John Kempf: Amish regenerative farmer talks with ex-Monsanto about ag and economics

About this episode

John Kempf, an Amish regenerative-agriculture consultant and founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, joins Vance Crowe for a wide-ranging conversation covering the Amish community's relationship with technology, plant immune systems and nutrition science, the intellectual-property framework's role in shaping industrial agriculture, and the economics of regenerative farming versus commodity crop supports.

“The extreme examples of that are what the Amish community is really known for... when you think about a barn rising, that's... we put the roof on the new dairy barn when the pile of burnt ashes was still smoking, it was like 96 hours later. We had 400 people working there every day, 12 to 16 hours a day for four days straight to get the cows back in under a roof.”

“In 2004... 80% of the leaves are infected with powdery mildew. And on the new soil that hadn't had the pesticide exposure, there is no powdery mildew... that was the light bulb moment for me.”

“I really think if we had a different intellectual property protection framework, we would have an agriculture that looks fundamentally different from the one that we have today... GMOs again comes down to protecting IP.”

Key moments

• Kempf's account of the Amish community rebuilding a burned dairy barn in 96 hours with 400 volunteers working 12-16 hour days — craft as collective, hands-on skill under pressure (craft).
• mid ~34%: The 2004 origin story — discovering that soil without pesticide exposure showed no powdery mildew, while treated soil was 80% infected — Kempf's "light bulb moment" for plant-immune-function research (legacy).
• mid ~45%: Kempf's structural argument that intellectual-property law, not biology, is why industrial agriculture defaulted to pesticides and GMOs rather than nutrition-based disease resistance (institutions).
• The ethanol-mandate discussion — 40% of the US corn crop goes to ethanol, a policy distortion Kempf calls "idiotic by almost every measure" that keeps marginal land in corn production (money, windows).
• Kempf's prediction that current commodity price supports and ethanol mandates are structurally unsustainable and will face significant reform within 20-40 years (institutions, legacy).

Notable quotes

“We put the roof on the new dairy barn when the pile of burnt ashes was still smoking, it was like 96 hours later. We had 400 people working there every day, 12 to 16 hours a day for four days straight to get the cows back in under a roof.”

“If there were a framework to protect the intellectual property of products that are known to produce results... then that would have led down a different pathway than genetically modified organisms and pesticides.”