What Weeds Are Really Telling You About Your Soil

0:00 I love this photo from Aleandro Cro. He's like he had some, you guys would know him from down in Mexico in the Chihuahua desert, and he had a new group of cattle that came in and what was interesting is they'd figured out how to eat prickly pear and it wasn't actually take that long for them to train the rest of the herd. So now he has a herd that knows how to eat prickly pear. So what he had traditionally thought of as a weed is suddenly a resource. You know there's incredible nutrient value, water things in prickly pear. So sometimes what we think of a weed for some operations may in fact not be a weed. So what is a weed? How would you define it?

0:50 Someone that something you don't want. All right, so totally subjective right. So for a cattle producer it's going to be very different than from a goat or from cropping operation or horticulture whatever it's talking about. So how we define it I think from a regenerative context is really thinking about what is this indicating what's it trying to tell me?

1:16 So I don't know if you've ever had this experience where perhaps there's been thistles blowing over from maybe your organic neighbors. You're like, 'Derm, you throw your seed at my place.' And but a seed, just because it lands in a place doesn't mean that it's going to germinate, right? They did some sampling in New Zealand and they looked at a yard, a square yard of soil, and what was in that and what they found in that square yard of soil. Apart from anything, was about two and a half pounds of clover seed. And there was no clover growing in that particular soil. Right? That seed bank can be massive, and they're finding new research here in the US of ancient plants that actually will germinate after hundreds of years. Okay. So it's all about the signal that something receives.

2:00 So what's our current modern approach to weeds? What are we doing? What do we think's going to solve the problem? Kill it. Who am I going to kill today when you wake up in the morning. So this is the number of unique resistant cases to herbicide and we're seeing this escalating. This is exponential. So what's the solution to this? Spray more. Oh no, no, no, no. You should genetically engineer something to resist dicamba and 24D. That's the solution. Right. So we're just getting heavier and heavier with the hammer. We're not solving it with this kind of approach. So my invitation is how do we alter that perspective on weeds and what else is it that weeds have to tell us, right?

2:54 So in my mind there's five interrelated reasons for why you might see a weed. All right? One, they might be quickly growing to protect soil, right? So nature doesn't want to see bare soil at any point. So what kind of species do you have that clamber to cover soil? Bindweed clambering. So bindweed's a good example because it's telling you you're losing soil carbon, right? It signal that it receives is when carbon starts to be lost from that environment, it's going to cover that ground. What else have you got like that? Purslane. Exactly. Same thing, right? Cover that ground. It might be a weed that we see in low organic matter. That prickly pear is probably an example. Can you think of some others? Ones you're going to see maybe on sandy soils on the organic matter soils. So there are particular plants that will receive that germination. It might be to balance a mineral. We call these the dynamic accumulators. Plants that will bring minerals from deep down through the profile and as they die down or they actually some like napweed will release minerals out their roots. So they're actually working to balance soil.

4:10 First time I came across this dynamic accumulators, we had a plant called ragwart which is very similar I guess to kind of your ragweed. You know it'll grow really tall. It's yellow. People would say where do you live? I'm like the yellow farm ups road. And everybody knew where we lived and if the cows lay down you couldn't see them. You couldn't find them. So someone said to me, 'Ragwart is a dynamic accumulator for calcium phosphorus copper, and low organic matter. So I put vermiccast on because I have to. I put on calcium in the form of lime. I put on some guano. And I put in a tiny bit of copper. And within 18 months, that weed was gone. And you can still go back to that property 26 years later and that the weed is still gone. It is in the gullies and it's at the neighbor's place. And I'm like that was really easy. I can do this really fast. And then I moved to the next property which had the concretion layer and it took probably about four or five years to achieve the same effect.

5:21 But if I could figure out what it is that this plant's trying to tell me, and there's some people in the who knows who knew Betsy Ross, who's come across her at Sustainable Soil Solutions, who's down in Texas. Between her and I, we've been working on stuff simultaneously across the world looking at building charts about what weeds are trying to tell you. So there's a pretty good book by Jay Mccayan called When Weeds Talk. Have you got it? And I find it's pretty spot on. Jay Mccayan, he did develop it using radionics. I do find some of the numbers don't kind of line up with what we see. And one thing he forgets that I think is really important is nitrates. So he doesn't talk about nitrates, but it's basically a categorization based on minerals of what these plants could be indicating. So if you can figure out the minerals, then that's got a lot to tell you about. So you could go, all right, it's trying to address copper. Maybe I just wait for it to grow and balance my copper.

6:29 Well, that might take you a hundred years, right? So for some of us that aren't that patient, and you might seal this, right? You see the healing crises that you see with some plants, like that mineral imbalance could be high potassium. And it's probably the main thing I see in people when they first start their transition. If your soils are compacted and you've got plates, then inside these plates could be a bunch of minerals, right? And then you come along and you flocculate which means to aggregate and you know build that structure is we release minerals right in that process. So if your soil's been very compacted and then it starts to open up what are some of those minerals that might be flushed calcium. Potassium. All right? Because potassium's in these plates. What happens when you get a flush of potassium? Ever seen it? Soils start to flocculate, open up. What starts to grow? What might you see?

7:37 Broadleaf weeds, right? So broadleaf weeds are your potassium indicators. Some of those could be thistles. That might be dock. It might be it could be Palmer amaranth, right? I suspect there's something else going on with that one. Right? But many of your broadleaf weeds are responses to potassium. We call this a healing crisis. Your soil is opening up. It's okay. It's the ugly hair stage. Girls, you're with me, right? Just let it grow. You'll go through it. Is that first and second year we see people with major broadleaf weeds in grazing operations. We can see this become a really big

8:15 Problem and people panic. Don't panic. It's just a healing crisis. It'll settle down. The other thing that can happen in these plates is we've seen operations that have lost crops because there's concentrated chemical residue in here that gets opened up and released. This is why you need a carbon buffer in your transition. Otherwise, you can risk a release of tied up chemicals. Has anyone seen that?

8:43 Okay, good. You guys are fine. It's fine.

8:48 All right, then. Microbial imbalances. Very very high fungal soils can create certain types of weeds. What kind of weeds might grow in a high fungal soil? Blackberry brambles.

9:01 I got schooled in the UK. It's not called mullen. Mulain, mulain. I was like, is that like faten? So, Malain, any of those big fluffy kind of where you see them in the forests or you see them in dry banks like gravel banks on the side of the river with big those big broad leaves, they're often fungal indicators, right? What's going on in that environment that's triggered that response for that plant to germinate?

9:31 Okay, so certain ones that we see bacterial, most of the weeds that we see in your environments are bacterial indicators, right? So high bacterial dominance certain types of plants. All right. And as a safety valve for toxins.

9:50 So my first trip into California was working in the San Andreas fault and all along that fault line is milk thistle, variegated thistle. And then we'd had these earthquakes in New Zealand and you know you sit on a plane and you're like please dear Lord don't talk to me. I don't know if you have that experience. It's happening in my head all the time. And I talked to the person next to me, which I never ever do. Well, they were a nuclear scientist. Always get my mom teases me. Apparently, I say it the same way as George Bush. Okay. So, it's okay. What? However he says it. All right. And we were talking about these earthquakes in New Zealand, right? Massive earthquakes had failed one of our biggest cities. But all along these fault lines, what we saw was milk thistle.

10:43 And she said, 'Well, what's happening is deeper down when that core is moving and the crust is moving, it grinds and it releases radon gas. There's uranium down there and radon gas is released and these plants are mopping up toxins.' So, I was on an operation and at the bottom of a gully, all they had was milk thistle. And I'm like, 'Hm, so what's under the ground?' And he's like, 'Well, it's a dump.' And yeah, we threw some batteries in there. I'm like, okay, so those milk thistle, just the same as in your human body in terms of liver detox, those plants are doing the same thing. They're detoxifying something. So you might see things growing where you've had chemicals spilled or maybe it's around the sheds where there's been a bit of chemical is there are certain plants that are there to detoxify, right? They're trying to repair environment.

11:33 So, what you've got on your tables, and some of you have done this before, so just coach rather than being the expert, just coach your table and supporting them to work through this. What we're looking at is a disturbance timeline. So, I want you to order your plants that are in the little pieces of what are envelopes. Order them from high disturbance to low disturbance. So, I want you to imagine what's the most highly disturbed environment. Wait, wait, wait. What would what would be what would take a soil back to zero? Big volcano, a very very hot fire, massive flinging erosion, right? Would we take off that top soil? All right, that would be very very very high disturbance. What kind of things are going to start growing in a high

12:18 Mosses and lichens are things that can grow on rocks. It feels like thistles are everywhere, but what's going to grow on a rock versus in a very low disturbed environment? Let's say there's been no disturbance, no fire, what kind of things might grow? Trees. So if we're on the top of Mount Everest, why are there not trees up there? Altitude is a disturbance. And if you look at where the grasslands of America are, rainfall is a disturbance or lack of rainfall. It's disturbing for everybody.

12:56 You've got your envelopes. You're going to do this in groups. Let's see if you can rate which ones high disturbance to low. There are some that mess with this transition and that would be your legumes. We don't include legumes in this. Legumes are just a bacteria. This is just our biological indicator. I would put legumes more in our mineral imbalances. The thing that often throws people out is the brambles, so thinking about brier or blackberry.

13:32 Those of you that are ranching know if your pasture sizes get too large and you don't get impact you start to see those woody type species. You might have buck brush, blackberry, snowberries. You can actually have a mosaic. Those of you that are grazing can find a mosaic of overgrazed areas. Let's say animals are walking to a water area and then they zigzag and they miss blackberry or whatever. You'll start to see that area become more fungal and then the area that they're grazing become overgrazed and more bacterial with those low successional grasses.

14:18 Was there anything else in that that you were wondering about? Some of you have pointed out that your climax tree can be different depending on your environment and on your soil mineral type. So some places it might be a climax that's a conifer and some it might be deciduous. There are a couple of these rules, but what we're thinking about is what's happening with biology. So we become more and more fungal dominant. Where is it that we're building soil the most? Where's the most soil building happening? In the grasses. Under your perennial grasses is where we get the most.

15:05 This is where some of you that have east or west coast forested ecosystems and then we take those trees out, you'll find those soils are really shallow. They wash away to subsoil pretty quick depending what those environments have been. The maximum soil building happens under perennials.

15:30 Now some of you are growing weeds like barley and rye grass. Barley, wheats, oats are weeds. They are weeds that humans have domesticated. They're annuals. Humans are like, come with me, buddy, I'll look after you and you can make more and more seeds. So most of our domesticated plants are actually on that annual, slightly weedy situation. And that's fine. We're not judging. But when we're thinking about soil building, it's in the rest, right? It's in that perennial system. And those perennial plants produce more fats. They are feeding more fungi than these annual systems. Bacteria eat simple sugars. So green grass, those of you that have made compost, right? And you have a big pile of grass clippings and you put your hand inside it, what does it feel like?

16:48 Why is it hot? Bacteria doing what? Getting it on. Right. And so that makes heat. Not in Nebraska, that's fine. But in other places, getting it on makes quite a lot of heat. So they're metabolizing. They're making heat. The bacteria feeding on your green grass, right?

17:12 So we talked about molasses before. They're going to feed on what other things would you put in your compost or think about that are simple sugars? But yeah, like some veggies. What else? Meat. Yeah. Roadkill. Sure. Yeah. So you should eat the meat, but if you don't, yes, bacteria are going to love it. What else are they going to eat? Green grass, green leaves, manure of leaves. They will also eat urea. Those of you that have ever put urea onto your compost, right? People do urea and they also eat most of your fungicides and pesticides. Delicious herbicides.

18:05 My favorite, right, is that those herbicides, the pesticides are eaten by many bacteria, right? It's food source. So it was interesting looking at the New Zealand situation is about 90% of our dairy farm soils are significantly compacted, very bacterial dominated, and when we look at what New Zealand dairy farm systems are feeding, it's all green grass or rye and clover manure or urine, urea fungicides herbicides pesticides. That's all that that ecosystem is being fed all the time is just bacterial, just bacteria, just bacteria. And I'm going to keep it vegetative, right? So there's never that situation where you might have corn stalks. There's not straw. They might feed a little bit of hay, but not really in a dairy situation, right? Not out on the fields.

19:01 So when we want to feed our fungi, these guys like the complex food, complex carbons, right? So what might be an example of a complex carbon? Yeah. Cellulose, lignin, wood chips. What else? Oils. A humic biochar. Fish hydrolysate. Fish hydrolysates rather than fish emulsion. Right. So a fish emulsion will feed bacteria. Anything else you're putting on your soil system. Compost should feed both. Right. Depending on your compost, what else are you putting on? Nothing. Fine. Rest.

20:06 Right. So fungi like it kind of quiet. A little like, 'Geez, Bob, can we just have a holiday?' All right, that's going to feed your fungi. As opposed to activity, activity, activity bang bang bang right? Tillage. Bacteria love it. That's extra delicious. Okay, so most of what we're doing in our farming systems is we're pushing back here for bacterial dominance. Okay, pretty much most of these actions push it this way. Hot fires, right? Whereas a cool burn, if it's very cool, can actually stimulate fungi, right? It's providing a little bit of ash depending what we're doing. Any other things you want to add? Leaves? Yeah. So green leaves for bacteria, brown leaves, fungi. So like your fungal, if you ever made like a leaf mold, lovely brown leaves, delicious. You're going to feed fungi in that process. But basically what we're looking at is the amount of disturbance and the types of foods is going to alter what kind of plants do we see thriving. And the way that you can tell is by getting your refractometer and measuring the bricks. And what we'll find is, let's say you have thistles, not any of you guys, but up the neighbors got thistles. Is if we measure.

21:34 That thistle might be running at bricks of 20 degrees. And let's say you're trying to grow corn and that corn is running at eight. You're farming for weeds. Does that make sense? So whoever's got the highest bricks is winning the game of life. They're sending out their sugars. They're changing their microbial community to suit themselves. So you always always want your bricks to be higher in the crop that you want. So if you're in bitter culture and orcharding, test those leaves. They should be higher than the grass ward. And I'd say 95% of places I go to, it's the other way around. The things you don't want to grow are thriving. You're like, am I farming for weeds? Yes, that is the answer.

22:25 Yeah. So use your refractometer just to take a look, right? It's a pretty simple one. And if the bricks is lower, then it means that actually you could leave that thistle alone. You can leave that plant alone. It's going to do itself out of a job because this guy's winning. You're like, I could never do that. It's okay. Cool.

22:50 So this is measured in action with the soil food web in New Zealand. So they came into these pastures. The pastures were one to one. So that's biomass. A handful of fungi to a handful of bacteria. They then came in and they cultivated it and planted kale, right? So kale, this is the environment that kale likes. So it's like 75 back here. So this is one to one to four. It's interesting the more fungal dominant we're getting perennial grass systems we're actually seeing very nutrient-dense quality grasses. So I'm pushing a little bit more fungal than I used to. But back here at 75, perfect for thistles, perfect for kale, right? Kale's going to do really well at that rate. Then they came in, they cultivated it again, sliced and diced it, reduced it to 0.5. And in this case, we're now down to that's cat's ear, but there's probably other plants that you have that really like that highly bacterial situation. Now when you get super bacterial like that, you need more herbicide.

24:03 So my hypothesis is when herbicides were first introduced, we actually had more fungi in the system. Do you support that? Right. And then what we've done is we've reduced that diversity. We've reduced that fungal community and now we need more and more herbicides to the point that I've been on some operations where they're doing well, you've seen it, six herbicides a year and they still can't control their weeds. When we take a look, they'll be bacterial dominated to the point it might be like 0.1 bacteria or fungi to bacteria, right? It now gets really hard to control weeds, right? The further we push that back. Any questions about that? Comments thoughts feelings?

25:07 Yeah. So the question was if I put brassicas in with grasses and the brassicas are really popping and the grasses are not thriving then yes you're probably much more bacterial dominated right because things will still germinate that you planted they just might not thrive. They might not germinate at all. Yeah. Because you now have a bunch of diversity in this system and different plants are signaling to different things, right. And we're starting to get health and vigor in the system. But what we find in most farming systems is they're just back here. And it means, yeah, you can probably grow a cover crop. Some of these cover crop species like oats, maize, sorghum, sudan, milo are feeding fungi. All your legumes are feeding fungi, right? So we put a legume into this mix to help stimulate and lift our fungal numbers is we're going to see your cover crop do.

26:04 Better than just two species, right? So we see more research about the importance of diversity. They're feeding different biology and moving that successional pathway.

26:26 So monoculture fungi monocultures will still be signaling to fungi. It's just now we have a nutrient imbalance that creates other problems, right? So anyone that's done alfalfa for a while, you know how tight those soils get, right? That's where crop rotation or training whoever you're selling alfalfa to, selling alfalfa to eat diversity.

26:53 One quick clarification there on your bacterial to fungal ratios, like your bacterial numbers first to the fungal because sometimes you're going back and forth and I know other people do the same thing. You're not alone. Don't worry. I'm not criticizing. I'm just trying to clarify.

27:10 Of course then on the spectrum if you're going towards the right on the low it's a higher fungal, right? So the number on the right is fungal. Yeah, or you fungal. Yeah. Yeah. So when I bacteria to fungi or fungi to bacteria that's Yeah, I did. You're right. So I did bacteria to fungi here. That's bacteria to fungi. The 0.1 ratio is it's fungal to bacteria. Yeah. No kale is 75. So slightly bacterial. Thank you.

27:45 We're thinking about handfuls, not numbers. Right. So thanks for all the plugs, by the way, Lauren. That was fantastic. I'll pay you later. But yeah, just thinking about the diversity of those species, but it's the biomass, like the volume of fungi, right? And this is just based on the soil food web approach, the and the if you're doing metabolomics or the DNA, the ratios going to be are your ratios different? Yeah, the ratio is going to be really different because you're picking up stuff that someone with a microscope's never going to see. So these ratios just apply to the soil food web. You guys will have a different ratio that you'll teach people about. Is it like 2.75? Do you have a ratio? Okay. Okay. Yeah. Let's geek out.

28:40 So this is also what happens if we're leaving environments undisturbed is we start to see that successional pathway right so that might be brush. And so all that we're talking about here is biological ratios so there's ways we can interrupt that. Used to talk a bit more about fire and then I had a really interesting experience in Australia which is we're not in these natural environments anymore right these situations are so dry, we've got to earn the right to be able to use fire again. We need to bring moisture back in order to be able to use fire. So I think most of us, we've lost that access to that tool because your landscapes are so low in organic matter and so low on water holding capacity. These fires are hot. So maybe not fire, but let's say something like this, which is bale grazing on top of sagebrush. So just rolling these out on top of this material and then allowing animals to trample it. But if you're in an arable situation, you're fine. You're out there disturbing anyway. So some of the species that are showing up at your place might be non-mycorrhizal. So this means they don't have this fungal relationship. So if you're seeing a lot of these, so pigweed, lambs quarters, so there's your amaranthus family. Anything in the brassica family, Chenopodiaceae family, spinach, they don't have a mycorrhizal relationship. You don't really have you don't have kosher down here. Oh, lucky. All right. So kosher is non-mycorrhizal. Lupens are the only one I know of in the

34:54 Anything that's trying to open up a soil? What mineral is it trying to help you with, do you think? Calcium. Functional calcium. Really good. So many of our weed species are actually indicating low available calcium. But there's two parts to that. It's because fungi make calcium available, right? So fungi make calcium available to the plant. So many of these indicators are more bacterial and low calcium.

35:23 Right? So many of our primitive grasses, so invasive grasses, creeping grasses, low palatable grasses often indicate low calcium compaction. It could be your management. I just threw this slide in here. Someone asked me about them and then it was quite funny because the minute I put the slide in I actually got a text message from these guys seeing if we could do a workshop in Gimpy in Australia which would be quite fun. So Ian and Dihagy Western Australia sheep and cropping. You guys have heard of them before. Very good. They just won Western Australian of the year award which is so fantastic for regenerative agriculture. It's really showing people that actually this is the way to farm. They practice what they call natural intelligence farming. They say 8 inch average rainfall, but most years they say they're not getting that average.

36:14 So they run sheep through some of their pastures. They are now up to 100,000 acres of cropping. It's so crazy. So they don't run sheep on all of it as you can imagine. They put down half a gallon of the worm extract. They put a compost extract as a folia. They biop-prime with the seed with their vermiccast, right? So they took on a piece of land that had been receiving multiple herbicides during the growing season. And in fact, when they brought the property, they found herbicides that had been banned since the 1980s in the barn. Like this guy was just using anything he could. The weed pressure was massive. And as you can imagine, it's Australia, so all the weeds want to kill you. So there's like the cow trops, like things that are just big spikes, poisonous plants, vines that just tangle up all your equipment, like everything you can imagine that's going to make your day go horrible.

37:13 So in the first year, they just do this program and what they noticed in the first year is they grew button grass, kerosene grass. Does that sound like a good idea? In Australia, they have windmill grasses, which I got told actually the Australians call them crack grass because they climb up the back of your trousers and out your thing. And it's true. They do the most phenomenal plants. So, in the first year, they see a lot of these early successional plants and they just let it go. They leave it. They do, like I said, a little bit of low rate glyphosate, but that's it. Then in year what came in and can we dim the lights because I think this is really cool to see and I was there this year.

38:06 So they grow during winter and in summer that's when things are not growing right, that's their off season. Is they had a little bit of moisture and what grew down every single row was a native seratia species that had not been seen in the area for 60 years and it was across thousands of acres. It's a native C4. It's very palatable. They could graze their sheep on it. They've altered the germination signal towards a beneficial C4 that the seeds just like no one planted that, that's just come up in those rows. So they've been dripping that concentrated vermicass went down the rows and then probably six months later you're seeing these plants germinate. Thank you. Put the lights back on. So, one of the things that they did is they took some soil from in the rows. They took some soil from in these rows.

39:05 And then they took soil that was probably like 40 feet away. So it's in the same pasture, but it hadn't received the treatment. And they sent that soil in because the previous owner had been dealing with herbicide rye, herbicide resistant rye and radish. They sent it away to the lab to do a germination test. And this is what they found is so what you're looking at on the graph is this is percent germination from zero to 100 and then chemical rate. So prospect is the name of the farm. So what they found was the seed that's in the soil is now being killed at half a rate glyphosate to pretty much half a rate of trifureline versus the seed that was 40 feet away that hadn't been treated at all, right? Which is still herbicide resistant at, you know, five times the rate. What's going on?

40:06 Something could be breaking down the herbicide. They're spraying the herbicide on it and it's killing it. So that's killing the weed. So they're growing here. They were growing rye. So they germinated the rye that was in the soil, herbicide resistant rye. But where it had had vermiccast, it's getting killed at half that rate. What's going on?

40:29 Yeah. So the rye is not happy. So it could be some kind of biological relationship that's made that seed coating maybe softer. How do herbicides work? Tell me what does glyphosate work on?

40:49 Yeah. So the glyphosate works on your shikimate pathway. What causes herbicide resistance is an overexpression of the gene on the shikimate pathway. That was a big sentence, right? So what happens is the gene that is on this pathway that the herbicide works on instead of it working on at this level that gene is overexpressing multiple times so that that herbicide can no longer work on that pathway. Does that make sense? So you get an overexpression of a gene that systems rolling. You can spray till your cows come home and you're not going to kill that weed. My hypothesis is that we've switched off the gene expression that's making herbicide resistance.

41:39 So we presented Diane and I at an event at the GDC, so the big grain organization in Australia and we showed them this data and Diane and said you're welcome to visit the property anytime you want because so there was it was a farmer event so I think there were at least five farmers in the room and 180 scientists said come and have a look come and see what we're doing. So, of course, they were flopped and swarmed by all these researchers. Not a single one, not a single one has ever asked them what they did. Not a single one of those GRDC or researchers has come to the property to find out what's happening here because these guys are like, 'We've worked this out. We don't know why it's working. We'd want to partner with you so we can figure this out.' And the GRDC represents farmers. And it makes me so freaking mad is they had no interest whatsoever in helping farmers deal with what we see as one of the biggest situations that's happening globally. I know I don't know about here, but even just driving through Idaho, there is more herbicide resistant plants growing than crops, right? We're in trouble and it's so simple. How do we balance microbiology? How do we switch these genes off? How do we get the system healthy again? Because the only other option is genetic engineering, dicamba, and something that makes your kids glow in the dark. Oh, come on. We need glow-in-the-dark children. Yeah, we can find them. No.

43:14 You have glow-in-the-dark children? No. All right. So cool. So there's reasons for why we see herbicide resistance. There's a reason why weeds are growing. So we have some

43:28 Plants that are our excess. What did you want me to stop? What time did we want to stop?

43:39 Okay, so we have plants that will be attracted to weeds. Some of these weeds are of excess. What I like about marshmallow, if I don't know if you've noticed this, it loves glyphosate. Why does it love glyphosate? Because it can release manganese, right? So it's a manganese dynamic accumulator of manganeses. So we can actually release has microbiology that can release bound manganeses, which is one of the things we see glyphosate doing.

44:13 So do we have an imbalance in nitrogen excess or deficiency? Generally, if we've got these weeds of imbalances, we're looking at things like low predators, low protozoran system, low nematodes. So there's a bunch of things we can do. Look at what's happening with soil minerals, feed our fungi, your carbon inputs. We mentioned a couple of them before that we could be using. If you're grazing, using adaptive grazing management.

44:44 Play with milk. We've had amazing results with milk. What's in milk? Calcium, phosphorous, sugars, enzymes. Yeah. And the minute you put any type of milk out, you're going to breed up lactobacillus, right? They're in the atmosphere. They respond to that. We see responses with it. We've had some surprisingly good results with milk with weeds of excesses. So any of our nitrate weeds, the ones I talked about before, nightshades, nettles, try a little bit of milk.

45:20 Dry milk. Yeah, so milk powder doesn't have to be organic. A2. I had a farmer once, chocolate milk powder works really well, but then he started feeding his carbs with it. I'm like, dude, don't do that. It's not cool. Yeah, so milk powder, but try it. Just play. So we found about four gallons an acre was a sweet spot and we got some phenomenal results with that with nitrate weeds, right?

45:49 So some of these are our nitrate weeds. So kosher, napweed I think of more as like releasing high potassium, trace element imbalances, family, mint family. I haven't done the testing. Yeah, be interesting. Broadleaf perhaps. Potassium. Marshmallow is in our nitrate weed list. Foxtail, barley, kosher.

46:26 So basically end up with the so you'll see this, right? You've had bare soil and then you get a flash of rain and these things come up, right? So what's happened is the bacteria being basically build, they build up and then they reach a threshold. They die off because they run out of food and they release nitrates. That's the signal for that plant to come and clean up the problem, right? So that plant's basically saying you don't have predators in this system. We've got a lot of nitrates. I'm going to come and clean it up.

47:00 Okay, and then we have some of our sodium plants. So I said foxtail barley, dock. This was actually a property that I'd worked on that had a whole lot of this sort of seagrass. They had a lot of sodium. It's got a name. I've forgotten what it's called, but they figured out that local restaurants would pay them a fortune. So they're actually making more money off this stuff, selling it to fancy restaurants as like an asparagus from the sea. Yeah, but you know, there's options. So I just want to finish on this bit because I think it's really interesting is if it's a mineral imbalance, so we talked about biological imbalances, but if it's a mineral imbalance, then what you want.

47:43 To do is test your weed. I was working with an operation in the Tom Minina basin. The grizzly bears now are coming closer and closer to the houses because they're harvesting carowway. Carowway kind of looks like your wild. Do you have it out here? Wild. It's like a carrot. Wild carrot. They're digging up the roots and then eating those roots to get ready for winter, but it's now right next to the house. So you have a grizzly bear in your backyard and no one's particularly happy about it.

48:10 So what we did is we tested the leaf of the carowway. We tested the soil and we looked at what is the carowway like and what we discovered was what it really likes is soils that are very low in calcium, very low in phosphorus, high in magnesium, low in boron, low in carbon and there were hard pans microbial wise low humus, low microisy, poor biological function. But we did this diagnosis so then we can go what's this weed trying to tell us and where do we not see this plant growing? So we didn't see it growing in areas that were high in boron, high in calcium.

48:48 So we actually did a program based on what the carowway was telling us to reduce that carowway encroachment. So one thing you can do is you can test. In this example the rancher was really interested in capeweed. Do you have capeweed? Not yet. Okay. It's on the coast. So Cape and he tested it to the plant he wanted to grow. So he wanted to grow perennial rye was the plant that he had in the pasture. So we tested them side by side. Take the plant that you don't want with the plant that you want. Send them into the lab and what try to message is it telling you. So nitrogen, phosphorus potassium sulfur carbon pretty close. What about calcium?

49:35 So we've got three times nearly four times the amount of calcium in that Capeweed. Magnesium one and a half times the mag sodium. There was 10 times the amount of sodium in the Cape than what was in the rye. And these soils, this is Western Australia, incredibly low in sodium, which seems strange, I know, but then we ran out. Okay. So zinc, we saw twice the amount of zinc. How much more boron was in the Cape? Yeah. 10 times. And then nitrates. So we know capeweed is a nitrate indicator anyway. But twice the amount of nitrates. So the weeds correlated with soil tests which showed low calcium, sodium, zinc, and boron and high nitrates.

50:23 So weeds, so these dynamic accumulator weeds are going to accumulate minerals that are low except for sodium and nitrates, right? So sometimes they'll accumulate because those soils are high in nitrates, right? So take these tests that it's just a normal feed test. You know, the $25 tests at your university or whoever you send your tests in. Test your weeds. The only weeds I don't send in are ones that are like really poisonous and the lab won't talk to me anymore. But I mean, we'll send in spiky stuff thistles mosquite.

51:02 So Betsy Ross did an experiment. She tested the mosquite, found what the mosquite was high in, did a biological with the trace elements that the mosquite was high in. Within six weeks, the bark of those mosquets split. You could go back three years later and all those mosquets are dead. So she's using like to kill like. What is it that this plant's trying to do? How do I do it out of a job? But all the grasses were flourishing. I've got some really cool photographs from her place. Right.

51:30 So she tested the mosquite what the mosquite was high in, what it's accumulating, she applied to the land, to the land, and to the plant. I mean, she sprayed it on the trees, but also to the land. Right. So I've been killing napweed at home with calcium and a little bit of nitrate, like calcium nitrate. I like calcium nitrate, but just a sprinkle on the napweed. And it looks like I've herbicided them, right? So figure out what is this plant trying to do? Is it a dynamic accumulator? Is it minerals? Can I put minerals on that will actually distract it? That will take it out of the system.

52:10 All right. I think we need to have a break for human health reasons. All right. Well, thanks everybody. We appreciate your patience.