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

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] John Kemp, welcome to the podcast.

John Kempf [00:00:03] Thanks for having me, Vince. I've been looking forward to having some interesting conversations with you.

Vance Crowe [00:00:07] Well, this is the first time I've ever interviewed somebody from the Amish community, so this is something a little bit mind bending to me. How is it if you're in the Amish community, you can even be doing a podcast?

John Kempf [00:00:19] Yeah, I don't expect that'll happen particularly often. There are, there are many different Amish denominations, several dozen I would suspect, I don't know the exact number with a quite a range of, of conservative values. And so the community that I'm a part of, and this is, this is a growing trend as, as the business world evolves, the community that I'm a part of permits the use of technology for work. So I'm still not on video and on camera and, and these types of presentations because, or appearances because of the Amish community background. But we're permitted the use of technology in our daily work lives.

Vance Crowe [00:00:59] And so when you encounter other people from denominations of the Amish community, is that, is there friction there between the way that you view technology?

John Kempf [00:01:09] There isn't really friction in that sense. There is a, there's a mutual respect of, of different points of view and different degrees of, or different values around where we land on the use of technology, but not, there's not, it's not particularly a friction point.

Vance Crowe [00:01:25] In high school, I had a chance to visit Amish community in Illinois, and it was where they bring you in and they show you the barns and the houses and kind of what is it like to live without electronics and lights is when when you go home at the end of the workday, there are no light switches at your house.

John Kempf [00:01:44] That is how I grew up. Everything was with gas lighting and there were no light switches, no electricity. And the home that I live in now has everything, wiring, lights, et cetera. And, and we are, I will say that we are on kind of the, the leading innovative edge within the Amish communities. That certainly is not common. We're in probably less than half percent, but the caveat is that all the wiring and all the lighting and everything that we use is all solar powered. There is no grid connection. So that's the, it's now a different boundary or a different line that has been drawn to say that we can utilize electricity, but everything is solar powered.

Vance Crowe [00:02:21] And so running a solar powered house, it, I, I'm guessing you're not trying to download YouTube videos, so it's probably not got that kind of pull on it.

John Kempf [00:02:31] No, it's primarily lighting and refrigeration. That's really it.

Vance Crowe [00:02:35] So what is the purpose in the Amish community of distancing yourself from technology?

John Kempf [00:02:42] The, the purpose, if you go back into history 50, 60 years ago, it started what by first prohibiting the use of television and radio and, and so forth. And, and, and then all electricity also as a part of that. And the fundamental core values that are at the foundation of that is a desire to have a very strong family and community values. So how do we keep families together? How do we keep families, the channels of communication open where people communicate with each other very readily, and how do we maintain strong community values where people are inclined to go help each other out and help support each other? And, you know, you lose a lot of, you lose family communication once you, once you start having television and radio in the house. And so that was, it was those foundational, the desire to keep those foundational values that really led to the lines being drawn where they were drawn at the time, and obviously where those lines are drawn are constantly eval, evolving and constantly being reevaluated.

Vance Crowe [00:03:41] Yeah. It's funny that you, you describe it this way because my sense of the Amish community was just that, like as technology came on, the world kept going forward and the Amish just said, oh no, we're just not going to accept those. But you're saying that they, when that came on, there was like a, we, we may wanna pull back from some of these things that were available to us.

John Kempf [00:04:03] Yes, there is. And, and there is an evolution as, as I just described in my personal experience, in that there was no use of electricity and, and battery power a decade ago. And today it's very widespread. So there, there is a constant reassessment of does this really align with our values or not? And there's, there's a lot of disparity between various communities and then even within church districts within those communities. But there are now a, a number of the largest Amish community in, in North America while in the world for that matter, is in Wayne and Holmes County, Ohio. And they have always permitted the use of bikes. And so when e-bikes came along, they were readily adopted. And e today e-bikes are used by the majority of the community, which is quite a con you think about traveling with an e-bike versus traveling with a horse and buggy. But you know, the e-bike doesn't violate the sense or, or the core value of trying to keep families and communities together. It's, it still facilitates community rather than eroding it as automobiles might.

Vance Crowe [00:05:08] I tend to, whenever I'm, you know, thinking about things to imagine that my perspective is the way that other, other people all feel it. But I, I sense that after COVID and after seeing people like this next generation struggle with anxiety attacks and depression and suicide, I think that what probably during the eighties seemed kind of ridiculous. Those people don't use electricity or don't let television into their house now is something that people almost wish that they, they could be more alike, like strive for that. And because like I think everybody's looking around saying, these problems are so apparent in our lives, in our families, in our children, how in the world will we ever get past them?

John Kempf [00:05:53] There are, there are challenges on so many levels. There are many young people that don't have a clear sense of who they are in the world because they don't have a strong connection to community and who, what they mean to other people within a community or within a family setting. And that's a dynamic that, I can't say universally doesn't exist, but it's much less prevalent in our communities because every individual is valued and needed and has a role to play within the community structure. And when you look at the Harvard study on, on longevity, what contributes to a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction and a long and healthy life is the quality of our immediate close relationships. And I, I find it, I of course have the benefit of having an kind of an insider's perspective in the Amish community, but also then having traveled a lot and having worked with many people from outside the Amish community, this is perhaps less true in the agricultural communities than, than in society at large. But it appears that society at large has really lost community values and what it means to be a community. And it's, it's the, the, the strengths that we have in supporting each other and working together are something that I've really come to appreciate.

Vance Crowe [00:07:15] I do these Legacy Interviews where I sit down with people to record their life stories. And one of the things that comes up is that most of the time people's adult children buy it for their parents. So you have this dynamic where there's an adult child that loves their parent enough that they wanna capture their stories to pass it on. And so there's a selection pressure there. But one of the things that I've noticed from the people that are in their seventies and eighties, maybe even like mid sixties, is that people were so much more deeply involved in community organizations 50 years ago, 40 years ago, that it almost doesn't even make sense in today's context. You're like, how could you possibly have time for that when they're serving on their, their fire district, they're in the, the parent teacher organization, they're involved in all these church groups, and you think, one, how could you have time for that? And two, you know, is that really fit? But all of those people, they, when they're telling their life stories, they're talking about their family. So many stories come down to their contributions to the community, what they were proud of that they did together, that it's really struck me.

John Kempf [00:08:22] Absolutely. And you know, the, the extreme examples of that are what the Amish community is really known for. Like if, if you played a word association game, and you said the word Amish, I dare say the, the top word associations would be horses and buggies and barn raisings. Yeah. And when you think about a barn rising, that's, I, I had the privilege of participating in one of these when I was in my late teens. Some of my friends had a dairy barn burned down in the middle of the winter. It was freezing blitz cold in late December, early January. And actually when you think about the time period, it was right over the holidays. It was the week after Christmas when this dairy barn burned down. They're milking 40 cows. And we put the roof on the new dairy barn when, while when the pile of burnt ashes and cis was still smoking, it was like 96 hours later we put the barn on the new roof. 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. And, you know, it, it is that, that's an extreme example, but there are so many other versions of that in smaller instances. I think a piece that is kind of missing from our culture, if you want to truly participate in a community, it's not about what you receive from the community, it's what you contribute, what it is, what is it that you're willing to contribute, and the degree of your contribution is going to directly to reflect what you get back out of it and what your family gets out of it.

Vance Crowe [00:10:02] And that being able to contribute something, it it, it is such a paradox because that ends up being like what people value in themselves. They start being able to say, ah, I'm able to, I may not have that many skills, but I can show up at the church and I help clean it once a week and that everybody knows me as the church cleaning lady. But that, that may not be all that complicated, but one, it's really necessary. And two that person has purpose and purposelessness is, is I mean, just the absolute bane of human existence. That's what makes you feel depressed and anxious. And and I think that community organizations were so deeply entwined with giving people purpose, that that, that now that it's gone, it's so gone from our communities, we don't even recognize that as part of the problem.

John Kempf [00:10:49] Contribution is one of the three fundamental pieces that really give us a sense of value and purpose and belonging vision ani from Mindvalley put together this three goals exercise that I've found to be so powerful with various people. And it's really you, you use a stopwatch and you go through this 92nd exercise, you time yourself for each question. On the three, there are three questions. The one question is, what do I desire to experience? How do I desire to grow and what do I desire to contribute? You take 90 seconds and a timer to answer those three questions. The, the power of using the stopwatch and limiting yourself is that you, you cut out the conscious brain. You, you don't have time to think about it. You just have to write, you have to go. And so that takes you straight into the subconscious. And I have gone through this exercise with many friends who look at the paper when they're done and they, they break out into tears. They become very emotional about it because all of a sudden they, they see what is really deeply meaningful to them on a piece of paper for the first time.

Vance Crowe [00:11:50] This is overwhelming to me. That is such a wonderful idea that, and it's, and the fact that it's so quick, it's like that automatic authoring where, where you're just like, I just have to let whatever is inside of me out. And by writing it down, there's something surreal about taking an idea that you've just kind of mystically thought about and putting it on paper. So gimme those three questions again. It's

John Kempf [00:12:14] The three questions. And, and you can look this up, just a simple YouTube search for Mindvalley three goals. Bring up a half a dozen different videos on this. But the, the three questions are how do I desire to grow? What do I desire to experience and what do I desire to contribute? 'cause it's really the, the, those three questions really speak to the essence, the, the foundational spiritual essence of what gives us purpose and meaning.

Vance Crowe [00:12:42] I, I think about this, the, the, that that question, what do you want to experience? It's so funny because when you're, when you're an 18-year-old boy, you have some like, Hey, I've got some things I want to experience. And then you get older and you're like, I know what those experiences are. And in fact, some of the, that is so vapid, it's not actually that valuable to me. So being able to go back and say, Hey, now that I'm in my forties, what is it that I want to experience it? It would allow you to focus your energies in a way that if you don't do it, you're just kind of caught up in that, that I am sure you've heard the term like mimetic desire, like what is it that other people want? So I want it too.

John Kempf [00:13:22] Yeah. And it, it brings, this exercise kind of brings your true deep inner desires to the forefront, the subconscious stuff that you may never have. They may have never come forward consciously, but all of a sudden, oh yeah, there they are.

Vance Crowe [00:13:39] Can you think of an experience that you want to have that you deeply long for?

John Kempf [00:13:46] You know, Vince, I, I am so fortunate every day I get out of bed and I have a conversation with my wife and I can tell her we have this conversation about how awesome our life is. It's, it's just simply incredible. Like it's all the things that we would wish for or that we would desire. We have a beautiful home, we have an amazing family. We're growing much of our own food. We have, we're surrounded by an incredible family and community and church community. It's like our, our work life and our professional life. It's, we are blessed beyond measure. And so, and that's in that spirit of gratitude, it's actually, it's been some time since I've gone through this exercise, but what is something that I would desire to experience? I think that was your question, right? You know, one of the things that I'd like to experience is I, well, I was going to answer this question and from a general public perspective, but I'm, I'm going to shift it a little bit here. I would like to experience my family, my daughter. I have a 3-year-old daughter right now. I would like to experience her and any siblings that she may have in the future to live a vibrantly healthy life that is, and, and have them not be exposed to a lot of toxins that are in our environment and in our ecosystems.

John Kempf [00:15:18] And to really be an image of the possible, portray an image of the possibilities of what is possible, an ideal and an inspiration for other people to strive for.

Vance Crowe [00:15:28] Oh man, that's beautiful. That, that turn of phrase, the image of the possible. I mean, that is a three-year-old child. I also have a three-year-old daughter, and you, you see that energy, that life energy of which as you get older, you just don't have,

John Kempf [00:15:42] You

Vance Crowe [00:15:42] Don't, you, you don't have the naivety, but you also don't have the

John Kempf [00:15:45] Excitement

Vance Crowe [00:15:46] And enthusiasm for life. And you see that, like that little girl could be literally anything she wants to be. And it's so, oh, it's just so beautiful.

John Kempf [00:15:55] Well, you know, we have this, I have this phrase in, in the region of agriculture space to, to kind of set the context. I often describe for growers that many of us don't actually know what really healthy plants look like anymore. Many of us have never experienced truly healthy plants. When I talk about truly healthy plants, I'm not talking about a plant that is nice and dark green and doesn't appear to have any disease present when you drive by in a pickup truck. I'm talking about a plant that has the inherent innate immune system to be completely resistant to all types of diseases and all types of insect pressure. Like that is possible. It's not theoretically possible. It is practically possible. It's something that we've experienced and, and been successful at executing on, on a scale of millions of acres. And so it is that level of health, that vibrant health that many of us don't have a context for in the agricultural and the plant growing scenario. But the same is true of people. Many of us no longer have a frame of reference for what truly healthy people look like anymore and the way that they behave. And not that they behave, but they're, they're just their vitality in the world. You know, Arden Anderson described this scenario for me or kind of clarified it for me in a presentation a decade ago. He said, we, we tend to think of health as being too opposite polarities. Either you're sick or you're well, but in reality, health is a spectrum. And on one end of the spectrum you have vibrant health. On the other end of the spectrum, you have disease, but then there's a broad range between those two.

John Kempf [00:17:31] And at some point below the threshold of vibrant health, at some point there is a, a tipping threshold where you enter into a Pred disease state. The majority of the spectrum is pre disease and the majority of the people in our western civilization and with the, with the toxins that we're exposed to the food that we eat and on and on, all the, every, all the challenges that we face, the majority of us are not in a vibrantly healthy state. We are in a pre disease state. I sometimes hear people make this comment that, well, except for this person having pancreatic cancer, he's perfectly healthy. It's like, if there ever was an oxymoron, that is it. It's like, and so many of us no longer have a frame of reference for what vibrant health actually looks like. And I, it would be my desire to be a good steward of our children's health to be, to portray an image of what is possible.

Vance Crowe [00:18:30] So this actually leads right to how you and I cross paths. So you are in the world of, I think, I think it's safe to call it alternative to the industrial system or, or like some kind of ancillary you, you are in the, I've I encountered you through people like Jason Ma, Zach Smith. I think the Ring Brothers told me that I should have you on. And it is because you are going out to the agriculture community and you're saying there are other ways to look at being a productive farmer than what's going on right now. And when I first hear this, like I've seen a lot of gurus like a lot because I, I used to work with Monsanto, and so there would always be people taking pot shots and I would go look at what they did when I go read your stuff, there is truly things in there that I was like, I actually had never considered that before, that that could be a problem or that that could be a challenge. So before we jump into some of my questions, why don't you tell people about, you know, what you do for a living and kind of how this is spread out into the world?

John Kempf [00:19:35] I think the background history and the story is important of how all of this came to be. I grew up in the Amish community on a family fruit and vegetable farm. We were farming, we had, the farm was 25 acres in total size. We had 15 acres of fruits and vegetables all being grown for fresh market. And so we are in the bel south of Lake Gere in northeastern Ohio. We typically, well we used to, we don't anymore, but we used to have about 90 inches of annual snowfall, about 44 inches of total annual precipitation was our annual average. And that translated to an environment in the summer months. We also had very high cloud cover. So we have high cloud cover and high humidity. It's the perfect Petri dish for disease propagation. And so our major crops, at the time we had probably a dozen or more crops, but the, the four primary crops were zucchini, cantaloupe, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Those four represented probably 60 to 70% of our total production. And in the early two thousands, 2000 2, 3, 4, we had intense disease and insect pressure. And the context is that at this moment in time, we had, my father had started growing vegetables in 1994 and we had all, all the information that we were exposed to was based on the idea that you have to use pesticides for disease control, insect control. We were, we were very mainstream contemporary agronomy in our approach.

John Kempf [00:21:09] And 2002, three and four, we had three consecutive years that we lost greater than 70% of our crops to a variety of different diseases and insects that we were not successful in managing with pesticides in spite of, I was a licensed pesticide applicator when I was 16 years old. And it was my responsibility when I graduated from school go only, we're only going through the eighth grade. So I graduated at age 14. And from that age forward, it was my responsibility to manage all the irrigation and all the spraying, both of fertilizers and pesticides. And we were making fungicide and cyclic applications every five to seven days. And we were not being successful trading out all kinds of different chemistries and, and different groups. And it seemed the more intensely we sprayed, the worse the challenges became. And then in 2004, the third year, this three year period, we had, I had this two by four in the face moment where we started renting a field from a neighboring farm that bordered right up against one of our own fields. So these two fields used to be two long narrow strips that were being tilled and planted up and down the slope because of how narrow they were. Now that we were farming both of them, we switched the road direction 90 degrees and started planting across the former field border. And so this, this field that we, this new field that we started renting had previously been in a dairy farm rotation. So it was corn, small grains, two years of hay and then back into corn. So it got limestone, it got manure applications and pesticide applications were very minimal to practically non-existent.

John Kempf [00:22:46] And in the 2000, we planted that field in 2004 into cantaloupe. And of course it's right beside the road where everybody can see it, that's driving by on, on the old soil that we had been farming for the previous decade that had been exposed to the intense pesticide applications. At harvest time, 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. And I'm not talking 5% or 10% infection, I'm talking zero. You couldn't find any pottery, mildew infection in that side of the field. And there was this clear knife line right down through the center of the field where the former field border had been. In fact, it was so pronounced that there were healthy vines growing right in among the unhealthy vines. And these are plants that are literally planted two feet apart. And that was the light bulb moment for me. I wanted to know what are the differences between these two plants and what allows one plant to be resistant to powdery mildew when the next one, two feet away is susceptible because the management was identical, the identical variety planted the same day, was exposed to the same fertilizer and fungicide applications, but two completely different outcomes. And I'll just abbreviate this story a bit, but the, I was very fortunate it was, it was a confluence of events that really has led me to and of opportunities that really led me to be where I am today. First of all, we had a local library that was absolutely incredible.

John Kempf [00:24:18] The local Middlefield Ohio library has the highest per person bookending rate of any library in the nation. And that's partially because of the Amish community and not having television and radio and all of that. And because they're were very well funded and very well supported by the community, and they were awesome about getting any book that the most, the most obscure scientific textbook ever. There was one that I wanted that only 400 copies were ever published, and they got one for me through interlibrary alone from Germany. So the library was awesome. I was able to make connections with some very good mentors who really guided my learning and studying, and I studied intensely over the course of the next, while it's still ongoing, but the next six months were particularly intense. And what I learned from my mentors and from what I was reading, is that there was an entire body of knowledge around plant immune systems that we had never been exposed to and that I had never heard about before. And it's the most, at its most, the, the foundational premise is simply that plants all have a functional immune system similar to ours. But we know that immune systems don't all function equally well, neither ours nor plants that in order for an immune system to function well, it needs to be supported with good microbiome integrity and good nutritional integrity. It's those two fundamental principles, whether we're talking about plants or livestock or people or bacteria or mosquitoes, they're all the same.

John Kempf [00:25:51] And so I, I was exposed to all this information on how we should manage plant nutrition, how we can manage plant nutrition for disease resistance and for insect resistance. And this was, this was a fundamentally different perspective because contemporary agronomy balances seeks to balance plant nutrition around one metric and one metric only. And that is increasing yield. How do you balance at nutrition to improve yields? And the information that I was being exposed to said that in fact, you can balance nutrition not just for optimal yields, but also for optimal immune function. And when you do that, you start getting very different outcomes. And so that's, that's really the, that was the turning point. We made some rapid transitions on the farm by 2006 we were completely pesticide free. And by 2006, I also started advancing equal agriculture as a consulting company and then eventually as a specialty nutritional products manufacturing company. And flash forward to today, we're working on millions of acres and we have a team of amazing people working all across north and South America.

Vance Crowe [00:27:02] So you're saying something that is so, I mean, to somebody that's maybe living in the city may think like, oh, you know, he just made this change and though they're not using pesticides anymore. But like, if you frame this up in the context of actual industrial scale agriculture to say that we are pesticide free is so outlandish as to almo as as to be like difficult to, to even wrap your mind around. Right. So

John Kempf [00:27:28] It sounds like a fairytale.

Vance Crowe [00:27:29] It does. It does. And so, so talk to me about how do you think the history went that we went from a period where we didn't need pesticides to pesticides being a part of being able to grow enough crops for modern society. And yet now you're saying, you know, we've gone over the line and we should go back to where we were.

John Kempf [00:27:51] Well, you're asking a very multifaceted question. You, you, if I understand your question, you're correctly, you're asking why did we, why did we arrive at the model that we're currently using, if there is a better model that's available. Is that the question you're asking?

Vance Crowe [00:28:04] Yeah, I mean, how, how ultimately did we get into using pesticides if, if, if the, if done correctly you don't need them anyway?

John Kempf [00:28:13] Yeah, well I could offer a very nuanced answer here, but I'll, I'll go with two pieces. The first is that this, this different model, this different approach of, of managing plant at nutrition is without question much more knowledge intensive. And to a degree it's also more management intensive. So it's not as easy to execute and to implement as a pesticide centric centric model is. So that's, that's one part. But I've also been intrigued to discover how much of this knowledge has been lost, how much was known historically about, oh, if you plant a hundred corn flowers per acre, you won't have any diseases in your wheat. It's like that's, that used to be common knowledge 60 years ago, it was published in some of the agronomic journals. So I, I found that there was this incredible body of literature and historical research that existed. I mean, it's been there all along, but it's been in the minority and there was a particularly large body of knowledge prior to about 1960 when the, when the pesticide model kind of really came to the forefront and took off in a very significant way. So I think to the second part, second piece I want to speak to is how did we get here? Why have we adopted this particular model of, of agriculture? Why has it become mainstream? And the kind of, one of the, the fundamental reasons I think for our success in our, in our consulting work and our work with crops is trying to really understand the fundamentals of what are going on in soil plant ecosystems.

John Kempf [00:29:52] From a first principles perspective, I, I

Vance Crowe [00:29:54] Really

John Kempf [00:29:56] Like to boil the ocean and ting take things down to their fundamental essence and then build back up. And that's, I think why we've arrived at a very different approach to the mainstream. So within using that first principles thinking of trying to understand the question that you asked of why are we here today? And I'll, I'm going to give a very different answer than one I've, I've not ever heard this before, but I think the, the reason we're we are where we are today is because of our intellectual property protection framework that exists. Like when you think about the need of commercial enterprises and organizations to protect their intellectual property and to be able to create and build enterprise value from that, the way that it has been framed over the course of the last century or two around the world is that in, in the case of, of agriculture and pesticides particularly, I'll, I'll use that particular framework, we need a, a specific identified mechanism or mode of action. And that leads to an outcome of, let's use bio controls as an example where we have this specific bacteria for that specific disease. But that's not how natural ecosystems work. Natural ecosystems work as you have this consortium, this group of two dozen or 400 or more different strains of organisms that work together in synergy to prevent this particular disease.

John Kempf [00:31:33] But you can't protect, you can't protect that intellectual property. So if there were a framework to protect the intellectual property of products that are known to produce results, but the exact mechanism, the exact mode of action is poorly understood, then that would have led down a different pathway than genetically modified organisms and pesticides. Because GMOs again comes down to protecting IP that you have, you can identify a specific mechanism or action and nevermind that it's unstable and has lots of question marks and variability to it, you still have this, this specific identified modification that you're making. And so 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.

Vance Crowe [00:32:26] Oh, John, I could not agree with you more. And in fact, I think I, I mean I am very much anti-intellectual property. I I am, I know. And when I worked at Monsanto, you should have seen people's faces when I would say, I don't think we should have ip. I don't, I like you, just like this is a non-starter for them. But, but like, there's so many things like you're describing medicine like the human body when you're going to get better doesn't get better because of one single molecule. But the only way you're gonna be able to get the FDA to approve it is if you say it's this molecule and it does this thing and it does it over this time period, and these are the side effects of this one molecule. But health doesn't work that way, right? Your health is just like everything else. It's a network that has really complicated interconnections between many, many things. And as soon as you pair it all the way down, you're, you're breaking the thing that, that actually makes it all work together.

John Kempf [00:33:24] Absolutely. I'm surprised you agree with me that strongly and I'm delighted to hear that. But it's, it, it's absolutely correct that it's, we we need to, you know, I forget who this saying is attributed to, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And yet we like to, we, we engage you in these, these living systems, human systems, plant soils. As if though, once we can successfully identify all the parts, then we understand the whole, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Vance Crowe [00:33:55] And now that we, like i the intellectual property, you can imagine when, when you're trying to build a factory and you've got this cotton gin and, and information moves more slowly, there might have been a, a time for it, but like, we don't even entertain that we should open up the way that the patent office works. We don't entertain that the whole trademark system should be, should be, you know, opened up. But I had never heard it put in the context that this is what is causing us problems in our food system. But I I sense strongly that you are correct about this.

John Kempf [00:34:28] Well, it's in food, it's in medicine, it's in everywhere. And, and look, it's like you, you suggested that we shouldn't have intellectual property. I would be in favor of a model that's let's, let's give, like I, I see that there is a need and a pathway for, or that there's a need for corporations and enterprises to invest a significant amount in developing new technology. So I'm willing to give them protection for a period of time, but let's frame that protection differently. Let's the time period can remain the same, seven years, 20 years, whatever it is. But instead of identifying it as based on a specific mechanism or mode of action, let's instead frame it around, this is something that has been proven to work. So we see that we put this particular worm juice extract that has this very powerful effect on this particular disease and we've documented it successfully over multiple seasons. Let's give an enterprise the opportunity to protect that innovation and commercialize it. But then at some point that protection moves off and, and now it becomes open source. And I think this is where the whole system is, is really breaking apart on, on both of those pieces, on, on eventually moving it into the larger mainstream, but also on, on really giving, providing a pathway for things that are known to be effective where the exact specific mechanisms are not specifically identified.

Vance Crowe [00:35:58] Yeah. And I, I could go into my personal philosophy about why some of this stuff has, has gotten so much worse than people could have imagined. But like for example, with Monsanto, when they had activist groups that would come to them and say, Hey, we don't know that these things are safe, whether glyphosate is safe or GMOs or whatever that is. And so Monsanto would say, you know what, activists just to be on the safe side, what we should do is just add in more testing. So we're gonna still use that same molecule or that same single thing, but we're just gonna add in three more years of testing to prove that we know what it is, where it goes, it's off target effects, whatever that is. But now by adding those three years on, you've just made it so nobody else that is trying to come up with a new technology can enter the market and their, their moat that they build up around them gets larger and the very people that are trying to make the system better are actually giving them the power to make it worse because they're Yeah. You know, the, the way this whole system is set up.

John Kempf [00:36:58] Yep, I hadn't thought of that, but that's, that in that particular context and the frame in the agricultural context. But I can absolutely see that that being the case,

Vance Crowe [00:37:07] So, you know, when you go to your site, there is immediately this, this concept of regenerative agriculture. And when I see that, I think, wow, the public all thinks this is really great. This is like a new way to do farming. I sense that it, it, it feels a little like using a new word for sustainability, but when I entered this world of regenerative ag, I came to it from people that were from, you know, Dan and yogurt and whatever the other, the other like cliff bar, they were putting forward regenerative ag. And when I looked at their details, it was actually kind of like a, a plan to socialize ag in order to be able to determine how much people should get paid in their wages and what kind of living conditions we should have. So when I come to your thing, I'm immediately suspicious of anybody talking about regenerative ag. Well, how do you respond to that?

John Kempf [00:38:03] That's an interesting perspective. You know, it's really interesting. I I, I doubt you're aware of this, but our team had a meeting, I can still identify the exact room we met, and we, we met for a two day strategy session in the middle of the winter in, in late 2010. And it was in that meeting that we decided, we, we were really asking the question like our, our approach to plant nutrition and to agronomy is so different from the mainstream. How do we describe it? How do we talk about it? How do we communicate what we were doing effectively? And it was in that meaning that we chose to use the term regenerative ag regenerative agriculture. And I think ma many people have said that we get a great deal of the credit for bringing that term to the forefront. It had been used historically, Rodale had brought it forward and used it as a term in the seventies, but it was a completely dormant terminology until we started really putting it out there in a much more significant way. So it's, it's been interesting to see the shift where now region regenerative agriculture is kind of having its moment in the sun and it's being defined as anyone wants to define it by, by all the, the players in the space. So it's interesting to hear that that skepticism that you have around that and, and to see just how this, this landscape has evolved. But to answer your question, I'll take it back all the way again to first principles. If you think about regeneration at its most fundamental level, it is exclusively about regenerating relationships, regenerating relationships between plants and soil microorganisms, regenerating relationships between livestock and the landscape regenerating relationships between farmers and input suppliers and the people who are buying from them.

John Kempf [00:39:51] It's regenerating relationships at all levels. And so when you think about, okay, what does regenerating relationships mean? What are you moving from? And two, what's, what's the transition from A to B and a, a relationship that is in need of regeneration is a relationship that is transactional, it's extractive and it is competitive. And a relationship that is much healthier, much more vibrant are relationships that are synergistic and collaborative and cooperative rather than competitive with, with each other. And so, I'm, I, there's an a little bit here. I'm, I'm moving away from the, the essence of the question that you asked, and I want to come back to that. But when you think about regenerating relationships in a landscape and a farming ecosystem, what does that really look like? And, and from, I'll, I'll kind of give an an agronomic answer first from a crop production perspective. There are many growers who have, well at this point, we've worked with over 10,000 growers in the last 15 years that we've been doing this. And there are so many growers that we've helped transition. And it's amazing. There are so many incredible stories and anecdotes of how all of a sudden a disease that was the bane of an orchard or of a farm operation just ceases to be present. It's, there are, there are a, a couple dozen, or more than a couple dozen, there are quite a number of these diseases that are known as incurable diseases.

John Kempf [00:41:31] I think about as incurable diseases for, there is no known effective pesticide treatment. There's pierces disease on grapes and crown gall and walnuts and bacterial canker on cherries. And kind of the list goes on and on. I could easily, I could probably name off 200 or more in, in an hour or so. And we start working with, I still remember the first time this happened was on bacterial canker and cherries in the Pacific Northwest. And we started working with a bacterial canker block that was tine for the bulldozer the following year because it was so bad. And we asked the grower to give us his worst block. So he gave us the worst block that was headed for the dozer, and in 12 months bacterial canker had vanished. And so for those of you who aren't familiar with the agricultural context, bacterial canker is an organism that lives inside the tree tissues. It is in the trunk, it's in the branches. It is once it, once a tree is infected, you cannot reasonably expect to make the claim that that organism has disappeared or gone. It's always going to be there. But what we were able to change, we were able to change the expression of the disease. It no longer man manifested itself as a disease. And so people would ask this the question, well, if you can treat bacterial canker, then you're going to be a billionaire. If I mu if, if I've heard that once, I must have heard it a hundred times. If if we can develop an effective solution for X or Y disease, I'm going to be a millionaire. And so they would ask the question, well, what did you do about bacterial canker?

John Kempf [00:43:04] And the answer was, everything and nothing. We did nothing specifically for bacterial canker. Instead we simply balanced plant at nutrition to improve immune function and to improve the overall plant health. And bacterial canker disappeared all on its own. So we did everything. We, we addressed 10 different nutrients, not just one or two, but none of them were targeted to bacterial canker specifically. So anyway, I feel like I've drifted off topic. This

Vance Crowe [00:43:33] Is brilliant. I forget, there's no, there's no problem with this. Like what I'm hearing you say in all of this is we are approaching problems as a, as a network and as a system in order to rebuild the relationships that if they were there, they would be overcoming these problems and, and in a more wild environment, these relationships would naturally occur. And so in the, in the planting, you're saying we're, we're just trying to understand it and then try and bring it back into balance. Is that right?

John Kempf [00:44:01] That's, that's exactly it. Bringing things back into balance. And here's, here's something that really blew my mind when I learned about it for the first time from plant pathologists who are way more knowledgeable than I, when you have a field that has a disease infection, let's say you have a watermelon field that is infected with vum and you have another watermelon fuel right beside it that doesn't have an infection with fum, the, the populations of fum in each gram of soil in those two fields is likely to be identical. You can have the exact same populations of fum. The difference is in the presence or the absence of other organisms that have a synergistic cooperative relationship with the plant and change the nature of the relationship that fum has with the plant. So in one field, fum has this pathogenic disease inducing relationship where it can destroy an entire crop. And the next field right beside it, fum isn't just passive. Here's, here's the incredible part of this story. It, it's not just a passive present in the soil, but it's still, it actually penetrates the root system and it starts exchanging nutrients with the plant where the plant is feeding the fum carbohydrates and the fum is extracting nutrients and making nutrients available to the plant. Exact the same as microrisal fungi. So you change the nature of the relationship from a pathogenic relationship to a symbiotic collaborative, synergistic relationship simply by having the overall ecosystem functioning well.

John Kempf [00:45:41] Isn't that incredible? I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:45:42] It really is. It's, it's like, it's one of those things where you turn your enemies into your, into your, you know, allies and all of a sudden the whole world changes.

John Kempf [00:45:51] That's exactly it. And this is, I mean, I'm, I'm using this one disease as an example, but this, this rethinking the relationships between plants and their environment and their ecosystems. Once we start approaching nutrition management and microbiome management from this different perspective, it changes all of the relationships. It changes the relationships to, to insects. All of a sudden just insect problems cease to exist. They're just not a problem anymore. The same is true of diseases and it's, it's so much fun, it's so inspiring and so invigorating to be on these farms when things start working really well. And this takes us all the way back to a comment that I made at the beginning of our conversation, that most growers don't really have any context for what really healthy plants actually look like anymore. Many of us have never gotten to experience really healthy plants.

Vance Crowe [00:46:44] Alright, I want to talk about this, this is a great topic because I remember a few years ago a bunch of people that I know from like the tech world, so like the yosha box of the world were citing a study that was saying, you know, crops used to have better nutrition.

John Kempf [00:47:02] And

Vance Crowe [00:47:02] When I, and when I see this, I immediately mock it, right? Like that's my, I I I'm, I'm prepared to be wrong on this. I'm prepared to have you disagree with me, but I see that, and I think we are producing so many more carrots and apples and oranges and pineapples in a, in, in a way that never would've even been there, right? Like my daughters ate frozen berries this morning, you know, we had red peppers that were fresh that, you know, for dinner last night. And like, so how can you possibly say that the crops are degrading when the amount that we have the bounty that is available is so much higher than it would've been in the past? It seems like if there's some minor nutrition loss, is that really that big of a deal when compared to how many more, how much more produce has been brought online?

John Kempf [00:47:56] Yes, probably. Again, there's a, there's a nuanced answer here. So the data does indicate that many fruits and vegetables have lost a great deal of mineral density, and I'm specifically using the word mineral and not nutritional density. It does suggest that many fruits and vegetables have lost a lot of mineral density. However, there's an important caveat and that is that the historical dataset is weak. And I'm talking a historical dataset going back 40, 50, 60 years ago, is that the entire broccoli crop of North America is represented in a given year in the USDA database by as perhaps as few as a dozen samples. So the historical dataset is weak. So that's, that's an important caveat. Now, given how, what we have learned about plant attrition, I think you, you're looking at all the bounty that is present today, but the challenge that I would ask you is would that bounty today exist to the degree that it does if it were not supported and propped up with pesticides? And the answer is certainly not to the degree that exists right now.

Vance Crowe [00:49:09] No. And they, and the people that are putting forward p pesticides would agree with you, they would say, yeah, without us and without these products, this wouldn't be possible.

John Kempf [00:49:18] Yeah. And at the point that I'd like to make is that there is a different pathway to achieving even better outcomes than what they're currently achieving. But we can talk more about that in a bit. There's one more point that I want to make, which is that the nutrition of crops being grown today is probably more highly variable than today versus 60 years ago. And I, I get to see this firsthand because when we work with growers, one of our, one of the keys to our success as an organization has been that given, given that we are recommending a fundamentally different approach in a different way of thinking, we can't afford to be wrong. We have to make certain that the growers we work with get economic results immediately the first year and consistently. And so because of, because of that, one of the mantras that we live by is never guess about something that's possible to measure. And so our and, and the growers that we work with, we collect leaf sap analysis and measure the mineral profiles of the leaf sap every 14 days of the growing season. It's, we're very consistent as a result of that. I think we probably have a larger database of mineral profiles of crop plants than anyone else that I know of outside of a few laboratories that actually run the analysis. And so I can tell you with a certainty now, it's, there's the clarifier here that our data is from leaves and not from fruit, but the variability of calcium content on tomatoes might be as much as eight x.

John Kempf [00:51:04] It's a huge variation. And that variability is a result of growing practices and soil conditions and all the, all the inherent variation that you, you might expect. And so when we have this conversation about mineral density or nutrient density, there is a tremendous variation that exists today. And there's no question Michigan State University conducted this study. It's, I think it's late eighties, maybe early nineties. It it's been a long time since I read it, where they were evaluating the anthocyanin content of blueberries. So anthocyanins are this phytonutrient, not a mineral, but a phytonutrient that are of particular interest because they are known to enhance our own immune systems, which is a function that many of these phytonutrients have. And they discovered that the anthocyanin variability of blueberries was a factor of 25 x. So you can have two one pound containers of blueberries and one container has 25 times more anthocyanins than the other. And you might guess, you might be able to guess which has the better flavor and which is the better aroma and which your, you and your children are most attracted to is, and it's these blueberries that have the, the high concentrations of phytonutrients are the most valuable for us because they enhance our immune systems the most as well. And historically, if there's a reason we have a sweet tooth, because in natural ecosystems, high sugar concentrations in fruit are associated with a high phytonutrient content. Our modern breeding has replaced a lot of that where we now have sweet corn and fruit that is very sweet, but that isn't necessarily associated with phytonutrients, but that's the historical context for why we would crave sugar.

Vance Crowe [00:52:46] Well, so you bring this up and you say that, you know, we look at these blueberries and those blueberries, how would anyone know? It it, I I, my perception is probably all of the blueberries at the grocery store are not that way, right? The, there's probably not this huge variability. So how does somebody go about getting blueberries with antho signin that they, that is, is way better?

John Kempf [00:53:11] There is the complicated sciencey answer is that in the next several years, there is going to be a lot more information revealed and publicly available on the phytonutrient content of various fruits. But the practical answer in the short term of what we really care about is that phytonutrient content correlates closely to two things, flavor and aroma, and what do we all want? We want flavor and aroma. We want food that tastes awesome. And, you know, yeah, you could get me on a whole other soapbox here, but it is pathetic that we have tomatoes and grocery store shelves that resemble cardboard more than any other substance. And that we have strawberries that are pickering. It's like the phytonutrient con, just like most go farmers no longer have a context for what really healthy plants actually looks like. Far too many consumers no longer have any context for what a really good strawberry takes. Like, like I grew up on our fruit and vegetable farm where we picked strawberries in the spring and, and some during the summer months that had an incredible flavor. And you compare, like anyone who has experience with homegrown strawberries and contrast those to store-bought strawberries today, or the same is true of tomatoes or of cantaloupe. It's like that is the contrast between commodity grown and higher phytonutrient consonant, higher phy phytonutrient concentration that can be grown on a, I don't even wanna say a smaller scale, but there certainly is a different style of production that takes place that is less oriented around yields and ship ability storability.

John Kempf [00:54:52] So that, that's the contrast of what is possible and what the ideal is that we should be striving forward. And that, by the way, I'm certain all consumers, like what consumers are advocating for tomatoes that are picked green and gas with ethylene and transported 3000 miles. No one,

Vance Crowe [00:55:11] Well, there's

John Kempf [00:55:12] No consumer advocating for that. They

Vance Crowe [00:55:14] Are advocating for the ability to be able to afford it, right? They are advocating for going to the grocery store and having $5 and being able to walk out with four apples, right? They, they do want that.

John Kempf [00:55:29] So, oh boy, we could really get into the weeds on this one, but regenerative growers that we work with in our consulting work at a EA rapidly become the low cost producers. We set out from the beginning, from the early days, we said we have to make certain that growers get economic responses from the recommendations that we make immediately in the first growing season. And that has really shaped our approach. And that's one of the reasons why we focus on much more immediate short-term measures like foliar applications of nutrients and spraying microbes and so forth. Bio stimulants, rather than doing more long-term, or it should say in addition to doing more long-term stuff like soil amendments and cover crops, is because we wanted immediate, immediate response. What invariably happens is that, think of it this way, when you have a really vibrantly healthy plant, do you think yields are going to go down? No yields are gonna go up. How much they increase is a question of where the previous thresholds were and what the operation looked like. It could be 5%, could be 10% in some cases, in some crops is as much as 20 30% or higher. So we're talking about very significant jumps. And at the same time, there is a, for the grower, there is a short term investment that needs to be made in adding nutrients, adding minerals that have been lost from the ecosystem like molybdenum and cobalt and selenium. Really unusual trace minerals that are no longer present in adequate amounts in many soil geological profiles.

John Kempf [00:57:01] So there is an investment, an upfront investment that needs to be made, but that investment is offset by reduced pesticide budgets, by reduced fungicide budgets. It's been very common for the growers that we work with to immediately in the first year have an increase in yields and a reduced in input costs. So from that perspective, when you look at that, you say, well, there's no need for products, farm products being grown in this way to be more expensive than what currently exists. Now on the other side of that argument, I would also argue that today food in North America is too cheap and that farmers in many cases, or in some cases, are not being paid well enough for the product they're producing. And that food deserves to be more expensive. And that's a whole political conversation Of course. That really, yeah, that can, that can open a whole other

Vance Crowe [00:58:02] I'm can of worms, but no, I'm, I think you and I have alignment on, on this, like in, in that if you can create higher production out of your crops by adding less inputs, first of all, like that's amazing. And then you, the, those farmers can end up creating higher margins. And in particular, if there's a way for you to be able to delineate these blueberries are different than those blueberries. I mean, consumers that can, will pay a higher one. But I actually, I mean, my political part of this conversation is that I think that the printing of money incessantly has, has harmed our food policy probably more. Well, I, I don't know more than anything you bring up the, the trademark idea, but the, or the, the patent idea. But, but there is like that, at the end of the day, the consumers have to know that there's something more valuable to buy and be able to make that offsetting choice because they have enough money in their pockets to be able to buy it. If it is more expensive, if it's not more expensive, then you've, you've solved both those problems.

John Kempf [00:59:02] Well, since I'm in the process of throwing out one controversial opinion after the other, I'll add one more to the mix. And, and, and that is, I believe, true of life in generally, not just farming in particular, but I believe people deserve to be paid better for producing higher quality. So similarly with farmers, I believe they deserve to be paid better for producing higher quality. But let's not forget the inverse of that. The inverse of that is that farmers also deserve to be paid proportionately less for producing junk. That's a controversial opinion that is really unhealthy or that is not accepted Well, because, and it's, I had this conversation, I was on a podcast interview with recently with a, a product, a crop farmer from the Canadian prairies. And he is like, yeah, but we are, we are producing really high quality. We we're producing really high quality feed stuffs. And my question was, how do you know? And there was no answer to the question, like, how do we know, because we're not testing, we're not measuring, we are de relying on elevators or other people further up the supply chain. And what they consider to be quality is not necessarily associated with nutritional quality in, in wheat, for example, milling quality and baking quality is not necessarily associated with nutritional value and nutritional quality. So the, the quality parameters that farmers are being asked to raise crops for may or may not be in the public's best interest and our best interest as consumers.

Vance Crowe [01:00:32] Yeah. This is an interesting thing because I see all those social media posts about European bread is so much better than American bread. And, and I, I mean, there again, I very much look at that with a, with a suspicious eye. But you're saying, Hey, if you're growing crops in a different way, then the output, the bread will actually have a different impact on you nutritionally then, then than if you're eating the tradi the, the way that normal bread is.

John Kempf [01:01:01] Yeah. There's no question that that is true and that that's the case. There, there is the peer reviewed evidence to support that in the case of animal products in the, in the case of some grain products. And we have, there's a handful of laboratories that I know that I collaborate with who have a pretty extensive database on, on grain quality protein, content protein, amino acid profiles and so forth. And there's no question that, again, the, the variation is significant. Like it's, the variation within wheat is probably bigger than the variation between wheat and another grain crop like spelt or something like that. So people who have gluten sensitivities or they, they think they have a wheat sensitivity and so they go to other grains like spelt could actually in many cases be equally well served or even better served simply by consuming higher quality wheat.

Vance Crowe [01:01:55] Wheat. So you mentioned the reception that you get from people when you're going out there. There's clearly some farmers that have benefited from this. Your business has grown rapidly and, and is quite massive. How, how does the world receive you, how does the ag world taken in your ideas?

John Kempf [01:02:13] You know, when I, when I was first starting out, I, I still remember there, there's only been one, one time ever where I gave a presentation that was not well received or there was one member of the audience that really had a problem with the information that I was presenting. And, you know, I found it kind of an interesting personal affirmation that three years later he completely changed camps and became a staunch advocate of what we were doing. But I, I have been very fortunate in that I had some very good mentors who guided my studying and learning and I read a lot. And so while I'm not a scientist in the sense that I have the initials behind my name, the, the pieces that I communicate and talked about are completely founded on science that is in the peer reviewed literature. And so there are abundance citations and references for the pieces and the things that I'm speaking about. And as a result of that, and also as a result of our very successful and large scale field experiences, there hasn't really been any, any gain saying from the agricultural community. Like there's, there's lots of question marks like how does this work? How do we implement this? There, there's lots of how questions and some why questions, but there, there isn't really a lot of, I haven't encountered any rejection directly or any people saying that, oh, this is, this can't possibly be true.

John Kempf [01:03:47] And maybe those conversations happen that I'm not exposed to them. I I wouldn't know that, but I don't, I don't see that. And I, I also, I don't see it on social media. I don't see it in any other places really either.

Vance Crowe [01:03:58] So can this scale, could you be doing this on a global global level?

John Kempf [01:04:04] Without question. We're doing it now on scale. I mean, it's our, our largest operation that we work on is in six figures in number of acres, not in five. And so we've got any number of operations that are 10, 20, 30, 40,000 acres of broad acre crops, fruit and vegetable crops. We have a few that are also in that scale, but many more that are in the hundreds or a few thousand acre range. So it does scale. The, the the caveat that I made earlier is that it is more management intensive and it's more knowledge intensive. Like, and that's, that's really the, the piece that I recognized early on. If, if we want to really see this scale in a significant way, then we need to have the very deep trusted technical expertise and coaching to be able to walk right alongside a grower and, and guide them through the transition process. So that's really kind of the foundational essence of our, of our business at a EA is to be able to be there and to guide growers through the process.

Vance Crowe [01:05:09] Yeah. I guess we've been talking this whole time and you haven't really talked about the company itself and, and when people hire you, what is it that they are getting when they, they, when they hire?

John Kempf [01:05:19] Yeah, so we have, we have an amazing team of people at a EA. It's just, it's, it's a joy and a privilege to work with them every day. We have a team right now, it's constantly growing. So I think at this moment it's right around 80 people. And in terms of numbers, we're working on about 2 million acres in this 2 million acres in the, in the most recent growing season. It's been interesting when you think about it on the, on the surface, one of our stated goals of the enterprise is to be able to get, I guess we are, we are a transition facilitator. So the ultimate aspect of regeneration is that you achieve a level of plant health and soil health where there isn't the need for constant supporting inputs. And that isn't, that is not a universal, I mean, there are, there are soils, there are geological context and crop context where that doesn't make sense. If you're growing strawberries in the sands of California, that's probably not ever going to happen. But we have, over the course of the last 15 years, we've worked on about, on about 4 million acres altogether. And when we work with a grower, we take this very, you know, perhaps the most recognizable analogy would be that of holistic medicine where we take a very integrative approach to evaluating everything that's going on in the farm from what are the major diseases, what are the major insect pressures, crops that are being grown, what does the soil mineral profile look like? What does the soil microbiome look like?

John Kempf [01:06:50] What is, what are the historical pesticide applications and fertilizer application systems and protocols? And then how do we begin gradually making a transition and shifting away with, without compromising the crop and without compromising the farm's financial situation? Because many farms have no margin for error. There's no opportunity for significant risk. We have to minimize the risk through the transition process. And so we are there in very much in a consul consulting capacity to help manage the transition. And then this is how the company originally started. And then at some point we recognized that there is a significant need for what, at that time, this is now a decade plus ago, there was a need for trace minerals like cobalt and molybdenum and selenium that weren't particularly available in the marketplace. So our business today has also evolved where we, a primary major part of our business is offering these specialty plant nutritional products and the microbiome support products that go hand in hand with the consulting and with the crop scouting that we do. So it's, it's kind of those three pieces, the, the in-depth crop scouting and data collection to evaluate what's happening, what's going on, the consulting piece to coach and guide through the transition, and then the products that may or may not be needed in varying degrees to support that.

Vance Crowe [01:08:20] So one of the questions I told you when we were emailing back and forth about setting this up is was I wanted to ask you what would happen to us agriculture if for some reason the support system for commodities like corn dropped out? Like if all of a sudden the state of Illinois didn't mandate that a certain amount of of ethanol had to be blended into your gasoline, do we have a need for all those acres of corn to be turned into tomatoes and, and pumpkins, or would we still be growing corn? We would just do it in a different way. What's your take on that?

John Kempf [01:08:56] You, you asked the questions that on the surface appear to be so simple, but are so deeply evocative or provocative perhaps. So if we look at this from a, a macro perspective, like what are, what are examples of countries for which that is true? And we can look at Australia as an example, like how would our agriculture look different if we didn't have the, the political rigging of the game as it exists right now? And I think, and this also, I mean, there's also a, a labor question that is very relevant here. If we had a pathway for legitimate legal immigration of farm labor, that that's a fundamental that also has to be addressed. But actually I'll just wrap up on that thought for the moment. And that is, a farmer made the comment to me recently that he shared with the congressional committee. He said, we have to accept the fact that our fresh fruits and vegetables are going to be picked by foreign hands. The only question is, will it happen inside the United States or outside the United States?

Vance Crowe [01:10:08] Wow.

John Kempf [01:10:09] And that is a spot on assessment of the reality that exists. And so putting that as an aside, just focusing for the moment on, on crop mix and how it would be indifferent. I mean, we have 40% of the US corn crop right now going to ethanol, which is idiotic by almost every measure. But that's another, another conversation. So I think, would the crop mix look very different? Would we stop growing? We would, we would almost certainly stop growing corn on marginal land. And I think the crop mix would look different. We would have much greater diversity. And the reality is, it's, it's difficult to conceive for, for farmers here in North America who, who are growing corn and soybeans who essentially have no risk. They, they would say they have risk, but from a crop protection perspective, you really, they really have no risk. It's difficult to, to conceive or to even want to imagine or think about a, a different system. But when you look at what is true in Australia and in, in different parts of the world, you know, I have, we have, I have many Australian friends and colleagues that we visit back and forth, and I have, I've had groups of them here to visit regularly. And one of the recurrent themes of feedback is that American farmers are so set in their ways. Like there is no innovation, there's no innovation around crops and cropping types and cover crops in corporate.

John Kempf [01:11:42] There's innovation is stagnant. And of course there are certainly, there is a group of innovators within agriculture like the Jason Mouses and the Zach Smiths of the world, but they are such a distinct minority. Whereas in, in production environments, as in Australia where you don't have these government price supports and crop supports, then that inspires innovation. You have to continue innovating or die. And this is a piece that I think we have really stagnated in our production ecosystems here in North America. And the time is going to come when that will come back to bite us. It might be 20 years in the future, 40 years in the future. It might be a gradual transition, I don't know. But it's, it's really a question of, is the, is the current support model as it currently exists, truly sustainable for the long term? Is it sustainable from a political opinion perspective? From a public opinion perspective? I, I will be very surprised if we don't see significant shifts in the coming decades, will they be easy? No, I think they'll be difficult every step of the way. But I think we don't have a choice except from a long-term sustainable, what the word sustainable can so easily be misunderstood from, to develop a sustainable or a synergistic relationship between populations and ecosystems and landscapes and farmers. We need a system that is not forced right now.

John Kempf [01:13:17] We have a system that is forced,

Vance Crowe [01:13:20] You know, shockingly, John, I don't know that I'm all that shocked about it. You and I agree on a lot and, and a lot of it has to do with like the, I mean, I believe basically the use of government force on whether it's intellectual property or the way that you influence the money system or how you, you put up price supports, these are all things that I think are heavily distorting reality to the degree that the fish swimming in this water don't even realize that this is the, the, the, the distortion is so, so heavy. Yeah,

John Kempf [01:13:54] You're, I completely agree with you.

Vance Crowe [01:13:56] How is you

John Kempf [01:13:56] Sounding like a little bit like a libertarian here?

Vance Crowe [01:13:59] Well, you have idea. So like as like, I find myself wanting to root for this idea, right? Who doesn't, who do, who wouldn't wanna root for crops that are, have more nutrients that soil that's better farmers that don't have to utilize crop protection as much. If you're, if if you're just a regular listener, you're not a farmer out there. In what way can you support what appears to me to be a movement or an ideology in some way that would help blow oxygen onto what you guys are doing?

John Kempf [01:14:39] Oh boy. Vance, you're, you're going to ask me a question that I, I have arguments with about all the time. And before I answer your question, I am going to go down this rabbit hole since you opened it. And that is, I'd like to ask you the very challenging question. Has consumer demand ever facilitated significant positive change, positive consumer demand?

Vance Crowe [01:15:02] Has consumer demand ever facilitated positive change,

John Kempf [01:15:06] Significant positive change? That's a key qualifier. So when I think about, and, and actually let me, let me clarify my question. So I'm, I'm framing this in terms of positive demand as compared to negative demand and significant change as compared to incremental change. So there are a few, and, and I'm asking this question in the context specifically of, of food and agriculture. I should have clarified that as well. So when we look at the supply supply,

Vance Crowe [01:15:33] I'd like to answer this real quick because I, I think I have been like, I think that it is impossible to answer that question since at least the 1970s, if not before in the 1930s, like once we went off the gold standard, now all of a sudden the value of our money has, is so rapidly dissipated that it is impossible for people to desire the, their, the way that they spend their money is so convoluted that, that we ourselves don't know how we're doing it. It's not possible to save money unless you're risking it. It's not possible to accumulate. So you are always fighting against the ever decreasing value of the American dollar. That would be where, how I would answer that. Yeah.

John Kempf [01:16:21] Yeah. Okay. That is an interesting answer. Not quite the answer I was looking for, but yeah, we could have another interesting conversation around monetary policy. So the, when I think of when have there been significant shifts, significant changes in the food supply chain, examples that come to mind are after Upton Sinclair wrote, the jungle beef consumption dropped by, I forget exactly what the numbers were, but they dropped like 40% nationally in a matter of weeks. And that led to the desire of the beef packers to ask for federal oversight and to ask the fox to guard the chicken house, essentially to create these regulatory process standards that would limit other smaller scale processors from coming in in. But that's a whole other story. But that, that was one example of, I'm let you Jan on all this. I'm totally with you. So other examples of negative demand are when you have salmonella outbreak on spinach. So there are, there's negative demand and without question, negative demand or the refusal to purchase has certainly led to shifts and changes in food supply chains. But when you think about positive demand, I mean the best example we have of positive demand is organically certified food who took less, who's taken four decades to get the less than 10%. Well, that's not the type of change that I'm interested in facilitating. I want to get to 40% of the supply chain in a decade. The exact inverse of that, and I'm, I just pulled that number right off the top of my head.

John Kempf [01:17:52] So I'm of the persuasion that consumer demand actually does very little in the mainstream retail supply chains to drive change. I don't believe there is any consumer demand for the tomatoes and strawberries that currently exist on the grocery store shelf. That demand is coming from the retailers and processors, packers, distributors, et cetera, to facilitate ship ability and storability. It's not coming from consumers. And I could go on and develop a list of dozens of other examples where it's not consumer demand that is driving what actually exists. And so since you and I are freely sharing these heretical opinions back and forth, I think the, the most meaningful change that we can make for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, our, is to the degree that we're able to simply opt out, to opt out to in, instead of going through the, the mainstream distribution channels to connect with local farmers by directly from local farmers to the degree that we're able to, and to the degree that we're not able to, you know, we live in such a different world from what we did 10 years ago. It's still a habit for many people to grow to the grocery store and buy a week supply or a couple weeks supply of groceries. But today we live in a world where you don't have to do that. You can buy food online and have it shipped to your door in many cases.

John Kempf [01:19:25] And, and I can speak from personal experience, in my case at least, it costs me less to do that than it does to drive to the grocery store and pick it up. And it, it costs less to the environment and to the ecosystem because you have one delivery driver making dozens of deliveries instead of one. It's, it's more efficient from many perspectives. But now when I buy things online, I'm no longer constrained and I'm no longer limited to what is in the local grocery store. And I can support food companies who are making regenerative agriculture a part of their mission and who are supporting farmers really well. That's what I would encourage people to do, is find people who share your values and support them. Don't just continue the same old habits of buying whatever is available locally. And as shocking as this is to say this is particularly true in the Midwest, I travel a lot for work all over the country, and it is pathetic that the Midwest, which considers itself the breadbasket of the world is a good food desert.

Vance Crowe [01:20:31] Those are strong words,

John Kempf [01:20:34] Very real. Try eating a continental breakfast at a hotel in the Midwest as compared to on one of the coast, the equality is abysmal. It's pathetic.

Vance Crowe [01:20:45] Yeah. I mean, I actually didn't even know I liked cantaloupe until I had a homegrown cantaloupe and then I was like, oh, this is what this is supposed to taste like, because the only time I'd ever had it was at a hotel that was buying it when it was like, like a rock. And then they cut it up when it was like a rock. And yeah, John, I absolutely loved this conversation. I had no idea where this would go, and I would love, love, love to have you back on as we wrap up, if people wanted to find out more, if you, if there's ag producers out there that are thinking, Hey, I'd, I'd like to find out what they can do on, on my farm or what I could be changing up, where, where should people go?

John Kempf [01:21:28] The kind of the central coalescing point is my personal website at John Kempf dot com. The company that I spend most of my time working with and supporting and working with growers and is through advancing eco agriculture, we share, one of the things that we believe on, that I believe in personally is freely you have received freely share. We share a lot of our information about the things that we're learning and how we're managing agronomy and how we're doing things differently on the Advancing Equal Agriculture YouTube channel. I also host a podcast called the Region of Agriculture podcast. So there's a lot of information available on out there, but I would suggest people go to John Kempf dot com and please subscribe to my blog. We're constantly posting updates. Vance, I've really enjoyed being here. This has been an awesome conversation. I certainly look forward to being back on for more.

Vance Crowe [01:22:15] Sounds great, John. Thank you.