John Kempf is an entrepreneur, speaker, a leading crop health consultant, and a designer of innovative soil and plant management systems. He founded Advancing Eco-Agriculture in 2006, and serves as Chief Vision Officer and Executive Board Chairman. He is also a host of the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where he interviews leading farmers and scientists who share cutting-edge practices and science that accelerate the healing of soil, crops, and our relationship to the land. As a member of the Amish Community in Pennsylvania, John prefers to use artistic renderings of his likeness rather than a photograph or video. So we're not airing a video of him today. Instead, you'll be getting a series of interviews with people who are doing amazing things in their field, in their community, and in the broader world. These interviews are curated so that you can learn from them and apply them to your day-to-day life. In this episode, we talk about: 1. The Amish community in Pennsylvania 2. What it means to be an Amish farmer 3. What does it mean to be a Mennonite farmer? 4. What are the rules and restrictions that are in place within the community? 5. How does it differ from other farming communities? 6. What do they think about chemical agriculture? 7. Are they discouraged from using pesticides? 8. What kind of equipment do they use? 9. How do they grow their own food? And so much more! This episode is sponsored by the National Association of Amish Farmers and Supporters of the Environment (NAFFE) and The Nature Conservancy (NANO) The company is located in Dayton, PA, and is dedicated to promoting sustainable practices and practices throughout the country and the entire country? The best place to get the most authentic experience in the best of the best practices in the world? Listen to this episode on all things Amish culture and practices that promote the highest quality of the highest possible human experience and practices and access to the most affordable and the most accessible practices possible in the highest attainable opportunities for everyone gets a chance to learn the most of it all? You can find a copy of this book on the book on everything you can find it everywhere you can get it everywhere else? Download it on the webcast or watch it on it's best practices and place it's a good deal and more of it is a podcast
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, my guest today is John Kempf, an entrepreneur, speaker, a leading crop health consultant, and a designer of innovative soil and plant management systems.
00:00:12.000John is part of the Amish community in Pennsylvania.
00:00:17.000He founded Advancing Eco-Agriculture in 2006 and serves as chief vision officer and executive board chairman.
00:00:28.000He's also a host of the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where he interviews leading farmers and scientists who share cutting-edge practices and Science that accelerates the healing of soil, crops, livestock, and our relationship to the land.
00:00:46.000As a member of the Amish community, John prefers to use artistic renderings of his likeness rather than a photograph or video.
00:00:55.000So we're not airing a video of him today.
00:01:06.000I've been an admirer of your work and of your platform for a long time, and there are many exciting things happening in the world, and there is a growing awareness of the opportunities and the potential that exists when we all align and pull together.
00:01:21.000So thank you for all the work you're doing, and thank you for having me.
00:01:23.000Yeah, so tell me about your journey and about how you discovered this occupation, I'll call it.
00:01:37.000Yeah, it's been an interesting journey, that's for sure.
00:01:41.000I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm in northeast Ohio in the snow belt south of Lake Erie, where I still live, and We were growing fresh market vegetables, and in a very mainstream, men are using very intense fertilizer applications and pesticide applications.
00:01:59.000This started in, I think we started in 1996, and then In the early 2000s, 2002, 2003, and 2004, we had a three-year consecutive period that we lost well over 70% of our major crops, our four major crops, to a number of different diseases and insects that we were not successful in managing with pesticides.
00:02:23.000This was, we were applying ever more intensive pesticide application rates.
00:02:28.000At this point in this three-year period, we were applying fungicides and insecticides every five days.
00:02:33.000And it seemed the more we applied, the worse the problems became.
00:02:38.000And then in 2004, we had a wake-up call experience that really got our attention.
00:02:44.000Can you just tell about what your farm is, what it looks like, and where it fits in your community?
00:02:51.000Yeah, we were one of the leading farmers in the community to first begin growing vegetables for wholesale markets.
00:03:08.000We had 25 acres altogether, 15 acres of land that was being tilled and planted into crops.
00:03:14.000And of those 15 acres, these four crops represented probably 70% of the total crop that we were growing.
00:03:21.000So we're located geographically in Northeast Ohio, maybe 20 miles, 25 miles south of Lake Erie and about 30 miles from the Pennsylvania border.
00:03:30.000So being in this snow belt region, and also being in a very high cloud cover region, means that during the summer months we have lots of humidity and lots of cloud cover, which is an almost perfect petri dish environment for disease propagation.
00:03:49.000Are there any prohibitions among the Amish about using chemical agriculture?
00:03:56.000I know that Amish are not supposed to be using certain kinds of machinery.
00:04:33.000Do any of the Amish communities or Mennonite communities forbid I'm not aware that there is any community where it is strictly forbidden.
00:04:45.000There are very few communities where it is discouraged.
00:04:49.000But the historical trajectory, the Amish community was taught to be subsurrient to government authority, to comply with governmental authority.
00:05:03.000And to trust and respect, there's a great deal of an ethos of trust and respect for those in authority positions.
00:05:12.000So it's quite interesting that even though we have this culture which has this very strong agrarian heritage, And a heritage of strong stewardship of the land.
00:05:25.000Some of them, not all of them, but some Amish farmers adopted GMO technologies and adopted chemicals with a great deal of intensity.
00:05:37.000You know, as a culture, we have culturally, I think we tend to have a very intensive work ethic, very aggressive work ethic.
00:05:46.000And so generally when Amish farmers, and this is, of course, speaking broadly, but when we begin adopting new things, the majority of the Amish community doesn't tend to do things halfway.
00:06:01.000And so they were some of the early adopters of And also, because of the intensity with which they use those tools, they were some of the first people to see the problems, which is exactly what happened on the farm that I grew up on.
00:06:20.000The chemical agriculture you were finding in, I think you said, was it 2016?
00:06:25.000This would have been early 2000s, 2002, 2003, and 2004 when we had this...
00:06:33.000So you were saying that in 2002 and 2003 and 2004, you were noticing that the more chemicals you used, the more your pest problems worsened.
00:06:44.000The more we used, the more intense the problems became.
00:06:47.000We were completely unsuccessful in managing a number of different diseases and pests, even though we were using a multitude of chemicals at label rates and sometimes at a higher frequency than intended in an effort to control them.
00:07:02.000And, you know, this led to a really fascinating experience.
00:07:05.000In 2004, The third year of this three year period, we began renting a field from a neighboring farm that had not had the previous intent, hadn't been managed, planted in vegetables, hadn't had the intensive pesticide applications.
00:07:21.000And there used to be these two long, narrow strips of soil that were being tilled and planted up and down the slope.
00:07:30.000Now we were managing both of them, so it made sense to try to control erosion to till and plant at a 90-degree angle across the former field border, which we did.
00:07:40.000We planted that field into cantaloupe.
00:07:43.000And at harvest time, the melons from the field that had the previous pesticide applications had 80% of the leaves infected with powdery mildew, which ended up costing us the majority of the crop.
00:08:00.000And on the new soil that didn't have the previous pesticide exposure, there was no powdery mildew.
00:08:21.000So these plants were all identical, the same variety, managed the same way.
00:08:26.000But they were spaced and planted two feet apart.
00:08:29.000And right on the field border, there were some vines that intermingled with the other vines where one vine had severe powdery mildew and the next one did not.
00:08:37.000And as you can imagine, that caught our attention in a significant way.
00:08:45.000Well, that was the trigger for an intensive learning journey, calling lots of people within academia, private consultants, and trying to understand what are the differences between these two plants?
00:08:58.000What allows one plant to be resistant to powdery mildew when the next plant two feet away is susceptible?
00:09:04.000And I was very fortunate to get some exceptional mentors in plant pathology and plant physiology over the next six months and did a lot of reading and studying.
00:09:14.000And kind of the summary of what I learned and have continued to learn since then is that all plants have an immune system.
00:09:25.000That has many similarities to ours in the sense, from a first principles perspective, in the sense that we know that we all have our own immune systems, but they don't all function equally well.
00:09:37.000Some people become ill very easily, and other people practically never become ill because of infections.
00:09:44.000And the difference between these two is how well their immune system has been supported over the course of their entire lifetime, and in fact, from even before they were born.
00:09:54.000And the same concept holds true of plants as well.
00:09:58.000Plants also have a functional immune system.
00:10:01.000They have the capacity to be completely resistant to all diseases and all insects.
00:10:06.000As long as their immune system is supported with the proper nutrition and the proper microbiome.
00:10:13.000Exactly the same as our own immune system.
00:10:15.000So this was a fascinating discovery to me because...
00:10:20.000I had been very interested in plant sciences and horticulture for years before this.
00:10:27.000And in all the research that I had done, the events that I had attended, there was no discussion in mainstream agronomy or in mainstream agriculture about plant immune systems.
00:10:38.000In fact, when I first started talking about this, I initially received some pushback and people would say, well, plants don't have immune systems.
00:10:46.000And yet there are entire scientific journals that are dedicated to plant immunology.
00:10:50.000And there are hundreds of articles, thousands of articles that have been published on this topic.
00:10:55.000And yet this conversation never made its way into mainstream agriculture.
00:10:59.000So what did you do with that information?
00:11:04.000Well, that led to quite a revolution on the farm, as you might imagine.
00:11:11.000I was very fortunate to be able to attend an ecological agriculture farming conference that winter with my father and my brother.
00:11:21.000And one of the presentations we listened to spent several hours describing the modes of action of pesticides and how they influence the human body.
00:11:32.000And at the time, not only were we farming, but my father was also the local ag inputs retailer for the fruit and vegetable growers.
00:11:41.000So we had all the fertilizers and the seeds and the equipment and all the pesticides.
00:11:46.000My father was a licensed pesticide distributor.
00:11:48.000I was a licensed pesticide applicator when I was 16 years old.
00:11:54.000We got done with that day of events, listening to presenters talk about pesticides.
00:12:09.000And so it was that kind of conversion experience We then came back to the farm and he gave me permission to do whatever was necessary from a nutrition and microbiome management perspective to eliminate the need to use pesticides.
00:12:26.000So in the 2005 growing season, we did some very intensive experimentation.
00:12:32.000We still used very tiny amounts of chemical herbicides.
00:12:37.000And then by 2006, we went completely pesticide free.
00:12:40.000And that farm has been completely pesticide free ever since then.
00:12:43.000So from that experience, and you know, if you flash forward to today with our consulting and the amazing team of people I get to work with, we're working on over 4 million acres of farmland across North America and some internationally we're working on over 4 million acres of farmland across North America and some internationally Yes.
00:13:04.000And every year, people approach us to say, we have this insoluble disease, this new disease that is just emerging for which there is no known solution.
00:13:32.000We have succeeded in resolving and reversing every single disease problem and every single insect problem that we've been approached with, with nutrition management and microbiome management.
00:13:44.000And so that gives me a lot of confidence.
00:13:46.000Earlier I made the statement that it's possible for plants to be 100% resistant to diseases and insects when you manage nutrition.
00:14:10.000And after a decade and a half of the level of experience that we've had, I think the confidence we have is born out of experience.
00:14:19.000And so there's no question in my mind that this is possible and realistic and achievable on a large scale.
00:14:25.000Let me go back to the Amish culture and the Amish community.
00:14:30.000I'm very curious about your own background because you seem like a highly educated, very eloquent, articulate, and learned person in this area.
00:14:42.000but are Amish likely to end up in an agricultural school, or where does their education end?
00:14:54.000And what is your relationship then to the professors at the agricultural academies? - Yes.
00:15:10.000So it would be very unusual for someone within the Amish community to extend their education beyond their formal education, I should say, beyond the eighth grade.
00:15:19.000So I only have a formal eighth grade education.
00:15:22.000And in fact, I don't know anyone personally who's remained in the Amish community who has an extended education.
00:15:29.000It's certainly possible that it may exist, but I'm not aware that it does.
00:15:37.000And let me just, let me ask you one thing about that out of curiosity.
00:15:41.000Are you educated in a public school in Ohio or do you, is it, are you homeschooled in an Amish community?
00:15:52.000It is in what we call our parochial school system, so our Amish community school system, which is a two-room schoolhouse with two teachers and 30 students, roughly.
00:16:01.00020 to 30 students is kind of the system that we have mostly here in North America within the Amish community.
00:16:08.000So those teachers also do not have a higher education.
00:16:13.000Those teachers are graduates from our own schools, so those are Amish teachers teaching in an Amish classroom that is within the community, gets administered by the community.
00:16:22.000And we certainly have some testing requirements that we have to meet and some obligations in our agreements with various state governments, but that is all a community-run education system.
00:16:33.000Okay, so then, to complete the answer to my original question, which was, what is your relationship with these agricultural professors?
00:16:44.000You're allowed to use telephones, obviously.
00:16:47.000Yes, yes, we're allowed to use telephones.
00:16:50.000And here in our community, I'm a part of a community that is more progressive than some, and we're permitted the use of technology for work, which is how we're able to have this conversation.
00:17:05.000And so, you know, I have the benefit of...
00:17:12.000I have several gifts that I'm very grateful for and I've been blessed with.
00:17:17.000One of them is being able to read very quickly and retain a great deal of what I read.
00:17:22.000And our local township library has the distinction of having the highest per person book lending rate of any library in the nation.
00:17:37.000And I think, I suspect a part of that, I don't know this for certain, but I suspect a part of that is contributed to by the Amish community.
00:17:46.000We don't have television and radios, and so reading is a very common form of entertainment.
00:17:51.000And we had outstanding service at that local library where...
00:17:56.000There were a number of different scientific books that I wanted to read, and they would get those books for me through interlibrary loan from anywhere in the world.
00:18:04.000I still remember receiving books from Germany and France and from throughout Europe on some of the topics that I was researching.
00:18:12.000To come back to the question that you're asking, I found some very remarkably knowledgeable individuals within the academic community and within ag universities whose knowledge and whose research had largely been throttled or that it wasn't widely advertised and wasn't widely known.
00:18:38.000Just as with in the case of Plant immune systems and the domain knowledge around plant immune systems not being widely known.
00:18:48.000You know, farming and agriculture is really a profession of generalists.
00:18:52.000Farmers need to know so much about many different domains, many different specialties.
00:18:59.000And in the study of, just in the study of growing crops, never mind animal agriculture, we have so many different domains of research.
00:19:08.000We have botanists and horticulturists and plant physiologists and plant pathologists and geneticists, the list goes on and on.
00:19:16.000And all of this amazing work on plant immune systems was being done in the botany department.
00:19:20.000The plant pathologists, for the most part, were not paying attention, were not aware of it, or perhaps not the plant pathologists, but certainly not the agronomists.
00:19:31.000What I learned is that there is a great deal of siloing within academia.
00:19:35.000And also, of course, funding is only available for those things.
00:19:40.000At least this has been largely true, I think, for at least the last 30 to 40 years, perhaps longer.
00:19:45.000Funding is only available for those types of research which contribute to commercial interests.
00:19:52.000For the most part, there are exceptions, but they are limited.
00:19:55.000And so I found really remarkable scientists within the USDA And some within academia who were doing very innovative, groundbreaking work that wasn't widely known.
00:20:06.000And I was very fortunate to develop an amazing group of mentors from among the people that I met and that I interacted with.
00:20:27.000I think over the years that I was responsible, when I graduated from school at the 8th grade, at the age of 14, I was given the responsibility for doing all of the drip irrigation and all the spraying, which included both fertilizer and pesticide applications.
00:20:42.000And we had various consultants and coaches that came out to the farm, partially because of my father's business as a distributor and a retailer of fertilizers and pesticides.
00:20:54.000But once we started down this pathway, I think a great deal of my learning was on the phone and attending events and talking to people virtually because I can only recall one of my mentors, two of my mentors ever visiting the farm.
00:21:11.000So much of it was done remotely, mostly on the phone.
00:21:14.000How do you visit these events on your horse?
00:21:17.000Are you Are you glad to get in the car?
00:21:22.000- Yeah, most Amish people drive and yeah, I've spent more time in a car driving across the country than I care to think about. - So you mentioned in the beginning that you have now 4 million acres.
00:21:36.000How did you go from 25 acres that you own to influencing what happens on 4 million acres?
00:21:43.000You know, it happens slowly and then it happens fast.
00:21:46.000Early on, once we started having some significant successes on our farm by the mid-summer of 2006, My mentors were referring other farmers to me and suggesting that I would give them recommendations and give them advice.
00:22:01.000We also had local growers that were driving past our fields all the time when they came to pick up supplies, and they were asking for information and support.
00:22:11.000And by the middle of the summer of 2006, my father told me that I can either try to help other people on their farms or I can continue to try to manage ours, but that I shouldn't try to do both.
00:22:24.000So, I really enjoyed the agronomy and the plant nutrition consulting work and opted to go in that direction.
00:22:30.000So, that led to the founding of Advancing Ecoagriculture as a consulting company.
00:22:35.000And, you know, Robert, what really inspired me, what really motivated me to go in this direction was When I realized the inherent potential that exists in managing plant immune systems, for a bit of context,
00:22:51.000over the last century, Plant nutrition has been managed and optimized to achieve one outcome, to prioritize one outcome only, and that was yield, yield at all costs.
00:23:07.000There was no consideration for quality, no consideration for nutritional integrity, no consideration for disease and insect resistance or immune support.
00:23:15.000And so we started, as you shift the framework and you say, yes, we want to have crops that produce high yields and are also resistant to diseases and insects.
00:23:27.000Once you have plants that have these functional immune systems, not only are they capable of resisting diseases in insects, but they are also, many of these foundational immune compounds have names that we recognize, like lycopene and resveratrol and anthocyanins.
00:23:44.000These are phytoalexins and what used to historically be called plant secondary metabolites.
00:23:49.000In plain English, we call them essential oils.
00:23:51.000These are compounds that plants produce as the foundation of their immune system that are known to enhance our own immune systems.
00:24:01.000And all of a sudden, when you realize that you can dramatically increase the quantity of these immune compounds in plants, sometimes by multiple orders of magnitude, we can start having a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine.
00:24:17.000And when we look at the shipwreck that is our collective national health status and all of the degenerative illnesses that we have, this is certainly not only an agricultural problem. this is certainly not only an agricultural problem.
00:24:35.000But it is a problem that agriculture can contribute to resolving, that when we can grow really healthy food, we can have a significant impact on public health at scale.
00:24:46.000And then the other piece that was really inspiring was observing that when we grow these really healthy plants, they regenerate soil health and that we can build soil carbon while we are growing a crop.
00:24:59.000And this was a bit of a mind twister because somehow...
00:25:05.000Recently, in the last three decades or so, we have developed the paradigm that agriculture and the process of going through food is somehow by its very nature inherently extractive.
00:25:18.000And that we need to, the process of growing a crop is going to remove nutrients and it's going to remove organic matter from the soil.
00:25:25.000And that if we want to replenish that and add things back, then we have to do other things.
00:25:30.000We have to grow cover crops, we have to add compost, whatever the case might be.
00:25:35.000Well, that's a relatively recent phenomenon because the understanding as recently as the 70s was that if you managed plant nutrition very well, you could build soil health while you were growing a crop.
00:25:48.000And so all of a sudden, when you start thinking that actually when we manage plant health to have these robust immune systems, we can regenerate soil and grow food as medicine at the same time.
00:26:00.000That was a tremendous inspiration to me to realize that we can solve so many of our collective of the Earth's ecological challenges, soil health challenges, environmental challenges by solving the foundational issues of how we manage our agriculture production. environmental challenges by solving the foundational issues of how we It was a very inspiring idea to me.
00:26:20.000So my vision became seeing these regenerative farming systems become the mainstream globally over the course of the next couple of decades.
00:26:33.000What has your fan club in the farm community, how much of that is in the Amish community?
00:26:44.000Or are you like the prophet in his hometown who nobody pays attention to, which they warn about in the Bible?
00:26:53.000Well, it depends on how you define hometown.
00:26:58.000So within the local community, what is interesting is that the local community that I grew up in within, let's say, a 20 mile radius of where I grew up, has shifted dramatically away from an agrarian culture to a trades craft culture where they're heavily involved in construction has shifted dramatically away from an agrarian culture to a trades craft culture where they're heavily involved in
00:27:20.000So within my own community, there are probably less than a dozen individuals that still make their primary income from farming in a community of probably close to 3000 households.
00:27:35.000And so that's within the local community itself.
00:27:39.000But then within the Amish culture, we actually have a very significant following within the Amish community across the Northeastern United States, where there is a significant Amish community.
00:27:53.000But then, yeah, a lot of our work is with grain crops and fruit and vegetable crops all across North America, U.S., Canada, Mexico, and even some international work.
00:28:04.000Let me ask you another off-subject question about the Amish.
00:28:13.000Do you think the Amish look at what's happening at the kind of social deterioration that is now so evident across the country, the alienation, the dispossession, the drug addiction, and just the atomization and fragmentation of society,
00:28:31.000the separation, the separateness that has become an affliction and is feeding mental illness and all that, You think you guys look at the rest of us and say, you see, we were right all the time.
00:28:46.000We had it right and you guys are now paying the price for the way, the separateness that you've gotten from nature and from community.
00:29:00.000I think there is a growing appreciation for what we have as a community.
00:29:11.000We are affected by the decay of society around us.
00:29:14.000So there's not that judgmental perspective, but an increasing sense of gratitude for what we have.
00:29:22.000You know, I've developed such a deep appreciation for this.
00:29:26.000It started, you know, as you grow older and you mature, you develop a different and evolving perspective, hopefully more wisdom, perhaps.
00:29:36.000So I started a decade ago, probably six, seven years ago, really beginning to appreciate the strong community and family culture that we have.
00:29:47.000And then what happened the last four years with COVID just amplified that because We suffered none of the social isolation that the majority of the culture did.
00:29:59.000Because initially, the early days, the first month, the six weeks of lockdowns, we wanted to be respectful.
00:30:21.000By the time when I think we were first told that it would be masks for two weeks and then masks for four weeks, and by the time the third extension came out at the state level, it was game over.
00:30:32.000The local community had realized that if we want to maintain our strong social and community fabric, Then we cannot permit ourselves to be isolated.
00:31:24.000They needed to require anyone who was inside the store to wear a mask.
00:31:29.000And within Amish customers would go into stores and have piled up grocery carts and refuse to wear a mask and they refuse to check them out without wearing a mask and they would abandon full grocery carts at the checkout counter and walk out.
00:31:48.000And that broke the store's resolve and broke the mandates within the local community.
00:31:53.000The only business who was successful in keeping the mask mandates alive were the local banks.
00:32:01.000They were the only ones who were successful in forcing it.
00:32:04.000As a result, there would be long lines of people outside doing banking through the drive-through because they refused to go into the bank and wear a mask.
00:32:15.000That was, I think in hindsight, without question, that was the right strategy for us as a community.
00:32:21.000Now, of course, that may not have been the right approach for everyone, because as a culture, we have different exposures.
00:34:04.000Yeah, I think the biggest successes...
00:34:07.000Are that it brings joy back into farming, it brings hope back into agriculture, and it brings a vision for the future.
00:34:14.000You know, we have an epidemic suicide rate within farmers here in North America.
00:34:21.000Well, not just here in North America, but really in many places around the globe.
00:34:25.000And farmers have been systemically taken advantage of by agribusiness corporations for decades.
00:34:31.000The farmers are being farmed, I think would be a very accurate way of describing it.
00:34:38.000What happens is that as you begin this transition, we've taken a slightly different approach to regenerative agriculture transitions and helping a farm transition than some of those that are commonly described in the media,
00:34:56.000in that we take a very practical approach Welcome to my show!
00:35:22.000And we've taken a very different perspective, firmly grounded in the expectation, the belief that you achieve what you incentivize.
00:35:30.000And that if we want to incentivize significant, large-scale, rapid adoption of regenerative agricultural management systems and management models, then the pathway to achieving that is to provide an economic incentive to growers, preferably a significant economic incentive.
00:35:47.000So in our consulting approach, we have focused on developing methods that do not produce a yield loss, that immediately during the transition, we expect to see positive yield responses and positive quality responses while maintaining and we expect to see positive yield responses and positive quality responses while maintaining and
00:36:08.000So the result is that three to five years down the road, you have gradually transitioned away from using the majority of the pesticides that you were using in the past and perhaps weaned off of them entirely.
00:36:20.000And your input costs are a fraction of what they were historically, while your yields have maintained or increased.
00:36:28.000And our objective, our goal, this doesn't always happen because it's agriculture and it's a highly variable system, but our objective is to achieve a greater profitability for the grower immediately in the first year.
00:36:45.000And there are many growers who strongly desire that and are motivated by that.
00:36:50.000And necessarily because they need it, they need it to survive.
00:36:55.000And so I would say I could share so many amazing stories about remarkable yield increases, 50% yield increases in apples and 30% yield increases in cotton while greatly reducing pesticides.
00:37:08.000There are many amazing stories, but the best story of all is how it is impacting our rural communities.
00:37:16.000Because if, you know, if we back up just a step and we think about What does regenerative agriculture mean?
00:37:25.000What is it that needs regenerative from a foundational first principles perspective?
00:37:30.000We can talk about regenerating ecosystems and regenerating soil health and regenerating the quality of food and regenerating public health, but none of that works and none of that is possible if we don't first regenerate the capacity for stewardship.
00:37:50.000You know, there are two very different points of view about the role of people in the landscape.
00:37:58.000The one point of view, sometimes held by environmentalists, is that the best way to regenerate an ecosystem is to remove people from the landscape.
00:38:08.000And the other point of view is that humans are the ultimate hyper-keystone species that And that the best way to regenerate landscapes is to have those landscapes and ecosystems be cared by stewards who have a thoughtful, loving, engaged relationship with the land and with the ecosystem.
00:38:33.000And that is the model that I subscribe to.
00:38:36.000I believe that humans have the capacity to regenerate far faster.
00:38:41.000In fact, it is necessary for humans to be present and engage in regenerating ecosystems, particularly in brittle environments.
00:38:47.000And so if that premise is true, that means we need thousands.
00:38:55.000More people who are engaged in the ecosystem and in the landscape who have this caring, loving relationship and who have the knowledge base to work from.
00:39:05.000In order to do that, you have to be able to pay them well, which is the fundamental problem that agriculture is suffering from right now, is that people engage in agriculture, if they put a similar level Of intellectual energy and work into almost any other profession, they would be paid very, very handsomely for their work, much more so than they are in agriculture.
00:39:30.000And so that's one of the foundational challenges is that if we, at its most fundamental level, we need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship, which means that there needs to be this assurance of an economic flow back into rural communities.
00:39:50.000Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time over a decade suing the big hog confinement companies like Smithfield, Tyson's, Murphy Farms, etc.
00:40:05.000And, you know, farmers would sign contracts with them.
00:40:11.000They'd borrow money on their house, mortgage their house, build a hog shed, put 1,100 sows in it, and then, you know, And Smithfield would own the pigs.
00:40:25.000It would dictate all the farming practices.
00:40:29.000It would drop off the piglets and then come pick them up.
00:40:33.000And, you know, when they hit kill weight...
00:40:38.000And then give them another generation of piglets.
00:40:41.000And those farmers were barely hanging onto their property for dear life.
00:40:48.000And I remember sitting at a kitchen table in North Carolina with one of these farmers, and he showed me a calculation that he did of his hours, how much hours he put into the farm and what his salary was essentially at the end of the year.
00:41:06.000He owned the farm, so he didn't get a salary, but he was looking at his profits and the amount of time.
00:41:13.000He was paying himself essentially $2.50 an hour.
00:42:09.000If you drive across Ohio, you're looking at corn that is eight feet high.
00:42:16.000That is GMO, Monsanto, Roundup Ready corn for acre after acre all the way to the horizon.
00:42:26.000And they rely on an economic model of these big subsidies and also methane production and all of these kind of markets that have been drummed up to buy that product.
00:42:38.000And they're locked into these monocultures with giant inputs coming in for carbon-based fertilizers and for chemical-based pesticides and herbicides.
00:42:53.000And they're poisoning themselves, they're poisoning the groundwater, they're poisoning the soil, they're poisoning their children, but they're locked into that system and don't seem to be able to get out of you.
00:43:06.000Somebody who is stuck in that economic model, does what you're doing offer any hope to somebody like that?
00:43:12.000Or is that just too disruptive of their life to switch from that activity to some other form of farming that's consistent with actual food production rather than commodity production?
00:43:26.000We do work with many growers who are exactly in that context, who are beginning to transition that context.
00:43:31.000Because of course, to break free from that system, you first have to have an economic pathway to freedom.
00:43:39.000And as you described, they are locked in from a capital investment perspective.
00:43:44.000They are locked in from an insurance and from a financing perspective.
00:43:47.000So there needs to be a pathway to freedom that is kind of within that model and within that system.
00:43:54.000But then, over time, change doesn't happen first in the field.
00:43:59.000It happens first in our hearts and minds.
00:44:01.000And we are all on our own journey of change.
00:44:04.000Every grower and every farmer is on their own individual journey.
00:44:08.000And to the degree that we can have empathy with where they are, empathy and understanding for where they are in that journey, and then bring them along.
00:44:17.000Because the reality is our current agricultural commodity production system, focusing on corn and beans and wheat and cotton, etc., is relatively easy.
00:44:29.000It's easy from a management perspective.
00:44:32.000It's easy from a financing perspective.
00:44:34.000And so learning to shift to a different model is That is more management intensive and that brings livestock back to the landscape.
00:44:46.000It requires the participation of more people in the operation.
00:44:51.000So I guess the point that I want to make is transitioning to a model that is more directly connected to producing high-quality food is a transition that takes time on many operations.
00:45:05.000Now, the time to facilitate that transition could be dramatically condensed from a policy perspective, which you very well know and understand, because the reality is it is policy which has created the model that currently exists.
00:45:26.000Because you don't have a cell phone, right?
00:45:29.000Yeah, as I mentioned, I'm a part of the community that permits the use of technology for work, so I have access to it at work.
00:45:34.000I don't have a lot of time to waste at work, but if there's a necessity, yeah, I will watch YouTube there.
00:45:39.000So, yeah, I'm just so curious about how you've, you know, you've absorbed all this incredible information, and I guess you just did it the old-fashioned way by reading.
00:45:53.000Well, you know, you can read faster than you can listen.
00:45:58.000You can absorb information faster than you can listen.
00:47:05.000I did it because it was something I felt was important and necessary to do.
00:47:09.000And the last six months, we've been playing around with the number one spot on the Earth Sciences category and Apple Podcasts, which I never imagined or expected to be the case.
00:47:21.000But I don't listen to my own podcast because, yeah, I don't have time to listen.
00:47:26.000Yeah, I don't listen because I can't stand the sound of my voice.
00:47:30.000But, you know, I was thinking as you were talking, there's a study that was written.
00:47:39.000It's called Geyer, G-U-I-E-R. And it's a study that looks at the efficacy of vaccines and other medical interventions.
00:47:48.000And it was published, I think, in Pediatrics in 2008.
00:47:53.000It was funded by CDC and NIH, and it was performed by scientists from Johns Hopkins.
00:48:05.000And they looked at mortalities from infectious disease in this country in the 20th century.
00:48:13.000So there was a dramatic drop in mortality from infectious disease, from measles, from pneumonia, from typhus, typhoid, cholera, polio, etc.
00:48:27.000It looked at each of these diseases and the declining mortalities and all of them dropped dramatically.
00:48:33.000Infectious disease was killing hundreds of thousands of people.
00:48:36.000Measles alone in the 19th century killed on average 10 to 20,000 people a year.
00:48:43.000By 1964, before the introduction of the vaccine, it was killing only 400, and they were almost all malnourished.
00:48:51.000Oh, it was kids, mainly black kids in the Mississippi Delta, who just didn't have enough to eat.
00:48:57.000And they looked not only at the efficacy of vaccines, but at all medical interventions, including antibiotics and surgeries.
00:49:05.000And they said, did they contribute to this dramatic drop of 80% Reduction of mortalities in the 20th century and one of the greatest Medical developments and milestones of all time, the essential disappeared.
00:49:23.000The diseases themselves did not disappear, they just stopped killing people.
00:49:27.000So every kid got measles, they just didn't kill anybody anymore, except malnourished people.
00:49:33.000And they said, what is the cause of this and how much did medical interventions contribute?
00:49:39.000And what they say is, Medical interventions, all of them put together, vaccines, antibiotics, surgeries contributed less than 3% and probably less than 1%.
00:49:50.000And that the real cause of those mortalities, and this, remember, is a CDC study, you know, exhaustive study, were not doctors, they were engineers.
00:50:06.000We're built through highways that allowed oranges to get up into the northern cities during the winter months.
00:50:14.000The refrigerators, the clean water for the cities, you know, chlorinated water, and all of these other engineering innovations that gave people good nutrition.
00:50:29.000And that's what eliminated disease because they had healthy immune systems.
00:50:34.000And it's almost impossible For most infectious diseases to kill a person with a healthy immune system.
00:50:43.000Infectious diseases are killing lots of people in Africa today, but if you look at what's wrong with those people, what's really killing them is malnutrition.
00:51:27.000They had diabetes and one other thing.
00:51:32.000And I was reminded of this study because of the way that you began this podcast by saying, you know, a healthy plant is almost impossible to kill.
00:52:00.000Was it the germ that actually killed them or was it the terrain?
00:52:04.000Was it the immune systems of the person who caught that disease?
00:52:10.000Those were assaulted by millions of microbes every day.
00:52:15.000Millions of pathogens, millions of bacteria are hitting our immune system every day.
00:52:19.000So what is it that causes some people to get the disease and to succumb and other people can walk into a room full of sick people and they never get sick?
00:52:28.000And, you know, the answer to that is what you discovered with plants.
00:52:34.000And as you said, it's a perfect analogy.
00:52:37.000Well, you know, Many people in the space either lack the knowledge or the intellectual honesty to dig deeper for root causes behind the surface-level information that they are given.
00:52:54.000In plant pathology, and if I recall correctly, perhaps also in human medicine, although I'm not entirely certain at this point, but in plant pathology, we have this concept that is used to teach First-year students at the university level about plant disease susceptibility that's called the disease triangle.
00:53:12.000And the disease triangle describes this concept that describes the three essential elements that are required in order for a disease to infect a plant.
00:53:22.000The one requirement is you need to have the presence of a pathogen, which we could have a whole interesting conversation about what really is a pathogen, particularly, I'm less familiar with the human health context, but as it turns out in the agricultural domain, many of these organisms that we call pathogens actually serve a beneficial function in a healthy environment, and that when the environment changes, they become pathogenic.
00:53:48.000So that could be kind of an interesting concept and idea to think about.
00:53:53.000But then the second aspect of the disease environment, or the disease triangle, is the environment, a proper environment.
00:54:24.000One of the foundations for our success at AEA and the reputation that we enjoy is we try to make decisions based on good data, based on good information, and constantly seek to identify the root cause.
00:54:43.000What's the root cause of why we have disease X expressing itself all of a sudden?
00:54:49.000What is interesting, Robert, is we have...
00:54:55.000We have a number of uncurable diseases that we have successfully reversed.
00:55:00.000One that comes to mind is bacterial canker on cherries and stone fruit, where we had orchards that were ready for the bulldozer.
00:55:07.000They were ready to be pushed out because they were no longer productive.
00:55:11.000And those trees completely recovered in 18 months to become middle-of-the-pack yielding blocks.
00:55:19.000And people ask us, well, what did you do?
00:55:23.000And we don't know, I don't know what it is that we did.
00:55:28.000We can't say we applied cobalt or we applied boron and it fit because what we did is we did a thorough nutritional assessment of those trees and of those blocks and we addressed the nutrient deficiencies across the board.
00:55:41.000You just, you do everything that is, you address everything that's imbalanced and the disease goes away.
00:55:46.000Now, of the 10 things that we did, Was it any particular one of them, or was it a combination of all ten?
00:55:55.000I have no idea, but I know that we reversed the situation.
00:55:59.000So I think digging for root causes and taking a very thorough and systemic approach is something that is far too frequently missing in our discourse around health management.
00:56:13.000Well, it's fascinating, and you're a fascinating guy, John.
00:56:18.000So, John Kempf, how do people reach you and how do they support you?
00:56:37.000You won't find any photos of me, but I have several managed social media accounts that I sometimes see, and you can certainly connect with me there.
00:56:48.000I'm very passionate about the work that we do.