AI Agronomist Solves 10-Year Farm Problem in One Prompt: John Kempf on Farm Security Theater

Guest [00:00:00] Support for the Ag Tribes report comes from river.com, an online platform for buying Bitcoin in the United States. Use the affiliate link provided in the show notes to purchase Bitcoin directly from River to grow your Bitcoin investment and support the podcast river.com. Invest in Bitcoin with confidence and Legacy. Interviews, a video service that captures people as they really are, so the future knows who they really were. Here's Legacy Interviews guest Phil Bender on how the experience allowed him time for personal reflection and an opportunity to honor his parents.

Vance Crowe [00:00:37] What was the experience like of

Guest [00:00:39] Being interviewed at this depth? Very rewarding, very refreshing. You know, you're just, your sense of interest and the depth of the questions was really impressive and you stayed present through the whole thing because I pay attention to that kind of thing. You were really, were walking with me through it. This is a keepsake for me, but also a great way to honor my parents. There are a couple things about my dad you drew out today that I don't know if, if I've said, said that to him. I think it's a moment in time to reflect, engage, deepen your perspective on what you've accomplished. I am reflecting on my version of what I saw, what I felt, how I responded to it. That is a legacy that's valuable. Welcome to the Ag Tribes report, a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host, Vance Crowe. The report begins in 3, 2, 1. Let's begin.

Vance Crowe [00:01:52] Welcome to the Ag Tribes report. I'm your host, Vance Crowe. Each week I bring on a co-host that represents one of the many ag tribes that make up US and Canadian agriculture. This week, the great John Kemp returns. John is a farmer from northeast Ohio and founder of advancing eco agriculture, a regenerative agronomy consulting company, established in 2006, driven by a mission to make regenerative agriculture mainstream. By 2040 Kemp developed an innovative soil and plant management system after witnessing the failure of conventional pesticides on his own family's farm. Now, his company, advancing Eco Ag, has launched his own AI agronomist, and that is an interesting thing for John to talk about. So, John, welcome to the show and tell us why'd you launch an AI agronomist.

Guest [00:02:43] Hi, advance. Thanks for having me on, but I'm curious about why you used the adjective great to describe me. After all, Jesus said, nothing is good. No one is good.

Vance Crowe [00:02:55] That's fair. I I think I described you that way because I enjoy our conversations and I would say, I don't know how adversarial you are, but I find that our ideas can clash and it's definitely a good, a good conversation. I, I walk away feeling refreshed after talking to you.

Guest [00:03:09] Yeah, likewise. There's this aspect of iron sharpening iron. If you don't disagree occasionally, then one person's doing most of the thinking or all the thinking. Yeah. Launching an AI has been interesting. It's kind of an interesting paradox, you know, having an Amish guy working on building and launching an ai. How does that work exactly?

Vance Crowe [00:03:31] I mean, that, that's the, the obvious first question right outta the gate. When did you start using AI enough that you thought, Hey, I can, I can pile information into here and, and how'd you do it?

Guest [00:03:42] Well, I read some of Ray Kurzweil's work on the, the coming of the singularity. And so I, I've been paying attention to this field starting probably 15 or more years ago, and it was probably 10 years ago that I first outlined a vision that I had of what an AI agronomist could become and could be, and that was before, before the advent of large language models, before that technology had been developed. And so I had, what I envisioned as an AI agronomist is something quite different from the way ai, the meaning of AI today, the way that people generally understand it. But I first sketched out what an AI should look like in, in the winter of 2014. Actually, it was late 2013, spring of 2014. So this has been something I've been spending quite a lot of, quite some time thinking about what it might look like. And, you know, it really comes out of this, when, when we take an integrated approach to plant nutrition and do agronomy management, there are, there are two pieces that make AI and and large data datasets particularly appropriate here. And that is this, this aspect of non-linearity and just the multi-dimensional data, the multiple factors. So when you start looking at soil microbiome data, plant microbiome data, plant nutritional profiles, soil nutritional profiles, meteorological data, there are these hundreds or thousands of potential data points that the human mind just can't grasp.

Guest [00:05:18] And it's difficult to see all the patterns and see all the interactions. And so there's an obvious fit here for deep learning, statistical analysis, and for AI to make sense of large data sets. And of course, the quality of the data going into that is a large part of what makes that data set valuable. What makes it AI potentially valuable?

Vance Crowe [00:05:43] Well, I I, I'm staggered by how far AI has come, and I'm excited that you've done something. We will take a much longer podcast sometime and sit down and really talk about what you did, how you did it, what engine you're using behind it. But I just thought, man, let's, let's jump right into it and find out a little bit about your AI agronomist, but we gotta head into the show. There is a lot going on. And on this week's episode, we're gonna dive into the Trump administration's new Farm Security is National Security Initiative. We're gonna talk about whether that's a genuine policy or just pure propaganda. We're also gonna examine why the USDA opened and then immediately shut the border to Mexican cattle due to the new world screw worm. And we're gonna explore other AI products that farmers are actually buying. You know, there's a lot of people out there saying, oh, they have, the farmers have access to this, but what are they willing to pay for? And then if we have a little bit of time left over, we're gonna talk about the cloud seeding and if it impacted the Texas flood, we're also gonna explore the Bitcoin land price report with Bitcoin's brand new all time highs. And we're gonna hear John's newest Peter Thiel paradox and learn about another worthy adversary. And we're gonna try and do that in just 30 minutes. So let's get started. The Trump administration launches farm security is National Security Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the Trump administration's new plan on July 8th aimed at prohibiting future purchases of US farmland by Chinese nationals and entities from other countries of concern.

Vance Crowe [00:07:19] The initiative seeks to claw back existing foreign held land where possible and safeguard the nation's food supply from potential adversarial influences. The announcement made alongside defense secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Christie Nome, involves removing over 550 foreign linked entities from the USDA system, enhancing monitoring near, near military bases and promoting state level bans on LAN and sales to adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. Currently, Chinese investors hold approximately 277,000 acres, which is just 0.02% of all privately held US agricultural land. And you can make a comparison here. Canada's foreign land ownership is 12.8 million acres. The Netherlands owns 4.9 and total foreign ownership overall is 45 million acres or about 3.5% of privately owned land. The, the plan also targets Chinese owned ag companies, Smithfield Foods, and Syngenta, which are both owned by Chinese companies. And I think it is worth listening to just a few moments of what Brooke Rollins had to say about this project.

Guest [00:08:34] Chinese owning a farmland in our country is a massive national security issue. And for the media, you can see the yellow is where all of the farms have been purchased over the last number of years. And the red is around all of the military bases where that farmland has been purchased. So this is a massive national security issue.

Vance Crowe [00:08:59] Okay. John, what do you think? Is this propaganda, I mean, it's not like the Chinese just bought this yesterday. What's going on with their, the US government jumping in on this?

Guest [00:09:12] Well, there's a number of thoughts that come to mind, but if we just look at what happened in Iran during the recent Iran Israeli conflict, one of the aspects of war modern warfare has changed with the development of drone technology and ai. Now all you need is a loan drone, drone launching base. And when you consider land close to military basis as a possible drone launching base, then obviously the implications of that from a national security perspective become very important. But it's worth asking a whole bunch of questions around this, why just land? Because you don't just require land. I mean, you can do this from a warehouse, you can do it from a larger building. There's lot, lots of, lots of considerations and thing, things to think about there. But there's also, when you consider Brooke used the phrase national security perspective, but what does national security actually mean? Is this from a worker perspective? Is it from a food security perspective? Because I would argue that from a food security perspective, we actually have much bigger concerns about the, the quantity and quality of food that we're importing from outside the country.

Vance Crowe [00:10:24] Yeah, I mean, I think that that's perfect example would be when we started to have an egg shortage after they killed all the chickens than they started importing from South Korea and Turkey and from wherever else. And but to go back to your earlier point about the drones and being near military bases, I am completely comfortable with the US government saying foreign entities can't own farmland and they certainly can't own them close to military bases. It just seems very precarious to me to make farm security and national security synonymous, which is the new mantra that came out just a couple of days ago. It makes me really uncomfortable because it feels like they're going to assert power in over farmland in a way that I don't think is good for people like you and me.

Guest [00:11:11] Well, why are, again, why are we limiting it to farmland? Who cares about Chinese ownership of Smithfield, for example? I mean, you wanna talk about a food security perspective. What about the, the significant processors and significant supply chain constraints? If you wanna, if if we're concerned that Chinese are going to exercise sovereignty over that in, in the event of a food shortage and export to the detriment of Americans, then let's have a conversation about much more than just land.

Vance Crowe [00:11:36] Yeah. And it's not just, yeah, I mean, Syngenta is owned by Kim China, and then you even look on a wider level. Of course, you know, right now company or countries like Germany are our, are our allies, but we have very little ownership of our packing houses or our seed companies, which if it really is national security, why did these deals get allowed to go through? Why, why were they allowed to sell a company like Monsanto to bear?

Guest [00:12:04] Yeah, the list goes on and on of, again, as you point out, if you really, if this really is considered a national security threat, which I I'm in, I'm in favor or, or I'm in alignment with that I can get, I can see that food security and the integrity of the supply chain should be considered a national security from a national security perspective. I mean, what is the, what's the old rule of thumb? We're we're three square meals away from a revolution or something like that. So food security from a national security perspective is a framing that I can, that I can align with that I can see why it would be framed that way. But then what does that mean exactly? Why is it being interpreted that way? Why now? And what is it that we expect to really do differently? And the bottom line question is, who does it benefit?

Vance Crowe [00:12:55] Yeah, I mean the biggest question for me that comes out of all of this is, is not like, should we or shouldn't we? It's why now, like the, the push on this became so big, the, the propaganda that I was having in a photos sent to me where the map of the United States was just covered in Chinese red flags with giant stars. And it was obvious that they were over-hyping this, but why now is it to distract from something else? Is it to secure power? It feels very uncomfortable to me.

Guest [00:13:23] Yeah. And why, why this tactic, why this approach? You know, it's worth asking what has this administration done that u unique actions, there's been supposedly some things in the, in the big beautiful bill that just passed, but what has this administration done truly to benefit farmers in a significant way? And if there's much, I haven't seen it.

Vance Crowe [00:13:50] No, but the super national FFA officer that is Brooke Rollins absolutely is out there talking and, and pumping up the system all the time. But for the most part it seems like it's, it it tilted towards the large industry groups and talking about what is going to happen as opposed to anything that's actually happened.

Guest [00:14:09] You know, it was quite interesting. I I had a conversation several weeks ago with, with a DC insider who is, who's a part of the MAHA Commission and putting the reports together. And he said something to me quite interesting when there were, there were some conversations around the inclusion of glyphosate and GMOs in the first Maha Commission report, or they were being considered, I don't think they were actually included. And he said the agriculture lobby is 50 times more intense than the pharmaceutical lobby. It was the most intense lobbying pressure that he had ever experienced. What does that say?

Vance Crowe [00:14:49] Yeah, I mean it's, it's often been said that Bear, who I used to work for, I worked for Monsano and then Bear bought them that one of the primary things that they bought when they were buying Monsanto was not for the seeds and the genetics, it was for the, the apparatus to be able to get things through the FDA, the USDA and the, and the whole lobbying system. And it's because the bureaucratic system is definitely tilted towards those who are willing to pay to play, I think. Alright, we could stay on this all night, but we need to move on because new world screw worm, both open and shut the border. Let's talk a little bit about what's going on in a whiplash move. The USDA first reopened cattle imports from Mexico after screwworm concerns and then just two short days later slammed them shut again. Secretary Rollins announced decisive action to shut down the southern border ports for livestock for trade due to this screw worm. So I'm posting up right now a map of just where that is right now. Reuters reports that the US again halts the cattle imports from Mexico. The pest can devastate livestock by laying eggs and creating open wounds. The screw worm, as we've talked about on this show, was eradicated in the US in 1966. And for a little while there they were saying, Hey, it's coming, we're gonna shut down the border. Then they opened it back up. There's a lot of talk from people like Jared McDaniel online that what they were really trying to do was open it up so they could move through a bunch of cattle to get processed from Mexico and Central America, and then they shut it down really quickly because it's now less than 300 miles.

Vance Crowe [00:16:32] It's 300 miles away from the border. So John,

Guest [00:16:35] Do we have any, ev do we have any evidence of cattle being moved through the border in that two day window in large numbers? Because it's, if that's true, that's kind of a big deal.

Vance Crowe [00:16:46] Yeah, well, so the, the anecdotal evidence on X was that a lot of people were saying how long the trucking lines were to get into the packing houses in Texas. But I mean, outside of that, I, I only have anecdotal conversations that were going on in X

Guest [00:17:01] Yeah, the, the whole, the whole timing of that. I mean, I think closing the border is something that farmers and ranchers generally would all agree on was the right move and the right call. But why open it for two days? Why, why the, again, just lots of questions of who does it benefit. We know who it doesn't benefit, it sure doesn't benefit the US rancher.

Vance Crowe [00:17:21] Yeah. And then this is a dangerous pest and I think that anybody that's got cattle out on rangeland definitely doesn't want this in the system. And you definitely don't want these put into, you know, if cattle are contaminated with this, putting 'em into our feedlot system would be just horrific. So the opening and closing just seemed stupid, stupid, stupid on behalf of the administration. 'cause now if it comes to the US it's gonna be blamed at least in part on that open border.

Guest [00:17:48] You know, this is a slight shift of topic, but an aligned topic, but there's a, there's a quote that comes to mind, I forget who it's attributed to, but is there any other agency like the USDA who over the course of its history, has counted its success as the decimation of its constituents? Like who are the USDA constituents really? Are they farmers and ranchers and growers, or are they the agribusiness industry groups? And if it is the former, if it's farmers and ranchers, then that population has been decimated over the course of the last century or more particularly in the last 20 or third. Well, there's been this ongoing trend, and so this is not just a point about the most recent administration, but it, it appears that they count as success, the decimation of their farming and growing constituents to a degree.

Vance Crowe [00:18:47] Well, I strongly believe that the decimation of this is a result of wild inflation. But to your point on the USDA, I don't know how much time you've spent in Washington DC but when you see the building that the USDA is housed in, it is so staggering because it is blocks long. You start driving by this building and you just keep driving and you're like, oh, the building just keeps going. And you have to ask yourself, what are all these people doing in Washington DC that you need all these USDA people who knows, but it doesn't seem like they're helping farmers maintain.

Guest [00:19:20] And when you consider the environmental context, the environment of, of dc the obvious question is, is that the best location to have someone or to have a group of people that is responsible for administering the Department of Ag? You know, who is it? Robert c Aldini. He had written several great books on framing, including the book Presuasion. But he describes how just the context, the environment that someone finds themselves in and the context of a conversation rapidly changes how they show up and who they show up as. And so if you really want to have people that are there to support agriculture, to support farmers, why are you having it in DC

Vance Crowe [00:20:04] A absolutely, I mean my, my, I it's kind of a joke I always say is that we should move the USDA to Kearney Nebraska because it's at least an hour away from an airport. And so everybody that's there would only be there to work for the USDA, whereas when it's in Washington DC the USDA is just one place that a part of the bureaucratic system swings through and it's controlled by people that wanna be in Washington DC They wanna be a part of that hyperconnected network of people in politics. And so if you, if you really wanted to make the USDA more about farmers, you would put them in a far more decentralized place that didn't make it easy for people to come and go.

Guest [00:20:46] Well, you would put them them in a, in an area that is surrounded by a rural ag community where the people who work would work at the USDA would have some type of, of life connection to agricultural community.

Vance Crowe [00:20:59] Alright, moving on. What AI products are farmers actually buying right now? You know, in, in anticipation of you coming on, I did a little research using Rock's New Model four, which was incredibly powerful. If you haven't used that particular system just in the last day or so. I have been staggered by it. But the AI in agriculture market is projected to reach 4.7 billion by 2028. And farmers are, according to ai, directly purchasing AI integrated tools right now. Top purchases include autonomous machinery like John Deere Sea and spray system that uses computer vision to identify weeds and cut herbicide use by up to 90%. Farmers are buying these through dealers for around $200,000. F FJ D'S A T two auto steer system provides AI powered GPS guidance for five to $10,000. And as for software platforms like Fairmont Fair Farm, a Knot, which includes AI advisory services for crop strategies and satellite monitoring, small farmer start at 10 to $50 a month per acre. And Microsoft Farm Vibes is an AI offering soil mapping and yield forecasting. Of course drones are in there with ai. And as I was going through this list and kind of seeing what AI was produced, I don't buy it, I don't think there's that many farmers paying directly for ai. But what's been your experience so far, John?

Guest [00:22:24] I haven't seen it either. And how much, I mean, where the places where I've seen, I, I don't think we can even accurately call it ai. There's, there's deep learning and machine learning for photo identification of insects on laser weeders or not insects on of, of weeds for laser weeders for robotic weeders. There's, there's image image detection of disease and insects and pathogens and so forth. So there's some of that out there, but how much of it are growers actually paying for? I haven't seen very much.

Vance Crowe [00:23:01] Yeah. I mean one of the most staggering podcasts I've ever put out was when I had grok interview me for the podcast and it was then that I got literally hundreds of phone calls, text messages, emails from people saying, I had no idea it was like this. Exactly. And this was just a few weeks ago. They didn't know it's there. And so, you know, maybe there, there's some people at the top of the, of the large industrial scale that are, that are buying John Deere systems, but I, I don't, I don't think, I think almost nobody is using ai. I heard Jason Mock at his field day had been exposed to AI and started being like, oh, I can start asking it questions about my field and getting responses back. What's adoption been like for you?

Guest [00:23:44] Well, it's, we're just approaching public launch this next week. So we've been in a, a private beta up to this point just providing beta access to a limited number of people. And of that particular group, everyone, I mean obviously it's, it's been by invitation or by people who expressed a desire and interest. So we've had virtually everyone that we offered access to has been in the system and playing around with it, which is under a thousand people at this point and just robustly testing everything out. But what is fascinating is the feedback and the responses. I, I've had, I had one agronomist who's been a successful agronomist for 25 years, say, John, this thing has solved more problems for me in the last 30 days than I've been able to solve in the last 10 years on my own, like I would. And he, he said verbatim, he said, I would pay $10,000 a month for this tool.

Vance Crowe [00:24:40] I mean, I believe it when, when a system works with ai it does solve problems like in my own office, all these tiny problems that you just don't know how to solve, right? How do you get that printer to network? How do you get this, you know, supplier to get something back to you, write an email for me to about this problem. We've been trying to figure out it, it radically does that. So on a farm fi, what is it figuring out? What's your AI system working on?

Guest [00:25:06] Well, our AI system is, is focused and trained on all the things that are agronomy and plant and livestock agriculture related so that it has a deep data set behind it that's focused and framed on that. And of course it, it can also do other things above and beyond that. But that's the specialty that it's really focused on. And so, you know, I'm fascinated by it. It can entertain questions at all levels, just like the scenario that you described where you had these very entry level questions of how do I fix X? But then also just this morning I was having a conversation with one of the dairy clients that we work with here at a EA that we do consulting work for and they're measuring the nutritional profile of their milk and their, they're intending to make changes to the label claims of their nutritional profile because they have an attritional profile that is markedly different from the USDA averages. It's significantly better. But there was this one characteristic was CLA conjugated linolenic acid that didn't match the trend of everything else. Like everything else was elevated 40 to 60% above, above baseline averages except this one marker. And alright, why? So I just asked our AI the question, forget exactly how I framed the prompt, but what nutritional management factors could be correlated with lower levels of CLA in plants and in milk? And lo and behold it gave me an answer of, of four different nutrients.

Guest [00:26:39] The first one of them being selenium. Because if it's association with glutathione peroxidase, and it described in detail the mechanisms by which these nutrients could influence lower levels of CLA and guess what those four nutrients are nutrients that this farm's soil is systemically low in. So it just, it nailed it right on the spot with no context, no information. And so there is, I I I think my, my assessment or my perspective is similar to yours Vance, in that agriculture in general, farmers and grower and, and agronomists generally haven't yet really deeply leaned into even the, the, the mainstream AI models like chat GPT and Gemini and and Grok and so forth. And they don't really know what's out there and what capabilities it has because when you start really digging into it, the capabilities are pretty impressive. And like you, I checked out grok four today and Wow,

Vance Crowe [00:27:38] Stunning. It's absolutely stunning. Well John, we will do a full on podcast about this. I'll let you get your system out there up and running and, and we'll do a full on podcast about this 'cause I got a lot of questions for you, but it is time for us we're gonna skip over the cloud seating. The long and short answer is I had Rock four do some hardcore research on this and they say even if the cloud seeding wanted to, all the timing was off, it was not the cause of those floods. No matter what way you feel about cloud seeding, whether it works or it doesn't work, it does not appear that that caused the flooding. Alright, moving on to the, it's two things. Oh go ahead John.

Guest [00:28:14] It's two things I would be remiss, I haven't even mentioned the name of our ai, it's called field log so people can look that up. It's launching public this coming week and on cloud seeding, cloud seeding is not the only form of geoengineering. I asked GR for, for a list of patents, how many patents are there that use some type of electromagnetic radiation for geoengineering? And the answer blew me away. I knew it was quite a few because I've personally read dozens. GROP four found 1300.

Vance Crowe [00:28:51] And what does that tell you then John?

Guest [00:28:53] Well what it tells me is let's not get just focused, let's not get focused on just cloud seating alone. That's kind of what everyone's aware of at the moment. But geoengineering is much bigger than cloud seating.

Vance Crowe [00:29:04] And do you think there should be laws, should we be trying to control and or stop this?

Guest [00:29:09] Well the evident the fact that everyone that the military and the USDA bureaucracy apparatus is all hush hush conspiracy theory. This doesn't exist. This doesn't, this isn't real when there are 1300 patents for, it tells me that it's probably something that we need to be transparent about, need to, to work on revealing more of what is happening and what's going on rather than just sweeping it under the carpet. Because the moment, the moment they label something a conspiracy theory, it's worth going after.

Vance Crowe [00:29:38] To your point, the EPA came out just today saying, Hey, we're gonna release everything we know about chemtrails and anything going on with this sort of geoengineering. And my immediate thought is, well the reason you're doing that is because you wanna distract from the fact that you just came out and said there are no Epstein files. He didn't have any clients. And what we'd really rather you focus on is not this Epstein case but the chemtrails. But to hear you maybe there is something here to look at.

Guest [00:30:07] Well it's, it's not just ignore cloud seating, look at geoengineering from an electromagnetic perspective and then you'll find where the heat is.

Vance Crowe [00:30:14] Alright, I'm glad you stopped me and then we didn't just jump right through. So if you have stories that you think we should cover on the Ag tribes report, send them to me on X at Vance Crow or Vance at Legacy Interviews dot com. Alright, moving on to a very exciting topic this week. The Bitcoin land price report last November, which is when I had you on the show last Bitcoin was $76,500 and today we are sitting at $116,000. A staggering 52% increase as today is a new all time high. So John have, have land prices changed that much since we spoke last?

Guest [00:30:58] No, not significantly. They're still in the 12 to 14 maybe high 15,000 range, but 14,000 is a safe number, which is where we were last November.

Vance Crowe [00:31:07] So what that means is that now Bitcoin would buy you one acre of land is worth 0.12 Bitcoin or one Bitcoin would buy you 8.3 acres. Whereas last year or at last November it was just a little bit over five acres per Bitcoin. How does that sit, what's been your experience with Bitcoin since we last spoke, John?

Guest [00:31:32] Well, since we last spoke and now own a little bit of Bitcoin enough, just enough that I can say that I'm dabbling. But you know, I feel like Bitcoin is, is an asset on your balance sheet is really what it is. And it's in that aspect it's, it has some of the same characteristics as Goldwood for example. And I'm a little bit like Warren Buffet in my perspective on holding assets on a balance sheet, even on a personal balance sheet. I prefer to invest those assets in growing something, particularly because of my association with agriculture. So it's interesting, I'm certainly playing around with it, I'm intrigued by it. I think it has something it's worth, it's worth people digging into and trying to understand well because when you understand Bitcoin you can't, you can't help but also learn a lot about monetary policy and the way that, how dysfunctional it is.

Vance Crowe [00:32:25] I totally agree with that. I think just, just the very active of purchasing Bitcoin will make your brain have to understand things in a, in a different way. I actually heard something this week that kinda struck me that Bitcoin is a new thing to buy that normally you can't buy. It's, it's buying a technology like as a whole, it it'd be the equivalent of buying the internet in a way because this technology is actually growing, it's spreading, it's becoming, it's changing philosophical Phil philosophies, it's, it's changing governments. So it is something more than just an a single asset that's not doing something, it is more alive than that in some way,

Guest [00:33:11] But very abstract. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:33:14] Alright, well we are gonna keep moving on 'cause we're running o out of time, but we're gonna turn now to the Peter Thiel paradox. So John, what is something that you believe in that almost nobody in your ag tribe agrees with you on?

Guest [00:33:30] You know, I, I've been thinking about that since our last conversation. I struggled to answer that a little bit then. And I'm, I'm surrounded by, I'm fortunate enough to be surrounded by a lot of critical thinkers. We're constantly testing each other's thought processes. And so there are, I don't know how many there, I certainly have many things that are very different from the mainstream. One is I believe that pesticides actually create future insect and disease susceptibility in a significant way. And I mean future in terms of five days and in terms of five years. And I also believe that agriculture is the foundation of good public health. It's not alone the foundation of poor public health because you can have poor public health as a result of, that's a, there's a number of contributing factors. There is, there are environmental factors, there is processed food, there is stuff that's in our water. The list kind of goes on and on, but you can only have good public health, optimized public health when you have a good, good food system, a healthy food system that's at the foundation of that. And you know, just recently the, with the Maha movement, Kennedy and Brooke Rollins have really been incentivizing and promoting removing sodas and sugary drinks from the SNAP program, specifically targeting, as I understand it, sugar in general, but high fructose corn syrup in particular.

Guest [00:35:04] And since we're having a conversation in the agricultural context, you know, it's not that far of a jump from no longer incentivizing and subsidizing sugary sodas to no longer sugar subsidizing the source of the sugars that are in those sodas IE corn syrup.

Vance Crowe [00:35:24] Well that's interesting. I mean, I think there are a lot of people that feel strongly that we should not be making it as cheap as possible for people to eat sugar. I think where I would actually, my my kind of latest Peter Teal paradox is I think that sugar has been unduly maligned and that that high fructose corn syrup is, is, is actually an innovation that is quite interesting. It's the fact that it allows so many more calories to be accessed for so cheaply, that's what's caused the problem. But I, I'm, I don't think high fructose corn syrup is in and of itself bad.

Guest [00:36:00] You and I are not aligned on that one. That's where we need

Vance Crowe [00:36:02] More time to have a conversation. But, you know,

Guest [00:36:04] I'll just give you, just give you one data point and there's many, but as I understand it, high fr high fructose corn syrup will not give you a feeling of satiation. So you can eat large amounts and still feel hungry or not feel satiated. So you can just eat and eat and eat. Whereas other forms of sugar do contribute that feeling of satiation. You eat a little bit and you feel full.

Vance Crowe [00:36:31] So I actually had heard this and believed it for a very long time and not that long ago, tried some, I'm an n of one, so, but I can only use my own experience on something like satiation and I don't find that to be true at all. I, I find that if I eat an equivalent amount of honey versus high fructose corn syrup, the satiation is the same. And what really makes a big difference is am I eating fats or protein around with them and what hormones are being released in your body as a result of the other factors that you're adding in. Not just the a your body's access to sugar.

Guest [00:37:06] But

Vance Crowe [00:37:06] What do I know? This is just my, my end of one experience. Well,

Guest [00:37:09] Since you rebuffed that, I'll give you one more. And that is, I'm, I'm a passionate beekeeper. I have around a hundred honeybee colonies and the evidence is pretty clear. There's, where was this researcher from, I wanna say University of South Carolina or Georgia or somewhere in the south, I forget right now, but there've been several studies on the health impacts of high fructose corn syrup versus sucrose on honeybees and sucrose winds by a significant distance, not because of the fructose or the sugar form as I understand it, but because HFCS contains, ah, goodness, the name of the molecule is escaping me right now. But there's actually a contaminant that is a result of the manufacturing process that has a very detrimental health effect on honeybee health. Now we're not honeybees, it may not have the same metabolic health effects on us as it does on honeybees, but there's another red flag for me.

Vance Crowe [00:38:04] Yeah, I mean when I first heard these ideas, it was by a guy that goes by anaology. I've had him on the podcast, I thought he was ridiculous. And now I'm just glad I've encountered it because I think I, I had a lot of received wisdom about this, but I still don't think the the, the case is settled by any stretch. Well,

Guest [00:38:21] Let's

Vance Crowe [00:38:21] Go

Guest [00:38:21] One, let's go one level of further.

Vance Crowe [00:38:23] All right.

Guest [00:38:25] You know, the FDA originally classified sugar as a drug and there was intense lobbying activity to get sugar reevaluated and reassigned and assigned as a food instead of as a drug. Because as a drug there were very limited amounts that you could include in food products. And so if you go back in, in history, I forget the exact timeline around this, I wanna say it's thirties, forties, somewhere in there, there was quite an intense lobbying pressure to get food rela, or excuse me, sugar reclassified as a food instead of as a drug.

Vance Crowe [00:38:59] I am convinced by, or at least it, it makes sense to me that you did get cravings from sugar. But I think that we live in a world now that is so different than what we grew up with or not what we grew up, what we evolved for. So it used to be the only time you could get access to carbohydrates would be in the middle of summertime. You know, carbohydrates were not easily accessible and at that point in time you were eating carbs and that signal to your body, Hey, turn up the temperature, burn them as fast as you can. 'cause what you really need is protein. But now, and then in the wintertime, you'd eat a lot more fats. And I think that when you have this combination of fats and sugars, it's doing something to our metabolism that is probably not great, but I think that we are maligning sugar when really it's a network effect that's more complicated than high fructose corn syrup is the enemy. And that that the, the end result is that we're going after the wrong problems, at least in Yeah, in terms of human nutrition.

Guest [00:40:01] Well, I certainly can agree with the fact that we have, we have a list of acceptable ingredients in our food supply here in North America that's 10, 10,000 plus ingredients long, which is like two factors of magnitude greater than what is permissible in Europe. And that there isn't, you know, if we get caught in just going after one ingredient or one group of ingredients like food dies, we will miss many, many other things that are without question also having a detrimental effect in combination. It's not like one of these things alone is going to kill us, but the the sheer exposure that we have in combinations that have never been studied and safety tested is something we should correct.

Vance Crowe [00:40:43] Yeah, I mean and no doubt and food preservatives, you know, we're trying to make food last longer. The the, and they're all studied in isolation. 'cause that's the only way you can do it. And really our bodies, just like you were describing, the microbiome is a network and, and it's signaling and it's much more complicated. So I'm with you on that. Well, John, do you have a worthy adversary? Somebody that you respect but you strongly disagree with

Guest [00:41:06] Someone who I respect, who I strongly disagree with. I probably have lots of those people that I disagree with on different things on. Probably you actually,

Vance Crowe [00:41:19] I will take that as as a badge. Does anything come to mind in particular?

Guest [00:41:24] We've never really gotten into the whole conversation around GMOs and, and pesticides and I don't know if we have the time, the bandwidth for that right now, but I think think that'd be a pretty interesting conversation around how they influence microbiomes, how they influence health generally in soils and livestock and people.

Vance Crowe [00:41:42] Yeah, I would definitely have that conversation with you on GMOs. I'm, I'm certainly a strong opinions loosely held. Like if somebody can show me something that demonstrates the danger, you and I have talked about like the cini research and you know, should we believe in it, should we not? But I'm, I'm absolutely open to having that conversation and to hearing anything you have to say about it. If, if people know stuff about that that I don't know, I'm, I'm very open to it.

Guest [00:42:09] Well that's, that's a very respectable position. Vance, you know, there is, I think we would live in a very different world if more people lived by, by Charlie Munger's advice where he says, you have no business. I actually think he says, you have no right. You have no right to have an opinion unless you can articulate the opposing point of view better than the opposition. And if we lived by that more generally, we would have much more loosely held opinions in general as a society and as individuals.

Vance Crowe [00:42:37] Yeah, I strongly I that I agree with that 100%. I mean the the, when you learn how to steal man another person's argument and like listen to what they're saying and be able to repeat it back for them, all of a sudden you realize like, oh man, there was nuance in what they were saying. They knew things I didn't know, but we just don't do that as a part of our culture.

Guest [00:42:56] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:42:57] Well John, if people were interested to pursue more about the advancing eco agriculture AI system, you said it was Lark, tell me a little bit more about it and where they could, where they could go to find out more.

Guest [00:43:09] You can find it on the advancing eco ag.com website. You can also just do a search for Field Lark. Yeah, it's just gonna be called Field Lark ai. And you know, actually the inspiration for that name came from, where is it? I think it's job 12 verse seven and eight. God is telling Job, he says, ask the earth and it will teach you. Ask the birds of the air and they will tell you, ask the trees and they will show you how. I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but you get the essence of it. It's like, huh, how can we embody more of that in the way that we show up in the world?

Vance Crowe [00:43:44] I love it. I'm really glad you're putting your ideas out there and I'm looking forward to doing a much longer podcast where we can explore some of these ideas. Thank you so much for coming on John.

Guest [00:43:53] Thanks Vince. Have an awesome day.

Vance Crowe [00:43:55] Alright, that's gonna do it for the Ag Tribes report. If you are interested in having me sit down with one of your loved ones to record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. I just, this last week did a fascinating family discussion where the adult children sat around a a table and I interviewed them about the stories that they remember and what made their family so great and what they wanted their parents to know that they were respected them about. I did a full interview with all, all both of the grandparents, the mom, the dad, and then an interview with them together. And then all of their grandchildren sent us a video that we are now editing together to show the grandparents. So this entire family tree was something we were able to put together. We did the work over about a week, we did it all online. And if that sounds like something that you wanna create for your family, an heirloom that will last for generations, then go to Legacy Interviews dot com and schedule a a meeting with me. We can set something up that's really truly beautiful. Also with Bitcoin's price screaming to the roof. If you are interested in buying Bitcoin and wanna support the show, I'm going to include a link in the show notes to river.com who has kindly been an affiliate to the show. So we, we benefit when you buy from that site. That is where I buy my Bitcoin from. All right, that is going to do it for this week's Ag Tribes report.

Vance Crowe [00:45:27] I did do an interview on it's the Future of Agriculture with Tim Hammerich all about Bitcoin. I have to say, those are some of the best questions I've ever gotten about Bitcoin. So tune into Tim Hammer, Rich's show. It's either gonna be this week or next week, but check it out if you're interested in Bitcoin. It was quite an interesting experience. All right, we'll be back next week with another guest host and until then feel free to disagree.