Denver Black: Welcome to the Soilcraft Regen Agronomy Podcast. At Soilcraft, our mission is to innovate and lead in the field of regenerative agronomy, forging a path that empowers farmers to produce food that nourishes and heals both the planet and its inhabitants. and radio podcast. know, the truth is people sometimes we get busy. Actually, we're busy all the time and we're trying to be consistent and sometimes we're consistent until we're not consistent. just tell people I'm consistently inconsistent. Right. Exactly. Anyways, thanks for joining us. We're here. You're here with Denver Black and TG, Trent Greybilt. Two sides of the world. Right now, Trent's ears are much greener than mine. This is where we are at. March 11th, we've had zero snow. It's hardly frozen the entire winter. It's hit 71 the other day. And now winter finally decided to show up. The mountains are getting like around five feet of snow in the next four days. The apricots are blooming, I suppose, as well. Yep, there's not a lot of those left anymore, but the ones that are around are Yeah, that's not good Apricots blooming so it'll be hard on them, but things are firing off right? mean, yeah things want to go there. planted Guys are spraying top dressing wheat spraying grass grass seed all kinds of things are going on lots of prepping happening and here we're dressed It's anxious. There's lots of prepping and lots of angst. Yesterday talking with growers, like some cases they're waiting on contracts and it's like, ⁓ we need to be planting this stuff like here in a week or two. And we don't even know if we're gonna have the contract to sell it. So it's, it's going to be a unique season. At for me. That's tough. lot of uncertainty. Agriculture in general is having a lot of uncertainty, Yeah. It's just been growing. mean, it's been that way in potatoes, for instance, for a number of years. But I'm guessing increasingly so. Is that right? Yeah. I think in some, mean, it's hard to know exactly why. That's where my mind always goes. Why? I'm always so curious. I'm so curious that I know my wife. But yeah, I don't have the reason. But in some ways we've gotten really good at production. feel like, mean, record productions and a lot of different things and specifically here in the Northwest over the last few years. so I think it's a combination of increased production, other countries getting good at production. combination of COVID and tariffs, both, think made other countries look other places to buy things, to purchase materials, products. And so they're like, Hey, this product from this country is actually not too bad. So it's maybe closer or less free. So I don't know if that's affected our, at least our American export market or not, but it's we're living in some, at least unique times in my young tenure. Yeah, it makes me think when you talk about it, it makes me think about how in general, our agriculture, our food system is in many ways like a surplus. Like we have more food than we need. Okay, not globally, because here in Zambia, for instance, we often suffer with food insecurity. But still generally speaking, I would say we grow a surplus of food. And ironically, when we talk about trying to grow food in better ways, maybe organically or whatever, people say, ⁓ but how are you going to feed the world? Because of course, the assumption is there's reduced yields and reduced production. Although you and I both know when we produce things regeneratively and even organically, even when we have to go all the way, maybe that's maybe not my first. preference, even when we do tie our hands to certified organic, we still don't actually produce less. But I would say at this time, we have a surplus of quote unquote food, but we've never had more scarcity in nutrition. We've never had more scarcity in minerals and nutrients and vitamins and antioxidants and plant metabolites. And like people are Especially in America, people are on average overweight, overfed, calorically, and yet malnourished. Yeah. And the challenge of course is, you know, the whole system is based on, the whole system is based on paying for farmers for tons of material. Okay. There are some, there are some, you know, don't get me wrong. There's some qualitative aspects to that. I'm not saying there's no qualitative aspects. You know, in wheat, there's milling qualities. know, potatoes, obviously there's got to be certain qualities for storage, fruit, obviously for storage as well. But again, most of the time it comes down to storage. doesn't come down, bread milling is textural, et cetera, so bread can rise, it's, but very seldomly, if ever, is it based nutritively. As close as we can come to is maybe protein percentages in certain crops like wheat, but even those too is a matter of blending for again, how bread rises or. certain doughs or pastas or whatever. It's not about nutrition. It's never about nutrition. And of course we eat food to be nourished, but we don't measure. We don't measure it by such means. And we know it when we eat something that's good, because our tongue tells us when there's nourishment. It tastes good. But I don't know, where are we going with all this? agree. I completely agree. I this was part of my entire presentation when I was at our grower meeting that we hosted in Kansas last week was on why is regenerative critical. And then I subtitled it as an epigenetics overview and looking at our overall human health. Looking at the challenges is if you go back to say my parents' time or my grandparents' time and people argue, like, well, I've been eating this way and I've been doing this and rrrr for 55 or whatever it is, 60 years. And I'm fine. So it ain't that bad for me. Well, this is the difference. This is where we're at. The challenges is saying my parents' time when they were kids or my grandparents' time. They could handle the toxicity because they were not malnutrition. They were not malnourished. They had the mineral components. They had all of that epigenetic influence from their parents and how they grew up and their nutrition and their raw natural, whatever you want to call it, diets, hard work, all of those things. We live in a world in which we don't have to essentially exercise to survive in a lot of ways. So at least in our, in my American Western culture, where you're at in Zambia, it's a little different. You got to work to survive and eat here. You can, it can come in a Walmart delivery to your front door. You don't hardly have to get up off your couch, you know, depending on where you're at and all of those things. But essentially in their time, they can handle toxicity. Now we're to a point in my generation, my children's generation, for one, my kid's generation is the first generation in our American history, statistically showing to not outlive the prior generation. That hasn't happened yet. And here we are. We've been this slow, you know, we've lived longer, longer, longer. Now we've plateaued and it's headed the other direction. So why is that? And I think a lot of it has to do with malnutrition, but the challenge is, we are inundated with toxins. whether it's hormone disruptors in your shampoo, your cosmetics that you're putting on your face, the hormone disruptors in the petroleum byproduct plastic materials that every single food is packaged in, the things that's washed in, you name it, the things we're breathing, the things we're wearing on our clothes, the things that's in our house, paint, electromagnetic, you name it, we're living in a toxic soup and it's amazing what our bodies can handle. But if we're malnutritious, we can't handle near as much. And that's why we're seeing this chronic epidemic of so many problems. mean, that was, have my slides pulled up here. It's like you look at the overall prevalence of chronic disease in America and from 1940, chronic disease, roughly was seven and a half percent by 2020, where 60 % of the population has chronic disease. Chronic disease means that like you, what's the term of chronic? It's something that you don't necessarily have an answer for. It's just constant. It's there. There's no real good thing cure. It's just you deal with it. You live with it. 60 % in 2020. That was six years ago. How is that? I you look at cancer rates, you look at total expenditure and then you look at our, we spend in America on health. And from in 1970, we spent, was like, let's see, per capita total national health expenditures per capita and total, guess, constant 2020 dollars because our dollars of value is different than it was in 1970. but it was like right under two gram. in 2020, we're at 12,500. So you look at the rate of increase of expense that people spend on going to the doctor and it's astronomical. And yet our chronic disease is astronomical. You look at, mean, we have 20,000 different prescription drugs available. Do we have a deficiency in medicine? No, look at the amount of the chemistries, the drugs, the vaccines, you name it from It's insane, and you look at cancer deaths, this is just literally from 1990. This is a global burden of disease paper published 2019. In 1990, let's say if that was the medium starting point at 0%, cancer deaths have went up 80%. The cancer death rate as far as age, the age standardized cancer death rate, which means the younger people are dying from cancer, has also went up. Like it's insane. Canfers cancer prevalence and projections in the US population from 1975 and the projected to 2040 goes from, let's see cancer prevalence in the US population and the millions is around 3.6 million. By 20, right now 20, well, five years, six years ago in 2019, it was 16.9 million by 2040 is projected to be 26.1 million people. Yeah, and along with that, like I was just, I was just talking to somebody about, you know, we're trying to work on banana Bunchy Top virus here in our bananas, which aphids are a vector and like trying to do all these things to get rid of it. But if you go back in time before banana Bunchy Top virus was a problem, you'll find it just emerged. Well, it emerged about the same time the previous Panama disease disappeared in bananas. Why did Panama disease disappear? Well, Panama disease disappeared because It was a problem. they genetically modified, not modified. Okay. They genetically bred for plants that were resistant to Panama, but it was a result. You don't get very far down the line and guess what shows up. Well, now all of sudden they're getting banana bunch of top virus, which tells us that when we tried to genetically. Read a phenotype, right through, through selective breeding at that time, we left behind something. it's the wrong approach. You didn't solve the problem. It's all about epigenetics. That's what the whole rest of the talk that I can go into. It's like, we didn't change the environment. Why do we have the disease? Why are we sick? We need to genetically engineer. We need to become transhumanism and mesh with machines and animals. need all of this evil, wicked satanic agenda is going completely against what the creation was designed to do. And that's why we have so many problems. Instead of saying, okay, let's maybe ask the creator how he designed this and work with it. No, we're smarter than him. We have better ideas. That's the enemy. It's all about epigenetics. I mean, if you talk about nutrition, what? Go ahead. Well, just was finishing my thought from earlier. It's like an exactly what you said. You look at our overall nutrient decline. And this is literally only looking at protein, calcium, iron, vitamin A, vitamin B2 and vitamin C. That's it. We're not talking about all your other macros, micros, bioflavonoids. you name it, that are in our food, that's super important for our health. Protein, and this is only from 19, well, only, I should say it's only up to 1999. So from 1950 to 1999, which was 26, 27 years ago, protein dropped by like 10%. Calcium dropped by almost 20%. Iron dropped by 15%. Vitamin A dropped by 20%. Vitamin B2 dropped by over 40%. Vitamin Z dropped by 15%. And that's 27 years ago, this was collected. So our overall nutrient value is going in our quality of food. And so the challenge is like, if we had the mineral nutrition, the aptitude, know, all these things, proper sunlight, you name it, and we could handle a lot of this toxic soup that we live in way better. They've proven that. You look at studies coming out of looking at the people who didn't get cancer. in Chernobyl or the nuclear meltdown happened in the subsequent decades. And they couldn't figure out why because there's other people had similar amount of nutrition, live in similar area, blah, blah, blah. And they didn't get tumor and cancers and all this messed up stuff from radioactive material. And the conclusion was after 10 years of studying these people that didn't get sick was they were properly hydrated. They were drinking clean structured water out of this river that was near there that was able to hydrate their cells. And they found, wow. If our cells are hydrated, I think above 70%, you can literally, the body can withstand a certain level of radiation and not be impacted. And so it all comes back to nutrition and overall health. And you look at this paper right here is from 2009. And this is the percentage of population not meeting even just the basic recommended daily amounts of vitamin A, folate, calcium, magnesium. I mean, it's anywhere from 86%. Lowest is 15 % that people aren't even getting of the recommended. And the recommended is like base to survive, not to be optimal and not to be able to handle all the toxic soup. So I know this has kind of a negative conversation that we've entered in here, but it's imperative for our survival and it can be reversed. It can absolutely be reversed. And that's when You can go into the whole Potters' Cat's and I've got all these slides on there because they've already done this with animals. And here we are. Well, we see it, right? I mean, you can see it. We literally, I mean, that's what I was just going to mention. It's just like, you know, Dykstra does a great job in some of his presentations. Tom Dykstra talking about how, you know, the soybean aphid shows up. I think it was, I've seen several people, but you know, soybean aphid shows up all of sudden. The aphid is not like this new aphid showed up. It's like we call it the soybean aphid now because all of sudden this aphid that existed in nature right in that same space for ages, all of sudden starts attacking aphids. Why is that? Okay, yes, to some degree often it's because now there's a ridiculous amount of soybeans being produced and so that aphid population can grow. But usually more often, no, it's actually something has changed in how we're producing that crop. And that's what's changing things is how we produce that and how we used to produce it. Yeah, absolutely. mean, do we not think that... Well, a lot of people probably don't, but do we not think that... Let's see, what do we have? What did I have here? And this was as of, I think, 2020. We have more than 17,000 different pesticides that are on the market. And so you look at the total number of use from 1990, we've got like... What is it? 1600 tons of total overall pesticides applied globally. And by 2020 we're at almost 3000. And so, yeah, it's getting worse. It's only getting, you look at the, what is it? The assessment of acute insecticide toxicity loading of chemical pesticide in United States. And so this is the toxicity levels in relations to your LD50, which is your lethal dose. And let's see. the LDL, how do you read this, an LDL in days in certain crops. In 1992, it was like roughly 5,000 on this graph. And by 2014, we're at 180,000. It's insane. And so it's like, of course nature is going to have to deal with this material and this fallout. We're going to have new insects, new pathogens. We're going to have all of these different things that are like, Hey, we've got to figure out how to deal with this stuff. We've never seen these compounds before. So nature's going to figure out a way to try to deal with it and try to remediate it. And that's why we have a lot of these weird Insects and disease that we don't understand because we've introduced all of these crazy compounds in our environment that Has to be dealt with somehow in nature's I mean you could see I just saw post the other day somebody was posting on one of the groups You know and look I I don't mean to knock it. I mean they're they're trying to help producers Trying to help producers with soybeans to produce better soybeans more even ripening better beans as a final product, you know, but like they were showing like the different herbicides you could use for desiccation. And one of them was diquat, you know, which is like paraquat, gramoxone, active ingredient. And it's like, even this, which has seemingly been seemingly innocuous, it's a contact herbicide, it's not systemic. So it kills on contact. It's not something that gets absorbed and then goes into the plant so much. Supposed to be one of the most innocuous. Yeah, and now some of the latest studies are showing that not only is it appreciating in soils and sticking around in soils, but it's being taken up by grain at an alarming level. the plants. the seed. From previous applications. From previous, previous, previous applications. we're eating it. And when they're testing it, it's like, it's not like, oh, this is slightly exceeding the minimum PPM allowable it's like 10 to a hundred fold higher than minimal the minimum allowed doses So it's it's like okay. And so what do we do? Yeah, okay. It's negative. ⁓ no, this guy's following. What are we supposed to do? There was a time when we did all of this without these fancy Things and not to say that we throw all the technology out up, you know We've reached a terrible point, so let's just go back to the horse and buggy and throw everything out. ⁓ But what can we do? And what I think is so amazing is, from what we're seeing, both there and here in Zambia, look, I mean, it's so cool, because if we go back, again, it depends on your worldview, but I just find it amazing that you go back to the original, in a biblical worldview, and you look at creation of man. formed from soil or humus, you know, and that's where we get the term humus. Human comes from humus, which is soil, not just gravel, sand, dirt, clay, actual organic matter, living, living soil. And, but it's just so appropriate because oftentimes we, people can look at things and think that's old fashioned, that's archaic until we actually realize, no, actually we are a product of the soil. are actually continually because whatever we consume, food, if it's food, it originates from that soil. Whether it's animal based and they eat plants that come from that soil, we are built from soil. 100 % right? Crazy. What does this say? What did the Creator do in Genesis? He took the dust of the earth and formed man and then breathed life into it. What's dust? Minerals. Yes. And then he breathed life. Probiotics, oxygen. I mean, it's insane. We joke about you are what you eat. But we are. Every single bite you take gets processed, broken down by microbes, and then absorbed into the bloodstream. And then we need to put it back. compounds go into ourselves to build us. Cue manure. We gotta put that back in the soil. That's the next stage. So obviously the solution is to grow soil, to build soil. We know that. We know that it grows. It's tantamount. It goes so far. But the big question is, but how do we grow soil? Okay, but we do know how to grow soils, how to build soils. And we know the natural way. We know the way that nature does it, the creation does it. Generally speaking, it's plants and animals working together through a decomposition cycle building, it appreciates. And we've short-circuited that and said, no, let's just plant crop after crop and make it yield as high as possible and remove everything and just do that. ⁓ we can't do that forever, so then let's just apply a few letters in the alphabet to it, and then what could go wrong? And so it's no wonder why we're here. But what I think is most amazing is to find that actually you can grow soil much quicker than we thought before. And actually that's, you know, it's so hard to measure it in a short span of time. The soil grows over time. And so we've been looking for ways, good ways to measure our progress. And I think, you you were mentioning there were some guys in the Midwest that were using the Haney test a little differently to test some of the biostimulants, soil prebiotics. I ⁓ that's interesting. Okay, I'll give that a shot. And so I did that recently. A grower I just recently started working with here in Zambia who grows coffee. And we're just doing a block where we're treating, we're treating it with the program, you know, our program, not to say that our program is the only program that can work, but the program, which is feeding the soil with soil vigor, which is a soil prebiotic. We haven't even, we don't, we don't have a chance to put down teas. We would like to put aerobic teas down, but we haven't had a chance to do that. and doing some time foliars, pulling sap analysis, know, treating excesses or extreme deficiencies. But we did a treated, untreated, so we had two blocks adjacent to each other. So we pulled a Haney test. We pulled a Haney test in the untreated and a Haney test where we applied soil vigor 72 hours post to just see like, is there something measurable? And it was amazing because what we found was that in the treated, we saw an increase in the WIOC, the water extractable organic carbon, by over 100 % and an increase in soil respiration by just over 20%. That's huge. One application, 50 liters per hectare, which I think we worked out comes to about five gallons an acre in the States, if I remember right. One application increased WIOC by 100 percent after three days post. That's like significant, but what I think is maybe more significant, you know, the fear is that, okay, if you add sugar, not to say that we added sugar, mean, soil vigor is a complex blend of a number of different things, but it does include molasses, which gets a bad rap. Yes, it did increase respiration. Everybody's worried, you you put on sugar and then you're just going to have a boom and bust. But if that's the case, if you saw a hundred percent increase in we are, you should expect to see 100 percent increase in soil respiration. When I saw a 20 percent increase, and then you might say, well, Denver, but that's still a problem because that's carbon leaving and we want to sequester carbon. I understand there could be an argument made for that. However, when you look at ⁓ most of the compelling research, for instance, even done on maize, ⁓ as to what is the most limiting element for crop yield and crop growth, it's actually carbon. and carbon dioxide, you know, they've been in admitted trials and found that, I mean, we can't keep up constantly emitting CO2 in a 360 circle around plants. Still, those plants could still take in more CO2. And so actually I do want a little burst if I have a growing crop. If I have a crop, a little burst is going to go right up into those lower leaves. They need it into the stomata. It's going to upregulate photosynthesis, which is going to increase rhodagicidates. Photosynthate. So I'm stoked. I mean, we're going to do more testing with this. This was in an adjacent block. So now this next week, we're going to actually pull a Haney test prior to our soil vigor app and then 72 hours post poll one. So the cool thing is now this first poll we're going to do is going to be 30 days post soil vigor. And so we can compare where is that WIOC at 30 days after we applied. Well, okay, 27 days after we applied because we know that and then we're gonna do it again 72 hours again and see if there's a difference after that so I think You know the the sad thing is sometimes actually we kind of get it knocks us a little bit the Haney test does because that's you to burst ⁓ And I think look on bare soil. Yeah, I'm concerned if we have a CO2 purse We're losing it, but I'm not sure we're measuring things fairly because the one thing it doesn't take into consideration, and I'm not sure how we could get at this, is lignified crop residue. Because I think the two main ingredients to building soil fast is a lot of soil residue, lignified soil residue, and the soil vigor, which is a lay biocarbon source, which feeds and revs up the biology, which then takes that residue and turns it into OM. And so the question is- Okay, the question is in that CO2 burst, do we have a living crop, one, and two, do we have residue available, their lignified residue? Because if we do, revving that up and getting a little burst is actually, I believe, going to create a net gain because it's going to upregulate the microbes in order to take that lignin and make it organic matter, and that's what we're seeing. So we're gonna start correlating these to increases in soil organic matter. and things like that and measuring those against each other. anyways, that's kind of what's happening here. huge. Real, if we could do it more real time. Yeah, because we know too much, we've seen too much. The challenge is how do we capture that so that other people can grasp and do the same thing? I know earlier I was ⁓ a little bit negative, but the positive side is... We can reverse all of these things. can build soil. We can build nutrient density. We can increase our health. We can reverse chronic disease if we focus on nutrition and we focus on building life. That's what regenerate means. And in over the past 50 years, it seems like we've had too much of an emphasis on sides killing. Okay, we'll dive deeper soon. The next time I'd like to, go over, we'll post some of the different numbers. We'll pull another sample here and we'll continue to go over them. And then I'm hopeful that maybe that side as you guys start to kick off, we can start doing some of those as well. Some of those treated and untreated and have a look at it. Alright, thanks for joining. We'll see you next week. Thanks so much for joining us as we expand our paradigms and explore what's possible in the realm of Regenagronomy. If you would like to contact us or learn more about what we do, please visit our website at www.soylcraft.com as well as our YouTube channel. If you have topics you would like us to unpack or stories, please connect with us so that we can share them with others.