different microbes, and eventually what they told me happened is that they don't fumigate the soils anymore. They have starved out or eradicated all the pathogenic ones, and they kept their soil with the beneficials. Now they still got a few pathogenic ones, there's some coexisting ones and different, I mean we don't know, it's all in there, to be honest with you. There's a whole host of things you don't understand, but in a big picture, what happened is that if we can populate soil with the beneficials, we starve out or eliminate the pathogenic ones, and so we have less diseases out there. We don't have to fumigate our soil.

40:15 What's really fascinating, I was looking at this guy who's planting zucchini and peppers and stuff in this farm in Florida, and he said he doesn't have any fumigation anymore, but what they do, they have drones and they fly the drones over. And if there's a little spot in there that shows any sign of diseases, the market goes out there and sees if there is something. They physically remove those disease plants and they work on it. It's a little bit of work, but it's manageable. We have technology today with drones and stuff we didn't have 15, 20 years ago, right. And so we can manage our soil and populate them with beneficial microbes and have our cake and eat it too. And I want to make that point so people understand it's not how many more bushels of corn we get, it's what are all the unseen benefits that we're gonna realize.

41:09 From a financial standpoint though, you know, and Keith, you know what your product costs, I'm not getting the cost in here, but if I can reduce my fertilizer rate by 20, 30, you know, I can save, you know, I'm very conservative here, depends where you buy your stuff. You can save forty, fifty, sixty dollars an acre. I can take that money and invest it on a microgreen product, for example, for a lot less than that and have 10 times the benefits out of it. Now people are not stupid, but they have to see the benefits, you know. The word value, and we talk about value a lot, and value it over and over. We talk about values: benefit minus cost. You know, when we take the cost out of it, what benefit do we get out of the product? And we need to understand this total value thing, and this is what micorize does. It brings a tremendous amount of value to the growers and to the soil, into the environment, and we need to give that speech over and over again. So when you put your microgreen product out there with 10 more sales and you have eight bacterial strains and you have streptomycins in there, these things all work collectively to benefit the soil and the environment out there.

42:25 And again, at this point I'd like to take a quick break, and any questions or concerns?

42:32 Yeah, we've got some good questions here. So kind of staying on the topic of mycorrhiza, Brad is asking, what is the length of time that mycorrhiza can survive without a host? For example, you know, after the corn crop dies off and before a cover crop can be planted, what's that window look like?

42:53 Less than 30 days. I don't know exactly, but it's less than 30 days. They have enough reserve, they can live, they got, you know, these arbuscles and vesicles, they can survive on, but they would die. Now, one thing I didn't talk about, we should talk about carbon sequestration a little bit because that's a whole different subject here too. But let's get the question that we'll talk about our carbon sequestration and andromalia and stuff like this. So yeah, I'm not sure if I answered this question, but if we don't have any live roots out there, with less than 30 days, the mycorrhiza, now sometimes they don't die, they will sporulate, but you know, cool the environment up.

43:29 Here they don't survive. What we're trying to do, we're trying to get gloomancies that would survive the winter here on cover crops, but so far we haven't had a lot of luck doing that. We can, some will survive, but Minnesota is a tundra. We have a lot of cold soils in Minnesota. For example, Kansas, Nebraska, you guys might be a little different out there. Of course, you get down towards Texas, football home, and warmer climate, so you have a lot better stuff.

43:57 What ended up happening, if we have cover crop and a lot of guys have cover crop in Minnesota, they extend the season because the microbes, a lot of the time, for soil temperature is about 50 degrees, they're quite active. So if you have cover crops out there, they would survive in there and they keep doing their thing, stabilizing phosphorus. It went into the fall, so you might have a much shorter window of freezing. But if you don't have a cover crop and your corn plant, you go harvest your corn in October, November. By December first, your microbes are non-existent. They basically die.

44:38 What ended up happening when they die, for example, they're not all lost. The outer coating of the mycorrhiza, on these mycelium, is a product called glomalin, and that's a remarkable printed Lego protein, basically what it is. It's got a lot of carbon in it. So when the fungus die and another blue million out there, the carbon that sequester it is estimated to be sequestered for 50 years. Now, who did that math, I don't know, but it makes a good discussion that we sequester carbon.

45:18 There's more carbon sequestration and I'm going to talk about right now because I wrote a whole chapter for carbon sequestration, what it is and the benefits it has. We can argue with global warming and carbon dioxide and carbon sequestrations, that's a whole different discussion. But the mycorrhiza as a whole, from all its activity, is very efficient in sequestering carbon. If you can have mycorrhizae that improves the photosynthetic capability of the plant, you can see why we're sequencing more carbon. So the holistic approach to this whole thing is the benefit, the benefit, and the benefit. The cost is minimal, so the value is there. That's the word I want to get to: what value does mycorrizer bring to the average American farmer?

46:08 Yeah, and if you know, like with some of the numbers you were putting out there earlier, I think it's very doable. If you're saving forty or fifty dollars, which is quite doable on fertility costs, then you're looking at a four to five x return on investment right away on this particular product. One other comment I want to make here on Brad's question about the length of time that mycorrhizae can survive. I think if you don't have a very long time frame, like the fall planting, like what we were talking about, it's really important to get a grass plant out there, like cereal rye in the fall or oats in the spring, because those plants tend to grow pretty fast and they develop a good root system before you see a lot of top growth. Just because you don't have a lot of top growth doesn't mean you don't have roots down there, and that's what's feeding the mycorrhizae.

46:59 That's where cereal rye is just such an incredible cover crop because it's got such a massive root system. It will germinate at 34 degrees soil temperature. So I get tired of people telling me it's too late to plant cereal rye, because at some point your soils will get back to 34 degrees and you'll be able to get something going there. That's a great product. A couple other questions here, Sean, that kind of relate around these products. Roger is asking, how can you have live microbes in your dry product? The microgreen is a dry product. Talk just real briefly about how you put them into a dormant state that they can survive in that dry formulation.

47:49 Yeah, they're spores and spores are dormant. That's basically what it is. They don't germinate or spoil it until they get in some type of a liquid medium or some sort, like soil moisture, or if you know when you start going planting, you sometimes put in your tank or something. Now, first of all, mycorrhizae is very tolerant. Your most fertilizer, mix starter fertilizer, and stuff, insecticide, fungicide, chemical as a whole, they're very tolerant to it.

48:18 Once they get into a liquid media they start to spoil it, so as long as you can keep them in a dry formulation, those spores are dormant and it's just like a seed, you know. You put a seed in a jar it might be there for 40 years, but you throw a seed in some soil, it germinates right away. It's Mother Nature. It keeps the dormancy factor is what caused it to stay stable for a couple years.

48:42 Got a couple questions around, and this is a legitimate question. Doug is saying that, understanding ag, you know Gabe Brown's group out there, they're very supportive of cover crops, but they're somewhat hesitant when it comes to adding biological additives as those products would need to be added annually. So I guess the question is, is there a certain point in time? And Lisa has a similar question. Like, if you've been in a regenerative system for multiple years, are you going to see a lot of benefit from adding whether it be mycorrhizae or adding other types of biological additives? Or is that boost that you see diminished in really really good systems?

49:31 Boy, it's a million dollar question, you know, and I don't know what we really know. Have an answer for that. I go back to the statement about that what value does it bring to you. Basically, I still try to get to the point that we've been farming, doing a lot of bad things to our soils over the years, and it'll take a long time to correct them, but we have to start doing them. Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm trying to answer this question, but I don't know if I have an answer for you per se, but we have to reintroduce what we've destroyed.

50:13 I'm not going to pick on the moldboard plow, but once the moldboard plow was introduced, I mean we plowed up the Prairie and we screwed up our whole biodiversity in our soil, and we recognize that now. It has only been going on for the last few years. Like I said, I started this process back in 1983. It took about 20 years to even understand what the heck we need to do and then start to find product. Where does it fit? How? Which one is suitable? Which corrupted it? And so we're not—we're in this very steep learning curve. But I think what we have, Keith, with your product for example, you know, like you say you don't want to belittle anybody's product, but there's a lot of biostimulants out there that do good things. They're a lot of companies have good things from a holistic approach. We will keep trying what works in your farm Nebraska might not work in my farm in Minnesota. So the geography makes a difference. If you're doing some soils that are Sandy or clay-based soil, they might react a little differently. We need to learn as we go what works on our respective farms and capitalize on the ones that work. And if something doesn't work on your farm, no sense continuing doing it, no sense beating a dead horse, you know. But overall, what I've seen with mycorrhizae, it has been very, very positive. What it does not only this year, but the long-term effect, what it does to the soil and help the environment as a whole, that's kind of the summary of the whole process here.

51:40 It's really good, Sean. We can do a few more questions, but one of them was just asking about your books. You mentioned you kind of built out a whole chapter on a certain subject. Can you share a little bit about where people can find your books that you've authored?

51:55 Well, the one applicable here is not going to be on for a little while yet. I got all these books—you got us all excited about it. Good preview. I got books published, but in fact in about two weeks I'm publishing one on corporate business management worldwide, how we manage business ethically and stuff like this. But last year I started writing this book on sustainability because I recognized the need for it. It's done. I got to get the publisher and get it published, stuff like this. But as time goes on, and I'll, when it's on the market, you guys will know. I used to write nonfiction and stuff like this over the years. I wrote a lot of scientific stuff in different magazines and stuff like this. But as I get older, I am recognizing that, you know, I've never lived forever, so I'm going to put some of this stuff out in writing here. But yeah, when a book is out, I think it'll really really help the people to understand what sustainability is. I'm just going to talk a lot about food.

52:55 Production and agriculture but energy and you know the holistic approach to sustainability. Sorry, it's not in the market yet but I'm getting busy, I'll put it in the market pretty quick. Well, we'll be looking forward to that when that comes out.

53:09 Do you have one of your favorite resources on mycorrhizal that you have, maybe somebody else's book or a website? What kind of resource would you want everybody to kind of look into?

53:20 Yeah, did you want to tackle that one? Dr. Luke is probably the best source I know. You know, and he has a lot of papers, a lot of presentation stuff out there. In fact, he and I talk about writing something together with Michael Writer. We haven't done it yet, but to answer the question, he's probably one of the smartest scientists I know. He's a good friend and so anybody who has questions, you know, you can fund it through Keith or something.

53:50 That's where the information comes from. And who Sham is talking about, Dr. Alak is the founder and the president of Umahari, the company that makes Michael Green. He was just in Bladen, he came and visited us there in Bladen at Green Cover. Wanted to get to know us a little bit better and we just had a great visit with him. So yeah, you got specific questions, feel free to shoot those over to me and we can kind of be the go between with him and the people that have questions.

54:18 Jake, and do we have time for maybe one or two more? Yep, we need a couple more, okay.

54:25 So Brad is asking, at what point will a corn or soybean plant turn off its support of mycorrhizae? And I'm assuming what he means here is either if it has too much free fertility in the soil or maybe at what point in as it's getting mature and that plant is starting to die, when is it no longer considered kind of a host plant for these organisms?

54:48 Well, the simple answer to that is that as long as live roots are out there, they will keep feeding each other. But my term of luxury consumption, what that means is that the plant will continue to feed the fungus but it's not going to benefit from the fungus. So it becomes a one-way street because you got too much available. I mean, it's just like the welfare system, you know. If the government gives somebody free money, why should I get a job? I'm not picking on welfare people, I'm just making a statement that when stuff is there available and you don't have to work for it, yeah, it doesn't really make the effort basically. And so if you have too much phosphorus or potassium or nitrogen or whatever available, the plant will pick up what's available and they don't rely. But they would have almost half the energy that they generate something will have to go feed these fungi. So you know, if you're having pathogenic ones and stuff there, you're basically feeding something that, you know, there's a lot of questions people say that we should put like a sugar boost or something in there for feeding the microbes. And I mean, the jury is out on that one yet because I don't think that's a great idea. When we put these additives in here, we're feeding the pathogens also and so that's my theory in the whole thing. But we really don't know. I think things like mycorrhiza, for example, when they come from the lab like your formulation, is they have enough nutrients with them to sustain them until they start getting fed by the root system. So we don't need to put all these artificial bacterial food or fungi food, whatever sugar solutions. I think that's more of a marketing point than anything else, but I know I get trouble saying that because there are companies out there that sell these things. But your common sense will tell you that why feed the pathogens? Yeah, that's all I want to say.

56:53 Yeah, that's good. Well, I think that's a good spot to wrap up. Sean, thank you so much for joining us. That was a real privilege to have you on and kind of wrap up our biological webinar series. So we know you have a lot going on, you're busy, so thank you for taking time with us today.

57:08 Thank you everybody for joining and we will keep you updated on continuing education and webinars in the future. So with that, yeah, thank you again. Yep, and we'll be getting this talk on YouTube if you want to share it with others. All the previous seven already out there on our YouTube channel, so feel free to go over there, subscribe if you haven't done that already. And if you missed some of the previous ones, I encourage you to jump in and watch them.

57:34 Absolutely, thank you guys. I need to roll pretty quick, appreciate it. Thank you, thank you everybody, have a wonderful day and you know, if you've got any questions, let you know, he knows to get a hold of me, okay? Thanks a lot, have a good day.