What Makes Healthy Seed: The Foundation of Better Crops

0:00 Thank you everybody for joining us. We are looking forward to a great conversation today, very excited about this. This is actually the first of, I believe, we're going to have six webinars in this series on regeneratively produced seed, why that's important, and what better way to kick this off than with John Kemp. I'm guessing that everybody on here knows John, but I'll just do a quick introduction. John is the founder and chief vision officer of Advancing EcoAgriculture, and really John is just one of my favorite people to visit with because not only is he incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to regenerative practices, soil health, plant nutrition, all of those things, but he's also extremely good at sharing that in a way that farmers can understand. And he's also very willing to do that as well. So he's got a big generous heart when it comes to teaching and sharing the information that he's gleaned over his career and working with thousands of producers all across the country, across the world, in helping them grow better crops, more regenerative crops. And so John, welcome, welcome to our webinar. We're so glad that you could join and help us kick this thing off.

1:13 Well, thank you Keith. It's quite an honor. That's quite an introduction. Thank you for the kind compliments. I've been looking forward to this conversation, and I'm quite interested in what will come out through the webinar series, what information will come forward. And for our audience who's listening, I am, if you're not familiar with my story and work, I'm actually a member of an Amish community here in Northeast Ohio, which is why I am not on camera. I'm sometimes on live webinars but not on recordings, and so forth. And so since this is being recorded and being live streamed on Facebook, I'm not on camera. So I get to be the mysterious man behind the green curtain.

1:57 Well, we certainly appreciate you taking time to join. I know just visiting a little bit before we jumped on here, I know you're coming into your busiest time of the year. We're getting really busy too. I know everybody watching is very busy, so time is precious and we appreciate everyone giving of their time because this is an important topic. And so we are grateful for that. So I'm going to jump right in, John. You know, we sell seed. You know, we sell cover crop seed, but this talk is not going to be just about cover crop seed. It's not going to be about green cover seed. We're going to talk about seed in general and why it's so important to get the best quality seed that you can, whether you're growing it yourself, whether you're purchasing it, purchasing it from somewhere else, but why that's important to get your crop off to a good start. And that healthy start is important whether it's a cover crop or even more importantly if it's your cash crop. You just have to get things off to a good start. It all starts with the seed because your crop can never get better than the seed that you use to plant it. And so John, I might just kick off with the first question here: how would you define what healthy seed is? What does it look like? What are some of the characteristics of healthy seed?

3:18 Well, let's start with the fun questions first, shall we? Well, you know, when I think about health, what is it that defines health for any organism? When we approach this question from a foundational or a first principles perspective, I started asking the question years ago around plant health. What defines plant health? What are the foundations of that? And over time, I came to the conclusion that the foundations of health for almost any organism are nutritional integrity and microbiome integrity. It takes both of those. Both are required to be balanced. Both are required to be functional. If either one of them has elements that are missing, it's really those two foundational pieces. And when you think about seed from that perspective, I've been, you know, I'm still comparatively a young man, but I've had the fortune to watch lots of crops emerge, both growing up on a farm and growing a lot of vegetable crops, a lot of cover crops, and now some of the experimental work that I'm doing at home and working with farmers from all over the place. And sometimes you observe seeds that when planted germinate rapidly. You often begin germination in a matter of hours and completing germination in a matter of a day or two, emerging a couple days later, and they have these dark green leaves that begin photosynthesizing and they just take off and go. And I still remember some of these experiences. We had one zucchini crop on my father's farm when I was growing up that was, the official days to harvest for this variety was 57 days. We harvested our first crop in 31 days, almost half the time. I've had similar experiences with green beans that the official seed to harvest window was 60 days. We were harvesting in 42 days. And so I've observed these examples where crops take off like they're running on rocket fuel, and others where the seeds just languish or the seedlings just languish.

5:38 They come out of the ground they're pale yellow they don't turn dark green they don't begin photosynthesizing and what has become really clear is one piece that has really caught my attention recently is we tend to think of a lot of diseases on different crops like verticillium and ferium and so forth. These diseases tend to be associated with later in the growing season at the last month or two before harvest but what has really caught my attention is that those diseases begin infecting a seedlings root system in the first 10 to 14 days after germination and then they just kind of sit there and coast along and usually don't cause any significant visual disease problems until eight or 10 weeks down the line.

6:28 So it's been that which has really put me on a journey to try to understand how can we prevent that initial disease susceptibility from happening and how can we have when we have some of these seeds that just take off like they're on rocket fuel, how can we replicate that and repeat that across all different varieties. And obviously there's a lot of factors that are going to go into that like soil temperature, moisture and things like that but you mentioned both the nutritional standpoint as well as the microbiome. Why don't you talk just a little bit more about what the difference between those are.

7:25 Well there's this interesting dichotomy. I asked the question on Twitter this morning when a seed is planted in the soil how quickly, how much time passes by before that soil microbiome or what is present in the soil system from a nutritional or a microbiome perspective begins influencing that seed. I asked the question just to stimulate conversation because I wanted people to ask about it because we have these two very different points of view. The one point of view is that a seed is or should be a largely self-contained unit that it should contain enough sugars, enough minerals that if you expose it to the right combination of temperatures and water or perhaps lighting that it will begin germinating and that it can completely sustain itself for at least 5 to seven days after emergence.

8:22 And that thought, it's certainly true that seeds have the capacity to do this they should have this ability but that thought has become associated with the thought that because healthy seeds should have this internal nutrition package, that therefore they are not dependent on the soil from the soil microbiome and soil nutrition perspective and that the soil is really only providing moisture and temperature. It's essentially a substrate but it can be a completely sterile substrate and the rest of what's present in the soil in that first 5 to seven days doesn't matter significantly.

9:02 And I find that thought process so intriguing because have we ever heard about this little thing called an allelopathic effect like when we have root systems from a cover crop or from some other plant species that are releasing these phytochemicals in the soil profile they will the seeds will sense that in their environment and it will completely inhibit germination. So the seed is in constant communication with its environment and it doesn't behave like this completely self-contained unit as I was taught to think about it.

9:39 So to bring that around to the question you asked about nutrition and about the microbiome, there are a number of crops where we observe significant insect susceptibility right after germination. So this is common on canola it's common on a lot of different brassicas and various cover crops where they're susceptible to flea beetles right after germination. Some crops are susceptible to armyworms and others right after germination, wireworm, wireworm, et cetera.

10:15 And I set out kind of in parallel to try to understand this phenomena along with the disease susceptibility piece that I was describing earlier and I realized that it is possible to, when we think about seed nutrition, we shouldn't be thinking about it purely in terms of carbohydrates and oils and the energy contained within that seed. We also need to think about it in terms of nutrient balance, mineral balance, particularly magnesium, sulfur, molybdenum and boron and a couple of others that have the ability to contribute insect resistance and it's been really interesting. We now have a couple of years experience with research and testing this in the field and I'm coming to the conclusion, I have this hypothesis and the hypothesis is that when the seeds have a high enough nutritional integrity.

11:18 Have high enough levels of some of these key nutrients, the emerging seedling is going to be completely resistant to insects and will eliminate the need for insecticide treatment. We've seen this on several crops already and we need to broaden that experience into a lot of additional crops and contexts, but that's quite exciting that we can remove insecticides and give these seedlings resistance to insects.

11:49 Now kind of the Band-Aid solution that we're working with right now is treating these seeds with minerals, but the best solution what we should really be striving for and where you have such an incredible opportunity at Green Cover is actually getting those seeds into the parent generation—getting those nutrients into the parent generation so that the nutrition is provided by the seed crop and directly transferred into the seed and you don't have to mess around with seed treatments.

12:15 I mean that's when you think about regeneratively grown seed—having the ability to contain or to supply these high mineral concentrations inside the seed itself—has the capacity to confer so much disease resistance and insect resistance. I'm quite excited to explore what the possibilities are on those frontiers.

12:33 And yeah, that's hugely fascinating. And you know, if that's true, if your hypothesis is true, I mean what a game changer for agriculture—to be able to get rid of neonicotinoids and all these other treatments that are being put on because so many seeds are susceptible to that early insect pressure.

12:57 Well, as of this moment, there are three particular insects that I can speak to coming from a place of significant field scale experience. They are flea beetle, rootworm, and wireworm. I can speak with confidence for those three specific insects that when seeds have enough of the minerals that I mentioned earlier and have good nutritional balance, you will not have a problem with those insects causing pressure in the first—I would suggest as long as the—depending on the speed of growth and temperatures—in at least the first three to four weeks of plant life. As that plant grows and builds biomass, then at some point it's going to exhaust the nutrients that were contained in that tiny seed and it could become a problem later on, but not in the first three to four weeks.

13:48 And that is exciting. Yeah, so is there a way for a producer to test the seed to know if those nutrients are in there? Can we look at the plant that produced that seed? Can we be doing a sap test or some sort of test on there to kind of know what that nutritional level is, or how do we kind of have an idea of where that seed is at on that scale?

14:11 The answer is yes, yes, and yes. So we are taking the approach—and again, it's still very early days, early stages for us in this discovery process—but you can measure the mineral content of the seed by simply sending the seed to a laboratory for a wet chemistry analysis, just a typical dry matter analysis similar to what they do on tissue analysis or on a feed analysis, and measure the mineral profile. So that's an easy step.

14:43 The next step is as soon as you have the data, the obvious question becomes: well, where are the desired thresholds? What are your target values and the levels?

14:51 Yeah, yeah, and that's a piece that we are still experimenting with and still figuring it out. But we have some data to compare with, and the variability is much greater than people might anticipate. I've seen levels for example vary by as much as 30X all the way from 300 parts per million down to 10 parts per million in the exact same variety of the same species—canola in this case.

15:23 And so that variability, I believe that there's also a genetic component here—that some varieties, some genetics, are simply better at absorbing some of these nutrients than others. And I am of the persuasion that that is one of the contributing factors that we associate with disease resistance or insect resistance. We say well this variety is better at being resistant than that variety, and I'm of the persuasion that that is associated with their ability to absorb nutrients and contain high nutrient concentration in the seed.

16:03 So plant breeders need to really be paying more attention to that and actually doing some of that testing to see if there is that correlation between nutrient uptake and some of the insect resistance.

16:12 Yeah, I would expect that will be the case, and it will also really change how we start thinking about managing nutrition for seed crops. All of a sudden, nutrition management for seed crops becomes really important, and particularly in the last well—for the entire duration of the plant's life for that matter, but particularly in the last month to six weeks before harvest when a lot of nutrients are moving into those seeds.

16:37 Because the reality is we should be thinking about instead of treating seeds with insecticides, instead of treating seeds with fungicides—we should be thinking about growing seeds that are insect resistant and fungal disease pressure resistant, which happens with the parent seed generation. And from what we are observing is totally completely.

17:01 In other words, we should be looking at these key minerals, particularly if, for example, we did sap tests and we saw that the parent plant was maybe deficient or low in something, we should be putting together a foliar nutrient package to put on that plant just prior to seed development to really boost that. Is that what you're saying?

17:23 That is one management strategy. I'm definitely an advocate of using sap analysis through the season and monitoring that. And based on all the work that we're seeing with fruit and vegetable crops and also some seed props, there's no question that the nutrient content that shows up in the sap analysis is going to correlate to what shows up in the grain and the seed.

17:50 So that is one management strategy, but also from a longer term perspective, using sap analysis if you are a seed grower growing seed over multiple years is really valuable, not just for the management of the current season but to realize that actually on this soil type on my operation I need to apply some of these minerals like boron to the soil at significantly higher concentrations. Because from my perspective, foliar applications are a very powerful and very valuable tool, but the objective should be to use sap analysis and to develop an understanding of our soil's ability to deliver nutrition and adjust our agronomy management accordingly into a multi-season, multi-year process and manage the following year well enough that we're not dependent on foliar analysis. That's the objective that we should be striving for.

18:44 Yeah, that's a good use of that tool. So I might just make a comment here that a lot of the discussion that we're having, you put out an article we kind of printed a version of it in our latest Soil Health Resource Guide called Seeds with Speed, and with the concept of you know, we want that quick germination, we want that early season vigor, that's characteristic of a healthy seed that translates to a healthy seedling that will eventually become a healthy plant. So people can get that, and I think Jonathan is probably going to be posting some links where people can go and read that article. So we're referencing some of the material out of there. I also will probably ask a few questions relating to the podcast you did with Dr. James White a couple months ago, I think it was episode 99 on your Regenerative Agriculture podcast. So I'm just giving these little tips here for people that want to go and do a little deeper dive and get a little more information on that, because this is such a big topic we're just barely going to scratch the surface here, but those would be some additional resources that people could go to.

19:56 So we kind of talked about the nutritional aspect, but the part that's just incredibly fascinating to me, and this you and Dr. White talked a lot about, is the whole concept of the microbiome and how the microbes in the soil are getting into the seed, you know, through the plant and in that seed, and how important that is. Talk just a little bit about why that's so important and how a healthy soil can confer a healthy microbiome to that seed.

20:30 This is an incredible science. We now live in a world where we think that it's normal to apply microbial inoculant to seed, whether that's rhizobium inoculant on legumes or mycorrhizal inoculant or products like our BioCode Gold, which are a blend of various endophytes and bacteria and algae and microorganisms and fungi and all kinds of other organisms. It isn't yet at the point where it's well, it is a standard practice on some crops, not universally on all crops, although it's rapidly moving in that direction. And those have been very valuable and very useful tools because they offer significant ROI and significant return. But what if they are just a step, and they are just one stage in the evolution of how we manage seeds and plants? And I believe this is what Dr. White and his colleagues' research is pointing us to: that the ideal that we should be striving for is that the seeds themselves are vectors and carriers for the microbiome that this plant has optimal relationships with, and it's the seed itself that carries organisms, as I understand it, largely on the seed surface and in the crevices and cracks and endosperm and so forth, but also to some limited degree on the inside of the seed as well. And that we should think of the seed itself as being a microbiome package in addition to being a nutritional package. This is what we should strive for. This is the ideal that we should seek to create. But of course, in order for that to function, just as in the case of nutrition management, means that the parent generation, the generation that the seed is coming from, needs to be grown in an environment that has been managed in a way to supply that microbiome, to nourish those plants with a balanced microbiome. And this far too frequently is not the case.

22:54 In my understanding, if it were true that the parent generation were producing seeds that had such abundant microbial diversity and populations being carried on the seed itself, microbial inoculant would no longer produce significant benefits. And we know from a lot of experience that that is far from being the case.

23:19 What Dr White has talked about is that when we are growing plants, these plants have these beneficial relationships with endophytes that are absorbed through the growing root tips and they migrate throughout the plant's entire vascular tissue. They are in the leaves, they're in the stems, they're on the leaf surface, in the blossoms, in the flowers, and ultimately inside the fruit or the grain or on the surface of the fruit and the grain.

23:54 In a microbially rich soil, there are—I don't know that we know how many species there are at this point. We are still in preliminary conversations at this point, but sometime in the next month to six weeks, I expect to be announcing the launch of a microbiome lab with Dr Laura Kavanagh where we will actually be able to measure the number of species that are present anywhere on a plant, whether that's in the system or on the leaf surface or on the grain, wherever the case might be.

24:32 Now we can measure seed and measure which species of organisms are present on that seed surface and whether there might be any additional benefits to inoculating or not. So rather than just inoculating with a shotgun approach because we don't know and we have no way of measuring, we now will have the ability to measure and to make a conscious data-driven decision about whether we want to add microbial inoculant or not.

25:02 Yeah, there is such an exciting time. There's so many exciting frontiers that are happening all at the same time. I assume that will be through some sort of a DNA analysis of what's actually on there.

25:13 Yes, there will be a genomics analysis of the full DNA profile. With Laura's technology, my understanding is where her reference archive—a library of all of this, a publicly available library of all of the organisms which are known and which have been sequenced—I think over six million organisms. And so you can get a readout in 24 hours of all the organisms that are present on a seed.

25:43 All of the organisms that we've identified—there's probably a number that we don't have a library for yet. Good point, which I think is really cool because God's creation is so incredibly complex that even with the advanced science and technology that we have, there's still things that we have to learn. There's unexplored territories at that microscopic level, and I find that kind of exciting.

26:12 Well, there's a very important point here about microbial inoculant generally speaking. Bio Code Gold is unique—I'll reveal something that I've not really talked about before. Dr Christine Jones and Elaine Ingham and other microbiologists have spoken to the fact that the majority—it's been a while since I read this, but if I recall correctly, it's in the order of 95% of the known organisms in the soil cannot be cultured in a laboratory. They can't be cultured in a tank, which means that you can't buy an inoculum that contains them.

26:55 And more specifically, you also can't get them from a compost pile or a Johnson suit compost pile or from vermic castings because they specifically require the presence of a living root system.

27:11 The only organisms that are commonly cultured and readily available commercially that are propagated in the presence of a living root system are mycorrhizal fungi. With the exception of Bio Code Gold, there are actually quite a bit of species diversity that we don't talk about and don't claim on the label inside Bio Code Gold because we are propagating—I don't even know how many species—in the presence of living root systems.

27:42 But forget about that plug for a product for a moment. The real point should be that these organisms that can only be propagated in the presence of a living root system and that you cannot purchase in an inoculant form can be vectored by the seed itself. So they can be transferred from parent generation to the subsequent generation.

28:03 The point being that some of the benefits that can occur from having seed that has an abundant microbiome cannot be replicated with most microbial inoculants. So when you're purchasing really good seed, you're not only getting the seed genetics, but you're also getting essentially the microbial seed as well to go into your field. And that's one of the reasons we want to do this series and feature some of our best growers—not that they're doing everything perfectly or that they've reached the pinnacle.

28:43 Need anything else, they still got a lot of room to grow, they'll admit that themselves, but they're doing a lot of things right and they're growing this seed in a regenerative system. And so, you know, we think too, we agree, and it's exciting to know that we'll have some better methods to be able to measure and quantify that the seed coming off their farms is superior to the seed coming off a more conventional type farm.

29:08 Well, we should think about a newborn animal. We know that a newborn animal, a calf, let's say, who has access to abundant levels of colostrum, will really build their immune system and build their microbiome very rapidly and they will have a much greater resilience to all types of stress conditions. And that's exactly what we're talking about with seed. You know, when we think about our bodies, we are the number of cells contained in the human body. Only about 10% of those cells are human, the other 90% are our microbiome, and we should be thinking about in the same way about seed. I don't know what how that translates to seed, but what percentage of the genetic information contained within a seed is actually the plant species that you're buying and how much of it is the microbiome?

30:12 We need to think we know all of us as growers kind of know that from experience you can get the exact same variety from multiple different producers and plant them and get distinctly different results. I still remember we had this one experience on the farm that I was growing up on. We, the one supplier we were getting arugula seed from ran out of arugula seed and we got a one pound container from one supplier and a four pound container from another supplier, planted in identical conditions the same day. I mean every all management aspects were identical. The one arugula, there were noticeable differences in the seed container and the seed bags. One of the suppliers had much larger seed size, and I think it was only about when I say much larger, the seed there was only about a third the seed count per pound, so roughly three times larger. That produced arugula that was four times larger in size than from the other seed supplier. It was the same variety, the same genetics, but too, hopefully the better one was the one you had four pounds of and not one pound.

31:23 Well, luckily for us that was the case.

31:30 So I don't want to necessarily throw a segment of agriculture under the bus here, but I think from a standpoint of comparison, let's talk just a little bit about some of the issues that commercial, you know, the current commercial seed production paradigms have. You know, what are the challenges they face in producing healthy seed? And I'm talking mostly about, you know, your corn and soybeans, the major crop seed types that we have here. I know that you and Dr. White talked about this, so just talk a little bit about the concerns and the issues in that system.

32:13 You're really about to put me on the soap box here. I still remember being at a conference a decade ago eating lunch at a large circular table with eight people around the table, and I'm eating lunch just listening into conversations and off to the side I hear this conversation where a farmer says, yeah, well, this one field doesn't yield particularly well, I can't really produce high corn yields out of that field, so I'm just going to put it into seed corn. And I whipped my head to the side. It's like, what did you just say? But I've been astounded to learn that that's a prevailing perspective, that's a common perspective particularly in the seed corn production world. I can't speak to that for a lot of other crops, but I know it's true for seed corn, at least for the several dozen growers that I've spoken with.

33:09 And that's such a fundamental paradigm misalignment. So as a result of that overhearing that conversation, I started asking questions about how seed corn is produced and what I found was just appalling.

33:26 So the ideal that we should be striving for is a seed that is as large in size as possible from a seedling vigor and microbiome perspective. This is one case where, as I understand it, bigger is practically always better because bigger means more sugar stored in the seed, it means more protein, more energy. You just have a much higher likelihood of success from larger, healthier seed. So bigger is better, and that translates to test weight, protein content, sugar content, overall seed size weight, all of those parameters. But and of course, to achieve that, you want a plant that is photosynthesizing, producing the largest number of sugars for the longest time period possible. In the case of corn, you want to delay the black layer formation period as late as possible so that you can have the maximum amount of minerals and sugars flowing into that seed. But we throw all of that out the window when we are growing corn today.

34:42 With modern detling equipment we are cutting off usually the top third of the plant right as we're getting into the blossoming pollination period. And so that greatly moves sugars into the grain. Then we don't allow the grain to fully completely mature. As I understand it, as it's been communicated to me in many cases it doesn't even fully reach the black layer stage. It's still physiologically immature and then we're desiccating the plant.

35:20 There are different compounds that have been used historically. It's my understanding that right now a very common application is to use sodium chloride or sodium hypochlorite as a desiccant. And so we are desiccating the plant and drying it down at a stage when the seed is still physiologically immature, with one of the stated objectives being a smaller seed size so that we can get more acres per planter box of seed.

35:52 It's interesting that seed is now being sold by seed size rather than by the pound. But anyway, separate conversation. When you look at that scenario, it's like we are deliberately creating these desicants. They're not all equal, but several of the ones that are being widely used today as I understand it are also very effective biocides. They're microbial biocides and they will have potent antibacterial antifungal effects where if they come in contact with the seed or are transferred through the husk into the kernel, they will have the effect of greatly reducing the microbiome on the seed surface.

36:36 We have inadvertently designed a seed production system to produce low test weight seed that is light, that does not contain a lot of energy in terms of carbohydrate and mineral energy, and that has a compromised microbiome. It's like if you set out to engineer a system to produce the worst quality of seed possible, you couldn't easily come up with something better than what we currently have. Yeah, and that's why so many seed treatments are needed on those because it's kind of a catch-22 to the ground.

37:19 Just a little bit of a preview: I am going to in this webinar series that we're doing, the last session number six is going to be a seed corn breeder who I have recently met. They're growing all non-GMO seed corn and they're doing their selection and they're growing in as much of a regenerative environment as possible—no till, cover crops. So they're trying to do a better paradigm. I'm going to have him on to share some of this, that there are options out there when it comes to some of that.

37:57 So let's compare and contrast that to now. You know, we can't grow hybrid seed corn on our own farms and save that seed and replant it, but some of these other things—most cover crops—you certainly have to be cognizant of PVP protections and things like that. But what are some of the advantages? And you know, we sell seed, so I'm not advocating for everybody to grow seed, but I think it makes sense to know—if you have the ability to grow some of your own seed and then purchase the stuff that you're not able to or don't have the right environment to grow. So what would be some of the things that people should do if they want to try growing some of their own seed, whether it be a soybean that is off protection and off patent, or their own cereal grains that aren't protected or things like that?

38:49 The short answer is go for it. Done well, the upsides are almost certain to be significant. And I have so many experiences in this domain, Keith, that I can speak to or observations of others' experiences. I'd like to tell you a story of Cal West selecting alfalfa seed. When I was first starting out in agronomy consulting, this is now almost two decades ago—actually might be two decades ago—a company that I was working with was Midwestern Bioag and Gary Zimmer from up in Wisconsin. And they were reselling a lot of different alfalfa genetics from Cal West and they started having conversations with Cal West to say, 'Hey, we want to let's select some alfalfa varieties that are optimized and they are selected for our conditions for organic dairy farms where manure is being applied, calcium is being applied, that are being managed in a biologically friendly manner rather than these larger alfalfa operations that are applying potassium chloride fertilizer and have hard compacted barren soils.'

40:05 And they did that work for three years. And when you think about it from a breeding program, three years is a very short amount of time to produce cultivars for the market, but if I recall correctly, in three years they released a couple of varieties and there was one real standout variety that was called Winter King.

46:29 Yeah epigenetics are a real thing and you have to be aware of them and use them to your advantage. Have you seen other situations like that? I've seen dozens Keith and that's such a beautiful example. What I really like about the example that you provided is that the point to it echoes the point that I was making earlier how rapidly it happens. Four to five, four to five generations. We're not talking about an effect that takes decades to achieve. It can happen rapidly. And sometimes in some of like in the arugula instance it can happen in a single generation.

47:05 Yeah, it's a powerful tool. So you know, definitely it does matter how your seed is grown and I, this is a little convicting to us ourselves because we know that we're doing as good as what we have been able to but we have a lot of room to improve there.

47:27 John, before we're going to jump into some question and answer from the audience here, but before we jump into that I want to just talk about a concept that I heard you and Dr White talking about because I find it hugely fascinating and it may stray off the topic of just straight seed a little bit, but you guys talked about Walter Goldstein and some of the work that he's doing up there at The Mandam Institute up in Wisconsin with breeding corn that will have it's nitrogen fixing corn. I mean, let's just call it what it is, you know, that associations with rizia and other endites. Talk just a little bit about you know that interaction between microbes and plants, you know, that as one example but there's many many others, because to me it's just such an exciting part of agriculture today.

48:21 Yeah, goodness, you want me to talk about that in a few minutes? That's an hour conversation in of itself. Well, do a little teaser and then we can direct people to more information as I'm trying to get Walter to write an article for our next resource guide because I think it's such a fascinating topic.

48:38 Well, I can take this conversation in so many different directions but the way that I would summarize it is to say that given the right microbial associations I'm of the persuasion that any plant, including high yielding grain crops and high yielding corn crops, can derive all of their nutrition including nitrogen from the soil and from the atmosphere as long as they are managed to achieve that outcome. And so when we think about Walter's work, Walter has identified these historic corn strains and varieties that contain, they still contain actually, I'll take a slight sidebar for a moment. What Dr White in his research has identified is that a lot of the modern corn genetics have lost some of their historical endophytic bacteria and possibly I would guess also fungi and algae and other organisms that are usually internally within the plant, specifically through the cell culturing process. So if cell culturing is used at any point in the breeding or the propagation work of developing a new variety then that cell culture is essentially a sterile environment and that resulting variety then has to recruit all of these organisms from whatever soil that gets planted into, which is unlikely to reintroduce all the species that were originally there in the parent generation. So that's an important distinction.

50:36 Walter has identified these historical corn varieties that contain organisms that have the ability to fix nitrogen without the presence of legumes, which is something that we've known about conceptually for a long time. There's different microbes and inoculants that do that, but here are some organisms that have a particularly strong symbiotic relationship with corn. And so in an effort to preserve not just to preserve that but to enhance that and to select specifically for that, Walter grows out his and does his varietal selections and his breeding work on soil that is managed in a biodynamic manner but that gets zero nitrogen applications and has had no nitrogen applications. As I recall, it's been a while since I've had a conversation with Walter, but if I recall correctly, there have been no nitrogen and no manure applications on this soil for decades. He is specifically seeking to develop corn varieties and their associated microbiome that can thrive in an environment or that grow a high yielding crop without the presence of any residual nitrogen. And this is actually a very important point because you know in the modern day economic world and human societies we have this little phrase that I hear repeated all the time, all the time: you achieve what you incentivize. And the same is true of microorganisms. You achieve what you incentivize. If you have a soil environment that has a surplus of free nitrogen in the soil profile then that disincentivizes the plant to support the biology to sequester nitrogen and so there is an

52:34 There are so many microbial inoculants on the marketplace today that claim the ability to fix X units of nitrogen or to replace a certain amount of your nitrogen inputs with these microbial inoculant and that is a perfect setup for failure. You cannot expect to put a microbe inoculant into the same type of system that destroyed biology in the first place and expected to be successful. So I think that's one of the key aspects as we think about selecting varieties or enhancing epigenetic expression over multiple generations we should seek to do that in the exact type of system that we want to optimize for.

53:21 Yeah that's a great answer and I was just made aware that actually Walter Gold is in the listening audience here. Hopefully we represented him well and Walter I do want to talk to you about a future followup here. But yeah John I think that's a great point about you know if you put a cover crop into your system and you don't change anything else in your system it's probably going to hurt you because you have to change the management system to accommodate it. It's the same way with the biological amendments you can't just drop that into the middle of a conventional system without changing anything else and expect it to work.

54:06 So let's take a few questions here John from the audience. Shane is asking here, are seeds with a high level of nutrients resistant to insect damage while they're in storage? And if not, how do you store seeds without damaging the microbiome with some sort of seed treatment to prevent insect damage and storage? That is a fascinating question that I haven't gotten to the point of researching yet. I don't know. There would have been a point in time probably as little as two years ago where I would have said probably not because my understanding is that the insect larvae that are going after seed in storage are going after the carbohydrates in particular and that those are still going to be present. But after some of our more recent experience I think there's a possibility that may be the case but I don't know I haven't tried it. The first place that I would experiment would be by ensuring that the seed has generous levels of boron specifically that was applied to the parent generation that got vectored into the seed. From what I've seen I have a sneaking suspicion that having generous levels of boron in the seed will confer insect resistance in storage. It remains to be proven but I would be surprised if that were wrong.

55:34 Well sounds like some good research to move forward on here. We have someone asking and I think you already kind of talked about this. How do we know if a seed that they're getting from a supplier carries the right microbiome? I think the answer to that is the lab that you're going to be launching here in the short term we'll be able to do that testing. Is that correct?

56:00 Yes, yeah we historically haven't been able to know. I mean there are things we can ask about how it's been grown. We can ask about how it's been treated with pesticides, etc. after being harvested but we haven't been able to measure definitively until just recently. Yeah, so that opportunity will be coming soon here. Teron is asking if you grow, say you harvest legume seed. It comes from the offspring of a legume plant grown in a healthy soil environment. Will that seed have the onboard rhizobia with it or should we still inoculate that with additional rhizobia when we plant that seed?

56:45 I don't know the answer to that question about rhizobia specifically. I am under the opinion that it would be vectored on the seed but I would need to verify that to know for sure. I could be mistaken about that. Yeah I would need to double check and respond back later on that. And if anyone would know it might be listed in Dr. White's research. I think it would be a valuable reference to identify that or to respond to that. And my reservation or hesitation is I'm not sure that rhizobia is actually considered an endophytic and populates the entire plant architecture but yeah I don't know right now.

57:30 Yeah and you know really as far as seed treatments go rhizobia is really relatively inexpensive and so it's pretty cheap insurance to put that on you know the proper rhizobia on your legumes every time. It will carry over in the soil but we're not sure about the seed. Yeah well I think the key question there are a few elements here I'll just elaborate on this Keith. Is for some of these organisms that are vectored on the seed coat they may propagate on the seed from one generation to the next but they may not thrive in storage if the seed is stored for several years. That's one possibility to consider. The other thing that we really need to think about is to the point I made earlier. The majority of these microorganisms can only be propagated in the presence of a living root system which means that while it's interesting to think about rhizobia and mycorrhizal fungi and others.

58:28 That we can culture and propagate as seed treatments. We should be thinking about seed vectored organisms from the perspective of what are all the things that we can't propagate in a lab, what are the seed treatments that you cannot buy or that you cannot even grow in a compost pile.

58:51 Here's one from Shank Car. He's asking if they can take the seeds that they purchase, can they put them under a microscope, can they see any of that microbiome under a microscope, or is it all dormant until you know that seed is actually starting to germinate. That's a question that's beyond my pay grade. If you read Dr. White's literature and his articles by him and his colleagues, that will tell you the microscopy work that they are doing and whether that is possible. He certainly would be a valuable resource in that as well. I suspect it would be much easier in a germinating seedling than it would be in the seed itself.

59:43 I would think that would be pretty hard to see in just a static seed like that. I have a question here from Adam. He is talking about in a high functioning soil with good bacteria to fungi ratio, Middle Tennessee type climate. He says do you feel if you just applied the proper Johnson Sue extract from local fauna, you know, as a furrow application and furrow treatment and a seed treatment, do you think that would be sufficient to really boost the biology in that seed or would you need additional extracts or inoculant on that as well.

1:00:21 The answer, building on what I said earlier, is Johnson Sue and Burmy compost and other compost teas and compost extracts can be valuable tools. I'm not discouraging them, but I am saying that they are not a replacement for seed vectored organisms as I understand it. So they're valuable tools and I'm in favor of using them, but as I understand it, we shouldn't think of them as being appropriate replacements for having the microbiome on the seed. It's like we have these three very distinct categories. You have one category which is your natural compost tea, compost extracts, the things that you can produce on your own farm, or in some cases you can also purchase. And then you have your purchased laboratory cultured microbial inoculant. And then you have seed. In this category would be Ryobi as an example. And then you have your seed vectored microorganisms. And the last, I'll add a fourth category of which there is minimal product available today, and these are microbial inoculants that are cultured in the presence of a living root system.

1:01:44 And those categories don't really overlap with each other from an agronomic perspective as I understand it. So if you have lab cultured Ryobi for the case of a legume inoculant, you cannot replace that with a compost tea extract and vice versa. They are not analogs of each other. They're very different. They serve very different purposes. And so you have kind of these four distinct categories of which arguably there's some limited overlap, but I think of them from an agronomic management perspective as being four very distinct groups.

1:02:21 And maybe one way to think about it is you know the compost extracts, Johnson Sue, and the other things do those things to make your soil and your system healthier, and then that healthy system will help confer that microbiome to the seed eventually. It may take a couple years or generations to do that. I know we're going over time here, but great conversation, so I'm going to just go do a couple more questions if that's okay with you, John.

1:02:50 Absolutely. Okay, so Christy is asking the question here. She says I am the manager, farm manager at Seed Savers Exchange, and I was recently approached by Clean Crop Tech, a company that has produced an electrical cold fusion device that could be used to clean seeds, especially those that may carry certain diseases. She's asking, wouldn't this type of treatment further reduce the microbiome of the seed.

1:03:17 Well, I don't know, but I would guess if it can clean off pathogens, the question is what else can it clean off, and the good news is five years ago we didn't have the technology to be able to answer that question inexpensively, and today we can. And you know, Christy, I would really recommend that you listen to episode 99 of John's podcast with Dr. White because Dr. White talks specifically about some experiments that he's done where they use Clorox and they remove all the microbes off of a seed, and then they plant it, and those plants rarely survive very long because those microbial partners are so important in the growth and the health of that seed. But then they've added things, they added microbes back after they've done that, and they can still get some good results. So it could be, you know, if there's a disease issue and you have to do that, there could be some ways to help recover from that prior to planting, but listen to that podcast because Dr. White.

1:04:20 Goes into a really good explanation of why that microbial population is so important. And also to build on that, Keith, in I don't have an exact timeline, but in the next, let's say in the next three to four weeks, I expect to be releasing a podcast episode with Dr. Laura Kavanaugh describing the capabilities of the technology that she is bringing forward and the ability to measure the genomics analysis, a DNA analysis of any on any location of a plant or in the soil. And the key phrase is relatively inexpensively. I mean, the current microbiome analysis that are available all cost multiple hundreds of dollars each. And if we can get that price down to, yeah, 25 or 30%, all of a sudden it becomes affordable and applicable to use on scale.

1:05:18 Yeah, that that would be great. I definitely look forward to that. So folks, if you only listen to one podcast, I'd recommend the regenerative agriculture podcast because John goes into great depth with people like Dr. White and Dr. Kavanaugh on that. So one last question here, John. This comes from Mike. He says, what's your opinion on growth regulators in seed production? Says I've been told in grower meetings that it will reduce bushel weight but gain an overall yield, which to me seems like it means you're growing more low quality seed. So I'm guessing he's talking about, you know, Palisade or something like that that keeps the nodes of a plant shorter.

1:06:01 I don't have a qualified opinion. I don't know. I would guess the moment you start speaking about increasing yields but having a lower test weight, that to me means you have less carbohydrate density and less mineral density in the seed, which I would consider not a positive thing. But I haven't actually tried it and tested it. We know that some of these phyto hormones, when they're applied late in the crop's development stages, also influence and affect the following seed's performance. Remember these epigenetic expressions. And I'm really cautious, I should say rather than concerned. I'm really cautious about phyto hormones.

1:07:03 Can you hear me now? Yeah, we can hear you now. Yeah, all right, no idea. I'm on a Starlink connection. We must have switched satellites. So I'm not sure where you lost me. Let me see what was the question about plant growth regulators and how that might affect seed quality. I would be concerned about anytime you start speaking about producing seed or producing a crop that has higher number of bushels but lower test weight. I never consider lower test weight in a seed to be a positive attribute. I want the largest, heaviest seed that I can possibly get.

1:07:44 And I'm also cautious about phyto hormone applications late in the plant's development cycle because I'm reasonably confident that they generally tend to have effects on epigenetic effects on the following generations, two, three, four generations down the line, that we may not be aware of or we're not thinking about and not looking for. So I'm generally cautious about those types of applications on a seed crop.

1:08:16 Well, yeah, and I would think anything that you do that kind of interrupts the natural growth and progression of a plant, you know, probably is going to have an effect on that seed of some kind. But yeah, great questions, great discussion. John, again, we're so grateful for your time. We know we took more than our hour here that we had asked for, and so we're very grateful to you for that. Folks, we'll be putting this recording out on our YouTube channel in a few days, so if you want to watch it again or have other people that you would like to watch it, be checking our YouTube channel for that. Again, don't forget to subscribe to John's regenerative agriculture podcast. You can go to advancing ecoagriculture to look at some of the products. And didn't really have time to talk about this, but I know, John, you guys just launched the new seed treatment product, so I'd encourage people to check that out as well.

1:09:12 But folks, we are going to be doing five more webinars in this series. We'll be talking with growers specifically. We'll be asking them how they're growing their seed, the regenerative practices that they're using. So we hope you can join us. Those will be on Wednesdays, starting next week, Wednesdays at noon. And so we hope that you can join us for that. So John, any closing words or words of encouragement for folks?

1:09:37 Yeah, thank you for inviting me on, Keith. And there's a number of questions that we didn't have time to get to. Feel free to reach out to me directly on social media or by email. I'd be happy to respond to those. And as you heard me say a number of times in the Q&A, this is a very much a new frontier, if you will, a pioneering space. There are a lot of questions that we don't know the answers to. But what we generally know is that figuring out the answers to these questions seems to hold a lot of potential and a lot of promise in terms of upside yield potential and epigenetic performance. So it's a very exciting space to be in. And thank you for the honor and the opportunity to be here, Keith. And I look forward to more conversations.

1:10:21 Okay, sounds great, John. Appreciate that. Thank you everybody for joining us. We hope that you have a great week and hope to see as many of you back here next week as possible. Have a great day.