Plant and Microbe Relationships: What Farmers Need to Know

0:00 Welcome everybody to this is our seventh webinar of this biological webinar series. Today we're going to have a host of panelists kind of having a discussion format so everybody is muted and your video is not on but you can type questions into either the webinar chat or the Q&A and we will try to answer those as we go along and answer any at the end of the discussion.

0:29 So with that Keith would you like to go ahead and introduce our guests?

0:33 Yep, sure would. Thanks Dylan, appreciate that. And yeah I'm excited for our discussion today. We have Armand Miller with Elevate Ag and then Nausea LaFontaine who we'll introduce here in just a moment but she brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the discussion as well.

0:53 So just want to kind of real quickly give a brief overview of the first seven that we've done or the first six I guess. If you haven't seen them you can go to our YouTube channel and watch them all but we started out with Doug Kramer talking about the liquid rhizofixer but specifically talking about microbes and the role of the rhizobia play in fixing atmospheric nitrogen for the Lagoon plants as they associate with.

1:19 We followed that with Jay Young talking about the Johnson Sue bioreactor and he showed some examples of what he has done to both make the Johnson Sue product as well as use it in his fields. The third week was Jim Ristow from South Dakota and Jim again talked about a little bit different type of composting method, the spice method that he learned here in good old Blade Nebraska when he came down a few years ago for the workshop that we have with Jerry Gillespie and Dr. Christine Jones.

1:47 David Olson joined us from California and talked a lot about how important seed microbes are, the microbes that are on the seed, whether they get there from the natural occurrence of how that seed is grown in the environment about which it was grown or if it is some added biology, about how important that was.

2:09 And then two weeks ago Scott Shimer and Austin with Elevated Ag were on and talked about the Hyper Grow product and how Scott's been using that out in Western Kansas, we're actually Eastern Colorado probably both, and the success that he's been having with that product. We're going to kind of follow up on some of that discussion here today.

2:30 And then of course if you joined us last week, a really interesting conversation with Laura Decker. Laura is the president of Microbiometer and they make a really unique device for measuring and looking at the fungal tube, bacterial microbiomass and it's a kind of unique test that they can use without needing a lab and just gives people a way to assess how healthy their soil is and if they're going in the right direction.

3:02 So all that's kind of led up to this. You know, we've got a big background in microbes and composting and how all those things are working and we want to kind of build on what we've done the first six weeks and just kind of have a conversation around the microbes and specifically on what do we do with the microbes once we get them, once we start creating the environment where we know we're having better microbial life in our soil, how do we take care of them, how do we manage them, how do we get the most out of them.

3:33 And so to do that again I invited Armand Miller. Armin is with Elevated Ag as I think most of you probably know. Green Cover is one of the owner partners of Elevate Ag. Elevated Ag is a Kansas-based company. We own a portion of it. Armin has some ownership and then there's other farmers within Kansas that have ownership as well and it's a company that makes and distributes biological products.

4:00 So we want Armin to be on this call because he has been working with Nausea for a number of years now and like I say she is just a great source, a great wealth of knowledge and information. So Armin I'm going to let you go ahead and do the introduction for Nausea since you have more experience in working with her and some of the products and the processes that she's doing.

4:26 Thank you so much Keith. Yes, it's a great pleasure of mine in order to introduce Nausea. So where I started with Nausea was that I learned about her through a couple of people. It was kind of simultaneously and it was kind of I think somebody knocking on my door saying that I need to get to know this person.

4:48 And the first time I listened to Naja was a TNT talk and it was basically a conversation about producers talking about what they experienced with some of the food products that and some of the other products that she put together.

5:04 So Nausea is an environmental engineer and a certified crop consultant specializing in soil biology and rejuvenating our soil system. Nausea also designs a different soil rejuvenation products that are labeled underneath the TNT product line and they help with soil management system.

5:30 She's also an educator and an influencer and one of the things that she says is that she does a lot of observing and learning from God's creation and that's really what we're doing is reestablishing that soil. And Nausea has a real great understanding that she can explain it in the terms that I can understand that aren't so scientific or chemical based on there.

6:03 So with that Keith I'll turn it back over to you.

6:07 Friend Naja comes from our neighbor to the North in Canada. She doesn't have a super strong Canadian accent so very easy to understand. I also wanted to let you know if you have a copy of our ninth edition of the soil resource guide, Naja was a contributing author for this one. She's got a really nice two-page article in here about photosynthesis, how that works and why that's important. So if you don't have one of those, let us know and we can make sure we get one of those. But Naja, I want to kick off the conversation. You know, we've been doing a lot of talking about microbes the last six weeks in getting them into our soil from different ways and keeping them happy. But from your perspective, tell us why you believe these microbes are so important to a healthy functioning soil system and even more importantly to an AG production system.

7:06 We have our digestive systems inside of our intestines, right? Without our digestive systems in proper order, and we know what can happen when the microbes in our gut get upset, and you know, we run into problems. All sorts of trouble. A plant has its digestive system on the outside of its roots. And believe it or not, a lot of the organisms that help to digest food for plants, extracting minerals from the soil and what not, are actually the same organisms that digest food in our own guts. So we're not a whole lot different, plants and us. And the need for that relationship between the plant and the soil microbes is, I mean, it's just built into how everything was created, where they're, you know, you want to talk about creation science or evolution, whatever. That's how it's supposed to be. And when we start to take parts of it out, whether deliberately or accidentally, things start to get out of balance. And when they start to get out of balance, a lot of times they get even more out of balance, especially when we're trying to go into rescue with things that are again contrary to how things work. Then it throws it even more out of whack.

8:41 We're in a situation globally where we have for decades now abused the soil and not paid proper attention to that micro-plant relationship. And it wants to work, it wants to thrive. And so a lot of times all we have to do is get out of its way. But we can accelerate it and we can amplify it and we can augment it by having a little bit better understanding of it and giving it a little bit of a helping hand and coaxing it along. And so that's kind of what I do with my work with my clients or in things like this podcast, to discuss that relationship and the importance of it.

9:34 I love that analogy of the digestive system. And I heard a speaker once, I don't remember who it was, but they said everything has to go through again, you know, so everything that gets into that plant has to go through a gut of some kind or at least in the natural system. And you know, a lot of it's going through microbes, but some of it's going through earthworms and other larger soil biological organisms. And yeah, it's just so important for making those nutrients available. And when we don't have that, our crops suffer and then we have to step in with what I call agricultural welfare and give the handouts out of the jug or out of the bottle because the natural system isn't working the way it's supposed to.

10:18 We talk extensively about how important diversity is. Diversity is one of the key tenets of soil health. And that applies not only to having plant diversity on our soil but especially for the biological diversity. So how do we get biological diversity in our soils when we don't have great cash crop diversity? You know, we're maybe only growing corn and soybeans, or out in the West, they're growing wheat every year. What are some practical ways that farmers can really help capture biological diversity when we don't have a lot of cash crop diversity?

11:03 One of the ways you can do that is by looking at nature. And when nature is growing things, you don't see monoculture. So when we grow things in monoculture, we're actually doing things in opposition to nature. And if while we're not going to mimic 140 different species of plants in our fields—that's just not practical, and that would be called weeds in the field—you know, if you're growing wheat, is it feasible to do a wheat and pea blend? Those are two crops that are very easy if you have even basic screening equipment you can screen and separate wheat from peas. Or maybe whoever you're selling it to is happy to have the peas in with the wheat because they're going to use it for feed or something like that. So looking at potential combinations that work together.

12:08 Intercropping, but also the potential for, I mean we don't have to harvest every single seed that we plant. So depending on where you're growing it, may be feasible to underseed. I'm going to use wheat as an example but underseed that with some clover. Right, so when you harvest, if there's any clover that goes through the combine back out on the field, you get that extra diversity of that extra plant type in there. You can do the same thing with corn. You can go in at knee-high and maybe do underseeding of annual rye grass or some clovers or whatever works, or you can intercede when you're planting with some peas that might grow for half the season then die out once the corn plants get tall enough and shade them out. But you can get extra diversity in that way.

13:04 Another way to do it is cover crops, and that theory that we don't have to harvest every seed that we plant. The microbes are there in the soil, they're there all the time, and they're like a teenage boy, they want to eat all the time, they're constantly eating. So if we don't have a living plant fixing fresh carbon, which gets converted to sugars, exudates, which can be all kinds of different things and pumping that into the soil to continue to feed those soil organisms, they're going to eat what's already sitting there. And one of the very first things that they will eat is the glomalin, which is the substance that holds that beautiful crumb structure in the soil. That's one of the easiest things for them to get out and eat. So the very first thing that your soil microbes are going to do in the absence of a living plant to continue to feed them is to start to tear down the house that they spent all season building, and it's going to degrade your soil structure.

14:11 So if however you can manage to get and have living plants on your field, whether you can get a cover crop been after your main crop, or maybe if you can get something in like oats and peas or something like that first thing in the spring, even one inch of growth is better than, I mean you think that there's not a lot there, but that one inch of oats is actually doing a lot of work already prior to your main crop or even weeds. I mean, it's green. What I tell my clients is if you don't pick the weeds, Mother Nature's going to pick the weeds, and you might not like the ones that she picks. So pick ones that have a specific purpose or function, for nitrogen fixing or soil structure or whatever, or maybe just because it's easy to terminate or at winter kills or whatever suits your needs. Then you choose that weed and grow that weed, and then you at least you've got something good to grow, and it's another different plant.

15:23 As far as the diversity of microbes go, if you wanted to go someplace and have a diversity of foods, you would make sure you would invite people from England and people from China and people from the Middle East and people from France and people from South America, people from Mexico, because then you're going to get all the different kinds of food that all those people are going to bring to that potluck dinner. And so the same thing is applicable to the soil microbes. Each plant provides a different suite of exudates and compounds, and the different types of microorganisms that prefer this, that, or the other thing, then also are able to flourish in the soil. So the more diversity you can get in, the more biological diversity you can stimulate, and the more quickly you can spur that soil regeneration and that increased fertility.

16:22 Yeah, that's great. That was the short answer. Oh, and thanks a lot, now you've made me hungry talking about food with all these wonderful places. But by the way, folks, since this is kind of a conversation, we want to invite everybody into the conversation. So if you have a question about something that you hear us say, go ahead and put it in the Q and A box, or you can put it out on the chat for the panelists, and we'll try to work that question into the conversation that we're doing. You can also ask questions that we'll answer at the end as well. But Armin, I'm going to come to you. If this is kind of the same question, you are on the road a lot. You're out visiting lots of farmers. You see lots of different operations and lots of different environments. What are some of the ways that you've seen really innovative farmers working to get that microbial diversity into their soil?

17:16 Well, Keith, one of the ways, and you know we with Jim Ristow kind of hit on it earlier in one of the conferences, is compost, and just yesterday I had a gentleman call me from Seneca, about four years ago he bought a product from me that we made prior to Elevate AG. It was a compost blend with a calcium base to it, and he called and I had not heard from him for four years and he called me says you know we've taked on new ground rent.

17:47 New ground and he said that set of fields that I took that product to survived and have outperformed even in droughts over the last and the bottom line was is that it's like Nausea said it had a had a compost base to it so it had a food source that kept those microbes alive and kept them cycling the nutrients and it created diversity over time because it wasn't something that the plants gave that diversity of microbes and this is one of the questions that I have for Nausea you know if you don't have the proper microbes out there how do you change it if you don't bring some diversity of microbes to the party at the beginning of the year or you don't bring that diversity of cover crops how do you change the diversity of your microbes to have the right microbes or how long does it take in order to build those microbes up in order to get the right diversity for that crop that that will now cycle those nutrients on there Nausea?

18:51 Yeah so if you just want things to just kind of proceed on their own without the diversity of of plants in the cropping system it's not going to happen. The old adage you know doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is very much applicable to this type of situation as well that's something I would definitely encourage anybody who's growing anything to really try to consider how to to do that but in the interim if you don't have that or you're working you know the boss doesn't want to doesn't want to do it or you want to speed things up then absolutely wherever you can get your hands on any kind of organic matter whether it's compost compost teas even you know various different microbial inoculants bug in a jug things or whatever those are helpful.

19:50 There's lots of stuff that blows around on the wind that we can't even we don't see lots of stuff and as the soil improves you know those things will will also flourish but they will likely need a you know diversity of plant population in order to self-sustain. But yeah compost teas are great. Having animals on if you can incorporate rotational grazing if you don't have that then even just animal manures can be helpful.

20:26 I was talking last week or the week before about looking at fresh demon cow manure under the microscope and how about look to see what that looks like under the microscope and I can tell you that I've never seen anything so lively and full of diversity because fresh fresh right off the assembly line cow manure so well well you know aged manure or manure for manure apparel spread on the field is is great there there is no substitute for that fresh deposition from an animal and this you know the saliva and the action of the hoofs and the pulling on the teeth or whatever I mean that's how it was that's what the plants are expecting that's what they they you know well we'll say evolved with or you know how they're designed to to work so that's the you know cat's meow ideal but if you don't have that then absolutely you know compost teasing and whatnot and knowing to understanding you were talking about earlier fungal bacterial ratios and understanding you're getting a little bit of an assay on the soil to understand what organisms are there and which ones are lacking or imbalanced and and then looking for sources to supplement and repopulate those things and there's a lot of talk about you know Johnson Sioux reactors and fungal populations and and wherever you or you can get effective microbes where you can kind of harvest them yourself and grow them in in the soil if you're so inclined to do that you know to try to increase your fungal populations in the soil.

22:13 You know various different ways of doing it and then once you've got your organisms then just like you wouldn't take you know 100 head of cattle and put them in a barn and close the door and see okay we'll come back in a month you want to make sure that you don't think you'd have too many cows but the same thing when you use these inoculants and throw them out on the soil if they don't have anything to eat whether it's a live living plant or you know sufficient organic matter for them to scavenge which is not the greatest or something that you put down you know I I like anytime I put more microorganisms down whether it's a compost tea or a bug in a jug or whatever I mean manures come with their automatic food source for the microbes because they're still not not done with it but but any any of those other ones compost teas extracts bugging the jug things I like putting down a food source and there's a whole list of different things that you can use for food sources for different organisms yeah and we're I

23:22 We'll get on that topic here in a little bit on the food sources and stuff, but I really like your point there. You know, if you're putting these things out there, whether it be an extract or a commercial bug in a jug type product, and you're not changing the rest of your system to support that, it's not likely going to work very well. And so I think that's why a lot of times I tell people all the time that biology can be very effective, but it's not always as consistent as chemistry because it's living. It's alive, and it's so dependent upon the system that you have built around it as well.

24:04 We do have a couple questions from the audience that I want to throw out to you, but before I get to those, I love what you said about the importance of having those diverse plants there to support that diverse biology. And I know that we've talked to our client base and our customers about this particular topic before. But I was just working with a customer from Illinois this morning. He's a corn soybean guy committed to this regenerative path, so he's starting to get wheat into his rotation, which in Illinois is not the common thing. And then he's going to follow up that wheat. So he's got wheat in the ground, he'll harvest that in July, and then he's going to plant sunflowers—double crop sunflowers—to try to harvest as a second cash crop. But underneath those, I'm designing a mix for him right now that has mung beans and cow peas and spring peas and clover and flax and buckwheat and mustard. So he'll have like 12 things out there growing, and he'll harvest one of them, and the rest of it is all completely going to be for the soil. And so those are the types of innovative producers we love working with because they're really thinking through ways that they can not only harvest a cash crop but also have all this diversity—the same concept of interceding with your corn, you know, interceding at V3 or V4 to just get some other things out there so it's not quite as much of a monoculture.

25:38 Kevin is asking, he says, 'I've heard that there can be significant differences in biology even among different varieties of the same plant species, as much as up to 10 percent difference.' And I think he's talking about the ability of different varieties of corn to host different biological populations. So his question is, is there significant value to blend multiple varieties of the same plant species to increase microbial diversity? So does it make sense to plant three or four different types of corn together, or in a cover crop maybe three or four different varieties of sorghum to try to capture that diversity?

26:24 I think it's more important to plant different plant families together and try to cover the different plant families. Because while there is diversity within, just like with people—you have diversity within ethnicities—but there are differences. And so the same thing with plants. You want to make sure that if you're going to be growing stuff all year, you've got some cool season grasses, some warm season grasses. Yes, they're all grasses, but there's an example of where the diversity can make a difference. You want to make sure you've got legume represented, you want to make sure you've got something in the Brassica family, and then also something in the China pod family, which also bumps things up a notch. So I think having representation of the different families is more critical.

27:32 Corn is one of those things where you can have a huge difference in varieties. I mean, there are corn varieties now that are being developed to withstand drought. But by the very nature of that breeding, it tends to select for corn varieties that refuse a mycorrhizal relationship. So, you know, great—the plant is more resistant to drought—but it refuses a mycorrhizal relationship. So you're refusing the relationship that, by its very nature, would make the plant more drought resistant all on its own. Yeah, right. And without the mycorrhizae, genetics and the mycorrhizae also frees up all kinds of nutrients, especially phosphorus and calcium, which are two things that are very, very important. Right. So are we doing a good thing by doing that? Or, you know, that's another question.

28:39 I think in looking at Kevin's question again, he might be asking more so about—let's take wheat for an example. If he's planting wheat as a cash crop, do you think it would be beneficial if he had three or four varieties of wheat all mixed together and planted out there? Still monoculture because it's still wheat, but you know, he may have three or four different varieties he can still harvest it all, haul it to the co-op. So in that instance, you know, there's no penalty from a harvesting standpoint. But do you see any benefits from a...

29:12 Biological standpoint doing that versus just a single variety. Yeah, not overly. I mean if you're going to do that you got to watch to make sure that the wheat's gonna mature at the same time and it's going to have the I mean you don't want to plant like a hard wheat and a soft wheat together because you want to make sure you have a consistent quality in your end product so it kind of sort of limits what you can do. But I don't think that you're gonna have a huge difference in what those plants are going to do from an exudate perspective either from the roots of the leaves. With regard to the soil I don't think it's going to be that big of a difference.

30:00 I know that along that topic one of the things that I know Rick Clark was talking about doing this is he's going to plant multiple varieties of wheat together and he's doing all old varieties so there's no protection there's no licensing issues but he's going to then just keep replanting what he harvests so he's going to epigenetically make that fit his specific environment both the biological environment as well as the climate environment. And so essentially you know after a few generations he'll have something that's completely different than anything on the market simply because he's made it adapt to what he's got going.

30:41 Exactly. And that's where there's a benefit if he's going to be keeping his own seed. Yes, then yes you're going to have you know this variety might be resistant to this disease and this one might be more resistant and this one might be more frost tolerant or whatever and through the success of generations if you are keeping your own seed then it's not important for the who you're selling it to to have that specific variety and the traits that are associated with that specific variety then by all means. And I think that's one thing that we've kind of gotten away from and that we've lost in our modern agriculture is you know somebody from Dakota is going to buy wheat that was bred and developed in Michigan and the conditions aren't the same and while it grows great in Michigan you plant it in North Dakota and hey that's not what it says on the label for what I'm supposed to get right but we've gotten away from the old way of doing things where the local strains were very well adopted to the very local conditions right.

31:44 And even you know what you would grow on your farm is going to be different from what your neighbor five miles down the road is going to grow right because you might have slightly different soil or depending on like where I'm situated it's bizarre but there's about a 10 mile square mile area and the crop insurance guys know about it because they come out and they're like oh you're from that area because it tends to be more drought prone than the surrounding areas for whatever reason. I say Moses dropped his staff out in the field they're way back when that's what I tell people. But I mean you can see the storms come and they either shoot off to the North or they shoot off to the South right you're like where'd the rain go.

32:29 So you know somebody who was growing their own varieties and keeping their own seed in that area would have would buy their own seed yeah they would automatically select for ones that would do better in those conditions so for that I would say yeah I wish more farmers would do that. The genetic diversity, also lack of genetic diversity also opens up our food supply to the potential for mass devastation right if we have all the same genetics all over the place you know more or less then you don't have that natural genetic diversity so if a disease comes through or you know poor conditions or insects or whatever then you have that monoculture that you end up with larger systemic failures right so it's a very exposed position.

33:28 Yeah. So just to kind of maybe close this topic out before we move on to the next topic Marlon from Idaho is saying that they're in Idaho there's some innovative farmers who have created a new crop they're doing things together called Harley, P-A-R-L-E-Y they're growing peas and barley together harvesting it like you suggested sometimes they're separating it sometimes they're not if it's going to the feed market why separate it it's a pretty complete ration or it can go back to the cover crop market. Said another new crop is P Molina, peas and cameline I think those guys in Idaho don't have anything better to do so you can sit around making up new novel crops baby. But I would be careful if Moe and Ron were getting together to come put something together but otherwise I'm all for it. There might be a lot of people that would buy the mix but that's a pretty big customer segment but not our customers right.

34:30 But I know for a fact that in the past we have bought a lot of the flax that we use as cover crops some of the chickpeas you know flax and chickpeas are another example of two things that grow very well together.

34:44 Why we're getting some hairy batch coming in out of Canada right now that they're separating out of the rice that they grew and so there's a lot of very successful poly cropping type systems out there. It's not for the faint of heart and it's not for the guy that's not willing to work but for those that are you can definitely add value to both of those crops.

35:06 Absolutely and if you're growing the two crops together right and let's say you get eighty percent of your rye crop which you would normally get and you get eighty percent of your pea crop or veg crop. Well yeah if you look at them each individually you've got a reduced yield but together you've got way more productivity on that soil because they help each other out both structurally they support each other structurally but also nutritionally right.

35:41 I love growing a grass whether it's wheat, rye, oats, barley or whatever with a legume like a pea or a vetch or that can get a little bit out of hand, rice a good choice but it's a shorter stuff, not so much. But having because when you have that mycorrhizal relationship in the soil both of those plants are mycorrhizal and what happens is the mycorrhizae interconnects your legume with your grass and starts to exchange sugars between the grasses and the legumes and also exchange nitrogen from the legumes to the grasses. So your grasses grow better they produce more sugar and then which then allows the legume to produce more nitrogen. So there's there's that again there's that natural connection, that natural relationship between the microbes that connects the plants together and you get a synergistic effect.

36:36 Yeah it's emulating the way God created plants to grow together in diverse cultures and not in monoculture. So absolutely I do want to move on to the next topic here. You know once we have all these microbes and nausea you mentioned it earlier we have to feed them. You can't lock your calves in the barn for a month and then not come back. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the food sources and specifically some of the things that are in the hypergirl product. You know last week Austin and Scott talked about this quite a bit but you know hypergrow is it's a compost extract which has been talked about a lot but then we're adding other things into it and some of them are can be food sources and some of them are more of the stimulant package. So Armin I want you to kind of do a little bit of a discussion here talking about the different ingredients that are in that product and then let's have nausea comment on what the purpose of those things are.

37:38 Yeah Keith, you know one of the things that we realized is if we can start them out in the soil at as early as possible these microbes, so in like hypergrow there's a large set of diverse microbes that are in there and so there's some food sources that are also in there. These microbes are more in a stasis situation so they can withstand a little bit of a battle meaning that they could be put in with some of your chemicals which would be like your 32s your 28s your liquid fertilizers those kind of things and still withstand that salt in there. But what also that's added to those is a humic and a fulvic acid, kelp that's in there and a chitosan that's in there and they all serve a different purpose in these situations in order to help get those microbes started.

38:42 The other things that we like to put which is a really high food source, so you got to keep those microbes in stasis. If you give them too much food meaning like a hydrolyzate or a fermented fish or some kind of a carbon base like molasses and that kind of stuff they want to go to eat and then go to work and they'll do that in your tank. So we try to keep that away from there and add it just when they're ready to go into the soil. So there's a lot of different things that are going on. We also put in the hypergrow of mineral base and also chelated minerals in there. So these you got to think that we eat a diversity. We don't need as much of the multivitamin but if we don't eat that diversity we need that multivitamin and that's where we come in with like sea crop something all these minerals that come from the ocean and that can supply some of that. So those are the things that we put into hypergrow in order to get it started. Then there's the large food sources after we start that we like to inject in a row to help populate in like Christine Jones says let's get started with a little bit of quorum sensing meaning that you know it's I may be okay with a hammer but I'm not very good as a plumber. You know and if I could hire this group that could build this house that we're building in the soil that there's everybody has a purpose and a job that's going to go a lot quicker. So that's part of the concept of putting these together on there.

40:22 So yeah I'd love to hear nausea's comments and that kind of stuff on some of those products out there. Yeah so I kind of just scratched down some notes here. So the sea crop that you're mentioning.

46:40 Spores of those in the soil are usually made out of chitin. So if you can turn on the soil microbes that want to eat chitin, you can also turn on the soil microbes that are going to tear apart that protective coating on that fungal pathogenic fungal spore, which then opens that fungal spore to other things to go in and destroy it. Fusarium is a perfect example of that. So if you can stimulate that chitin digestion cycle in the soil, you can decrease your fusarium load in your soil and the potential for that.

47:20 Kelp is another one that is highly fungal food. I really like it. It also has plant growth regulators, whether it be for root growth or vegetative growth. And it's almost like a chill pill for your plants. For example, if you look at the weather forecast and go okay, the plants aren't looking too bad but it looks like I got like a week or two weeks of hot sunny weather coming up, you get out there with say a foliar spray of kelp. It's like a stress reliever for the plant. So you can help that plant get through that stressful time. Including that in with your soil microbes helps stimulate the fungal portion of the soil, helps stimulate germination. It's a natural germination stimulant. It helps get those roots growing initially. So there's a lot of benefits to all of those things.

48:24 I don't know if there's anything else you want to add, or yeah, talk a little bit about the hydrolyzates and those kind of things as a food system for these microbes and for the fungi and what kind of spurs them, including high energy fish, those kind of things as we can add those throughout the season or to that cover crop in order to promote more growth, those kind of things. Talk a little bit about how that works.

48:54 So when it comes to protein digestate products, we'll just call that because you can make a hydrolyzate out of any kind of meat really, doesn't have to be fish. But we'll just talk about fish today. So there's three different products really that to discuss. You've got a hydrolyzate, which you mentioned, and that is basically whatever fish parts are being digested, which are just digested enough to basically liquefy the fish so you can pour it, but it also includes all of the fats that are naturally there. They the fats haven't been removed. Then you have an emulsion, which has been cooked in order to extract the fats out of it. So it's broken down, it's also liquidy, but the fats have been removed from it. So you lose the well, it has value. There's nutrients there, there's micronutrients, there's some nitrogen, there's proteins, amino acids and whatnot. By removing the fats, well you're going to eliminate or avoid the gumming up of your equipment with fish oils and stuff. But those oils are not digestible by bacteria. They're only digestible by soil fungi. And so by going with an emulsion versus a hydrolyzate, you lose a significant portion of that fungal stimulating proportion. So for in soil, I prefer hydrolyzate versus an emulsion.

50:29 And then you've got the fermented product. So the high energy fish is unique in the fermented fish category in that it is made with whole salmon. So the salmon flesh has different properties from other fish. But because you're also doing with a whole salmon, you're getting all of the meat and you're getting all the skin. Where some other products may be just with the carcasses because they've taken the fillets out, so they've taken the meat and whatever skin comes with that off, and then what's left you get some skin off the backbone and the fins and what's on the head and whatnot that goes in. But you're missing out on that full carcass. So the high energy fish is a little bit different in the hydrolyzates in that way. But the other way that it's different is that a hydrolyzate or an emulsion is just broken down enough so you can liquefy the fish and pour it and use it. The fermented fish is allowed to naturally ferment for 12 to 18 months. And so it's different in that where the more raw fish has complete proteins in there, still has some work to be done to break it down. You get a little bit of an initial kick, but then the microbes have to work to release the rest of it and work on the rest of it. Whereas the high energy fish, that's already been done. So 100% of that high energy fish is immediately available in very simple compounds and immediately available to the soil microbes. And if you're adding that to a compost tea brew or something like that, you can see how fast stuff works to get that stuff going. And it also because everything is the fats are chopped up, broken down and converted.

52:35 Water soluble compounds you don't have while you have the building blocks of the oil there because the oil's been broken down to its building blocks you don't have the oil itself. So again you don't have a problem with gumming up of your equipment. But by using, you can use it, either use that in trench. It's both a bacterial and a fungal stimulant. Everything just seems to go absolutely nuts on that stuff. I think it's because it's so easily readily available. It's like giving a three-year-old a sucker or a can of pop. That's what you're doing to the soil microbes with the high energy fish.

53:17 But it's very useful as a foliar for that reason because that energy is all immediately available and it provides the plant with various different building blocks to make proteins and amino acids, proteins and also fats. It can rebuild the fats from the fat building blocks. So the plant is short-circuiting the building of all of those building blocks itself and can very quickly produce those fats. And you see that when you use it in a foliar spray within a few days you start to see that nice waxy sheen come on the leaves.

53:56 Which you're not going to see that with hydrolyzed or an emulsion. That's one of the ways that the energy fish is very different. And those fats that you're seeing on that the plant is exuding on the leaf surface, the plant is also exuding similar fats out through the root system. And again, because fats are digestible by fungi and not bacteria, the exuding of those lipids, those fats out through the root system, it is a driving force for stimulating the soil fungi in that relationship.

54:40 So did that kind of answer your question?

54:43 Yeah, talk a little bit about how molasses or the sugar-based black strap, those kind of things work within the same microbial fungal units like these other products. You hear a lot of people stimulating their plants on a foliar basis or in the soil with those type of products out there.

55:05 Yeah, so molasses or any other kinds of sugars as well. I prefer to use whole. I call them whole fertilizers like a molasses versus some people would just buy like cane sugar and just use cane sugar. And while a raw cane sugar is going to come with some minerals, the molasses is basically all the minerals have been extracted from making white table sugar, which has nothing in it but sugar and with a little bit of that white sugar left in it. So there's a lot of minerals left behind with molasses. So there's the benefit of that. You're getting like a micronutrient boost along with the molasses, especially iron.

55:52 That's probably one of the nutrients that a lot of people don't think about as far as relating that to the plants, especially in a foliar capacity. And we talked about or we didn't talk about, I wrote in the article that Keith mentioned about photosynthesis, about chlorophyll. And chlorophyll is made out of magnesium with four nitrogen around it and the plant puts that chlorophyll together and attaches that nitrogen to the magnesium. So there's two things that are needed for chlorophyll, which then makes sugars, which then can feed the soil microbes, but it uses iron to do that. And without sufficient iron, the plant assembly line for chlorophyll is slowed down. So that's one of the ways that molasses can help from a foliar perspective.

56:52 One of the other ways that it helps is a lot of times when I go and do a field testing and I measure the bricks or the sugar content of plants, they're almost always low. And when you have low bricks, that's an invitation for insects to munch on the plants. And so by using a sugar source or molasses in a foliar, you're immediately addressing the low sugar level in the plant by putting sugars in. But the form of sugar and molasses is also usually sucrose, which is two sugars put together, which a lot of insects have a hard time digesting. So by putting that kind of sugar into the plant, you make the plant undigestible to the insects and the insects go away. Aphids are a perfect example. Get rid of aphids, you use molasses and they'll be gone.

57:48 In the soil, putting that molasses in there is a good sugar source to stimulate bacteria. And while most soils are a more important microbial deficiency in soils is fungi, the bacteria are key for supporting the fungi because the bacteria are going to free up nutrients a lot faster. They're going to work a lot faster.

58:18 To free up nutrients than what soil fungi do, and so you can help with the recovery of fungal populations by helping the recovery of the bacterial populations because the fungi will establish a relationship with the bacteria and they will help each other out. So if you can get the bacteria going, they'll help get the fungi going too. Sugar sources are helpful that way, but yes I do like molasses. But if you're going to use molasses to address the low bricks content in plants, by all means find out why the bricks is low in the first place and see if you can address that.

58:56 Is there any other food sources out there for these microbials and fungi that we haven't covered that you would recommend? Well, one thing is residue, right? That's a microbial food source. If you have a high carbon residue like straw or corn stubble or leaves or wood chips or whatever, maybe you just go to forested area and you had shred a bunch of stuff and there's wood chips all over the surface. If you incorporate the high carbon material into the soil, bacteria reproduce very quickly and they feed themselves first, and they're going to look at all this carbon and go, wow, we need nitrogen to break this down, and so they're going to pull nitrogen in soil faster than your plants can. So you want to be careful with incorporating high carbon material into the soil or at least how deep. What, keep it in the surface, you leave it on the surface.

1:00:13 And here's, this is where one of the benefits of no-till. The only place where the bacteria can really get at that material is right at where it's touching the soil, right at that soil-residue interface where it tends to be a little bit moister. Because bacteria need a lot higher moisture level than fungi do to operate. So the soil fungi will go through the soil and actually go up into that residue mat and break it down, and the bacteria will only be working at that interface level.

1:00:55 It's another reason why we don't want to do tillage because not only does it physically destroy it, but biologically it breaks it down too fast as well. Yeah, and by getting that residue and putting it underneath the soil, now you have—you're making that residue really moist which then makes it, you know, a good environment for bacteria, and then they're going to just strip nitrogen out of the soil to get at that carbon source right. And so now you're going to look at nitrogen deficiency problems. And as far as tillage goes, if you want to incorporate it, the shallower you can incorporate that the better. So if you do want to kind of get it into the soil a little bit, especially for organics, then you want to try to minimize the depth that you're going to be doing that instead of, you know, plowing or chilling six inches or eight inches. You know, try maybe three inches.

1:01:58 Well great conversations folks. I we do have a few questions here that I want to get to as we kind of wrap up our time together here. You know, we've talked, you mentioned the soil fungi a number of times, and Armin, there's a question here from Warren for you. Can you talk a little bit about the elevated fungi product that you offer as well and, you know, kind of what's in that or kind of the source that it came from, and how we're using that as a fungal component to the soil?

1:02:30 Yeah, the elevated fungi is part of Ryan moss, and it's a fungal source that be more saprobic than it would be mycorrhizal. Okay, so it would help break down more of the nutrients for the soil and that kind of stuff on there. And so in this process where we're getting that from is also David Olson, that we're able to pull that product, and that has a shelf life. Not only that, it's more in a stasis form than if you extract it from the field. You need to take it to the field right away because you haven't put it in a stasis, so it's not as vulnerable. But that product basically helping with that microbial population out there in the essence of, can we stimulate more bacteria that the fungal can keep on growing with and get that stimulated? So, you know, we got to remember we're trying to get that seed out of the ground, and as Naja would say, you know, microbes are similar to the colostrum that a calf would get for the seed, you know. So what we're trying to initiate is that immediate growth. We got a lot of bacteria there. How can we get some of the fungal that wasn't there and get that started? That's why that product was brought to the marketplace. Yeah, and for a little bit deeper dive and explanation of that, go back and watch the webinar we did with David a couple weeks ago. We do get into a few

1:04:04 More details about what that is and how that works. One last question to kind of end on and I think this is a great one to end on because the end goal of all of this is to produce better and healthier food for people. That's why we want better soil, healthier soil, better biology. And so Matt asked the question: has there been any nutrient density testing done on grain grown in a diverse regenerative type system versus conventional production models? And do we also see any of that played out in livestock production? Are we producing better meat from a regenerative system than from a non-regenerative? I think everybody would say yes, we are convinced that it is. Has there been some good testing done on that? Are you aware of that? And Armin, then maybe just briefly you can talk a little bit about grain sense and how that could be something that could do some basic testing.

1:05:04 I think Dan Kitteridge has done some studies on that. They've developed an instrument that measures nutrient density. And in order, along with the measuring of the nutrient density in various crops, they've recorded what the cultivation practices are so they could try to line up what cultivation practices produce these high nutrient density crops. But the other thing that anybody who's grown cattle can attest to is if you have a pasture that has higher forage quality and higher mineralization—more calcium, more potassium, more manganese, more magnesium, more zinc, more of everything else in it—the cattle will eat less of it and they do better. And that speaks for itself. We don't have to do a double-blind control study to know that when the cattle eat less and they do better when you have a better quality forage, that speaks for itself, I think.

1:06:33 Yeah, Keith, two of the things that we look at is one in the soil, how we change in the soil, but then we also look at after that fruit or that crop has been produced and we're getting closer to harvest. We can pull two weeks before you harvest, seeds, thrash them, put them in this machine. It's called the Grain Sense machine and determine protein, carbohydrates, fats and oils out of that, and in different species all the way from corn, soybeans, sunflower, different rice, those kind of things, and determine what the quality of that seed is. But the new measurement that we're looking at in the soil is a verified that regenerative is using, and that's basically a test between 0 and 6 and 6 to 12 to determine your nitrogen and how do you qualify. So anything above the seven on that a health soil health score above a seven will promote qualifying you that you got a higher density in that fruit. I was talking to Jim Rickster the other day and he actually had a field that on his regen barley tested a 13, but he had another alfalfa field that tested a 34. He says this year I need to go and plant corn in there if I want to get that corn into a bourbon or, you know, those kind of things for a density. So yes, there are methods out there of testing this ahead of time so we kind of know that we can have a direction where we go and then apply the diversity of microbes that have functionality to get a balance. And then after the balance is put out there and you've got your crop out there, how do you feed that with all these different food sources that we mentioned in this call today in order to promote that biology? And so yes, Keith, there are ways in order to get that done.

1:08:35 Yeah, and I think with grains too a good indicator of high nutrient density is your bulk density, right? How heavy and dense is that grain? Because the micronutrients, when you go on a periodic table of elements and you look at how heavy is copper and how heavy is iron and how is manganese, they're heavy. And if you get a little bit more of that stuff into the grain, it makes the grain heavier.

1:08:59 Yeah, I posted the links to a couple webinars we've done in the past, one with Steve Groff talking about that nutrient, and Dan Kittredge's nutrient density meter, and then also a really good one with Stefan van Lee who is talking at Utah State now, talking about that same type of projects but specifically about grass-fed beef. So that's ongoing research. This will give you a little bit of a taste of that. So great questions, great discussions, everybody. Thank you all for joining us. We have our last in this series next week. We will be having Sean Mott. Sean is an expert in mycorrhizae fungi and we're going to be talking specifically about what mycorrhizae do in the soil, the key role that they play, and then the formulation around our micro green product that Sean had a hand in developing. It's a really unique and related product from that we're importing from India. So that'll be our last one and I think we'll end on a good note. So Nassia, thank you so much for joining us. Armin, thank you for joining us and thank you everybody for being part of this webinar series. We hope to see you next week. Thank you, thank you.