Arden Andersen 2020 Winter Seminar

well interesting brad mentioned to me said well we didn't really bring dr anderson here to scare the bejesus out of everybody. but the reality is why i talk about these things is because the primary reason why all of you are farming is to make a living and raise a family and have a lifestyle that you choose to have that's really what it's about and so that lifestyle is affected by your health and by your family's health. and so if we can recognize that there are reasons for that problem whether it's family health or a community health issue or so on then we can do something about it because that's really what we're here to talk about is that okay now we know all these things and what are we going to do about it because there is another model and and unfortunately a lot of people in industry just tells you oh gee more of the same is the only thing we can do that's not true but we need to know where we're at and how we got here in order to figure out how to get back out of it and it really doesn't take quite as long as you think but i will say i recognize and and i was talking to a friend about this in fact i was talking to the gentleman uh last night about this brad and his colleagues that it is easier and more difficult at the same time today as it was in the early 1980s to do this stuff to do this approach it's easier in that we have more experience we have more knowledge we have more products that are great products available to us to do things in the soils that we didn't have then at the same time we have many more roadblocks today relative to toxicity out there we've had more years of accumulated pesticides in the soil we've had more damage to the soil more damage to the environment we have a more unstable weather pattern than we did 30 years ago 40 years ago so it's as i said it's more difficult and easier at the same time um with that whole process so it's always about cause and effect disease is not an accident either cancer is not an accident and so i realize many people don't want to hear that because they also believe that conventional model that better life through chemistry yes but it really needs to be nutritional chemistry not pharmaceutical chemistry or other similar things so what is the actual cause of constipation of the soil compaction of the soil it's at the molecular level it's not at the macro level with those tractor tracks running across the ground because like the farm that my wife and i purchased it wasn't tractor tracks it was cattle tracks it was rain but the real issue is is when you look at the calcium magnesium ratio it's very narrow we have a heavy soil we're about 26 28 cec and we have in about an equal percentage of calcium as we do magnesium in the soil so that at the molecular level is what causes or leads to compaction of the soil because at the molecular level then you set up plates that are held together very very strongly and literally if we get a little bit of rain on the on the ground it's like snot and you walk across the field you don't have to walk across the field you walk 10 feet and you'll have a couple pounds of mud on your boots that's at the molecular level that's calcium magnesium ratios at the ma at the molecular level and so we need to change those we have to change that not only with nutrient we have to change that with biology and so i'll give you an example though we can't do it all with chemistry in australia they have a huge area in central west and south queensland and west northern new south wales that is their cotton belt and some of you think that you have large farms here um an average farm in the cotton belt is five to ten thousand acres there are many of them that are twenty five to a hundred thousand acres of cotton it's flat as a board for as far as you can see we're talking hundreds of miles flat as a board and we're talking about canon exchange capacities from 25 to 70. now i don't know how many of you are really familiar with exchange capacities and clay soils but a heavy soil in this region would be what 25 yeah maybe i mean up to 30. up to 30. yep so you so you you think that's a heavy soil so let's go to a soil that's 50 to 70 exchange capacity and then it actually has a higher magnesium percentage than calcium so i saw some of those running 42 to 45 magnesium and 38 35 38 calcium they are hard soils and because we have an exchange capacity out there 50 plus even 30 even 25 in order to change the exchange capacity ratio of calcium to make and to magnesium like neil kinsey says he wants to do get it to 80 percent 70 to 80 percent you would have to apply carloads of calcium per acre in order to make that change well theoretically to make that change so on a practical basis you're not going to do it you're not going to do it you're only going to make that shift with biology and with the inner crop mix to address that so one of the gentlemen there that i knew one of the farmers that i consulted they came to my course he was in a cotton wheat rotation and so he dumped the wheat and went to a cotton vetch rotation now these are all irrigated by the way um you're talking three to five inches of rain a year so you're not going to grow anything dry lamb and they are typically also they got some salt problems so they got some sodium issues and so they run their cotton crop in the off season then he'll plant two cycles of vetch a month before it's time to get in the field for cotton that vetch goes in let it set for a month and then comes back with his cotton again and what he found is he's uh farms about 7000 acres of cotton and what he found was is that the wheat anyway was pretty much a break even at best for him so his wife he said was very happy with him because now he can actually take a vacation with her and because they don't they're not out harvesting wheat but he said his cotton production went up significantly a half a bale to a full bale per acre which more than compensated for all of any of the equipment or cost of putting the vetch in there and the soil started to open up so it can be done and because his cash crop is cotton now also understand this is long staple cotton so that would be california and arizona is pima cotton long staple that's the higher value cotton how many of you have been to arizona or california where they're raising cotton okay so what kind of yields do you think they talk about there as being hey gee we we did well here pima cotton uh two three bales an acre you better get four in australia you don't break even these guys are good farmers and they're in difficult environments cost you 30 percent more across the board to farm an australian does here because of taxes because of fuel costs because of all your inputs it's just what it costs so it can be done in very difficult environments but you have to understand that biology needs to be part of the equation because chemically you never will get it done you can go out there with huge equipment you're never going to open up that 50 cec soil and get it to produce better you have to get biology involved in that and plants bring that biology with us yes so when you look at a soil test what priority would you prioritize the calcium magnesium compared to other data good question when i look at a soil test what priority would i put calcium magnesium very high however what's your exchange capacity if i'm in a sandy soil low cec let's say 5 to 10 15 then i can physically change that ratio by the application of lime calcium carbonate but if i'm over 20 logistically i can't really afford to put that much lime out there plus i'm going to alter the biological environment if i put that much lime all at once out there in order to change that so what i have to look at is what's my functional calcium and that's going to be biology to get that going so i'm going to go with smaller doses more frequently with the biology at the same time i'm going to look at my grass weed pressure because grass weed pressure foxtail quackgrass johnson grass those things that tells me what my calcium is doing and regardless of what the soil test says if i have grass weed problems out there now i know it's amazing how many farmers from oh we don't have a grass weed problems okay if you didn't apply the herbicide to kill those grass weeds would you have grass oh yeah we'd have it all over the place we had a calcium problem so that's how we interpret the soil test then is what do we see growing out there what's my compaction issue as well and what's my grass weed pressure if i didn't go out and try to kill it all the time all right and that helps me to determine what i need to do as far as prioritizing that calcium magnesium ratio because frequently also the heavier the soil the narrower your calcium magnesium ratio you also have magnesium deficiency because what we really have is an anaerobic system set up and so we may actually have to get some magnesium in our foliars in order to address that out there as well so good question so um what is so why do we have cell compaction because we have a problem with biology and that calcium magnesium ratio so if we're going to actually change compaction we need to change that at the molecular level so that's going to be biology that's going to be various plants that we may rotate into the system to get that done so what's the cause of constipation is it a drug deficiency some people think it's an excellent x-lax deficiency i happen not to think so um so is it a symptom uh versus a cause and so really there's no accidents out there you just have to really look at cause and affect relationships and that's how we really solve things and so it just talks here why is soil compactable and it all starts with nutrition minerals vitamins amino acids fatty acids organic gases all those things are fundamental and necessary for every living organisms including the bacteria and the fungi that we may be applying out there or stimulating to grow in the system because they're actually the biggest army we really want to be farming the microorganisms because they're going to take care of the crop for us they're going to take care of the crop and the better we feed them the microorganisms the better they will feed our crop the healthier they will keep our crop throughout that season the better they will tolerate a drought or flood or excess moisture obviously there's always there are a range of tolerance here we're not going to be able to tolerate six feet of water sitting on top of your field for a month yes that you know that's going gonna have to take some other um intervention in order to solve that problem at the same time if you get zero water for three months literally zero amount of rain you're in a drought okay we have to address that but that's actually a little easier to address than that six foot of water sitting out there on top of the ground from a flood and so same thing with the diseases they're there because there's a nutrient imbalance in the system we'll talk about a couple of those when we get to the corn diseases here in a bit all pesticides interfere chelate out trace minerals that's the way they operate at the molecular level and genetic different differences in disease susceptibility is really about nutrient balance so it has to do with how that variety is interacting with the microbes and specific nutrient assimilation out there so let's take a little bit look here as well and what do we mean by that well boron deficiency and perm and membrane permeability so what goes on anytime you put a foliar spray on you're feeding the plant but what happens is that actually signals the plant to dump something through the roots into the ground to feed microbes to access various different nutrients in the soil and so if there is a [Music] problem an imbalance those plants exudate that they kick out so it's going to be sugars and amino acids the stuff that they kick out in to the soil is not going to be appropriate for the plant in other words a plant's going to bleed it's going to bleed it's going to leak because there's not enough nutrients to hold it so the example here is if we have a boron deficiency what happens to the plant and so when we have that plant and we have the roots below the ground what's happening is that because of a boron deficiency that plant is going to leak because over here is a supply of boron all right and so we have deficiencies up to sufficiency and what this is showing is how many micrograms of potassium of sugar of phenolic compounds and amino acids are being leaked leaked out into the soil now why is that important so we got potassium here and we got the phenolics we've got sugar and there'll be other things as well amino acids of course out there so why is that important because and by the way this is 1995 in uh um plant physiology so what's going on is that if there is sufficiency of boron the plant is able to take all of this potassium sucrose phenolics and amino acids and actually make plant mass actually utilize that to make plant make self when the boron is deficient it can't hang on to it and the shelves in the cupboard are only so big and photosynthesis maybe continue to go on so it bleeds it leaks through the roots into the soil these various different nutrients that then because they are out of sequence feed the microorganisms but they feed the pathogens because they're not going to be complete and the pathogens see this bleeding oh my goodness we got all this free because sugar particularly feeding bacteria amino acids depending on which the amino acids are if they're real simple ones they're going to feed the bacteria and the fungi and so the pathogens are built up they're fed as soon as we solve that boron problem that bleeding stops for the most part well if the bleeding stops that means we're not feeding the pathogens anymore either then and the plant is healthier all around just with a simple boron application so when we really look at this whole process it goes back to basic biochemistry it's called the citric acid cycle or the krebs cycle that's energy production so many of you are familiar with the word photosynthesis but really what is photosynthesis and photosynthesis is where we take carbon dioxide from the air plus water hopefully we got enough water uh with the sunlight and what do we produce sugar and what else oxygen is released okay those two things we take that for granted oh that's photosynthesis what happens to that sugar in the plant well ideally and most importantly it produces atp adenosine triphosphate which is the fuel the electricity that actually drives the plant every cell in the plant every cell in you and i it's all about atp production that's energy production it is completely completely dependent upon sugar production now yes in addition some of that sugar is going to go to starch and fuel just food for that plant that's going to be utilized for making other things organic acids and so on and so forth the process now by which this atp is converted to all of these things because in order to convert that sugar to starch that sugar to other fuels what do you got to have atp atp is necessary in that process so how do we make atp that's what this cycle is about and so why i put it up there it's not for you to memorize that we'll wait until the test at the end of the course here um i just put up b vitamins b vitamins are necessary for that process to occur yes there's a whole lot of other things as well but just the b vitamins so how many of you apply b vitamins in your npk fertilizers none of you you assume that those b vitamins are just going to show up or you assume they don't even apply where do we normally get those b vitamins microbes they're the producers that the plant will take up and many of them are made in the plant as well provided there is enough building block for them to be manufactured yes it's a complex system it's a wonderfully designed system and understand that this simple process photosynthesis we track that in the field with a refractometer we want 12 and above at the weakest point of the plant 24 7 that's our goal so we continue to work for that because once we get to that point we're not going to have any issues with diseases and insects once you get that above 12 bricks that corn plant that bean plant 24 7 you're not going to have any disease or weed problems they're not there so bees we just talked about that a little bit there standard nutrition studies really don't look at things very well we know the nutrient values coming down several studies came out 2006 2001 2004 and even before that a study back i think it was 1992 or 92. this was the composition of foods that's out of england and and vegetables and fruits the decline in basic nutrients how come well because we're not taking care of business out in the field that's what it's about disease toxins are common for cerium toxins are now common in all glyphosate sprayed crops and crops grown on soils having been sprayed with glyphosate so we're having all kinds of fusarium issues of course fusarium is not very good you've got three different major uh problems with this so fumonosin you get heart failure in pigs esophageal cancer in humans vomitoxin animals are going to go off feed messes up their stomach digestive system zoroalinone is estrogen-like and it causes precocious puberty in males and females if you don't know what that is that means that they develop puberty early the earliest i've seen is age six and a little girl age six it's a little early um so dan was talking excuse me brad was talking about you know how many years do we have how many ears do we have and how many years do we harvest so the potential that we have even practically the potential we have is at least two to three harvestable ears yeah it's definitely pie in the sky to think we're gonna harvest eight or ten but on a practical basis two to three is reasonable so that brings us into the discussion of what is health well i've divided out really to four different levels should be able to discuss what the fourth one would be on the bottom first of all health that's going to maximum brix mineralization nutrition yield taste and it's naturally free of pests parasites we don't have to spray something on to kill him it's just not there nature protects its own the next is pre-disease that's really where a lot of people are that's where a lot of our crops are it appears healthy it's amazing to me how many times we'll see the farmer will just the day before a couple days before they just went out and they just sprayed for insects or something and then walk out in the field oh yeah see we don't have any inside problems oh great the plant's healthy well that's an artificial healthy that's really pre-disease because the insects are saying no it's not healthy and so what do we see it's kind of an artificial control of these organisms so we look at the bricks bricks is not going to be 12. the majority of our crop production today including most of our organic crop production today and the other thing is is that when you check your brix readings on those things typically if you check your bricks reading in the morning you spray your whatever it might be if you're going to spray herbicide on you spray your fungicide spray your insecticide and then about an hour or so later go recheck the bricks reading typically you'll find that bricks are eating dropped after the application of those chemicals because they're chelating agents they actually stress the plant and then finally we get to disease which is we actually see things we actually see that tar spot or that mildew or whatever it might be out there what do you think the bottom one is death death so health pre-disease disease and death where are we on that scale and it really is a balance between nutrition and disease the two do not occur in the same context so if we have a lot of disease we have poor nutrition unbalanced nutrition maybe we got a lot of excesses of one thing or two things or three things and deficiencies of other things or functional deficiencies because it's all about functionality and so it's a similar in medicine we have to use the right form of nutrients in order to get the results and agriculture as a rule wants to try to use the cheapest possible and so that's why agriculture has been used as the dumping ground for industry a lot of trace minerals come from spent acids so they'll use sulfuric or phosphoric acid to clean metal before they paint it it'll pick up the lead and aluminum and other things in it but gee because it was a phosphoric acid they then can make a cheap phosphate fertilizer out of it and sell it to you and they don't have to claim oh wait a minute we're pulling a little lead with this we got a little cadmium in here we got a little aluminum in here none of those by the way are nutrients for the plants but of course agriculture is a good dumping ground because you bought it cheaply therapeutic dosing and that's another very important thing and that is is that we have to apply a quantity that is going to make the change that we desire you understand that relative to your herbicide applications if you only put out one-tenth the dose do you get the result so it's the same thing with nutrition we have to have a therapeutic level of nutrition in order to get the changes that we need for that and that is not always quantity and sometimes it's timing and functionality of the product in order to get us to that point but nutrients are not drugs and so drugs are never going to result in health they only abate or suppress symptoms so it's same thing putting a herbicide out there putting a fungicide out there putting an insecticide out there put a miticide out there you haven't solved anything other than you've abated it until the next spray and so it's the same what are we going to what are we going to select as far as the quality of our products and so just because you put a biological fertilizer out there doesn't mean you're going to get results if the the product itself may be fine or the product may not be good do you know how to assess it do you have confidence in the people uh that are helping you with it um those kinds of things so this perhaps is the one thing you do need to memorize and that is is that looking at this scale of death disease predisease and health where are you where is your soil on this scale so let's say and most of you are going to be somewhere in this range most of you are going to be somewhere in that range and so being in this range what we want to grasp on this scale is that let's say here's your field okay down here's death of course up here's health all right so you purchase product a and you apply product a oh gee it didn't do much for me ah the product's no good doesn't have anything to do with the product really product may be just fine but the product doesn't increase your state of health let's say you purchase product b oh my god it dropped my yield it's a terrible product no not necessarily it was just below your status of health so let's say you purchase product c and apply that oh my goodness that's the best thing since sliced bread wow we need to use this forever and over the years you improve the quality of your soil so now this is where you're at and you purchase product c again next year boom drops your yield oh they must have messed up that product i just can't get that quality product that i used to get it used to improve the quality of our yield law every year yeah but if you were doing a good job of putting things together you now have to go to product d in order to continue improvement so if all you want is the status quo that's fine for continuing the status quo product then but as you if you truly are on an improvement program you need to compensate every year to continue improving which means if you are here and your neighbor is here and another neighbor is up here are they going to be able to use the same product well maybe they could try d but the problem is is that if they're down here d may not be accessible to them because if you're up here and you're using d i guarantee you that d is also a little bit more delicate of a product and if you're putting everything else in here that's maintaining the status quo you'll probably kill d before it has a chance of doing much help because it's not just chemistry it's also biology that you're dealing with it's also biology it's also going to have to do with which variety you're growing when you're getting it in what kind of soil you have so if all you're doing is a status quo yes if if all of you are just down here at disease or pre-disease yeah it really doesn't make much difference just go ahead and continue doing the same old status quo thing continue using iowa state or nebraska or ohio state or illinois go ahead and use their soil testing and their recommendations because it doesn't really make any difference there's any science behind it anyway it's all just status quo to maintain the lip service to continue you're using the chemical industries approach it doesn't make any difference it's not going to move ever ever get you up here so understand that depending upon the quality of the product you have to match that to the health status of your field and your crop and your crop it's the same thing with your own personal health same thing with your own personal help same thing if you're raising animals same thing with them where are they and so a product that might be just fine for the status quo if your animals are in better health giving them the status quo stuff is only going to decline their health you have to continue improving the inputs in order to continue raising the bar so to speak all right yes sir is this why a lot of our soils have a hard time switching from an hydrocephalus good question is this why a lot of the soils have a difficulty switching from anhydrous to better form yeah what's happening is you're using a you're using a sledgehammer essentially anhydrous is a very strong alkali and so what happens is is that alkali is very effective at extracting nutrients there's a huge consequence to that in that it's burning out the carbon burning out the organic matter over time the humus over time let's we've got to play on words here a little bit with organic matter versus humus it burns out the humans which actually the humous is full of trace minerals so that releases those there so that's why you continue to see some improvement the reality is is that what we have to do is one we have to change varieties and two we have to then get the biology to go in there to help us hold whatever nitrogen we put out there instead of using a sledgehammer we use just a ball beam hammer out there on there but yes good question on that okay so knowledge is power so we have to get a clear understanding of how food is produced and um move along with that and so nutrition we've already talked about that a little bit so i don't want to belittle this a little bit again root exudates i did the one on boron and so this one is zinc so if we got a zinc deficiency sufficiency deficiency so this is zinc sufficiency zinc deficiency and what is being dumped in amino acid sugar and phenolics out through the roots so you see it's bleeding red bleeding it's bleeding in deficiency states the cotton the wheat the apple we're bleeding nutrients into the soil so we have to solve that at the um well foliar level is a good place to address that so aphids and mites healthy plants we want to just kind of move along here that work shiboso has already talked about we know that insects are just there trying to pick up free nitrogens in particular and i know brad has done some testing with nova crop control and several years ago we had them test and they collected enough data and finally figured out proved it in greenhouse work over in the netherlands that as soon as the sap reaches 55 nitrate nitrogen out of total nitrogen you will have aphids feeding no matter what else you do you will have aphids feeding not until because that's what they easily digest and so what that means is is that you're low in sugar so your brix readings are going to be too low because you can't convert that nitrogen to an amino acid it takes sugar in order to convert that free nitrogen to an amino acid and you don't have sufficient sugar to do that which means you're not sufficient nutrition to do that and so you will continue to build up more and more nitrate nitrogen and when you get to that 55 percent you have aphids and they're feeding it doesn't matter how many times you spray them because you haven't done anything to change the table you're continuing to serve their favorite food so we have to continue a new paradigm with that whole process so we've already been through this a little bit look at the salads and foods today mineral depletion even the 1960s it did spectral analysis of 4 000 grain samples and what they found was up they continued to drop in basic nutrients the 1960s so we're not talking about just today 2020 that oh gee all of a sudden we got deficiency it's been going on for 100 years and so herbicide resistant weeds here we go here chronologically around the world so tell me how successful herbicide use has been oh we're still farming yeah but it's becoming more and more difficult have to use more and more herbicide have to figure out other ways to address it it just continues to go up here's a list of a number of herbicide resistant species and there's many many others you can go to that website and you can see them they just continue to increase more and more roundup as well more and more what it does um here's a steroid pathway from cholesterol this is in mammals and so on comes down through and uh inhibited by various different things pesticides down here and that conversion of estrogen so we end up getting out here into some things that we don't want that's how we get can get cancer from it because it's an endocrine disruptor and um weeds this is one really difficult for people as well how are we going to solve the weed problem if we can't use herbicides and well there's a lot of people that do but understand that it's basic geological science so how can we figure that out well actually the norwegians did i think it was a norwegian it was scandinavians and i believe was in norwegians actually did this original work now elaine ingham also did some of that work but the norwegians did it before she did and what they found was they went to bare volcanic rock you can find those places around the world easily you go to hawaii the big island in hawaii you can find fresh volcanic rock as well if you've ever been to the big island in hawaii there's several years worth of lava flows major lava flows one in 1968 1954 and so what they did was they went and analyzed those various different volcanic flows and evaluated who was showing up first and who showed up next and next and next and next all the way through mature forests so start out with bear rock fresh volcanic lava flow all the way out to now who do we have in these healthy forests unfortunately getting fewer and fewer healthy forests anymore and what they found was that first of all bacteria show up that's the first guys on this on the scene as bacteria start working and etching away at that we start seeing mosses and lichens and various other things and then we start seeing small little shrubs and various other things and then across here finally we get to some upright plants and we get to primitive grasses you know the primitive grasses like foxtail and quackgrass and johnson grass and those kinds the primitive grasses because then we get to the prairie grasses our fescues for example and what we find when we do the analysis of biology in the roots we see that it's the fungi that start coming in here but these fungi down here and these primitive grasses and first upright plants are dominantly what we classify as pathogens because they're more capable of surviving in those more difficult environments more anaerobic environments until we get out to the prairie glass grasses and now we start seeing particularly mycorrhizae fungi showing up mycorrhizae fungi are all the crops that you're growing uh well corn beans and wheat so on those are all mycorrhizae dependent plants and um further and further we get out here all the forests are mycorrhizae dependent uh fungi plants in other in order for them to be truly healthy they have to be completely coated with mycorrhizae around the roots and so what's happened is with our soils in many of these areas these are prairie soils in a lot of areas in the midwest you go back 250 years they are prairie soils and so at that point in time they were rich beneficial fungi rich in mycorrhizae and what we've done over time is that we have moved them geologically speaking to the left we've moved them more primitive to a more primitive biology and a more primitive biology is more conducive to weeds number two some of you have already recognized this you've already seen this and if you're working overtime to improve these soils you will see it and that is is that the insects begin going from consuming your crop corn and soybeans and wheat to they begin consuming the weeds it's one of the early changes that we see leave the crop alone they start consuming the weeds and then we don't have the weeds weeds change first of all you're going to start seeing changes in weed species in your fields and then the insects going after them and if you check the bricks reading you start checking the bricks readings in your weeds you'll notice that those are also declining over time and so the way that we really address the weed problem on our farms is a biological shift in the soil that's how you solve it now logistically how do we get there and it's up to you and that's what these gentlemen talk about as far as you know how do they do it on their farms well just because it works on their farm doesn't mean it exactly works on your farm you're a different manager so you may have to integrate some other things into that process but that's how we're going to solve those weeds and this is a scandinavian research if you wish to go and actually find it so there's a real couple nice videos out there too life in the soil it's a great one shows you how the biology is working and and feeds on the roots and so on this is interesting as well just talking about controlling weeds based upon the carbon in the soil this is work done out of ohio and what they found out was is that if we improve that carbon nitrogen ratio in the soil um to from a 25 to one which is pretty common up to three times that we reduce broadleaf weeds by 75 doing nothing else not tilling not doing anything else just by changing that carbon nitrogen ratio in the soil which means we've got to do some biological things appropriate for that to happen we automatically reduce broadleaf weeds by 75 percent why is that because of this because as we move to the right here we're getting more bioactive carbon in the soil so automatically we're reducing these first upright plants we're reducing their ability to function out there in the soil over time and so as well this whole concept of thinking oh gee i left all that residue out there i'm improving my soils not necessarily not necessarily and in fact what they found out is is that in a lot of these no-till areas a lot of the gmo stuff you aren't improving at all and because it's not getting actually converted to humus you may have organic matter there but it's not humus it's not actually feeding the plant the next plant out there weed susceptibility here this just has to do with this ph alone and a local ph what do i mean by a local ph a ph right at the root as opposed to ph generally in the soil as well these are some just some pictures how we doing on time we're very good on time what time is it okay that's easy for you to say um so here are some pictures we want to look at soybeans and wheat we got some take all problems and this is all from glyphosate residue these are complements of don huber by the way citrus variegated chlorosis same thing this is glyphosate in the soil it ties it up again iron chlorosis out here and again here's what we see with nutrient density between gmos and non-gmos and what we're seeing in the gmos is we're also seeing some formaldehyde residue in those and of course that gets dumped into the animals who consume that and also then guidelines for formaldehyde it's not a nice thing here we go look at the calcium look at the brix level differences once again just because we go apply something whether especially in terms of fertilizer has never and will never guarantee you become plant-based we have to have a functional system to allow these things to happen and occur properly calcium is where it starts calcium is king we don't often look at it in that manner because we're told it's all just about np go put it on go spend your money but this is one of the reasons for years we have said the most waste of money that we as farmers spend in a given year is on post versus potassium too many times we spend money on products that almost immediately get tied up in the soil and then we don't have the proper mechanisms to make a functional plant available thank you the other thing that you see here is that this is not only the corn you harvest the corn was harvested obviously for them to go and get it tested but that also reflects what's the quality of the residue that you're putting back in the ground so the non-gmo one not only do we have a better crop that we're selling to the farms other farms animal operations and so on you have better residue that you're putting back in the ground so we're more than multiplying it's not just an equal amount if you put a ton if you have one ton of this residue versus one ton of this residue they're not equivalent as far as what it's doing to help improve your soil the following year so that's why it becomes a snowballing effect for the benefit it comes a snowballing effect for the detriment it depending upon which side of the spectrum you are on so glyphosate in human urine it's there we have it all over the place and i can tell you from personal experience my wife and i are pretty strict on eating organic foods as much as we can in kansas city we're fortunate we have costco and a number of other places that actually have reasonable quality stuff and two years three years ago three years ago there's a lab in kansas city called great plains laboratory and they will do human testing urine blood for various different things so we decided well let's just see how much pesticide we're spilling in our urine and so we did both a complete panel of pesticides as well as specifically glyphosate because that was an added test and so both of us were spilling both in urine pretty significant amounts my wife more than i which was interesting and that's the difference in her ability to detoxify things that's a genetics issue then because she's even more strict than i am relative to those things so she's not eating things that should have glyphosate in them but obviously most of things still do have glyphosate in them and so um we know from personal experience it's it's in the urine it's in the urine and so people who don't even care at all uh significant amounts in the urine and so here as well mean urinary glyphosate um 3.4 parts per billion so i like to play a little games with this once in a while as well because the industry likes to tell you that oh my gosh it's in such small quantities it couldn't possibly be a problem for you they depend upon just like the statement that brad said they depend upon your ignorance of science in order to be able to tell you nonsense like that they depend upon your ignorance and i'll get to that in a minute because i'm going to show you how much active testosterone you men have in your bloodstream so when you want to talk about parts per million being on such a small quantity parts per billion is way out there oh my god parts per trillion you think oh that doesn't even exist you'll see that it does so the usage recommendations this is a product razor pro herbicide active ingredients 41 glyphosates from new farm and these are the recommended rates out there so i did some calculations with the math let's do a little bit of math out there and so if we're going to put 48 ounces out there that is 600 parts per billion and so if i am applying that in 20 gallons of water i'm ending up out here at about point zero zero three four uh parts per million times that money number of ounces so essentially i'm putting out point zero eight uh mills is what we see in uh women's urine great and that is uh .0034 parts per million but wait a minute um we're actually putting out there 617 parts per million of actual herbicide so your hormones let me see the desired amount of vitamin d in your serum is 30 to 100 nanograms per milliliter that's parts per billion and men's testosterone is 250 to 875 that's the reference range nanograms per deciliter women's estrogen is uh 990 to 590 picograms that's parts per trillion so the hormones that make you men or women dominantly are circulating in your bloodstream in parts per billion and parts per trillion concentrations so when somebody tells me that circulating glyphosate at a thousand times that in your bloodstream has no effect their fos you see i have an advantage as being a physician and also an agronomist i know a little bit of science and so why i showed you the video on the endocrine disrupting because it has become a huge political juggernaut about gender dysphoria in this country and around the world where do you think that's coming from it's coming from endocrine disrupting herbicides and pesticides that are at higher concentrations than the hormones that naturally circulate through our bloodstream so there is a consequence for everything that we do the cancer rates the parkinson's rates in farmers is ridiculous the miscarriage rates the birth defect rates in rural families is ridiculous why are we doing this anyway you're farming for a lifestyle you're farming for a lifestyle you may have grown up in it it may be what you thought that was the only thing you knew but if you become successful you're doing it because of a lifestyle you like the farm lifestyle you're not going to be very happy most of you know if you can't pay your bills that's not a very good lifestyle so the only good farm lifestyle is if you can pay your bills but if you can pay your bills but you die at 45 of liver cancer how good was that lifestyle for the rest of your family as well so we can do something different about these things and that's why we talk about these of how important it is already been through those things so i don't need to go through that again and again so what we want to start with is getting out into the field and testing the field so how are we going to make these changes where do we start first of all we get out into the field well maybe we go with somebody like brad or his colleagues or maybe someone else you know a consultant get a hold of some tools you get a penetrometer you get yourself a refractometer well refractometer is not going to do much good this time of year but a penetrometer is you can get out there with a penetrometer you can get out there with a shovel you can get out there with a thermometer you can look at those parameters today and so the soil test quality kit we're getting out there with a soil respiration that's a little kit that you can get that actually checks for co2 respiration so what you do is you get a sample of soil you put it in this little container and you put a little uh dipstick thing in there that goes with it put a cover on it set it for 24 hours it changes color and the color change tells you how much respiration is going on what's respiration how much biology you have there so it's a general check over time it's not something i'm going to check every week may not even check every month but certainly i'm going to check every season potentially on that water infiltration what is that so i take for example a a quart tin can that may not be strong enough to get into some of these soils you may have to take um a six inch piece of pvc file the end of it so you got a nice wedge in it you drive that into the ground at least six inches be better if you go in about 10 inches you have calculated in that six or eight inch pipe how much water is one inch so you measure out that much and you have a stopwatch you dump that water in hits your stopwatch and you time how long does it take for that one inch of water to infiltrate into the soil and then once that's done you put a second inch in there time it how long does it take for that second inch to infiltrate what does this tell you how well you're going to survive a two inch rain how well you're going to survive a one inch downpour is it going to soak in or is it going to end up out in the river with half of your nutrients water infiltration correlates to one how compact is the soil how much biology how much organic matter do we have in there because organic matter actually humus not just organic matter humus holds about four to one its weight in water so you increase your humus level out there you'll have faster infiltration next we're looking at bulk density so we're actually weighing a given volume of that soil we're checking the ph the uh ec which is electric conductivity and we're doing a nitrate test uh we're doing a slaking test in other words we're taking some of the clumps we're dipping them in water and seeing how fast they break up in the water and then we're doing counts of uh critters do we have any earthworms out there probably this time of year may never may not have too many so it may not be the best time to go out there and do that but certainly in the summertime you can get out there what do we have for earthworm counts in many fields today across the united states around the world you don't find any earthworms so that that's a pretty quick test zero next so then that's just that's our soil now the other things you can add to that what does it smell like does it smell chemically or does it have a nice foresty aroma to it what does it feel like so you can do some of your standard soil test you know making a soil ribbon and those kinds of things you can do that as well that doesn't change much though over time these things are things that are going to change from year to year as you either decline or improve your soil and particularly with the weather as squirrely as it's been that water infiltration issue is very important for us because we're getting more downpours in various areas around the country so how well is our soil going to tolerate that versus the neighbor or versus us before um so we're going to do i already talked about those things then you know we're doing the water infiltration the temperature of the ph ec the co2 the slaking the texture the structure we're doing a brix for the sap when we're checking the penetrometer and if you want to actually look for that you can go to the usda.gov and you can get all that information off from there so that's michael mcneills he developed it when he was at usda and that kit is still well available so um soil testing there's several different ones that you can use and again it's interpretation along with what do you see in the field it's just like if i do a lab test lab tests are nice on people and i use them but i've had so many patients come in to your lab tests look pretty good but doctor i feel terrible your lab tests are good but doctor i feel terrible so the conventional perspective on that is is okay well here's some prozac here's your antidepressant here's your anti-anxiety drug because your lab so you're good you must be just depressed that's the standard approach so just because the lab test says you're okay wait a minute that lab test was invented by a man you don't feel good all right we need to figure out what else is going on same thing here we're doing these various different tests we need to get out in the field that's why we have that previous kit that i showed you get out in the field what do you actually see your soil test may say hey everything is hunky-dory yeah but we got weed problems we have soil compaction problems out there we may have rootworm issues we may not have yields that are anywhere near what we should be getting we've got a problem with water runoff those kinds of things are what you're going to visually see don't necessarily show up in the soil test so typical mining assay your typical university test the reims morgan test is something developed by kerry reams but originally it came from ireland and the reason they used it as a morgan extract what they found out was they gave them a better functional phosphate level which was very important for them because the more common fertilizer that they use in pastures is super phosphate in those countries so functional nutrient basics if we're looking at that on the reems test i want that two to four thousand of calcium the phosphorus at two to four hundred potash at half that and you think oh no we gotta use more we always use more potash than we do phosphorus true that's consumption that's consumption what you have to recognize is is that phosphorus is recycled phosphorus is recycled it's like the railroad car takes things back and forth the potash is going to be consumed and so yes you're going to consume more pounds per acre of potash but in order to be able to do that we have to have a therapeutic level of phosphorus in order to make that happen as the transport mechanism as the energy mechanism to get that to happen we want equal amounts of nitrate and ammoniacal nitrogen and what you'll see that also is a nice biological indicator can i get some more water please because what will happen is that it's easy to get nitrate nitrogen well you can get some ammonical too if you apply anhydrous but it's not stable it doesn't stay there how many of you have driven by in the springtime and smell ammonia in the air that fertilizer is not going for the crop that's back in the air it's because it's not stable it's not tied to a carbon so what you will see on these soil tests is that as the soil improves biologically this ammoniacal nitrogen comes up because a lot of times if you go throughout the season you track it throughout the season the further away you get from an ammonia application the lower that ammonia nitrogen shows on your soil test it only comes up as we get biology and stably because we want this 24 7. these are not soil tests okay we show up one time in the year and that's great no no no that's 24 7 that we need to have those numbers just like using the refractometer that needs to be above 12 24 7. and so the same thing with this that's 24 7. so if we look at the standard tests we're looking at more percentages so if we look at the albrecht or kinsey and some of those guys that are doing that kind of stuff and that's good information i don't have a problem with it it you just it's how you interpret it how you're going to use it this actually gives us some numbers that we can do on a regular basis this is going to be kind of an annual thing and it gives me it's sort of like what are my capital assets and this is more what's my cash flow that i'm going to pay the bills today for or with other testing of course there's other labs around that you can use i'm not so tied up in labs as i am interpretation of those correlated to what do we see out there in the field so again that functional qualities that brix 24 7. calcium we need it for a lot of different things brad's already alluded to that mention that you can go through these of all the things that it's for it's a cell wall binder it's needed for chromosome activation it is very important as a second messenger for making these various different enzymes you have to have it it's the foundation that doesn't mean that we're going to actually consume more than potash or magnesium or some of those when we analyze that crop when it comes off the field but calcium has to be there in order for the other things to work just like the phosphorus so we're talking about things setting the foundation so that we can improve those yields overall um it's a very important communicator so to get that message that we are going to need to put on potash what i mean i don't mean put it on the soil to put it on in the plant we have to have calcium in order for that to occur it's a second messenger and there's been a lot of research out there on that and so a total foliar mass was greater under heat stress than the controlled conditions when we had higher calcium levels so one of the problems that you see with squirrely weather is drought and flood so we get under heat stress and particularly in small grains if we have a lot of heat stress we don't get good pollination we don't get good pollination corn if it's too hot and dry correct well that depends upon what your calcium level is depends what your calcium level is the better your foundation calcium the better your crop handles heat stress so the better pollination you're going to get under heat stress conditions so it's true we don't know exactly what the weather's going to be but if we prepare by getting our nutrients we handle whatever stress better and so this is just a graph of that you can go to those websites and look at that um it's very important uh it this just talks about that graph what that graph is so just the schematic of it and by the way if you want to get some of these things up make it available here to brad so you can look these up further if you want to and do further research on those another thing calcium is very important protects against reactive oxygen species so again what's that that has to do with free radicals essentially heat stress essentially heat stress and so again calcium is protecting us from that heat stress it also counters nitrogen so it allows us what happens is that if we have a good level of calcium we don't have that excess nitrogen problem which means also guess what we don't have the aphid issues so it's a good detoxifier does counter heavy metal so if we got that problem out there it helps us to um utilize our nitrogen better and it's very important for growth and so we're going to get into that in just a moment but it is very important for growth there is a growth factor obtained in water extracts of many plant tissue this factor was shown to be calcium ion for the growth of the pollen tube so it goes back to why i said how can we handle heat stress for pollination well if calcium is the key growth factor involved in pollen tube germination guess what if you don't have enough there you don't have very good heat stress or any kind of stress for that pollination need bacterial diseases as well better your calcium is uh nutrient levels the high level of calcium um can affect nitrogen so it's that free nitrogen that really calls in a lot of these insect problems so um getting now into that what i said this male female thing boys and girls you can affect that you can directly change it and some of you may or may not have times where i could have said this to the previous generation because most people most farmers used to have a garden and not very many farmers have gardens today but in your gardens and you have all the tomatoes growing real tall vines but no fruit some of you may have seen that in your soybeans though gee you have great plants growing but not very much pod set or the internode distance is great much greater than you want well that means you got too much boy and not enough girl in there that's really what that means too much boy not enough girl and that's this whole energy management process and calcium is the foundation so the better we have our calcium set up the better this foundation we have the more easily we are to affect boys and girls what does that mean well what that means is is that in the early part of the season we want to be over on left of center here we want to be growing we're growing the plant but as soon as we need seed set we need to be over on this side and to carry it out throughout the end of the season because we need to set that fruit or seed and we need to keep it there we don't want to drop it we don't lose it that has to do with the stability of it staying there has to do with how much calcium we have over here so let's say that gee we just can't get those rascals to set or our inner nodes are way too far apart what are we going to do some people say oh i just need to put out a a growth regulator yeah but to foliar spray could be a growth regulator should be so out here then what are we going to put out here to set fruit or to get this to move to release energy well some very simple things gee we're going to put a little phosphorus out there want to get some ammonia nitrogen out there we're going to put some vinegar out there estrogen equivalents to get that to set fruit and to hold fruit and the art of this is to keep it over here enough to maintain fruit set and very much you would see that in fruit trees and garden vegetables but not so far that we stop the growth because if you move it all the way over here the growth stops so you set a whole bunch of fruit but it doesn't mature it doesn't fill out it doesn't grow so the art is keeping it right in here and that has to do again with the more stable your calcium the more easily you are to change what's happening with that fruit set versus growth process male female vegetative is male and fruiting is female now recognize every cell is both all the time but certain phases whether you're in the vegetative stage or in the fruiting stage are going to be dominated by the other hormone the other side and so you've got a continuum going all the time nitrate nitrogen is going to be growth ammoniacal nitrogen is going to be fruiting okay so you ask the question why is it we have such a difficulty in getting off from anhydrous ammonia well you're growing grain and so what's happening is is that if we just dump the anhydrous we have to do something to make sure we produce enough ammoniacal nitrogen to get that fruit to set and grow okay it's not just nitrogen that's at issue it's what form is the nitrogen that is at issue okay sources of course a lot of different things limestone and so on we can do foliars but it's more difficult to do foliars if you're not organic there are a few more available to you as far as calcium foliars are concerned but it's a challenge getting calcium with phosphorus without them precipitating out plants grow from energy that's really what it's about we already talked about that a little bit glyphosate unfortunately it will reduce these nutrients so it significantly reduces calcium concentrations of the grain and some aspects of plant breeding and obtaining archicad products on technologies contaminated lands is the name of the article and that came out of the russian institute of agriculture radiology and ecology and so probably monsanto or bear didn't buy that one potassium it's a regulatory mechanism it's also growth energy so potassium is another growing thing here some potassium tidbits and we need to keep it balanced and the problem is is that we have substituted potassium for calc uh for calcium in most of our cropping systems that's why we have so many disease problems and that's why we've hit plateaus with yields is because we've substituted potassium for calcium it's not that we need to throw out the potassium it needs it means that we got to bring the calcium in so that we get better efficiency out of our potassium in those sources of course sulfate sulfate's going to be your best one i'd get rid of potassium chloride because one it's going to be eroded most of it's going to be leach the other thing is it's hard on the microbes in the soil if you want to make change you get rid of potassium chloride yeah i know it's cheap and um so that's the argument but here's the research that was done at the great salt lake mineral corporation in 1988 they looked at various sources of potassium so potassium chloride potassium sulfate potassium phosphate and they looked at leaching x number of time after rainfall inches so if we had four in this is centimeters inches centimeter inches centimeter inches centimeter inches centimeter inches all right so a four inch rain we've just dropped 17 percent of our potassium we are is lost if we if we use potassium chloride well i know you guys like to donate to the environment anyway so after eight inches of rain we've lost 75 percent so you've donated 75 of your potassium purchase to the environment all right i got better places yeah yeah so potassium sulfate um a four inch rain you haven't lost any of it how often do you get you know heavy rains or accumulation over time by that by the time you get out to the end of the season um you've already utilized a lot of that so some of that's not going to go but depending upon if you have a wet spring you're going to lose a big portion of your potassium do you ever have wet springs huh and so it has to do with how biologically fit that product is in other words how much the biology can take that and bind it so it's not leachable so as well it chelates your potassium and so it will knock out your potassium you're going to find lower potassium levels as well it's a cation chelator nitrogen we've already talked about those a little bit a couple things there of course nitrogen really correlates to insect pressure higher nitrogen higher insect pressure i didn't say higher protein level higher amino acid level higher nitrogen it's always the free sources there that give us more and more problem and so we need to really look at getting the biological system operating out here understanding that there is a correlation between what goes on in you and what goes on in the soil so what i'd like to do we have uh what 20 minutes about 30 minutes what i want to do is i wanted to have at least a half hour here so we can just answer questions and um maybe address a few concerns that people may have i know one thing was and i see a question back there was this tar spot so somehow that slide got missing i don't know it's not in there i had a star spot slide so tar spot um the actual tar spot itself is oxidized manganese so tar spot is the consequence of glyphosate just like xylella just like a number of other diseases that have now emerged are re-emerged because of glyphosate around the world and so how is how does that mechanism operate well first of all what happens is the um fungus that is um actually there's two fungus there's a primary one and there's a secondary one that come in on the tar spot and what's happened is is that those are pretty much anaerobic fungi and they're all around all the time that's not the issue the issue is is that the glyphosate has killed off the reducing uh beneficials and so there's nothing to keep these guys in check and so they proliferate and they are strong oxidizers of manganese and so they oxidize the manganese that is in the soil and if they get into the plant that's in the plant and so when it's oxidized it precipitates in other words it drops out and so it'll accumulate and that's your tar spot on the leaf so you do is you do a tissue analysis you send that tissue in to the standard lab and they're going to tell oh your manganese is fine well yes you have mineral the mineral manganese there but it's not in the functional form it's an oxidized form it's no good to you it's no good to you so the plant gets weaker and weaker and weaker and of course the fungus takes over and knocks out your plants so um it's a glyphosate residue issue in the soil and so one there's two things that you need to do one obviously we ought to quit using glyphosate two we have to get manganese and zinc into the system and many of the places that are having various disease problems we're finding that we have to use a phosphite form at least partially in order to get it transported in you can't use that in organic operations but you can't otherwise why is that because glyphosate is a is an organophosphate essentially um chelating agent and so it is a very strong phosphate molecule and so we have to put something in there that has equal or greater affinity for the mineral than does the glyphosate and so we put it in there in a phosphate form but we still need about 10 percent phosphate why because if all i put in is phosphite i'll shut down my atp in the plant and i'll actually reduce yield so in order to bypass in other words what i've got to do it's a cat and mouse game with glyphosate chelating my manganese and wanting to oxidize that manganese so i have to play that cat and mouse game with a little bit of phosphite because it wins and that then both manganese and zinc are the problem relative to solving that um issue in there it's no different than uh is like i said a few other things xylella xylella is a bacteria they've that seems to be transported by various different thrips sharpshooter and others and it then plugs the sap and that organism has proliferated again because of shutting down the beneficials and you see it every place where glyphosate has been applied over the years so citrus is a big place that they're seeing it if you know anything about citrus greening down in florida promises to literally wipe out the citrus industry in florida and it's not that difficult to turn it around but there's no drug or chemical that will do that so and it's the same thing with panama disease in sugar cane uh big problems same thing they've been using glyphosate as a desiccant and so that's where that comes from so people are wondering where are you getting the glyphosate in your food you're getting it in all the grains yes one of the big reasons that we asked dr anderson to discuss this this is not the only disease that we are dealing with or have dealt with in the past that the majority of the industry has said you get it sorry there's nothing you can do because there is similar to goss's wealth similar to deployed air rot similar to some of these other diseases that we can't control with a fungicide we can't control it with a typical pesticide there are ways we're not always at the mercy of mother nature in conventional agriculture dictating how and what we do but we only have control of these things if we understand the whys if we understand the whys we can prevent these things and so this is a reason that we wanted him one dr anderson discussed this because there was a bulletin or paper just released here recently for some independent dollars and research and then some private companies are throwing a ton of money and how do we control this we have that ability right now if we understand actually and there are actually um some resistant varieties what does a resistant variety mean it means that it is stronger at reducing manganese and stimulating the microbes that will help to reduce manganese so that we don't lose it to oxidation so now there was a question in the back room earlier [Music] in the practices that that we're doing now and what i mean is following what brad and adam and acrobatic systems are promoting you know eliminating glyphosate reducing slash eliminating dnk and increasing your biology there's a lot of people out there that you know say come to us and say well you better be careful you're going to follow the cliff because you're not doing some of these things yeah and my question is to to those that are doing the conventional system of applying max anhydrous max p max k when are they going to fall off well good question uh when are they going to fall off the cliff and who are doing the conventional approach and saying that well if you're not doing a conventional approach eventually going to fall off the cliff many of them have already fallen off the cliff that's what this stuff is about is these emerging and re-emerging diseases that we thought were already taken care of and now they're back new thing and oh gee we can't control it 68 resistant weeds now to glyphosate wait a minute that was supposed to be the magic end all herbicide so if you happen to have that waterhemp or whatever other weed variety that is resistant to glyphosate what are you going to do you're already off the cliff and you're going to go back to previous approaches and same thing with varieties um and now the one thing i could never figure out though a little tongue-in-cheek here i could never figure out why farmers so enjoy paying royalties i just could never figure that out why you so enjoy paying monsanto royalties for crops when the genetics are already there actually uh are surpassed gmos with non-gmo varieties they're already there they're already out there and many people are growing them and they're out yielding conventional approaches and prairie hybrids in tampico illinois they're an example of that they grow non-gmo hybrid seed and they've got the data to prove it and there are other companies out there doing that so as far as falling off the cliff it's who defines the cliff i mean that's that's the bottom line and so where i would look and like i said i've been to australia quite a few times and i look at the farmers down there cost them 30 percent more to grow across the board because the cost of everything there are no subsidies so they're growing in a world market with no subsidies 30 more cost of production pretty good operations pretty darn good operations so it can happen you can make a difference you can survive it but those farmers have been forced to look further down the road and realize that hey this isn't going to work long term and when they were looking at gmo cotton down the road earlier the when the the second rollout of gmos things they figured out early on wait a minute these things got to have a lot more trace mineral foliars in order to produce so they already figured out that they had to be more aggressive with nutrition up front and so most of them though have figured out the biological approach they have to it's a dry continent and so um you don't get a second chance you just don't get a second chance and so i think you look at what you want to do 20 years from now some of you are young enough you still may be farming but certainly many of you want your children to be able to farm if they choose to and many of you probably have kids that have already indicated they want to farm okay so what's the farming operation going to look like 20 years from now now we don't know all the technology and what but we do know relative to production safety profitability ability to survive independently because guess what if you don't the government's more than happy to come in and start putting more and more regulations on you and they will you already know that another question about karen yes thank you sulfur is definitely a very important nutrient we have to have it for amino acid or protein production we definitely need it for oil production so soybeans oil producing bean has to have sulfur and sulfur also is very important for better seed set it's what we call a female energy wise and so most farmers don't make the connection that if you use potassium sulfate as opposed to potassium chloride you're getting a nice dosage on a regular basis of sulfur nutrient-wise in the soil so with one application we're getting two nice things into the soil so it also comes a little bit from gypsum so if we're putting calcium sulfate out there we're gonna get a little sulfur from that gypsum is nice for helping to mellow the soil it's more of a soil conditioner than anything else what we use it for but it also provides a nice sulfur kick for us in that and we don't have as much sulfur in most of our soils anymore because we don't have as many coal burning power plants i'm not promoting coal burning power plants but i'm saying in the past because we had so many call burning power plants there was a lot more sulfur in the air and it came down as a rain and so we've got a fair amount of sulfur in our soils in certain areas as a result of that so absolutely we have to have sulfur many farmers will use sulfate traces so manganese copper zinc iron sulfate as their trace source may or may not be the best trace but it does provide us with some sulfur yes so absolutely it's got to come but i'm getting a lot of that with my gypsum so it is included on our soil tests so we want to be testing sulfur on a regular basis to make sure that we have that base in the soil and it also is tested on the subtest what rate on your gypsum per acre typically 500 pounds what radon gypsum typically 500 pounds um if you if you can do it more frequently then that's what i would do unfortunately sometimes you just logistically you don't have that option your lime applicators don't want to put down less than a ton most of them don't want to put down less than two tons it's a little bit too much and so because they think oh we're getting calcium with that but it's not a great source of functional calcium so we use calcium carbonate if we want calcium we use gypsum if we want a soil conditioner to help open it up address some of our magnesium issues um and get some sulfur in there so i'm looking at typically 500 pounds is what i would like to see 500 to a thousand pounds is it turned on fall over and spring applied um if i can put it on the fall i'd love to do that sometimes logistics don't allow us to do that so you put it on whatever you can put it on yes other questions yes sir yeah you mentioned you don't like human sludge what about pig manure out of a pit or a lagoon question is about sludge i don't like sludge what about pig manure of a pit what's going into the pigs so i know i'm going to have glyphosate in it because most of the pig operations are using genetically engineered corn so there's going to be glyphosate that's come through in the manure so i know i'm applying some glyphosate through that too what other drugs are in there antibiotics and various things that comes through so i'm dumping that out there as well on my soil and so i am going to have to deal with that in a biological system and then am i getting an accumulation of any any heavy metals i want to look at that may or may not be but i need to look at that and so i need to have it analyzed for all of those kinds of things and then don't bury it do not bury it because i've got an anaerobic product that i bury and i put it down into an anaerobic zone so now i'm going to have anaerobic compounds and formaldehyde is one of those anaerobic compounds that will be formed and so we will see it in the soil we will see it in the soil i don't can you get by with i mean there's there are ways that we can address that but burying it is not the way that we're gonna address it so we're going to have to keep it up higher we're going to have to get it mixed with something else maybe lime maybe as simple as putting some lime with it to help us with that aerate it maybe there's some microorganisms that we can put with it uh when it's going out in order to help us along um with that process there's no there's no free lunch there's no free lunch and what we hear all the time is oh it's very inexpensive npk no it's never inexpensive there's a consequence down the road with that salt is another thing you got to look at too is how much salt is going out with that because they're feeding pig salt so other questions tom did you have another what about gypsum with that paper nerf yeah that's possibility too yeah we'll throw a little juice what about i always heard the turkey manure then had nearly calcium in it that chicken manure has or a layer of manure yeah good question uh calcium in chicken manure versus turkey manure it all depends upon what they're feeding them so you have to kind of look at that and you still have to look at what's the residue what's going through the bird one of the things that of late has been discussed a little bit more in human nutrition is arsenic because they use arsenic in the birds it's an antibiotic in order to increase bird production that arsenic is coming through in the manure and you're dumping that arsenic out on the field another thing what would you in chicken manure or turkey manure what would you put uh some of the products like fish sea crop uh humates you make acid things like that what things would i put with the bird manure i don't want to put things in there that i can lose so i'm very careful about putting worm castings and that kind of stuff with it unless i can absolutely guarantee it's going to stay aerobic so if there's a chance it's going to go anaerobic i'm doing myself a disfavor because now my nice worm castings becomes anaerobic it goes to formaldehyde and other salts that i don't want so humates is a reasonable choice the powdered humates or even humic acid is a reasonable choice to put out there with that because in in that way biologically it's a little bit more inert and if it goes anaerobic for a little while typically i'm not going to have a problem with humates humic acid because it's a chemical product as opposed to a biological product per se in there and i'm going to analyze what do i have in the product and make that decision logistically what can i put with it it's it's nice for me to stand up here and tell you need to put this in and put that in and so on i i've done the put let's put the humates on their thing as you're coated with dust from the humates and so on so um it's a very very fine powder it's very difficult to deal with so you've got to be logistically set up to be able to add those things in and blend them and then apply them and so there's some logistical stuff with that so things that you can easily mix together really what we've got to talk about and they may have to be separate applications so you may have to spread the manure and then come out and spread the gypsum separately on top of that but if you put lime down always have a carbon with it so that's why i like humates to go with that or even molasses or something like that so we don't lose our calcium yes yes probiotics and humans should that be something we should always take uh to offset this yes and no if you happen to have sibo which is small bowel small intestine bacterial overgrowth if you take a probiotic you'll be worse so that doesn't work for you the other thing is is that it's also dose dependent so if i'm going to take a probiotic and i do prescribe probiotics and periodically i'll take them not a lot but periodically well i won't very often because i've had sibo and you get sibo because of long-term use of antibiotics so i grew up on antibiotics basically and so it wipes out your gut and just changes flora so typically minimum of 20 billion colony count three times a day and there is a product out there called probiotic 225 which is 225 billion calorie count it comes in a little packet it's in a box of 15 and we'll have people take one a week so that we actually get therapeutic levels to actually make change in the gut and most of the over-the-counter stuff you go to walmart or whatever and you buy the little over-the-counter one it's two and a half five billion whatever great so it's expensive because it's not going to do much unless you take 10 of them three times a day okay so you've got to have a therapeutic level in order to actually make change the next thing is is that what else are you doing in order for that biology to survive the gut so that has to do with your diet your supplements your water quality all of those things but they can be quite valuable particularly i find just from an easy transient thing let's say you travel to mexico and you pick up montezuma's revenge yeah you're going to need probiotics in order to help reconstitute that gut and help you okay so those kinds of things yeah food poisoning absolutely you need to get the good probiotics back in there but you got to have the therapeutic dose at least 30 billion three times a day to make that change we have the effects of glyphosate you know we quit using glyphosate today on our farm how many years are we still going to feel the effects of that and then same form if you changed your diet you know on that and didn't eat foods how long does that mean good question of how long are we going to have the glyphosate residue in the soil well the danes yep the danish study said 22 and a half years is the half-life of glyphosate we don't know we just do not know and because so much of it is continuing to be used in the human body like i said my wife and i are pretty much organic she's really a nazi when it comes to that as far as making that selection and yet her urinalysis showed she was dumping a fair amount of glyphosate so where are we getting it i'd like to know we don't eat 100 organic because that's simply not available so are we getting it from well we know we're getting it from grains some grains particularly eat out at a restaurant they're not organic it's in the grains everything grown in canada has glyphosate on it because they use it as a desiccant before harvest so every grain grown in in canada unless it's organic has glyphosate on it but we're also getting drift it's in the rain water u.s geological survey i've shown that it's in the rain water and so it's in a lot of wells and what are we going to do about that so the bottom line is is that i can't answer that question i don't know how long we're going to be dealing with it what are we going to do about it really is the bigger issue which means nutrition is a key thing so like that issue there we've got to be more aggressive with our manganese and our zinc foliar sprays in order to counter this that's what we have to do we have to look at the patient in other words we have to look at the crop not the tissue analysis because if you're starting to get tar spot you're oxidizing that manganese i've got to get manganese out there period and that's the only way i'm going to counter that process once i already have it now i've got to prevent it by getting my biology in there getting enough carbon and so on to tie up the glyphosate and or to gradually start getting it broken down over time how long does that take i don't know i don't know we don't know because we still see it it's in the rain water so we know that we can compensate for it in our foliar sprays we also know that organic farms that may have been organic for 10 years they're still there so we have to compensate for that and it it is just the reality we have to compensate for it and so that means in all of our analyses we have to take it into consideration and to just bump things up a little bit and make sure hey i'm going to make sure i'm covering this manganese now could i get manganese toxicity sure you can get toxicity of anything so i have to just be aware of that as well and that's why it's so important get out into the field and we actually have to be looking at things that's why we're doing the sap testing um in addition our as opposed to the tissue testing now there's a few guys that are really good at tissue testing michael mcneil's one don huber's one another one well they can read a tissue test and their their numbers are all different than what the recommendations are but that comes with don's in his 80s and michael's in his 70s you know it comes with 40 plus years of school of hard knocks and you got to remember those guys came up before they had all this fancy equipment as well so they actually had to learn from practical exchange with those things so diet is a real important thing so you have to minimize exposure as much as possible so that means we avoid the gmo stuff as much as possible and then one we gotta have clean water and so that we're not adding it in the water itself and unfortunately a lot of people are drinking tap water they're drinking well water they're drinking city water all of those are contaminated and so you got to get get an ro system in the house we have one in our house we have an ro system that we don't drink anything but ro water in the house we don't cook with anything but our water and so you have to do those things that you can do and not worry about it after that reverse osmosis so basically it is a very fine filtration system that is going to depending upon how much money you spend for the filters can take things all the way down to taking chemicals out of the water so it'll take iron out it'll take any any of those things so we put that under the um i think ours was i don't know a thousand dollars or something like that so it's under the sink separate system comes to that and then there's a little spout that comes out next to our regular water spout which is what we use and we thought we needed to drink all the individuals well perhaps if we were a thousand years ago maybe so but we're not there now and the minerals now been contaminated a lot of them are unbalanced there's chemicals in the water that we don't need so i'd rather start with clean water and get those nutrients in there through the food i eat and through the supplementation that i take in okay yes real quick all right 80 20 rule so got your crop above ground couple ears off from there of course our roots and we have our son over here so if you do a mineral analysis on your corn and we had a couple of them back there what total percentage ash do you typically find total percentage of ash less than ten percent typically yes ash content four and a half five percent somewhere somewhere in that range yes don't know typically that's what you're going to have all right what's ash mineral ash is mineral okay so if we have 100 pounds of crop that comes off let's say that i just erased this whole thing there that 100 pounds of crop came off okay there should be an equal amount of crop volume below ground in the root system now the problem with a lot of modern agriculture we have so messed up the soil we don't have a real good root structure so we may not have an equal amount there but we should have we should have an equal volume below ground as we have above ground so we should have a hundred pounds of residue that actually stayed there that's if we took everything off out here now if you're just harvesting corn and beans you're not taking 100 of everything off you're getting some residue back in there but let's say we got 100 pounds there okay where did that 100 pounds come from so what do we get from the air co2 and sunlight yes so co2 in sunlight and what does that turn into sugar and that sugar then turns into what fats starch or sugars amino acids organic acids yes huh all of it comes from sugar what's that sugar come from oh there's one other thing here water water and co2 right water and co2 and sunlight so typically eighty percent is going to come from the air of that hundred pounds twenty percent is going to come from the soil see oh well that's just not possible well if we do an ash analysis of this how much mineral do we find than 10 so if that is because well how much moisture is in it typically in our whole crop just about eighty percent moisture correct a lot of it is water but in order to form sugar sugar is what's going to form all of these other things for us and that sugar comes dominantly from carbon dioxide with a little bit of moisture and you can do the you can do the molecular numbers on how much that actually weighs but the bottom line is is that it comes from sugar dominantly that sugar is coming from carbon dioxide and oxygen but carbon dioxide is the heaviest in sunlight and so i take a hundred pounds off eighty percent of that hundred pounds came from the air essentially and twenty 20 of it came from the soil so what that means is that of that 100 pounds 20 pounds of it came from the soil so that means i've got 80 pounds came from the air that i'm taking off so i didn't extract anything what i extracted was 20 pounds from the soil out of that hundred that i removed but i also have a hundred pounds that was generated in the soil 80 of which came from the air so if 80 of it came from the air minus my 20 that leaves me still with 60 pounds net so every year that you farm this is obviously if you're at 100 efficiency so that's our goal is to move in that direction so every year that you farm you're only taking 20 off so we're going to subtract that 20 from here plus excuse me we've got to oh i already subtracted the other uh 20 from there so we should still be getting a net of 60 pounds added to the soil every single year of carbonaceous material because that's where it came from origins carbonaceous material however our soils have lost carbon over time soils getting weaker and weaker over time and we have to hammer them harder and harder in order to get production out of it so as we start turning around we start getting more and more efficient which means this air this photosynthesis efficiency begins to improve even further and so we get closer and closer and closer to that full 80 percent coming off from the air because of sunlight carbon dioxide and moisture and we get a lot of moisture from the air do we not it's called do so we can utilize a significant amount of that dew provided we have a magnet in order to take care of that now how does this system operate well it's all about physics and the reality is is that we have actually an electrical system we have an alternating electrical system it's called night and day and that electrical system as well having to do with the electromagnetic field of the earth courses across north south so on the surface of the earth you have an electromagnetic field running this direction and we have plants that run perpendicular to that so what happens you have a magnetic field and perpendicular to all magnetic fields is what an electrical field if you look at how a generator operates or an electric motor you set up an electric field 90 degrees to that is a magnetic field so if you set up a magnetic field 90 degrees to that is an electric field why is that important because this is all about physics the movement of nutrients back and forth in the cell in the plant is about exchange of electrical charge it's about exchange and electrical charge positive and negative positive and negative back and forth all the time and so what we find and phil callahan actually did this work originally he was interested in the megalithic tombs and around towers of ireland and unfortunately i was able to take two trips with him and uh back in the 80s and do some of that research with him and he was looking at it from a health perspective and why the round towers are built the way they're built and what they're made of and so on and so forth and he came up with what's called magnetic well he didn't come up with it but applied what's called magnetic susceptibility magnetic susceptibility and what you have is you have ferro magnetism you have paramagnetism you have diamagnetism and what that means is is that it has to do with what does that item how does that item respond to a magnetic field in other words a magnet so if you take a selenium cobalt magnet and you suspend it from a string and i take a ferromagnetic material like a standard nail what will that nail do with that magnet suspended from a string it'll bring that magnet to it will it not or vice versa i hold the magnet and suspend the nail from the string boom it'll come right to it right what happens if i take a wire and wrap around that nail and hook that to a battery what's happened to that nail now i have an electromagnet i can then pick up other nails with that electromagnet so that ferromagnetic material a nail is magnetizable okay and it will come to a magnet a paramagnetic material will do the same healthy soil is highly paramagnetic in other words if i take a chunk of that soil and i suspend this selenium cobalt magnet why it's selenium cobalt magnet because it's a high gauss it's small and i can demonstrate it on a string it will be attracted to that soil particle or that rock mineral particle if i have that okay however let's say that i come up and make you a paramagnetic basalt is oftentimes paramagnetic so let me make a nail out of that paramagnetic material so i'm going to wrap a wire around it again and hook that to a magnet what happens nothing it does not become magnetized it will not it is not magnetizable because it is not ferromagnetic ferromagnetic means full of iron typically so even though it is attracted to the magnet i can't magnetize it next is a diamagnetic material it's the opposite so in other words if i have that and i bring the magnet closer to it it'll repel it'll push away from the magnet okay and it is also not magnetizable so what does that have to do with plants healthy soil the healthier the soil becomes the more paramagnetic it becomes the healthier the plant the more diamagnetic it becomes so i'm putting opposite charges in there so what happens when you put opposite charges fireworks things happen growth change what we see as we farm conventionally these soils over time become more and more and more neutral they become less paramagnetic so less paramagnetic that means we have less differential so if you know anything about a battery what does charging a battery mean you cause a significant differential between the positive and the negative plates yes isn't that what it means if i charge up a tractor battery and when it is decharged or uncharged or discharged what does that mean they're neutral they've equalized the opposite sides of the plates positive and negative now have neutralized so i have no net exchange in electricity in in electrons so i have no movement okay so what do i have to do in order to charge that battery i have to cause a differential and the greater the differential the more discharge more power i get from that battery potentially okay it's the same thing with a plant so the greater differential i have between a paramagnetic soil and a diamagnetic plant the greater amount of fireworks the greater amount of energy exchange the greater amount of crop growth when you're when you look at things with this thought process is this why the some of the fully recognized [Music] yes his question was is this why sometimes we'll see that a foliar works great we've balanced nutrients a little bit better and it really takes off on others it doesn't yeah i mean the the greater differential you have again the greater potential you have for energy exchange it's just a battery that's all it is and so how do we improve that foliar sprays is one of the ways that we improve that there are three ways to increase paramagnetism paramagnetism in the soil three ways number one you add paramagnetic rock that's a little expensive particularly you know you're farming 10 000 acres you need to put on 10 ton per acre of paramagnetic rock um you probably won't be farming very much afterwards because you'll be bankrupt all right but that is one way of doing it how why did i say 10 tons because the work done by borel out of australia that was the sweet spot in maximizing paramagnetism in the soil because they looked at various different dosages all the way up to 20 tons they did these are greenhouse studies that they did and what they found out 10 tons was the sweet spot that's where you maximize the curve after that you didn't increase the curve any so so 10 tons i mean you put 500 pounds on you're getting some benefit but logistically speaking we can't be moving all of our mountains to our prairie lands it's just it's not logistically practical but we still can use some of those minerals in small doses um in a practical basis so one we can add the mineral okay and you definitely could do that in a garden you can definitely do that in a greenhouse you can definitely do that with potted plants in in small location no question about it you can do that you can afford that number two oxygen oxygen is one of the most paramagnetic elements you'll find well don't we want to make this more aerobic we're going to open this up aerate it don't we talk about aeration in the soil so our aeration in the soil helps to increase paramagnetism in the soil all right and number three biology it's structure microorganisms structure the soil and structure increases magnetic susceptibility because you set up an antenna basically so we can change this by getting the microorganisms in there and getting the nutrient in there through the plants we can change that so now when you want to talk about genetic potential it's understanding how this battery operates and what do i need to do in order to get that battery to maximize its functionality and then simply increase the battery itself over time okay well i certainly appreciate the opportunity to be here to speak with you and the interesting thing is i i have been around the world i've seen farms in all walks of life and things and and i want to make sure i say this to every farmer that i see you hold in your hand in your hands the well-being of your fellow human beings you do you truly do i don't care what you grow your farmers you hold in your hands the well-being of your fellow human beings that is a tremendous mission whether you believe it spiritually or not that is a tremendous mission it is also a great honor to be that important to your fellow human beings and so i thank you for what you do because you wouldn't be here today if you weren't at least interested in improving the lot of your farms and your farms are part of a community which is part of a country and part of a a planet so thank you as well for all that you do and if i can be of further service just ask so thank you very much thank you