Okay, so we have four webinars in our three steps to rapid solar generation webinar series. And today's Webinar three. And we've got a real special guest today. Adam York of York Family Farms is going to be talking about his work that he's done in his farm transition, 10,000 acres plus also working on all the neighborhood farms and expanding that business. And then we have a webinar four coming up, which is going to be meet the soil region pros. And so that's going to be this Saturday. And it's going to be a number of consultants. People are actually out there doing the work. And it's a good opportunity for you to ask questions about what we are actually doing to further the Soul Food Web approach and converting a large scale farming into the Soul Food Web. Okay, let's go ahead and continue on. So the topics for today. We'll just do a quick introduction with the speakers, the panels that we have today. And then we're going to do an audience poll. We always like to hear a question for you folks to be able to answer. We'll take 30 seconds for you to do that. And then part one of our webinar today is going to be talking with farmer Adam York and the work that he's been doing. And then we'll do a quick Q and A after that. So if you have questions, you'll hit the Q and A button down below. And I'll have a screen and describe some instructions for that in just a second. And then we'll get into the promotion that we're going on, which is about the Soul Food Web training program and the offer that we've got. And then part two is going to be Adam York and also Todd Harrington, who Todd was working with Adam to make all this transition work. So they'll talk about some of the good work that they're doing, and then we'll finish that with a Q and A session. And so, again, if you got questions, go to the Q and A section. And we expect that today's webinar to be about 120 minutes or 2 hours. Okay. For the panels today, we've got doctor lining. Of course, he couldn't do this work without her. So this is fantastic to have a lien with us. And then, like I mentioned, out of York. So he's got York Farms, and so he's farming. He's also not educating other farmers about the Sofa Web approach and consulting on those large scale farms. We got Todd Harrington, part of Harrington's Organic Land Care. He's a Sofa Web consultant. We've got Dr. Adam Cobb, which is a Sofa Web school science. Communicator. So he's helping us do a lot of the outreach in our Sofa Web school. We got Dr. Adrian Gotchax, who's a Sofa school science mentor. So helping train the new crop of consultants and lab practitioners that we have out there. And then myself, I own a company called Founding Soil and I'm a web consultant. All right, next slide. So here's a quick poll. And again, we'll keep it up for about a minute or two. And you should see that poll launching into your screens now. All right. That poll will be up until you answer it in the background. So, Adrian, we can move on to the next slide, please. Okay. I talked about Q and A. So we'd like to have this dynamic feedback. We want to hear questions from you to be able to have a discussion amongst the panelists. So at the bottom of your Zoom screen, you're going to see a Q and A. Your question will be recorded, and then I'll be going through and selecting questions. We won't be able to answer every question that's out there. But if you can, we will try to answer when they're going to kind of fit for the theme for today. And please put your questions in the Q and A. If you put them in chat, they may not get. So if you do have a question you want panelists to ask, the Q amp A section is the right area to go. Okay. So part one, we're going to be talking with Adam York. So, Adam, go ahead and take it away. Okay. Here we go then. Yes. Sound great? Okay. All right. So hello, everybody. My name is Adam York. We run a multi generational family farm from Jacksonville, Illinois. My farm alongside my brother, my two cousins, which are in my uncle. So we grow soybeans corn and we farm ourselves a little over 10,000 acres, probably a little closer to 11,000 now. And then we do help some other farmers and locally in the area service some of their farms as well. Excellent. Okay. So part of our transition, it's been an interesting journey, but we have gotten rid of we don't use any DAP fertilizer, any hot ash. We do not use any liquid insecticides and Hydro pneumonia. We don't use sea treatments on our soybeans. Some of the corn around our area is still hard to get. Some of the sea treatments, not without them. We do not use roundup anymore. We use some different chemicals, more of a non GMO type chemicals. We've gotten away from liquid starters and we have switched still a good chunk of our grains from GMO. We used to be 100% GMO soy and GMO corn. And we had switched probably about 95% over to non GMO. I would switch at all. The problem is with some of the dicamba around some of our fields are bordering some of our neighbors too closely, and they do seem to smoke some of our stuff. And we've gotten away from aggressive tillage. I do believe tillage is important. If you do need it, if you don't, that's one thing that depends on the soil. But we have went to more of a vertical tillage type tillage system to plant cover crops. And if you do need some sort of tillage. We went more towards an inline Ripper, but here in the last couple of years, we have not really done any tillage whatsoever other than a little bit of vertical tillage. So a lot of our results, we have noticed that when we first started this journey, our soils were very degraded, more or less. It's pretty easy to see. So we're seeing a lot of improvement there. I couldn't find an earthworm to save our lives. We were spending way too much money on fertilizer and just the inconsistency was from year to year was just not there for us. And like I said, we knew we could need to change but didn't know what direction to go in and that's kind of how the journey started. Great. Next slide. Okay, so this is kind of where it gets kind of fun. In 2012, had a good friend of mine, he actually used to be a seat salesman and known him for a long time and he was kind of going down a little different route. I never did buy seed from him before, but I knew who he was and anyways, he came by the farm and was trying to sell the jug liquid biological product. And I didn't know a thing about biology at this point in time. And I think a lot of farmers out there know what, a lot of these salesmen, especially they come out of the woodwork, especially when prices are high or whatever, trying to sell you anything and everything under the sun and pretty much said, yeah, you're selling snake oil. We took a bet and more or less he's like, alright, guys, if it doesn't work, I'm never, ever going to come back to your farm. It's like deal one less salesman we got to deal with. So we tried on some small stuff that was actually a drought year for us, but we do have some irrigation and even where it was drought prone versus under irrigation, these trials paid. We had cut the fertilizer there and did some with no fertilizer or cut rates of fertilizer and these trials paid, but like I said, we didn't know why and that is pretty much it boggled my mind and I just had to figure it out. So at that point in time, we were working with Agronomists and we were doing, I mean, I don't even know, £300 of gap in some places, up to £400 of potato. I mean, we were throwing a lot of money away. So I hired Brad Holbrock, which was Agronomist. He worked for a C company. I've known him for a long time, probably since like 2001. I have known him and he kind of has the same goals as what I had. So we started working together. I think he actually went on his own when we hired him as an Agronomist in 2012, but we wanted to know why. And this is pretty much where our self education began. So let's see here. So fast forward a little bit or 20 13, 14, we did more trials. Okay. We were still working with the same company. We were doing food sources with the biology. We continue to decrease the use of dry fertilizers. That was one of the main things. When Brad came on. We were variable rating, we were doing a few things but we were not throwing the type of money that we were in 2012. And like I said, we started educating ourselves. I think to this day it's still very important to do that, surround yourself with good people. And in 2015 we cut out all fertilizer Dappas and then we started making compost tea. Todd says we weren't making very good compost tea then, but it still was working. I think that just tells you how degraded our soils were. That even the stuff that we were making. Even though Todd says it wasn't very good, it still was showing some benefit. And in 2016, my partner in Agribyo systems now and my grants. At the time, Brad contacted Dr. Lane Ingham because we just had some answers that we needed answered and we didn't know who else to call except for Ms. Elaine. So she pointed in the direction of Todd Harrington. And that is about the time that we all started working together with Todd. Todd started helping us with improving our extracts, making our own vermicompost. And so the part of our transition to reach in Ad. So what we've actually been seeing on our farm today versus back before we started this is we are getting a very healthy population of earthworms in our soil, more aggregate structure. When we first started this, we had no aggregate structure or any earthworms whatsoever. We were fighting water hemp, a lot of other horrible weeds around our area that farmers still around this area that are still in the conventional methods are still fighting. We've improved our soil structure. We've gotten rid of some. We've had some soil compaction layers due to high magnesium levels that we have improved those, which is in turn improved our water holding capacity. We do farm in Illinois River bottoms where we do have some irrigation, where we have some sand, some gumbos, a lot of different types of soil. We have decreased a lot of our irrigation needs which is very time consuming sometimes. And we've also backed off our nitrogen use by probably about 60 to £100 depending on the soil, depending on the situation. And then also we have increased our bricks levels and our lands. So like I said here, the big picture benefits is lower input cost, which is especially in today's world, guys, where fertilizer is really expensive, it's a big deal. Even when we all thought that they were somewhat affordable, it was still a big deal. Yields have improved and we are more self sufficient as a farm compared to a lot of other farms that are very dependent on what the next guy is going to try to sell them. So challenges, this is always fun. So no matter any type of change that you're planning on making, you are going to occur. Some challenges. We have a hard time sometimes depending on how harvest goes and on what rainfall is getting some covers planted timely, where we planted some corn and some covers. We've had some tough learning curves there. We've cut back on herbicides. One of the main things is we've gotten away from roundup, but we have not still completely gotten away from it. I would love to, but we are working on cutting them back and we have been doing so. And probably I think at first it's not maybe going to this method for us is not pushing the easy button like some conventional farming is. So maybe initially it's a little more time consuming. But I think over time I think you're actually going to have more time. And another challenge is everybody wants to fix soils obviously, as quickly as possible, and that depending on everybody's situation is a little bit different. And that is challenging. We have a saying that pretty much we say we didn't screw these soils up in one year. We're not going to fix them in one year. So it's going to take a little bit of time, but you're on the right path. Okay. All right. Where do we save money? So when we first started this, we talked about budget cuts. Depends on what you do with that money. Right. So we were probably saving right out the gate, probably anywhere between $100 to $150 per acre. Some of that cost is obviously less pillage lower on your fuel cost. A big one. A real big one. A lot of guys know is going from GMO to non GMO seed. I know a bag of corn for us. If you want to get it all at the big GMO seed, it's going to be 300 and $2350 a bag where you can get a non GMO bag of corn for 150 to 170, depending on your area. That's a big difference. And also we've cut out all seat treatment. There's a lot of people that are making a lot of money and spend a lot of money on seed treatments. There's some people that are spending all the way up to $30 to $40 on a bag of beans, where normally a bag of beans cost you $30 to $40. We've cut out majority of our fungicide costs. I think as long as you're keeping your bricks levels up and you're doing some of the right things and Mother Nature's cooperating with you, she hasn't for us for the last couple of years been a little tough on that side. But that is another cost that you can cut out if you can and you can also, like I talked earlier, you can cut out between six or we cut out between 61 hundred units of nitrogen. And we're still at that point in time where we're at. I mean, my goal is still to try to produce 250 to 300 bushels of corn. And at this point in time, we're doing it right now, somewhere around that between 100 and £140, £150 of nitrogen, depending on the soil. So we have no potash or DAP cost. We do not use any dry fertilizer and then we do not use any insecticide. We've cut all those out. So this approach pretty much frees up the budget to spend money on things that the crop and the soil needs, whether that's biology or other fertilizers, maybe like a boron or molybdenum, certain things like that. And we decided a lot of that versus on, we do a lot of SAP testing. So that's how we kind of come up with what other nutrients are we missing as well? So the creation of Agrobio Systems has been kind of an interesting one. So when Brad and I started going down this road, we had really no ambitions to start a company. But the reason why we did start Agribus Systems was because we were doing this on our own farms and it kind of sparked the interest of a few other farmers around our area. They're like, hey, that sounds like something that we'd be interested in. So we ended up going out on lamb and saying, if there's people out there kind of looking in the same direction as we are, I think maybe we can help them. We can obviously help ourselves and kind of learn this deal together. So at this point in time, we do have eight full time employees, 50, some clients, probably a little bit more than that, some are more locally, some are scattered across the United States. And yeah, we probably work on 100,000 acres or so, give or take farms that are all the way up to 11,000 acres to farms that are 8000 to 9000 farms that are five to ten. One of the things that we do at Agribyal Systems is we do try to help educate growers and the main reason is because we're not trying to tell guys what to do. But if we can help educate guys on why certain things that maybe we promote are important, it does help make that transition a little bit easier. Like I said, a couple of things we like to ask them is, what are your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? There's a lot of farmers around home. Sometimes they're just trying to get from one year to the next year. For me, I have three boys, my brother has four boys. This is about trying to leave. For me, it's about trying to leave the soil better than when I found it. So my children don't have to go through possibly some of the challenges that I've had to. And we asked growers, what are their challenges? Everybody in agriculture has certain things that are challenges and they're tough. I'm a farmer. I understand it. So it's something that we kind of help guys try to work on some of their challenges. Another thing, trying to put a vision in front of some of our growers. Where do you want to be in five to ten years and how are you going to get there? And that's kind of where we come in and try to help that self education is key. The more educated the grower is with good science and information, the easier it is to help them grow and be successful. We can't continue to degrade soils year after year and expect the same results or better results from year to year. This slide really resonates with me because one of the challenges of being a consultant out in the field is the education part of it. There's a lot of people who are kind of hearing through the Zeitgeist, hey, farming with biology approach, but be able to really internalize that and change that operation. The educational hurdles when the things we first got to tackle. So I'm glad to see that was something that you focused in on and are focusing on with your other clients, too. Yeah, I would agree. I think we're at the Q and A section. Our first Q and A. Adrian, can you share the slide with the first question, or are you still kind of putting that together and it might be a mute, sir. Adrian. There we go. All right. All right. Perfect. So, Adam, we got a question directed right towards you. You mentioned vertical tillage. Could you explain what you mean by that? That's a question from Joanne. Yeah. So for us, we use a Krause Accelerator 8005. I do believe the number on it, and more or less, it's got some notched blades that are going straight. They're not the cup like the old discs. It's a notch curve, not curve. They're notched straight blades. And they just kind of like telling the soil about inch and a half, two inches. You can set it depending on what you're trying to accomplish. But on our accelerator, we have a heating unit on that as well. And that's how we feed our cover crops with that, just to kind of help incorporate them in the top inch to two inches of the soil. It's what works for us. There's people that do some notill, and it's been successful with that as well. This is what's worked for us. But that's a piece of equipment that we use currently. And would you say that it minimizes the amount of disturbance in the sale compared to other tilling techniques that you use in the past, correct. A lot less disturbance, for sure, right? Yeah. And that's all we're trying to you know, if we're trying to build aggregate structure, we don't want to tear it down. It's kind of like building a house. So I don't want to have to build a house every year. I don't want to tear it down every year. Right. Yeah. Fantastic panelists. Any other comments you guys want to make to that question about vertical tillage? No. All right. Let's move on to question number two, and this one's from Cecilia. And the question is, what about pesticide use? Did you reduce fungicide bacteria side use as well? And I mean, that could go to nematocytes and and all those other kind of sides would say you Adam about that. Yeah. So we don't use any sides at all unless we do use a funeral side here and there if we have to. But otherwise we don't use any of the sides. So we do use well, other than pesticide, I guess. But where we went with pesticides is when we went to non GMO, we just went more to a non GMO chemical program we have incorporated. There's a lot of really good research out there. I still have a little bit of work for this to do myself, but there is a lot of research out there that guys are using folk acid, which we do use, fulfic acid, helping to reduce their rates of pesticides. There's a lot of good work out there. That's something that we're still working on. We have cut our pesticide rates. We have not cut them in half, but we have cut them down as much as another 25% and had really good luck with it. And I think this year we're going to hopefully be able to do more than that. We just got to get to the point where we're feeling a lot more comfortable with that and we have to do trials and just got to figure out where your comfort level and what you can and what you can't do so you don't fail. And that's kind of where we're at with it at this time. Would you say year over year, you think you're just on a sliding scale reducing the amount of pesticide use? Your pest pressure is just becoming less and less and less? Yeah, that is correct. I think some of the exciting things about pest control is the biological side of the house is we need to get better understanding about the life cycle of the pests we're dealing with and trying to attack those life cycles with biological applications and things like that. And I know that there's a lot more sites that's happening in that realm. But I agree with you. I think pesticides use you can reduce and then eventually just phase out. Yes. And that's cool. I mean, it's hard to just completely transition and just go cold Turkey. I've heard a lot of people doing that. I think that can be somewhat of a failure right out the gate. So you just kind of have to go and kind of cut but also test it, too. Say, hey, I'm going to go take a trip here and I'm not going to use any pesticide and see where I'm at or do halfway and see where I'm at there. And you don't have to do it on big scales, but do it on somewhat of a scale that you can actually prove to yourself it's no different with nitrogen. Prove yourself that, hey, if I'm scared to cut nitrogen or whatever, just take a little bit and try it. And that's the only way you're going to prove to yourself that I'm ready for this or I'm not ready. But play around with different rates, and that helps you learn, in my opinion. Well, the tricky balance regarding, I think you mentioned diagnostic tools. Go ahead, Adrian. Oh, no, that's fine. The tricky balance there is that once you start to build up this beautiful habitat in your soil and your plant communities, you're drawing in these insect predator communities that if there's any kind of pesticide residues on that, then you're cutting your legs out from under you when you could be using that workforce and community support to help just solve the rest of the problem. So at a certain point, it is like a leap of faith or the opposite. Right. You bring them in and you kill them. Then you're killing the predators in your area with your pesticides that you're afraid to let go of, like fill those houses again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I really like that you brought that up, Adrian. You can tell that we're two ecologists in the room, because I love anything related to this kind of discussion so much. I heard a talk by our local Zera society that focuses on especially native pollinators and other beneficial insects. And most States have an active Xero society. If you're in the US, there's probably an equivalent group in most international contexts that can help you determine if you have like most farms have little areas that are not economic for actually row cropping. And so if you can start to establish the kinds of native plants that draw in the native predator insect populations and give them places to overwinter or floral resources like nectars that are specific to them, then I've observed with my own eyes in home gardening that certain flowers will bring in, like parasitic Wasps that destroy all the aphids that get on your cabbage. Right. Because they're laying eggs inside every aphid. And then you can just see they call the mummies the dead aphids. After a while, they look like little puffed rice. Yeah. It's really gross, but it's better than eating your cabbage. Right. So what I've seen is when people make the mental transition to thinking about optimizing, especially the nutrient inputs on their operations and making that what Adam referred to is sort of like an investment strategy rather than a kill it deal with the buyer strategy, then it frees up a little bit of time and resource and energy to think. Well, I've got that area over there by the Creek. I can't crop, but maybe I could establish some beneficial native plants there and then that just builds over time. You see this, like virtuous cycle going on with the ecology of farms? Yes. I also think it's probably really important to be keeping track of what the biology is in your soil. Have you gotten the organisms up to the point where they can control, where they've got enough effect on the pest and disease problems that you have the workforce to take care of the problems? If you've just gotten barely started getting your bacterium, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, microordepods up to the right place, if you haven't gotten there yet, you can't be expecting that these organisms are going to take care of all of your problems right away. If we can get all of that biology back into the soil, we see that we can do this in a year. But if for one reason or another, it takes a while to get those microorganisms established, well, then go at it more slowly. Go with reducing your nitrogen by X amount, by putting on fulvic acid. So you'll have some of the pesticide and fungicide effects of those materials feeding the organisms, getting rid of your problems, little by little, it will increase. So it's kind of up to you as growers up to us to encourage our clients to be moving along back sequence as rapidly as possible. I kept on something that Adam had mentioned, too, that it's not like we have to make it a guessing game. There's a lot of diagnostic tools to help you make decisions about this. Plant. Sap analysis, tissue analysis, chemistry, microbiology assessments, all that data exactly helps you build this picture, saying, okay, here's what's happening and here's what we need to do, and you can be very smart and specific and prescribed about what you're trying to do versus just a guessing game. All right, our next question is related. So I thought I popped this up here. Perfect. I love this question. So, Anya, I think this is a fantastic question. Groups and people that work in regenerate often claim to work with biology, but use compost tea blindly without checking the biology in the microscope or even seem to understand what it is, calling it a fluid fertilizer. I know that Regent AG is an open field, but it is frustrating seeing the lack of precision when using compost heat. How do you handle the wide tent that this field of agriculture is open to? And boy, Lane, I think this question is geared right to you because your work has been focused really on this question, right? Yeah. Where you have to be finding out what those sets of organisms are in your soil. So where are you starting from? What's missing? How much of it are you missing? And then how are you going to get those organisms established in your soil? So how rapidly can you convert your dirt back into soil? And I think we've just got to remain steadfast, reminding people that they do have to know what they're doing. You're not going to just throw a fire bomb on something and cross your fingers and hope that it's going to come out with the right kinds of microorganisms left in the soil, because most certainly it is not. You need to be measuring. How can we manage if we can't measure? And that's what the biology, the microscope work, the biology in the soil is all about. You need to be measuring the organisms. Do you have what you need? And then remember that it's not just looking at your soil as if it's one way of existing because soil is constantly trying to improve itself. A disturbance comes along, you're going to go backwards, and then you get to restart fixing the problem again. And if you disturb before the biology is established, you're going to go backwards. So how many times do you have to do the back and forth game until you understand you need to be keeping an eye out on your microorganisms? You don't have to be really seriously pinpoint in your answer. We don't need replaced decimal precision, and we can do more of a qualitative test. You yourself could be looking at your soil once a week, and it's going to take you 20 minutes to get an idea of whether this field has a decent level of organisms or not. So the reliance on quantitative analysis is important several times during the growing season, but in between you can be taken really quick and easy to do assessments. Just having come and worked with us for going through the foundation courses, for example, the fourth foundation classes, teaching you how to use a simple microscope and getting qualitative comparisons of here's where we started, we've increased it by a factor of two. We need to increase it by a factor of ten. So you just keep working for that goal, knowing that you'll get there as rapidly as possible. Hopefully. Hey Elaine, I have a quick question. Brian, can I ask Lane a quick question regarding this? Sure. Yeah. So a lot of clients are doing this applying these compostes kind of randomly without testing at least direct microscope plate counts. And yet they're having companies come in doing pretty expensive tests, doing the PLFAs and the DNA testing, and so they're getting all the different species and doing these expensive tests, but yet they're not doing direct plate accounts with their biology, their compost, and their extract. Well, you don't ever want to waste your money on plate counts. That's the most meaningless thing that you can do, thinking that you're learning something about the organisms in your soil. 99% of the organisms that are in your soil cannot and will not grow on plate cultures in the laboratory. They just sorry, it's a waste of your time and money. Pflas were showing that that has nothing to do with the biomass of the bacterium fungi most fungi don't make the PLFAs, the phospholipid fatty acids. They just don't make the simple, easy to determine TFLA. So you're not getting an estimate of that fungal biomass. You're not getting an estimate of the protozoa or the nematodes, good or bad. So again, it's another waste of your time. Now, microscope work. Yeah, that's what we want to be doing. People don't realize that folks that have gone through the courses being able to do the microscope work is really important when you're doing this, looking at the extracts and the active, and that's something that Adam's done a great job with. We've got them. They've got a microscope, and they're always looking at their stuff. Always. Yes. And that gives you an idea of whether you're moving things in the right direction. Why keep putting on something that's actually making you go backwards. And if you don't make your compost T correctly, you can push the biology backwards into a worse condition where you're going to be promoting diseases and tests. So you want to make certain if you're going to take the time to make a compost tea, let's take the 20 minutes to look at what's in there. And is it going to improve your soil or not? If the answer is not, go put it someplace else where you still have a problem. Adrian, even once we have a good compost heat, thinking about the things the other practical elements like you're describing, Adam, thinking about how you navigate your field and work with your practices to make sure to support the biology that you get out there, you have to reassess and make sure they're actually establishing and make sure like you're saying the aside, you try to keep as many of those asides out of there. I like to say let's leave the asides aside. That's the truth. We bought a crimper a couple of years ago, and our plan is we're going to try to transition a couple of hundred acres over and rolling cramp. There's a lot of organic guys that are doing a lot of tillage, whatever. My plan is to maybe do some more cover crops, crimp it, plant a crop into it, and kind of go that transition to get away from insects, pesticides. At the end of the day, I didn't encourage you to look into short, low growing ground covers instead of something that you got to roll and crimp, because I can never get out there at the right time to roll and crimp and get the result that I want. My life is too complex. It's like you look out there and you go, darn, I should be out there rolling and crimping, and I could take care of the problem, but I'm not going to be back home until next Sunday. I agree. I think some low line covers would be yes. So we have a whole list of things that we've been working with, and people are starting to show which ones are the best for their kind of land dykondrapins, which is the temperate, not the tropical dicondra. That is a weed. You want to make sure you get the right kind of diconra. And because you have wet Springs, the dicodra is going to grow, get established, take over, but they never grow more than maybe three to five inches, and that's it. So they're self seeding. When they make seed, they maintain themselves over the years. Well, you want more diversity than that. So throw about 20 different plant seeds out there and get them established and they'll share the space and they'll give you lots of benefits. So try a small area this growing season, perhaps with a bigger mix of ground covers. This is a really interesting area of ours to discuss, and I'd love to also engage, Todd and Adam and hear all of your thoughts about the goal here is just to keep those roots healthy and in the ground. Right. And to keep our crops supplied with healthy, structured soil and protect that soil surface. So I'd love to hear more about for both of you, how you've been able to do that practically out there. Keep going. Nutrients coming. Yeah. Cover crop technology is really advanced looking at even the exudates. Right, Elaine, the different exudes that are being produced by these different cover crops, how they benefit the biology and also the intended crop. I know, Adam, there was one of your fields that got flooded. You planted a lot of sorghum. And I remember looking at the biology and we were lacking something. I don't know if it was protozoa or what, but after a season of putting that in, it really brought the biology back around. We were seeing a lot of beneficial nematodes in it after just that one year with the covers helping with that. That was a flooded soil, that's the soil got really flooded. You can grow anything. I don't think on that. That's amazing. Todd, you need to be talking with Adrian because she's a chemical ecologist, so she knows all of those. What are the waste products? What are the secondary metabolites? What are the tertiary metabolites? And Adrian gets talking to me about that, and I kind of like, okay, I've had enough. I need to go digest for the next two weeks. Let's have another conversation. Smiling. But it goes back to the original topic, Brian. When we were talking about the reason and the need to do the actual microscope work, we wouldn't have known this unless we took samples and looked at it. But everything that Adam does, he always goes under the scope, you know, and that's really played out really well going forward on making decisions for sure. It's interesting when I look at the regenerative AG space, what we're doing, like at the Sofa approach, it is an emerging market. The sites have been around for quite some time. But to really start to transition large scale it is really starting to gain momentum and starting to change. And with that, I am seeing a tremendous amount of new products coming on the market that are claimed to be biological. And it's really hard for me and my growers because I get constantly inundated. What about this product? The salesman sell me this? What about that? What about this? And I have a feeling the market is going to be in that little bit of a potential, some snake oil salesman kind of stuff out that you have to really pay attention to. What we've been trying to do is really just set some consistency, some straightforward practices that really can help our growers and education work with a microscope and getting our farming community educating. That space, I think, will help tamp down that snake whale salesman activity that's out there. Well, that's interesting because a lot of the reason Adam and Brad started AgriBio was because they were buying products from other salesmen, and they have to go directly to the source and get the raw materials yeah, I'd say probably over half my clients that had already gone down the road of biological before I got to them. And then I go look at the products that they're putting on that are supposed to be biological products. And you look at it, you're like, wow, there's nothing in here. Maybe a lot of bacteria, but there's no fungi, no protozone. There's nothing to make constitutes or food web. It's kind of funny because Adam was saying, hey, I bought a product was probably sub optimal, but I did see a benefit, and I see it all the time. It's like I apply this, I got something I helped control, a little bit of powder Miller. I helped do something. But it's like, okay, your potential is so much larger. Let's really take a look at how we can optimize the microbiology in that soil. And we really don't want to be bringing alien species that they isolated. It in Pennsylvania. And now here you are in Illinois. Those aren't the right sets of organisms to grow in your soils under your conditions, with your crop species. And so with that mixture, you actually only put out a lot of food, perhaps to grow a lot of bacteria, but it got your Indigenous bacteria going, and that was the real reason why it works so well. So really being absolutely sure about what's causing the benefit, well, we need to interpret things correctly, and I don't think you can do that if you have no idea of what actually happened. Well, I got to tell you, Adam's gotten pretty good at microherding. I got these guys going out into the local negotiators environment, and we have kind of a funny story, right, Adam? When I went back in the day, we were looking for some fungal food. You're like, well, I don't know where we're going to get wood chips. And then I turn around, look across the street. Goddamn pile of woodches. It's like, Holy mackerel, start digging into it right out of it. You're like, look at all this, Ritamorph, and you're using all these terms that I wasn't really aware of. Tell me about this. I'm like, oh, well, I just remember there was a guy that dumps Woodchief down here about four days. We've gotten pretty good about finding local sources because Todd has helped us and everybody has them. You just have to open your eyes to what you're looking for. At the end of the day, I do feel compelled, as the mycorrhizal ecologist in the room, to say, I really hope people are cautious with mycorrhizal inoculum because I've been involved in research where we took commercial sources of mycorrhizae and trialed them and found in some cases that they helped invasive weeds grow better. In other cases, that they decreased the growth of the target for crop species. And the other scary thing is we turned some of those inoculum into our testing lab, and they said these things are off the charts on nitrogen and phosphorus, like they've hidden. The companies that are producing these are sometimes hiding a bunch of antigenic, sulfurs, and things like that. So it's nothing to do with the mycorrhizal fungi. The spores won't even germinate and grow, given those high levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, et cetera. So it's just complete moonshine. So if we do find local ways. I dream of a situation where every region of the world, there's people that are using methods to cultivate the native mycorrhizae from that area and that those become available because it's very powerful along with everything else. When you re establish the soul food web, those mutualistic partnerships, especially for grasses, are phenomenal. But don't put the wrong thing in there. Right. I want to give up props real quick here, because I just think it's so incredible what Dr. Lennon has created to be able to empower us all, to take what's growing around us, create and understand how to create healthy compost, get that out onto the field and really start this movement. So thanks for doing what you do, Elaine. Second, that third. That. Okay. Well, we have a lot of great questions. I say let's move on to our next part of the webinar, and we'll continue our Q and A at the end of our next section here. So I think we're going to talk about our promotion that we have running. And so this is the biggest discount we've offered, and it's going to be available through January. So the time frame is coming up shortly here. And there are limited places available for the promotion that we're running. And we're going to watch a video that's going to describe about our new bundle, which is going to be the biocomplete compost bundle. And then we also talk about the consultant Kickstarter bundle. So, Adrian, if you want to go ahead and kick that video off and tell us if you can go on mute. This month we're presenting our biggest bundle with the biggest savings. With the Consultant Kickstarter bundle, you can register for the Soil Food Web Foundation courses with Dr. Elaine Ingham for just 38. 70, saving over one one $0 through October 21. You'll also get stage one of the Consultant training program totally free, saving a further 1540. That's 26 hours of mentor time dedicated to helping you make your own biological compost and develop your microscope skills to the standard required to qualify as a certified Soil Food Web Lab technician. You'll also get two free bonuses with this offer, the Introduction to Permaculture course by Brambell and the all new Soil Sponge Regeneration Workshop with DD Purse House, saving a further $500. This is the biggest discount bundle we've offered, with a total value of over $7,000, for which you'll only pay 38 $70, saving you over $3,100. That's 45% off. There are limited places available with the Consultant Kickstarter bundle, so please don't delay. In foundation course one, you'll take a deep dive into the science and methodology that underpins the Soil Food Web approach, which was developed by Dr. Elaine Ingham. Over the last four decades. You'll study the history of soil on planet Earth and how the agricultural practices we've been using in the last hundred years have degraded our soils to the point where we now only have around 60 harvests left, according to the United Nations. You'll learn about the solution to many of the problems that are familiar to farmers all over the world today. Problems like diminishing soil fertility, pest and disease pressure, low crop yields, drought, flooding, compaction and soil erosion. Regenerative agriculture can address all of these problems. You'll be introduced to regenerative practices like notill and the use of cover plants. You'll also learn about the four major groups of microorganisms that drive soil regeneration and how the process can be accelerated by restoring the microbial community or soil food web to your client's soils. Dr. Elaine will present a number of case studies from around the world that she has worked on personally. Here you'll see some of the amazing results that have been achieved using the Soil Food Web approach. In foundation course two, you will learn all about the importance of biological compost and how it's very different to regular compost. When most people look at compost, they only see a means of delivering nutrients to their plants, so they think about how much nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and other elements are in the compost. When we look at biological compost, we see a means of inoculating the soil with beneficial microorganisms so the soil ecosystem can start to function again, providing plants with a continual supply of nutrients. This is kind of like teaching someone to fish so they can feed themselves for life, as opposed to just giving them a single meal. In this part of the training, you will learn how to make biological compost using various starting materials to create a recipe that will produce results. You'll learn how to monitor and control moisture levels, aeration, and temperature in order to ensure that beneficial microorganisms are multiplied while disease causing organisms are destroyed or become dormant. You'll also learn about the various types of equipment that can be used at different scales, and you'll learn about the different ways in which biological compost can be applied to the soil. In foundation course three, you'll study Dr. Elaine's methods for making liquid biological soil amendments. Compost extracts are used as a soil drench, delivering microbes deep into the soil profile where they can interact with the plant's root system. Compost teas are applied to the plant's foliage, where they form a protective barrier against foliar diseases. In time, as your soil biome becomes more diverse and vigorous, your plants and trees may be entirely covered with beneficial microbes without having to continually apply them. In foundation course four, you'll focus on four major groups of microorganisms in the soil food web bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes. You'll learn how to use a compound microscope to identify and quantify these microbes so that you can really see what's going on in your compost and in the soil. This will give you the ability to assess the quality of your compost and liquid amendments before you invest all the time and effort that is required to apply them to the soil. You will also be able to monitor the progress of the microbial community in your soil over time, so if something is going wrong, you will know about it before the plants start to suffer. This gives you the opportunity to take remedial action early on in the growing season. In Stage One of the Consultant Training Program, you'll be assigned to one of our highly skilled mentors, some of whom are soil food web consultants who run their own businesses supporting farmers to make the transition to the soil food web approach, and others are PhD biologists who have been working closely with Dr. Ingham for several years. You'll work one on one with your mentor to develop your compost making and microscopy skills. When it comes to making great biological compost, there are many variables and every situation is different. Our mentors have worked with dozens of students making compost in many different conditions, so they'll be able to help you address some of these challenges that are unique to your location. They'll also guide you to avoid making common mistakes that can cost you lots of time, money, and effort. Your mentor will support you as you develop your skills to the required standard to pass the Microscopy Proficiency Assessment. Achieving this standard will give you the confidence to really know what's happening in the microbial community in your compost and soil. You'll be able to identify and quantify the four major groups of microbes in the soil in about an hour or less. Once you've successfully passed the Microscopy Proficiency Assessment, you can elect to be listed on our website as a certified Soil Food Web Lab Tech, which means that you can assess soil samples for other farmers and growers in your region. You'll have a total of 26 hours of mentor time, so you can arrange Zoom calls and exchange emails with your mentor whenever you feel you need help. Our mentors work together as a team and there's lots of diverse experience and knowledge between them, so you'll have access to a great deal of support. You'll also have access to the two bonus courses. In the Introduction to Permaculture course, you'll learn from internationally respected teacher, author and lecturer in permaculture, Graham Bell. This is a series of 18 lectures and quizzes where you will take a deep dive into this amazing design system that can be applied when designing your home, garden, farm, business or community. Permaculture is all about being in balance with the planet and is an ideal tool to have in your bag whenever you're considering making a change. The Source Sponge Regeneration Workshop is delivered by educator and author Dee Dee Pursalls. This five session course is all about regenerating the soil sponge for flood, drought and wildfire resilience. It builds on the successes of innovative land managers around the world who are saving huge sums in damages from extreme weather events and crop diseases while restoring the dignity and profitability of farming. Deedee teaches participatory workshops both in person and online, helping to show the nested relationships between soil health, human health, water cycles and climate resiliency. So just to recap, the Consultant Kickstarter bundle comprises the Soil Food Web Foundation courses with Dr. Elaine Ingram where you get to study the theory and application methods behind the Soil Food Web approach. And that all important 26 hours of mentor time in stage one of the Consultant Training program designed to help you develop your compost making and microscopy skills. You'll also get the two free bonuses, the Introduction to Permaculture course with Gran Bell, and the Soil Sponge Regeneration workshop with DV Purse House. This bundle is ideal if you want to kickstart your new career as a Soil Food Web Consultant. Once you have completed the foundation courses in stage one of the Consulting Training program, you will be well positioned to complete your certification and be listed as a Soil Food Web Consultant on the school's website. With these programs, you'll be on the path to a meaningful and impactful career as the Soil Food Web Consultant or biological compost producer. Okay, so we're going to move on to our part two, where we're going to have Todd and Adam talk about the operation that they've kind of created here. This is the fun part. When I try to assist money, I know it always takes over. We're just going to get out of it and come right back. Our programs are a blaster. My students are the best. Sign up. It's great. I agree. I second that. Okay. Okay, so we're going to be, like I said, moving on to part two, almost. We can talk about the next webinar. Thank you. Sorry, I forgot about that. So webinar four, which is meeting the soil Virgin Pros. So that's going to be Saturday. And we're going to have Todd, who's already on the panelists today. We have Casey Ernst and Keisha Wheeler from Calif by Amendments. And then we have Ronald Flores from Flores and Systems. We have Eric Filer from High Desert Soil Works, and we have myself from Spider Soil. And this will be good opportunity for folks to be able to ask questions about the consultant works that we do and how we go about it and how do you become a consultant and all that kind of good stuff? Okay. All right. So part two, Adam York and Todd Harrington. So you guys take it away. We've been working together for quite a while now. Every year, Adam, like many other farmers, have challenges. And I think both 2000 and 2001, Adam was challenged by excessive rain, rainy season, certain fields got flooded again. And once you get these conditions, there's not a lot you can do. If anything, Adam might be able to talk a little bit about how these deals might have been able to recover a little bit better. But really, there's a certain point where when the soils are so saturated, no matter how much you do biologically or organic regeneratively, there's limitations, especially when it comes to weather. So, Adam, maybe you could just talk briefly about those challenges and maybe how it's important to have a contingency factor, maybe on how we're going to keep those crops from going south completely, especially when it comes to nitrogen. Yeah. So for us in 2019, I think it was for a lot of people, it was very wet in our area. And then another, we were very wet again this year, especially in certain areas. So I think one area we had down our river bottoms, we had 54 inches of rain from April 1 to I do believe it was the end of August, which is twice as much as what was on Norm. So there's kind of been some interesting things that we have done. So in 2019, there was 2400 acres that we couldn't even plant. It was so wet. And by the time we could even plant, I do believe it was the first part of August. So that's when we just chose just to go ahead and grow a bunch of cover crops just to help build soil. It seems like what we found out, the soil is pretty resilient. You just have to kind of come up with trying to be a synergistic with the soil instead of antagonistic. Every farmer is going to have certain challenges they face, and it's going to differ from year to year and just trying to make the best decisions to help build your soils at that point in time, it's pretty key. So we had that issue. And like this year we did have a crop down south that was not very good after that much rain, but we did choose to we did some foliars. There are certain things when you get in those circumstances, it's really challenging to overcome them. But we're the type of people that we don't give up very easily. So there are certain things that you can always do to help better yourself in the process. I think what's important here, too, Adam, though, is that like most conventional farmers, right away started playing fungicides because obviously we had quite a few diseases in those fields because of the excessive brain things going anaerobic. So instead of applying a fungicide, you just let the crop do its thing. And obviously you didn't have good yields, but you didn't go switch to a fungicide and try to save the crop. There comes a point in time where, yeah, what's the difference in cost? So if you were to apply a fungicide and save that crop versus let it go and let nature takes his course, everything has gotten pretty expensive anymore. So $30 an acre plus applications in certain circumstances, it's not worth it. But when crops are good, we've not used Congo side. It's one of those things. It's a tool that I think in agriculture, when you're making the transition, all these things are tools. It just depends on what goals you have. At the end of the day, I do believe in what you're trying to accomplish. So here we are back 2007, you guys are producing about 3500 gallons. We had a bunch of the growing Earth solution brewers. The biggest ones they had were 500 gallons. And why don't you tell us a little bit about how much work that was and when we were testing those brewers? And I don't mean to say Brown water, but there wasn't a lot of biology there. And I think some of the results were based on some of the inputs, the amendments probably, and the sugars and the humidity and the kelps that were in there. It's probably where we were seeing some response on the crops. But you've gone a long way since then. So tell us a little bit about originally starting, how challenged you were doing the activated air rated top of tea with the 7500 gallon brewers. Yeah. So when we first went to the compost tea, we had seven of these brewers and we were brewing up tea. We were getting compost from not locally. We were getting it from actually California, shipping it in, getting a food source and making these teas. So my brother and I would be and we had a couple of guys that were helping us at the time. But when we first started this, we were pretty low budget. We had an old quantit that when it's warm outside, it's hotter in the quantum than it is outside. And when it's cold outside, it's colder in that building. It was not ideal, but we were just at least working with what we had at that point in time. And we weren't getting much sleep during planting season when this started. But when we were doing this, we were seeing some value, like Todd said, was it from some of the food that we were adding? What it was, we were at least seeing some value, but we were also understanding that we weren't going to be able to live our lives very good if we continued down this road, because I probably would have been divorced, my wife would. It comes to a point in time where you still have to have a life too. So we got with Todd and we were looking at this tea and he's like, oh, there's so many things we can do to help improve what you're doing. We ended up choosing to go to compost extract and did a lot of work on our food sources. Todd has helped us. We're still working on. We do our own vermicompost source, all our stuff, local sources from around home. Right now, we're working on a highly fungal compost that we have working on in the shed. We're fortunate enough now that we build a building that is not like what we had before, but we do have a worm room, what we call it, and we have a vermicompost and we do keep the temperature regulated in there, which helps a lot. We went from working crazy hours making tea to switching over to an extract. We have an extractor and producing a continuous flow extractor, which makes, I don't know about, I would say 1700 to 1800 gallon an hour continuously. So it's made our lives a lot easier. And then we add the food sources to the extract as they're hitting the planter or sprayer or however you choose to apply it. Yeah. So when I saw the size of Adam's operation, I'm going, wow, they were really limited by time and volume at that, 3500 gallons, not to mention the amount of time and labor costs to clean and disinfect and kind of get to the next batch. So we went from 3500 gallons to producing in a day, anywhere from ten to 20,000 gallons. That's a big difference. And I jokingly said, Adam, I said, once you go extract, you don't go back. In a way when it comes to production and doing large scale crops like this, really, the extract plays very well when it comes to the volume thing and also the stability thing and also the cleaning thing. So not that active, don't have a place because they definitely have a place. But at this point in time, it made a lot of sense to get Adam going into developing the extracts and producing his own compost. Just in one season, though, Adam went from being able to only produce 3500 gallons in a couple of days to producing ten to 20,000 gallons a day with the extract. So I'm sure that was contested. It was a big savings and a big improvement in their capacity to produce more biology. Even if it wasn't hit the nail on the head too, Todd. I mean there is a place for tea in our operation. It just made a lot more sense. I was not going to be able to keep help and just logistics of it. This is just what worked for us. Yeah. Maybe talk a little detail. We'll go to the next slide about how we were utilizing the extract in the spring in furrow during planting. Yeah. Okay. So this is how we set up our new building. So I'll start over here. The tank on the left is just kind of a mixing tank. How we do certain things but over you can kind of almost see it's kind of blurry. But on the right side of the picture, whatever, you can see our extractor there and Todd sitting there and you can kind of see it's got a place for our vermicompost. You have that vermicompost into the extractor. It's got water jet into it and it's extracting the microorganisms and the nutrients out of the vermicompost and making an extract. So over on the left side, the white tanks, we did this on purpose. We bought two different colors of tanks just for easy. But on the right side you have the blue tanks. Those are just our water tanks. So we get water come in. The PH of our water is a little high but we use folic acid to help bring the PH down. And then the white tanks on the left are where our compost extract goes into. So you can kind of see on the backside of these tanks on the bottom, you can kind of see some hoses down there. You can't really see them real well. But we have pumps and those pumps are circulating on timers. They will go on and they will vortex the extract to keep it in good shape. But we have all this stuff set up on digital timers so it works out really well. But those are 2500 gallon cone bottom tanks with about 30 deg cone on them. Yeah. So on the slide on the right, if you go back. Thank you. Adam had several different types of compost that he was extracting. So you'll see a couple of different vents and at times we might be using different sources of Irma compost or compost. Might be more fungal, it might be more of a Burma compost. So he was definitely good about trying different combinations of different mixes to get that diversity into his product. Yeah, it's a good thing you brought that up Todd, because every year Todd gets together with us several different times of the year. Actually we're going to get together here this next month as well and we do a lot of work on improving. You're always trying to fine tune and improve the compost that you're creating. We do a lot of different things. And at the end of the day, we look at all these under scope and try to figure out what the best mix is to kind of get to where we want to get to at the end of the day. So we might be adding three or four different types in and mixing them together. And also the water source atom. Maybe you can just explain the two different sources of water. We had a well, and then we had city water. We looked at the water, we analyzed it, and then we ended up doing some things to the water, doing some structural things to the water. And also the PH thing, which you mentioned was important because your original PH s were pretty high. I don't know which source. Yeah, our PH on the city was like nine. The well was a lot better. Depends on where you're at and how much water you need. If we do use the city, we are storing it in storage tanks, letting it blow off. That's not in the picture, though. I mean, those are what, 10,000 gallon tanks? Yeah, we have 210 thousand gallon tanks holding tanks, and then those go into these. So we have actually 30,000 gallons of water storage to 10,000, and they end up going into these tanks here. And that's where we treat it with the folbic acid to help bring the PH down in it. Now, obviously, as Lane knows, and she talks a lot about humic and phobics. The phobic and the humics are something we always use, especially the declorinate the water, but also in this situation, we're using it to lower the PH, but yet we know it's compatible with the biology, and it's a great product to use where some people might use phosphate or gases, let's say, which is pretty detrimental to the biology, to lower the PH. So we're really sensitive to those kinds of things. And Adam found a good recipe. What kind of rate do you use of the phobic on a regular basis in these batch tanks to the right that you see there, on the left, the blue color tanks are the water tanks that have been spiked with the phobic become much more of a problem too recently because sources of water becoming difficult. People are drilling deeper, having high levels, bicarbonate and things like that. So treating your water is really important. We did this before. We had this slide already. But this is Adam, if you just want to kind of summarize how many pivots you have and how many pivots you're injecting with the extract or the active. And I think this one you were actually we had an extract that we brought in the tankers, and then we downloaded it. And Adam is really great about being innovative with equipment and utilizing old equipment that otherwise would go out into the pasture was these seven gallon expensive tanks. These no longer needed anymore. So what he did is he put them on trailers and then brought them to the pivots. We would download the extract, add the food, because these brewers already had aerators on them. And if the location didn't have power, then we had a generator that would generate the regenerative blowers so that we could activate the extract for a certain period of time and then it would get injected. Yeah, I guess I'll start with we operate. I think it's 21 irrigator pivots. I think if I did the math right the other day, I think we're like 4200 acres underwater or something like that. I do believe so. They're a lot of work, but they're very valuable too. Obviously, if you need moisture, but you can also inject things into them. Over here. This is a diesel powered one, so it's running off of, I think this is a six cylinder. This pivot actually right here has a corner span on it. It actually covers about 320 acres. So they have checked valves in them and we'll have injection pumps over there. On the left hand side, underneath the Valley sign, there's a yellow diaphragm pump. And that is what we inject the compost teas or extracts or any food sources or whatever you choose to inject. That's how we do it. But it's been very beneficial for us to be able to do this and very economical. Like I said, in order to aerate the T, we had to use a generator, which is kind of a pain in the butt. But you can on these pivots. If other people have pivots, you can actually get a bigger inverter inside that Valley panel. And you can actually, while that irrigator is running, as long as you have a big enough inverter, you can run a 110 plug in there and just plug them right in if that's something other people choose to do. We ended up doing that to about. I think we did ten of our pivots that way, which has been very handy if you need to. Iterate okay. So this is a slide here where this is how we transport a lot of the extract and food sources. So we pull around. This here is actually a picture of a 1200 gallon Poly wagon tank. We have 1600 gallons. Enduro class makes some really nice tanks. They also have decks that you can actually put totes on them with food sources or however you want to do it. But we keep the extract in the tanks and then we have these cone bottom. You'll see the cones on the side where we'll inject the food sources in there, as that extract is going to whatever you are applying. So the way we mainly apply it is through our planners. It's in springtime and we use an AG Excel system. They're out of Nebraska, but they came up with an orifice tube. So instead of having the orifices with just the little holes in them where if you get a piece of compost or whatever, they're easily plugged. These are like eight foot long hoses that have an orifice on it that bigger things are able to travel through to go down and put this around your seed. And from there it goes into we call like a totally tubular tube, which is like a stainless steel tube that the extract drops right in front of where the seed is actually being planted in the furrow. But these tanks help us get it to the sprayers planners. We have several of these. We actually have some bigger trucks. You can put it and we have stainless steel tankers that we can move it in however you're set up to do. But the main thing is when you're pulling around extract or any of these biologicals, make sure that you're doing your due diligence to keep things clean. That is a big deal. You're flushing with water, you're cleaning. If we get rained out or whatever, we're using a product called San Diego to help sanitize our planners, our sprayers, our tanks, certain things like that. It's more like a vinegar solution. But do your due diligence to make sure that you are being very thoughtful and clean. Yeah. Adam knows I'm a big stickler for disinfecting and cleaning. These guys a great job at putting a program together. And just to explain this, what you're looking at here, too. And as Adam knows, one of the nice things about the system is that it also does a great job at mixing the food sources, the molasses, so that pump will circulate the biology and the food together and mix it all up. So you have really good mix combination. It doesn't just put it in the tank. It actually circulates it. Yeah. And it's actually injecting it right into the line as it going in. So it's just I mean, it's blending very. And it's all two inch pipe, which is nice. And then you have a motor so you can run it slow. So it's minimally invasive. It's not like one speed. Some of these pumps, you crank them up full bore and you're just slicing and dicing. With this system, you can really passively move to biology into the tank and get everything mixed up nicely without causing too much disturbance. Yeah. We've done a lot of checks from before the pump, after the pump, certain things like that to make sure that we're not doing ill harm or as much ill harm. No. The great rigs. Yeah. So this is one of our sprayers can we start from when you first started spraying, though? So, Adam, when I first met with Adam, these guys are spraying the extract out. They only had one rig. I mean, these things aren't cheap, and Adam can tell you how expensive they are. And so they were using an existing rig that was also they were spraying herbicides out of like surf land and some of these other things and it's very difficult to try to flush out any kind of pesticides that are in these things but when you're first starting off, I mean there's no other way to do it so maybe you want to just take over and kind of explain how we talked about removing screens and trying to get the materials out and flushing and disinfecting and you went to another yeah so it's kind of a big process but we'll do the same thing. We're very just being disinfecting things just because anything harmful can you don't want to be wasting your time if you're trying to do something good by smoking it, by just being lazy or whatever, just not cleaning. So on these sprayers they have pipes and they have caps and there's a lot of lines and stuff but we did our due diligence. You have to make sure that you flush everything out. We used hot water, we just went through and just pretty much everything but getting inside the lines and getting in there and cleaning ourselves. I mean anything and everything you could clean you did. We put new site gauges on them and ran San Diego through them, let them sit in the booms for a day and then at the end of the day or the next day you flush it back out with warm water and get these things really clean. So when we were running compost we were compost extracts, we were running a 50 mesh screen. We were taking some of the other screens out but we would keep the 50 mesh in and would really be pretty good because actually we're screening it with a 50 mesh screen before it hits the tank so it actually works pretty decent with that. We've used some turbo tips, we've had pretty good luck with them. You can use the flood tip, you can use whatever but the bigger the hole the better off you're going to be. Just to help from plugging tips with you're always going to get a few fines in there from any extract or any compost source and that's really good stuff but you want to keep it. You don't want to also be cleaning your tips and times money sometimes yeah the key is really to get as much volume out with minimize pressure and Adam kind of knew this right from the get go and looking at all the different tips because these rigs have multiple tips on a spiral on that boom. And Adam I don't know, did you actually have to get tips or did you have tips on there already that you can do? We have tips and each tip just depend on what we are trying to accomplish. We're trying to keep the PSI somewhere around 35, 40. You just didn't want to be blowing it out there 60, 70 or 80 and doing a lot of damage so a lot of guys that do a lot of their own spraying, they kind of have an idea, but we're doing 15 gallon acre using TJ six S and having really good luck with those. So then you ended up going from one rig that did it all to actually dedicating and getting a sprayer just for doing biologicals and nutrients. Yeah. Like I said, we're heavily invested now we got a new shed sprayer. What is the ring like that cost again? Just so everybody knows. I don't know, they're more expensive now because everything's went up. But you're going to spend 300 on one pretty easy. Two 5300. What size boom is that one? That's 120 ft. Boom there. Right. There you go. Yeah. So this is a cool picture. That's the one I was talking about earlier. Yeah. So this is one of our farms here. We have a neighbor conventional farm on the left and then our farm is on the right. You do see a lot of these things that I talked about earlier. We've cut out and you can kind of see you can see that the crop on the right, even though we're doing a lot of things different, looks very beautiful to me compared to the conventional side. When you kind of go through this transition, this is something that's really interesting because you'll get a lot of neighbors or I've had a lot of neighbors around us that are conventional and they're talking about you somehow or another behind your back or two face or whatever. But a lot of these crops are artificially that these conventional guys are growing are artificially painted with high nitrates. So we've tested neighbors and ourselves too with having so much nitrogen down on this conventional stuff. They're just the nitrates are sky high and that's bringing in disease insects and everything else under the sun. So when neighbors drive by and the forest is not as green, they'll get on you a little bit. But once you start really figuring out why theirs are so green, it makes complete sense. But we're seeing where everything's dead on their side. You can see on our side where we got a lot of grasses that are growing and we've also fought different weed species. And a lot of our neighbors have had we've transitioned to more grasses and not so much of the pig we and the water hemp that a lot of our guys in our area fight, which is actually on the other side. Can't see it from this picture. There's patches of water, hemp and pigweek throughout that field. And on your field, we just couldn't even find any, just mostly grasses, which is really cool. So dollars and cents, Adam, like by the acre, what would the yield difference be between the neighbor on the left versus what you yielded? Let's say that year? And then also what was the cost difference be roughly on what he would spend an acre. His cost versus your cost yeah. So what I've talked to, even still I have friends that are still in the conventional side. Oh, they're still your friends. We all have our own thought process, but they're still our neighbors and everything else. And so the guys that are doing the conventional are just mainly focusing all their money on obviously potash, which is potassium, DAP, which is phosphorus inhydrates ammonia, and doing a lot of roundup. So by the time that they get done spending money, plus doing a lot of seed treatments, I would say doing the way we are doing it and going to the non GMO, we're somewhere between depending on the farm and your situation, whatever, you can easily be $100 to $150 an acre cheaper than your neighbor. What do they spend an acre? Are they spending 500 $800 an acre now? Well, that's a loaded question because everybody has different, I mean, inputs or inputs, but people have a lot of different overheads. Some people are paying $500 cash rent. That's a loaded question. That's a hard one to really answer, to be honest. Generally that type of profit feed corn, it's grown conventionally. I mean, there's got to be some generalization to what these guys are spending with GMO corn and all the inputs. Yeah. I mean, I'm here to tell you that GMO corn is going to cost you 323. 30 a bag if you go fully traded and non GMO is going to be $150 to $170. But isn't it conceivable that these farms, these guys could be spending $500 to $800 an acre all in. Oh, there's guys got a lot more money in it than that, right. So technically you could cut that in half, right. Within three to five years, if not more. Yeah. You're never going to change. Your land expense is going to be your land expense. Your fuel expense goes down, your insecticide expense goes to nothing. If you choose to do that, your seed corn and seed beans, you can cut a lot of that out. So you can cut a lot of your inputs off. But some guys have the per acre cost depends on what the guy's overhead is, too. You have fuel, I mean, you have equipment, you have land costs, you have a lot of that type of stuff. But on the input side, yes, you could cut a lot of that down by $150 an acre. Pretty easy depending on how you choose to go. But I think in this picture here, we've tested a lot of bricks on a lot of GMO plants over the years and it's all relatively pretty similar. Every year is a little bit different. But these are GMO plants that we've tested against in a non biological system. A lot of times we'll see bricks levels from four to five. We have seen them up to eight depends on this year. But when do you start getting into the biological program and you get more into the non GMO crops and just doing things better. You see that bricks level jump up and be twice not hard to see. That be twice as good is what some other guys around the area are doing. So the other thing that's kind of really interesting about this picture is where you have the ears of corn. We've seen this a lot. And a lot of growers around the area is they're spreading a lot of high rates of fertilizer, highlights of nitrogen, and really boosting that energy up early. But you see the tip back really bad, late where what we've been doing and trying to feed the crop throughout the season not do everything at one time. Try to keep that energy level up and your biological activity fed and going. You can do a lot better job of being able to fill that year out to the tip. At the end of the day, when you're trying to cut some of your costs early, you have more money that you are able to spend if you need to late in the season, you're not budgeted out at the end of the day. Those are some things that we've seen and it's been very rewarding to be able to see that and try to figure that stuff out because years and the methods that I was farming and grew up in taught farming. I mean, it was very typical to see that tip back from year to year and it was like, oh, it's normal. Hell, everybody said, well, you know, you got the right population. No, that's not normal. That's money and effort that you spent that you did not fill out your full potential is what that really, truly means. Well, Adam, for folks who haven't worked much with corn, specifically, help us understand the kernels back here are the ones that develop first, right? So this tip back really means that it was boom, boom, boom and then ran out of steam. Yes, ran out of steam. That's exactly right. It just ran out and it started cutting back and it would go like probably real similar for certain crops, whether it's soybeans or whatever. And you had the pods that were created and the beans that were created, but you ran out of energy and you didn't fill them or they have blanks or whatever. The other thing about any grain crops that we've been growing is the more balanced you are and everything biology, minerals, everything all around, the more balance your crop is going to be, the better the fruit is going to be, the better the grain or however, it's going to be more nutrient dense and it's also going to have a lot more weight to it as well as what we've found. Yeah. So it's more nutrient dense. When you talk about energy, Adam, I'm assuming you're talking about all things like maximizing photosynthesis, converting complete proteins to having the nitrates convert to complete proteins. And then you get lipid production so your plants are going from an active to passive resistance. And so you have a really all in all this energy. Are you talking about all the different things that occur both biologically and chemically? Are you talking about certain minerals like nitrogen? Yeah. Nitrogen is part of it, getting that converted over to an amino acid protein as soon as possible. It's everything. It's biologically in keeping. I think a lot of the energy has to do with keeping your biological fed and keeping them active throughout the growing season. I mean, it's just trying to keep that energy up throughout the season. If you're running low on a specific mineral or whatever, that is, if we consider because of all the biology work that you've been doing in your soils now it's actually maintaining your minerals or your energy in the soil once it didn't have that charge or the battery in the soil. So what you're seeing is contributing to the kernels probably growing out there further. Right. And then you have this longer term energy. Yeah. And I think it has to do with that. And also, like I said, it's keeping them fed and just making sure that you're doing the best of your ability to keep things synergistic and not. So we lost that. We lost them. I think we just lost that. Well, I was going to also say you can even see it right here. Right. All corn plants have these support roots, right. These wide ones that are out there to help keep them upright. And that's what the Western corn root worm will attack and knock the plant over. But the fine root hairs, you can see the amount of just detail in there. Those are the surface areas that are enabling microbes to access and exchange with this plant that enables that plant to have that long term seed production throughout the season. One of the things that Adam and Brad have been really great about, we're not only very intelligent farmers, but they do a lot of work also looking at the bricks and SAP testing, they do quite a bit of SAP testing and they do supplemental Foliar sprays when and if needed. While these crops are going through this transition of being chemical dependent, more biological. And they've been really innovative with their Foliar sprays. And I think that's another reason he talks about this extended energy they're getting. I think some of it also has to do with the staff testing and folder sprays. Unfortunately, he's not here to ask the question, but that was one of the things I did want to ask him. He extensively assesses the biology in the soil. So he theoretically would have data that could be correlated one to the next, also, right? Absolutely. Yeah. That would be a beautiful thing to start playing. Well, a lot of the work I think that the future of all the work that I'm doing is and I'm sure Todd same way is how do you become much more specific in that transition period? So you can reduce the amount of those inputs the farmers are requiring to maintain the production while you're doing that transition. And if you get very prescribed and you can minimize the amount, then you're having less impact to the microbiology. I mean, that's always a trade off. You start putting on the chemical products, you're taking some step backwards. How can we minimize those taking step backwards while we're going through a successful transition? We got Adam back. Yeah. So Adam, one of the questions I was going to ask is that I just assume that this is the case, too. But I had mentioned that you guys are really very intelligent farmers, and I've done a lot of work with staff testing and doing Foliar sprays and supplemental sprays, going through this conventional to more sustainable biological programs. So maybe you could touch a little bit on the benefits of doing the SAP testing, doing the Foliar sprays, and being able to have that's part of this energy regenerative energy or reduce energy that you're not getting as much of because you're doing the staff testing in the Foliar sprays. Yeah. So I think it's a good thing to be able to test your staff test throughout the growing season. I think it's great to test, take samples of soil, kind of see where you're at biologically as well throughout the season and just try to adjust accordingly. I think if the Foliar sprays are very beneficial, the one thing that we've been working on, we've been doing a lot of testing is mixing some minerals with sea compost extracts as well. We've been doing a little bit of work with that, having pretty good luck with that. Haven't done a lot of it in the past. I've kind of played around with it, but that's something that we're going to be really looking at, bringing some of the minerals with the biology through certain testing, if you need those minerals as well. And that helps with the energy and just helps increase your bricks and doing the due diligence, having a refractometer and doing whatever fully or spray that you choose to do. But make sure that when you're doing them, you're checking your bricks. And if you're getting the jump that you're looking for, then that's a good way of testing. And then you go to maybe doing small acres with it. If you're not seeing that jump, try to figure out why you're not seeing that jump. If there's something in the mix, it's maybe not rolling like you want it to. So that's a lot of things that we've been doing and having been very successful at doing that. So when you're adding a full year amendment to a leaf, forgive me for not understanding the theory, but is the theory that that is then feeding and stimulating microbial growth that then protects and supports the plane? Yeah. So if you are kind of what we found out, too. So over the years that we've declared it or some farms have been degraded, you're not having the organic matter there as you would you had 60 years ago. So some of these negatively charged minerals are not just depending on your situation, too. If you've had too much rain or we've kind of fought like Boron, for example, we've had to feel like we've had to add more on to get the levels up with it. So, yeah, just doing all the due diligence, I think, with testing and trying to only add what you need to, but also be very balanced about how you're adding things. And when you're applying a good foliar, you're raising the bricks in the plant and you're photosynthesizing at a higher rate, which in tune is feeding everything in the soil. Rock on. Yeah. You get these benefits. Oh, sorry. I think one of the things that we're seeing happening, especially with Adam, is that because we do a lot of work with compost and we're looking at putting minerals in compost and letting the microbe solubilize and convert these minerals to more plant available in the microbial biomass. With Adam, he's applying these trace minerals. It's kind of looking at it like clients and farmers will use foliar sprays either in a chelated form or in a cation form. Right. And it depends on what crop is spraying, why they're spraying this. But I think when we're applying these minerals, these trace minerals with biology, the biology has the ability to break these things down further, like a chelate, but it's in the biomass of the microbes and the bacteria and the fungi. And in nature, we all know that plants should have the biology and the leaf surface. Right. That film should have that biofilm on the plant. So when he's applying these extracts with the trace minerals, he's getting a better response with it because of that fact. And you're using less of those trace minerals and getting a response. So it's almost like a chelated response, but it's actually a biological response because of the enzymes and the organic acids. Correct? Correct. And that's what a lot of the minerals that we're using already chelated with amino acids, organic acids. They have humid in them, some folvic, they're not Evta like a lot of other products sold, everything's jiving. And we do the due diligence and testing it with the biology and so on and so forth. So the minerals are like a T shirt Cannon out into the crowd. And when you're foliar, you're using it as a foliar, sometimes, a lot of it, there's ten to 15 times more efficient. So you're just using such minute amounts and it's making some really big results that's especially important. These trace minerals when we're talking about the action of ligaments plants. And it's worth mentioning because I work with a bunch of pasture producers here in Oregon, visit their pastures and all. And sometimes they are not getting good nitrogen fixation out of their rhizobium that's associated with alfalfa or another thing that they're growing. And you look at a sold chemical analysis and they have almost no boron or something else that can interrupt that process. And so really prescribing exactly the trace mineral. It's something you can invest in when you're not investing so much in excessive NPK. Right, Adams? And really great about that. You guys have been on it for a number of years now. Really a lot of it has to do with understanding, really trying to know what your most limiting factor is. Biology is a big part of, but there's a lot of different ones and it's going to differ for everybody. It's just having to do your own due diligence and just try to do the proper testing and figure these things out and really just concentrate on keeping a good balance of everything. Can you explain which I think is fascinating is like the end human product. You're using quite a bit less of it and getting like how many times greater nitrogen from this product. Yeah. We have a product called inhum and more or less it's Amy nitrogen and humic acid. It's a foliar nitrogen product that we use on like our corn and we're doing four to five gallons of the acre with 20 gallon mix. And we'll mix some kelp in certain like a sea crop or other things with it and we're falling over the corn. And at the end of the day, if we use four gallons like actual like 7.6 actual units of nitrogen. But the efficiency, if you're using if following the Foliar recommendations. So you're spraying under 82 deg. The humidity is where it needs to be. Some people have where the moon phase is, even if you're the most efficient is where the energy is the highest six days before a full moon. So if you're doing and following all these rules that this product could act like ten to 15 times of the actual in it. So you might be actually the plants actually acting like it's getting more like 80 units of nitrogen instead of just the 7.6 because it's just so efficient and it's in a form that the plant recognizes and wants it instead of being in like a nitrate or another form. This is a really important topic because a lot of people don't understand that when they're transitioning, we want to find sources of nutrients like this nitrogen form that is less invasive to biology. It's not 100% organic, but yet it's a lot less invasive to the biology. And it's a great transitional product to use and you're using it at a much lower rate and getting much bigger bang as your nitrogen source. Right. Adam? I think is a great way to transition to the actual organic forms of like soy or liquid soy or something like that, which gets really expensive. So the cost wise there's a real value there for folks that are transitioning from we'll just say something extreme like Hydro somehonium or something like that, or urea, you know what I mean? This is a great product to be using during this transition. So I'm glad you mentioned talk a little bit about it, Todd. I'm really glad you brought that up. The concept of transition, because so often what I run into, especially with some of my friends who are more on the traditional chemical agriculture paradigm, still, is that nobody has the economic capacity to do like a five year transition and not make any money in the middle of all of that. Right. And it's like, well, we know what the target can be. I have a friend that has research that shows you can get like £150 per acre potentially mineralizable nitrogen just from some vet as a cover crop in winter. But then how do we ease that transitionary period before your soil biology is really taking off and running the show and keeping everything going? How do we create that shift in the ecosystem? Right. So we bump it up to the right level where we really get the transformation that we're looking for. And it's such an important topic. In fact, I hope we can eventually make a whole course here at Soul Food Web School about nutrient management through the process of transitioning. Well, I think as long as we understand that we have all these different tools to our tools to being able to have different tools to use and also the knowledge base to have it's just like someone might use a high rate of an herbicide. Well, their water is really hard and so they're only getting 50% efficacy at the full rate. Well, why don't we just soften the water? There's these simple little things that people need to understand as one of many tools to cut back on the use of these chemicals or maybe using a surfactant. So there are multiple tools that we have in our toolbox now that we just need to know. They need to know that we have. And so Adam have really done a great job at utilizing all the tools. I think a misconception that people have, too, is that in the transition phase, they're going to be losing money. If you're smart about Adam's Prudent right here that you're still in the transition phase and you're already seeing massive cost savings, and those cost savings will tend to accelerate as you're going farther through that transition. But yeah, it's not like, oh, for five years, I got to take a hit financially. I don't think you have to. Who wants to do that anyway? But I think that goes back to the education and surround yourself with people that know more than you do at that point in time and just learning and trying to figure out, all right, what's the best economical way that I can do this and not go under so that's everybody's fear. Yeah. You never go backwards and lose money. Every year we're going to get closer and closer to the 100% goal of this is up there in the stratosphere. In the first year, we're getting 100 miles above the surface of the planet. And the next year we're going to get a little higher. A little higher. And finally. All right, we're up there. Now what else can I use to minimize the cost? So it takes a little while or maybe we can figure out exactly how we go from what you're missing to having the full food web. And if we really work on it and focus, we can get to that. The soil biology is right on what it should be. And so you can realize things in the first growing season. Yeah. Observation is important, too. I know the last time I was at Adams, one of the things I noticed pretty clearly the difference between his fields in the fall, Adam, and the residual, how much more coloration decomposing going on was quite different from the conventional fields. The Gray color, that is really a noticeable difference. I don't know if this is the last slide, but it talks about ongoing proof that biology systems can work well visually. Those are the you mentioned Earthworms, and then also the rise Morphin, the mushrooms now that we're seeing in your fields, they weren't there before, but this fall residual program that you guys have visually, you can really see it, right? Fantastic. I love it. Just as a time keeper, I know we're at the very end of this, actually. Adrian, can we go with one last question? I think this is a perfect question for Adam to kind of end the Q and A on. Sorry to put you on spot like that. You're good. I forgot to reset. Here we go. No problem. But, Adam, this question is really for you. And I think this is a great webinar. And the question is from Norm, which is you spoke a lot about your cost savings, et cetera. I'm interested if you have experienced any quality of life changes that you cannot put a cost on. I think this is a fantastic way to end this. Yes, that is a great question. I love that question. Yes. I'm going to bring up a story that back when we were planting, everybody was like, hey, we need to get more yield, more yield, more yield. That's what everybody talked about. So that was more insecticide, more whatever. I got to a point where I was Loading the planner with a product or liquid insecticide, and I got some on my hands and I was planting corn and I couldn't feel my legs for about half the day. And you talk about being scary and being like, I have little children at home. And you start factoring in the health issues when it comes to being around certain chemicals, certain sexicides, something like that. What is the value on that? What's the value on your health? What's the value on the type of food you put in your body? Everybody's always told me if you don't have health, you have nothing. It doesn't matter how much money you got in the bank or it doesn't matter how much land you farm, it doesn't matter any of this type of stuff. At the end of the day, if you don't have health, you really don't have anything. So I do believe that value is a lot greater than any financial savings at the end of the day. And yet we aren't told from the chemical companies the dangers that you're actually dealing with with any of these toxic chemicals. It's like glyphosate was always, oh, there's no harm in it doesn't hurt human beings at all. Now we discovered that it causes really severe terminal cancer. There's really nothing you're going to do about it except maybe prolong for a few years. And so how can you trust any of those sides you want to get off of them as rapidly as possible for your health and for your children's health and the food that you're growing, whether it's going into cattle or whatever point, whatever.
