RFK Jr. The Defender - Hope From Farmers with John Kempf

00:00:00.000 Hey 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.

00:00:12.000 John is part of the Amish community in Pennsylvania.

00:00:17.000 He founded Advancing Eco-Agriculture in 2006 and serves as chief vision officer and executive board chairman.

00:00:28.000 He'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.

00:00:46.000 As a member of the Amish community, John prefers to use artistic renderings of his likeness rather than a photograph or video.

00:00:55.000 So we're not airing a video of him today.

00:01:00.000 John, welcome to the show.

00:01:02.000 Thank you, Bobby, for having me.

00:01:04.000 It's quite an honor to be here.

00:01:06.000 I'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.

00:01:21.000 So thank you for all the work you're doing, and thank you for having me.

00:01:23.000 Yeah, so tell me about your journey and about how you discovered this occupation, I'll call it.

00:01:37.000 Yeah, it's been an interesting journey, that's for sure.

00:01:41.000 I 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.

00:01:59.000 This 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.

00:02:23.000 This was, we were applying ever more intensive pesticide application rates.

00:02:28.000 At this point in this three-year period, we were applying fungicides and insecticides every five days.

00:02:33.000 And it seemed the more we applied, the worse the problems became.

00:02:38.000 And then in 2004, we had a wake-up call experience that really got our attention.

00:02:44.000 Can you just tell about what your farm is, what it looks like, and where it fits in your community?

00:02:51.000 Yeah, we were one of the leading farmers in the community to first begin growing vegetables for wholesale markets.

00:02:59.000 And we had...

00:03:01.000 Four primary crops being tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and zucchini.

00:03:05.000 And it was a small family farm.

00:03:08.000 We had 25 acres altogether, 15 acres of land that was being tilled and planted into crops.

00:03:14.000 And of those 15 acres, these four crops represented probably 70% of the total crop that we were growing.

00:03:21.000 So we're located geographically in Northeast Ohio, maybe 20 miles, 25 miles south of Lake Erie and about 30 miles from the Pennsylvania border.

00:03:30.000 So 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.

00:03:49.000 Are there any prohibitions among the Amish about using chemical agriculture?

00:03:56.000 I know that Amish are not supposed to be using certain kinds of machinery.

00:04:02.000 What are those rules?

00:04:04.000 Well, there are many different Amish denominations, probably close to two dozen.

00:04:09.000 And so the rules and the restrictions vary widely from community to community.

00:04:13.000 So the community that I grew up in, we are farming with horses.

00:04:17.000 We're not using any electricity.

00:04:19.000 That has shifted a little bit in the last decade where we're now using more solar power and battery power tools and so forth.

00:04:25.000 But there's still no electricity, television, radio, or any of those modern electronics for the most part.

00:04:31.000 How about chemical agriculture?

00:04:33.000 Do any of the Amish communities or Mennonite communities forbid I'm not aware that there is any community where it is strictly forbidden.

00:04:45.000 There are very few communities where it is discouraged.

00:04:49.000 But the historical trajectory, the Amish community was taught to be subsurrient to government authority, to comply with governmental authority.

00:05:03.000 And to trust and respect, there's a great deal of an ethos of trust and respect for those in authority positions.

00:05:12.000 So 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.

00:05:25.000 Some of them, not all of them, but some Amish farmers adopted GMO technologies and adopted chemicals with a great deal of intensity.

00:05:37.000 You know, as a culture, we have culturally, I think we tend to have a very intensive work ethic, very aggressive work ethic.

00:05:46.000 And 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.

00:05:59.000 They go all the way in 100%.

00:06:01.000 And 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.

00:06:20.000 The chemical agriculture you were finding in, I think you said, was it 2016?

00:06:25.000 This would have been early 2000s, 2002, 2003, and 2004 when we had this...

00:06:32.000 Let me say that again.

00:06:33.000 So 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.

00:06:44.000 The more we used, the more intense the problems became.

00:06:47.000 We 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.

00:07:02.000 And, you know, this led to a really fascinating experience.

00:07:05.000 In 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.

00:07:21.000 And there used to be these two long, narrow strips of soil that were being tilled and planted up and down the slope.

00:07:30.000 Now 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.

00:07:40.000 We planted that field into cantaloupe.

00:07:43.000 And 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.

00:08:00.000 And on the new soil that didn't have the previous pesticide exposure, there was no powdery mildew.

00:08:05.000 Not 5% or 10%, but zero.

00:08:08.000 You couldn't find any powdery mildew.

00:08:10.000 And it was so pronounced...

00:08:13.000 That there was this very sharp, clean boundary.

00:08:17.000 There was like a knife line right down to the center of the field.

00:08:19.000 In fact, it was so pronounced.

00:08:21.000 So these plants were all identical, the same variety, managed the same way.

00:08:26.000 But they were spaced and planted two feet apart.

00:08:29.000 And 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.

00:08:37.000 And as you can imagine, that caught our attention in a significant way.

00:08:42.000 And what did you do next?

00:08:45.000 Well, 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?

00:08:58.000 What allows one plant to be resistant to powdery mildew when the next plant two feet away is susceptible?

00:09:04.000 And 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.

00:09:14.000 And kind of the summary of what I learned and have continued to learn since then is that all plants have an immune system.

00:09:25.000 That 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.

00:09:37.000 Some people become ill very easily, and other people practically never become ill because of infections.

00:09:44.000 And 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.

00:09:54.000 And the same concept holds true of plants as well.

00:09:58.000 Plants also have a functional immune system.

00:10:01.000 They have the capacity to be completely resistant to all diseases and all insects.

00:10:06.000 As long as their immune system is supported with the proper nutrition and the proper microbiome.

00:10:13.000 Exactly the same as our own immune system.

00:10:15.000 So this was a fascinating discovery to me because...

00:10:20.000 I had been very interested in plant sciences and horticulture for years before this.

00:10:27.000 And 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.

00:10:38.000 In fact, when I first started talking about this, I initially received some pushback and people would say, well, plants don't have immune systems.

00:10:46.000 And yet there are entire scientific journals that are dedicated to plant immunology.

00:10:50.000 And there are hundreds of articles, thousands of articles that have been published on this topic.

00:10:55.000 And yet this conversation never made its way into mainstream agriculture.

00:10:59.000 So what did you do with that information?

00:11:04.000 Well, that led to quite a revolution on the farm, as you might imagine.

00:11:11.000 I was very fortunate to be able to attend an ecological agriculture farming conference that winter with my father and my brother.

00:11:21.000 And one of the presentations we listened to spent several hours describing the modes of action of pesticides and how they influence the human body.

00:11:32.000 And at the time, not only were we farming, but my father was also the local ag inputs retailer for the fruit and vegetable growers.

00:11:41.000 So we had all the fertilizers and the seeds and the equipment and all the pesticides.

00:11:46.000 My father was a licensed pesticide distributor.

00:11:48.000 I was a licensed pesticide applicator when I was 16 years old.

00:11:54.000 We got done with that day of events, listening to presenters talk about pesticides.

00:12:00.000 My father got to the end of the day.

00:12:02.000 We went back to the hotel room and he said, we're done.

00:12:06.000 We're over.

00:12:07.000 We're not using pesticides anymore.

00:12:09.000 And 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.

00:12:26.000 So in the 2005 growing season, we did some very intensive experimentation.

00:12:32.000 We still used very tiny amounts of chemical herbicides.

00:12:37.000 And then by 2006, we went completely pesticide free.

00:12:40.000 And that farm has been completely pesticide free ever since then.

00:12:43.000 So 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.

00:13:04.000 And 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.

00:13:17.000 There is no known pesticide solution.

00:13:19.000 There is nothing that we have in our arsenal that works.

00:13:22.000 And at this point...

00:13:27.000 I can say that we have a perfect track record.

00:13:30.000 We are at 100%.

00:13:32.000 We 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.

00:13:44.000 And so that gives me a lot of confidence.

00:13:46.000 Earlier I made the statement that it's possible for plants to be 100% resistant to diseases and insects when you manage nutrition.

00:13:55.000 And that's quite a big claim to make.

00:13:58.000 That's a pretty big mouthful.

00:14:00.000 But it's not one that I make from a theory or from a hypothesis.

00:14:07.000 We have actually done this.

00:14:09.000 We are doing it.

00:14:10.000 And 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.

00:14:19.000 And so there's no question in my mind that this is possible and realistic and achievable on a large scale.

00:14:25.000 Let me go back to the Amish culture and the Amish community.

00:14:30.000 I'm very curious about your own background because you seem like a highly educated, very eloquent, articulate, and learned person in this area.

00:14:42.000 but are Amish likely to end up in an agricultural school, or where does their education end?

00:14:54.000 And what is your relationship then to the professors at the agricultural academies? - Yes.

00:15:07.000 Yeah, good questions.

00:15:10.000 So 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.

00:15:19.000 So I only have a formal eighth grade education.

00:15:22.000 And in fact, I don't know anyone personally who's remained in the Amish community who has an extended education.

00:15:29.000 It's certainly possible that it may exist, but I'm not aware that it does.

00:15:35.000 And, but we have...

00:15:37.000 And let me just, let me ask you one thing about that out of curiosity.

00:15:41.000 Are you educated in a public school in Ohio or do you, is it, are you homeschooled in an Amish community?

00:15:52.000 It 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.

00:16:01.000 20 to 30 students is kind of the system that we have mostly here in North America within the Amish community.

00:16:08.000 So those teachers also do not have a higher education.

00:16:13.000 Those 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.

00:16:22.000 And 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.

00:16:33.000 Okay, so then, to complete the answer to my original question, which was, what is your relationship with these agricultural professors?

00:16:44.000 You're allowed to use telephones, obviously.

00:16:47.000 Yes, yes, we're allowed to use telephones.

00:16:50.000 And 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.

00:17:05.000 And so, you know, I have the benefit of...

00:17:12.000 I have several gifts that I'm very grateful for and I've been blessed with.

00:17:17.000 One of them is being able to read very quickly and retain a great deal of what I read.

00:17:22.000 And our local township library has the distinction of having the highest per person book lending rate of any library in the nation.

00:17:37.000 And 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.

00:17:46.000 We don't have television and radios, and so reading is a very common form of entertainment.

00:17:51.000 And we had outstanding service at that local library where...

00:17:56.000 There 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.

00:18:04.000 I still remember receiving books from Germany and France and from throughout Europe on some of the topics that I was researching.

00:18:11.000 So...

00:18:12.000 To 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.

00:18:38.000 Just as with in the case of Plant immune systems and the domain knowledge around plant immune systems not being widely known.

00:18:48.000 You know, farming and agriculture is really a profession of generalists.

00:18:52.000 Farmers need to know so much about many different domains, many different specialties.

00:18:59.000 And in the study of, just in the study of growing crops, never mind animal agriculture, we have so many different domains of research.

00:19:08.000 We have botanists and horticulturists and plant physiologists and plant pathologists and geneticists, the list goes on and on.

00:19:16.000 And all of this amazing work on plant immune systems was being done in the botany department.

00:19:20.000 The 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.

00:19:29.000 And...

00:19:31.000 What I learned is that there is a great deal of siloing within academia.

00:19:35.000 And also, of course, funding is only available for those things.

00:19:40.000 At least this has been largely true, I think, for at least the last 30 to 40 years, perhaps longer.

00:19:45.000 Funding is only available for those types of research which contribute to commercial interests.

00:19:52.000 For the most part, there are exceptions, but they are limited.

00:19:55.000 And 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.

00:20:06.000 And I was very fortunate to develop an amazing group of mentors from among the people that I met and that I interacted with.

00:20:14.000 Did they come out to your farm?

00:20:16.000 How big is your farm?

00:20:17.000 Our farm was quite small.

00:20:19.000 It's 25 acres total and about 15 acres that we were planting.

00:20:22.000 Okay.

00:20:23.000 And so they...

00:20:27.000 I 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.

00:20:42.000 And 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.

00:20:54.000 But 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.

00:21:11.000 So much of it was done remotely, mostly on the phone.

00:21:14.000 How do you visit these events on your horse?

00:21:17.000 Are you Are you glad to get in the car?

00:21:21.000 Oh yes.

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.

00:21:36.000 How did you go from 25 acres that you own to influencing what happens on 4 million acres?

00:21:43.000 You know, it happens slowly and then it happens fast.

00:21:46.000 Early 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.

00:22:01.000 We 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.

00:22:11.000 And 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.

00:22:24.000 So, I really enjoyed the agronomy and the plant nutrition consulting work and opted to go in that direction.

00:22:30.000 So, that led to the founding of Advancing Ecoagriculture as a consulting company.

00:22:35.000 And, 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,

00:22:51.000 over 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.

00:23:07.000 There was no consideration for quality, no consideration for nutritional integrity, no consideration for disease and insect resistance or immune support.

00:23:15.000 And 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.

00:23:27.000 Once 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.

00:23:44.000 These are phytoalexins and what used to historically be called plant secondary metabolites.

00:23:49.000 In plain English, we call them essential oils.

00:23:51.000 These are compounds that plants produce as the foundation of their immune system that are known to enhance our own immune systems.

00:24:01.000 And 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.

00:24:17.000 And 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.

00:24:35.000 But 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.

00:24:44.000 So that was very inspiring.

00:24:46.000 And 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.

00:24:59.000 And this was a bit of a mind twister because somehow...

00:25:05.000 Recently, 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.

00:25:18.000 And 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.

00:25:25.000 And that if we want to replenish that and add things back, then we have to do other things.

00:25:30.000 We have to grow cover crops, we have to add compost, whatever the case might be.

00:25:35.000 Well, 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.

00:25:48.000 And 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.

00:26:00.000 That 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.

00:26:20.000 So my vision became seeing these regenerative farming systems become the mainstream globally over the course of the next couple of decades.

00:26:33.000 What has your fan club in the farm community, how much of that is in the Amish community?

00:26:44.000 Or are you like the prophet in his hometown who nobody pays attention to, which they warn about in the Bible?

00:26:53.000 Well, it depends on how you define hometown.

00:26:58.000 So 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

00:27:20.000 So 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.

00:27:35.000 And so that's within the local community itself.

00:27:39.000 But 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.

00:27:53.000 But 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.

00:28:04.000 Let me ask you another off-subject question about the Amish.

00:28:13.000 Do 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,

00:28:31.000 the 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.

00:28:46.000 We 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.

00:29:00.000 I think there is a growing appreciation for what we have as a community.

00:29:04.000 There's not particularly...

00:29:06.000 So you're not gloating.

00:29:08.000 You're not gloating.

00:29:09.000 No, no, no, no.

00:29:10.000 Why would we?

00:29:11.000 We are affected by the decay of society around us.

00:29:14.000 So there's not that judgmental perspective, but an increasing sense of gratitude for what we have.

00:29:22.000 You know, I've developed such a deep appreciation for this.

00:29:26.000 It started, you know, as you grow older and you mature, you develop a different and evolving perspective, hopefully more wisdom, perhaps.

00:29:36.000 So I started a decade ago, probably six, seven years ago, really beginning to appreciate the strong community and family culture that we have.

00:29:47.000 And 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.

00:29:59.000 Because initially, the early days, the first month, the six weeks of lockdowns, we wanted to be respectful.

00:30:09.000 We wanted to do the right thing.

00:30:10.000 There were still lots of unknowns.

00:30:12.000 And so we tried to comply with those.

00:30:14.000 A lot of schools shut down early that school season.

00:30:16.000 But after about six weeks...

00:30:19.000 That game was over.

00:30:21.000 By 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.

00:30:32.000 The local community had realized that if we want to maintain our strong social and community fabric, Then we cannot permit ourselves to be isolated.

00:30:43.000 So we went on.

00:30:44.000 We continued without pause.

00:30:46.000 Our church services, our...

00:30:49.000 In fact, most churches, there were a few churches that closed for one or two weeks, but most kept going continuously.

00:30:58.000 And local businesses.

00:31:00.000 It was quite interesting.

00:31:01.000 The local community has a very significant economic presence, even in the non-Amish community that they're surrounded by. 0.99

00:31:09.000 So, of course, we necessarily support grocery stores and hardware stores and so forth.

00:31:16.000 And here in Ohio, the governor used the mandate that stores couldn't check out.

00:31:22.000 Stores were given the responsibility.

00:31:24.000 They needed to require anyone who was inside the store to wear a mask.

00:31:29.000 And 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. 0.51

00:31:48.000 And that broke the store's resolve and broke the mandates within the local community.

00:31:53.000 The only business who was successful in keeping the mask mandates alive were the local banks.

00:32:01.000 They were the only ones who were successful in forcing it.

00:32:04.000 As 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.

00:32:15.000 That was, I think in hindsight, without question, that was the right strategy for us as a community.

00:32:21.000 Now, of course, that may not have been the right approach for everyone, because as a culture, we have different exposures.

00:32:27.000 We're around animals.

00:32:29.000 We're around the outdoors a lot more than some people are in the cities.

00:32:31.000 But that was the right pathway for us, and I'm very glad we took that pathway.

00:32:35.000 Yeah, and I just...

00:32:37.000 How old are you, John?

00:32:40.000 35, 36, somewhere in there.

00:32:42.000 So John, just some people, because there's no picture on this, so I want you to know kind of who I'm talking to.

00:32:52.000 John Kempf is a very, very good-looking guy.

00:32:58.000 He's got a clean shape.

00:33:01.000 What do you call those chin whiskers?

00:33:04.000 Yeah, a full beard.

00:33:05.000 He's got a full beard under his chin.

00:33:08.000 It's about a foot and a half long.

00:33:11.000 He's got a great smile and twinkling eyes and just a really wonderful looking person.

00:33:21.000 And then you speak to Pennsylvania Dutch or what we used to call Pennsylvania Dutch in your homes.

00:33:30.000 Yeah, English is a second language for us.

00:33:32.000 I didn't learn to speak English until I went to school.

00:33:36.000 And you call outsiders English.

00:33:39.000 At least that's what they did.

00:33:41.000 Yeah, generally.

00:33:43.000 The English.

00:33:46.000 So then, what do you think have been kind of the biggest successes of this program?

00:33:53.000 Are we referring to our regenerative agriculture work?

00:33:56.000 Yeah.

00:33:57.000 Oh my goodness, Robert.

00:33:59.000 As it's growing, it's growing around the country now, right?

00:34:03.000 And around the world.

00:34:04.000 Yeah, I think the biggest successes...

00:34:07.000 Are that it brings joy back into farming, it brings hope back into agriculture, and it brings a vision for the future.

00:34:14.000 You know, we have an epidemic suicide rate within farmers here in North America.

00:34:21.000 Well, not just here in North America, but really in many places around the globe.

00:34:25.000 And farmers have been systemically taken advantage of by agribusiness corporations for decades.

00:34:31.000 The farmers are being farmed, I think would be a very accurate way of describing it.

00:34:38.000 What 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,

00:34:56.000 in that we take a very practical approach Welcome to my show!

00:35:22.000 And we've taken a very different perspective, firmly grounded in the expectation, the belief that you achieve what you incentivize.

00:35:30.000 And 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.

00:35:47.000 So 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

00:36:08.000 So 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.

00:36:20.000 And your input costs are a fraction of what they were historically, while your yields have maintained or increased.

00:36:28.000 And 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.

00:36:45.000 And there are many growers who strongly desire that and are motivated by that.

00:36:50.000 And necessarily because they need it, they need it to survive.

00:36:55.000 And 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.

00:37:08.000 There are many amazing stories, but the best story of all is how it is impacting our rural communities.

00:37:16.000 Because if, you know, if we back up just a step and we think about What does regenerative agriculture mean?

00:37:25.000 What is it that needs regenerative from a foundational first principles perspective?

00:37:30.000 We 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.

00:37:50.000 You know, there are two very different points of view about the role of people in the landscape.

00:37:58.000 The one point of view, sometimes held by environmentalists, is that the best way to regenerate an ecosystem is to remove people from the landscape.

00:38:08.000 And 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.

00:38:33.000 And that is the model that I subscribe to.

00:38:36.000 I believe that humans have the capacity to regenerate far faster.

00:38:41.000 In fact, it is necessary for humans to be present and engage in regenerating ecosystems, particularly in brittle environments.

00:38:47.000 And so if that premise is true, that means we need thousands.

00:38:53.000 No, we need millions.

00:38:55.000 More 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.

00:39:05.000 In 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.

00:39:30.000 And 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.

00:39:50.000 Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time over a decade suing the big hog confinement companies like Smithfield, Tyson's, Murphy Farms, etc.

00:40:05.000 And, you know, farmers would sign contracts with them.

00:40:08.000 They'd build a hog shed.

00:40:11.000 They'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.

00:40:24.000 It would own the feed.

00:40:25.000 It would dictate all the farming practices.

00:40:29.000 It would drop off the piglets and then come pick them up. 0.92

00:40:33.000 And, you know, when they hit kill weight...

00:40:38.000 And then give them another generation of piglets. 1.00

00:40:41.000 And those farmers were barely hanging onto their property for dear life.

00:40:48.000 And 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.

00:41:06.000 He owned the farm, so he didn't get a salary, but he was looking at his profits and the amount of time.

00:41:13.000 He was paying himself essentially $2.50 an hour.

00:41:18.000 Yeah.

00:41:18.000 Oh, and that's, you know, and he was a smart, incredibly hardworking guy.

00:41:25.000 If he had gone and rented out his labor, he would have made so much more money.

00:41:29.000 Right.

00:41:29.000 And instead, you know, and most of them, most of the farmers that I was working for had to have two salary households.

00:41:40.000 Their wives were working as school teachers or nurses in the local town.

00:41:44.000 And it's the only way they survive.

00:41:46.000 And that's a sad thing.

00:41:49.000 It's not sustainable.

00:41:50.000 That's still a very common story today.

00:41:53.000 Farmers in many cases, just as in the case that you described, farmers are financially indentured servants.

00:41:59.000 And I think it's accurate to say that the farmers are being farmed.

00:42:05.000 Let me ask you this about that.

00:42:07.000 You're in Ohio.

00:42:09.000 If you drive across Ohio, you're looking at corn that is eight feet high.

00:42:16.000 That is GMO, Monsanto, Roundup Ready corn for acre after acre all the way to the horizon.

00:42:26.000 And 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.

00:42:38.000 And they're locked into these monocultures with giant inputs coming in for carbon-based fertilizers and for chemical-based pesticides and herbicides.

00:42:53.000 And 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.

00:43:06.000 Somebody who is stuck in that economic model, does what you're doing offer any hope to somebody like that?

00:43:12.000 Or 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?

00:43:25.000 Yes, it does.

00:43:26.000 We do work with many growers who are exactly in that context, who are beginning to transition that context.

00:43:31.000 Because of course, to break free from that system, you first have to have an economic pathway to freedom.

00:43:39.000 And as you described, they are locked in from a capital investment perspective.

00:43:44.000 They are locked in from an insurance and from a financing perspective.

00:43:47.000 So there needs to be a pathway to freedom that is kind of within that model and within that system.

00:43:54.000 But then, over time, change doesn't happen first in the field.

00:43:59.000 It happens first in our hearts and minds.

00:44:01.000 And we are all on our own journey of change.

00:44:04.000 Every grower and every farmer is on their own individual journey.

00:44:08.000 And 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.

00:44:17.000 Because the reality is our current agricultural commodity production system, focusing on corn and beans and wheat and cotton, etc., is relatively easy.

00:44:29.000 It's easy from a management perspective.

00:44:32.000 It's easy from a financing perspective.

00:44:34.000 And so learning to shift to a different model is That is more management intensive and that brings livestock back to the landscape.

00:44:44.000 There are a lot of moving pieces.

00:44:46.000 It requires the participation of more people in the operation.

00:44:51.000 So 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.

00:45:05.000 Now, 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.

00:45:21.000 Let me ask you something.

00:45:22.000 Do you watch YouTube?

00:45:25.000 Occasionally.

00:45:25.000 I mean, how do you watch?

00:45:26.000 Because you don't have a cell phone, right?

00:45:29.000 Yeah, 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.

00:45:34.000 I don't have a lot of time to waste at work, but if there's a necessity, yeah, I will watch YouTube there.

00:45:39.000 So, 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.

00:45:53.000 Well, you know, you can read faster than you can listen.

00:45:58.000 You can absorb information faster than you can listen.

00:46:00.000 Yeah, I know that.

00:46:00.000 I never watch YouTube because I tell people, send it to me in writing.

00:46:09.000 My kids would know absolutely nothing if it weren't for YouTube, you know, or podcasts or whatever.

00:46:16.000 That's where they're getting their information from.

00:46:20.000 And you do a podcast, so I guess you're allowed to give it.

00:46:26.000 Yeah, I host a podcast, and you know, I had so much fun in the podcast.

00:46:29.000 What happened is...

00:46:31.000 Early on, I met some amazing mentors.

00:46:34.000 People who were just, they were the classical definition of a walking encyclopedia with extremely deep domain knowledge.

00:46:41.000 And they had written down a lot, but they passed away and they took far more with them than they left behind.

00:46:47.000 And I knew some of the stories and the experiences, and I wanted to capture some of that and share it with a larger audience.

00:46:54.000 And that was the genesis of the podcast and to share some of the hope and the inspiration and the things that I was learning.

00:47:00.000 And I did it for myself.

00:47:05.000 I did it because it was something I felt was important and necessary to do.

00:47:09.000 And 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.

00:47:19.000 So it's been an interesting journey.

00:47:21.000 But I don't listen to my own podcast because, yeah, I don't have time to listen.

00:47:26.000 Yeah, I don't listen because I can't stand the sound of my voice.

00:47:30.000 But, you know, I was thinking as you were talking, there's a study that was written.

00:47:39.000 It's called Geyer, G-U-I-E-R. And it's a study that looks at the efficacy of vaccines and other medical interventions.

00:47:48.000 And it was published, I think, in Pediatrics in 2008.

00:47:53.000 It was funded by CDC and NIH, and it was performed by scientists from Johns Hopkins.

00:48:05.000 And they looked at mortalities from infectious disease in this country in the 20th century.

00:48:13.000 So there was a dramatic drop in mortality from infectious disease, from measles, from pneumonia, from typhus, typhoid, cholera, polio, etc.

00:48:24.000 Liptheria, tetanus, pertussis.

00:48:27.000 It looked at each of these diseases and the declining mortalities and all of them dropped dramatically.

00:48:33.000 Infectious disease was killing hundreds of thousands of people.

00:48:36.000 Measles alone in the 19th century killed on average 10 to 20,000 people a year.

00:48:43.000 By 1964, before the introduction of the vaccine, it was killing only 400, and they were almost all malnourished.

00:48:51.000 Oh, it was kids, mainly black kids in the Mississippi Delta, who just didn't have enough to eat.

00:48:57.000 And they looked not only at the efficacy of vaccines, but at all medical interventions, including antibiotics and surgeries.

00:49:05.000 And 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.

00:49:23.000 The diseases themselves did not disappear, they just stopped killing people.

00:49:27.000 So every kid got measles, they just didn't kill anybody anymore, except malnourished people. 0.99

00:49:33.000 And they said, what is the cause of this and how much did medical interventions contribute?

00:49:39.000 And what they say is, Medical interventions, all of them put together, vaccines, antibiotics, surgeries contributed less than 3% and probably less than 1%.

00:49:49.000 Wow.

00:49:50.000 And that the real cause of those mortalities, and this, remember, is a CDC study, you know, exhaustive study, were not doctors, they were engineers.

00:50:06.000 We're built through highways that allowed oranges to get up into the northern cities during the winter months.

00:50:14.000 The refrigerators, the clean water for the cities, you know, chlorinated water, and all of these other engineering innovations that gave people good nutrition.

00:50:29.000 And that's what eliminated disease because they had healthy immune systems.

00:50:34.000 And it's almost impossible For most infectious diseases to kill a person with a healthy immune system.

00:50:43.000 Infectious 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.

00:50:53.000 So it's brought them up to the edge.

00:50:56.000 And during COVID, we had the highest mortality rate in the world.

00:51:00.000 We had 16% of the COVID deaths.

00:51:02.000 We only had 4.2% of the world's population.

00:51:06.000 Whatever we were doing was wrong.

00:51:08.000 But what CDC said is not our fault.

00:51:11.000 It's not our fault.

00:51:12.000 It wasn't our management of COVID. It's because Americans are so sick. 1.00

00:51:16.000 CDC said the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.

00:51:22.000 So they had obesity.

00:51:24.000 They had, you know, asthma.

00:51:27.000 They had diabetes and one other thing.

00:51:32.000 And 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.

00:51:42.000 Exactly.

00:51:42.000 It's the human parallel.

00:51:43.000 It's the perfect parallel.

00:51:45.000 Yeah.

00:51:47.000 And it's called, you know, Pat Stewart had this big...

00:51:52.000 A dispute over it and it was, you know, about whether it was germ theory or terrain theory.

00:51:57.000 Was it, what was killing people?

00:52:00.000 Was it the germ that actually killed them or was it the terrain?

00:52:04.000 Was it the immune systems of the person who caught that disease?

00:52:10.000 Those were assaulted by millions of microbes every day.

00:52:15.000 Millions of pathogens, millions of bacteria are hitting our immune system every day.

00:52:19.000 So 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?

00:52:28.000 And, you know, the answer to that is what you discovered with plants.

00:52:34.000 And as you said, it's a perfect analogy.

00:52:37.000 Well, 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.

00:52:54.000 In 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.

00:53:12.000 And the disease triangle describes this concept that describes the three essential elements that are required in order for a disease to infect a plant.

00:53:22.000 The 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.

00:53:48.000 So that could be kind of an interesting concept and idea to think about.

00:53:53.000 But then the second aspect of the disease environment, or the disease triangle, is the environment, a proper environment.

00:54:01.000 And the third is a susceptible host.

00:54:05.000 And that concept is often just kind of taken at face value, and we move on.

00:54:10.000 But hang on a second.

00:54:12.000 Let's stop and think about what defines a susceptible host.

00:54:17.000 Because not all hosts are uniformly susceptible.

00:54:19.000 Let's understand why that is.

00:54:24.000 One 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.

00:54:43.000 What's the root cause of why we have disease X expressing itself all of a sudden?

00:54:49.000 What is interesting, Robert, is we have...

00:54:55.000 We have a number of uncurable diseases that we have successfully reversed.

00:55:00.000 One that comes to mind is bacterial canker on cherries and stone fruit, where we had orchards that were ready for the bulldozer.

00:55:07.000 They were ready to be pushed out because they were no longer productive.

00:55:11.000 And those trees completely recovered in 18 months to become middle-of-the-pack yielding blocks.

00:55:19.000 And people ask us, well, what did you do?

00:55:23.000 And we don't know, I don't know what it is that we did.

00:55:26.000 There is no one silver bullet.

00:55:28.000 We 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.

00:55:41.000 You just, you do everything that is, you address everything that's imbalanced and the disease goes away.

00:55:46.000 Now, of the 10 things that we did, Was it any particular one of them, or was it a combination of all ten?

00:55:55.000 I have no idea, but I know that we reversed the situation.

00:55:59.000 So 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.

00:56:13.000 Well, it's fascinating, and you're a fascinating guy, John.

00:56:18.000 So, John Kempf, how do people reach you and how do they support you?

00:56:23.000 I have a website, johnkempf.com.

00:56:28.000 I host the Regenerative Agriculture podcast, our consulting and product nutrition company is called Advancing Eco Agriculture.

00:56:35.000 You can find my icon.

00:56:37.000 You 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.

00:56:48.000 I'm very passionate about the work that we do.

00:56:50.000 We have the opportunity.

00:56:51.000 There is so much potential and so much opportunity in agriculture right now and for the world.

00:56:55.000 You know, I think all of us are here on this earth for a reason, for a purpose.

00:57:05.000 And the greater the calamities appear to be, the greater is the opportunity.

00:57:13.000 And we are here for such a time as this.

00:57:16.000 No one else is going to solve these problems for us.

00:57:18.000 We need to solve them ourselves.

00:57:20.000 And collectively, as a human race, we collectively already have the knowledge.

00:57:26.000 We have the know-how.

00:57:27.000 We have the wisdom.

00:57:28.000 We know what needs to be done.

00:57:29.000 We just need to find the collective will and the alliance to actually do it.

00:57:35.000 And we can.

00:57:35.000 That's what we're here for.

00:57:37.000 So thank you for having me on.

00:57:40.000 John Kemp, thank you very, very much.

00:57:42.000 Thanks for joining me.

00:57:43.000 A fascinating conversation.

00:57:45.000 Thank you, Robert.

RFK Jr. The Defender - May 30, 2024

Hope From Farmers with John Kempf

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