#167: John Kempf (Advancing Eco Agriculture) — Regenerative Agriculture Solutions

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What success looks like is to have a world where the air is clean and the water is clean and ecosystems are regenerated. And our streams are filled with fish and wildlife,
and we have these abundant ecosystems. And where people are living in symbiosis with nature, you know, there are very two very different worldviews about people's presence on the planet.
And the presence of the one worldview is that humans are a parasite and that the best way to regenerate ecosystems is to remove humans from the landscape.
The other perspective and the one that I subscribe to is that humans are a hyper keystone species and that when humans engage with ecosystems and engage with the landscape in a loving,
caring stewardship relationship. They have the ability to transform and regenerate ecosystems faster than by any other mechanism, than by any other means. And that is what success looks like for me,
is when we have globally adopted a collective consciousness of being loving, caring stewards of the ecosystem and our landscapes. Let's discover what people are building in the Greater Cleveland Community.
We are telling the stories of Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio.
I am your host, Jeffrey Stern, and today I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with John Kempf. This is John Kempf. of Advancing Ego Agriculture,
a regenerative agronomy consulting company founded back in 2006 to share the knowledge, tools, and systems that regenerate farm profitability, soil health, and plant health,
all while reducing the need for fertilizers and pesticides. Under John's leadership, AEA has grown to be trusted by over 10 ,000 growers across the world to deliver exceptional yield and quality improvement.
results on over 4 million of collective acres of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and broad acre crops, all while profitably generating over 20 million in revenue last year and raising over $2 million in crowdfunding.
From a recognition that our existing food system is fundamentally broken, John's vision is one that agriculture, the source of so many challenges in our world today, has the capacity to be the solution to those very challenges,
where the process of growing food regenerates land, revitalizes communities, produces food that improves our health, and leads to farming landscapes that are beautiful, vibrant, and clean.
In addition to building AEA, John is also the host of the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, one of the leading agriculture podcasts in the entire country, with many millions of downloads, where he interviews leading farmers and scientists on the practices and science that accelerate the healing of soil,
crops, livestock, and our relationship to the land. It is hard to not be inspired after meeting with John. He is clearly pushing the envelope of what is possible and what is necessary,
unaccepting of the status quo and limitations of conventional agriculture, his passion and enthusiasm are infectious, and his progress with AEA is more than compelling. This was such a fun and educational conversation for me from unpacking the larger concept of regenerative agriculture to hearing about the influence of his Amos upbringing,
and much more. So please enjoy my conversation with John Kempf after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90.
As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped hundreds of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast,
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The link will also be in our show notes. (upbeat music) - So as a family farmer, I knew you grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm and clearly have this very in -depth understanding of agriculture and the whole ecosystem around it having grown up from within it.
I thought it would be a great place to kick us off there, you know, hearing a bit more about your family. in a family farm and how it has forgive the pun,
you know, sowed the seeds of inspiration for, for ultimately what you're, you're working on here today. - That's quite funny. So the seeds, that's quite good. Yeah.
Well, I, you know, I grew up in an amazing family with incredible parents and the gifts they gave us are, I have a lot. of gratitude to my parents for the sense of liberty to be able to question and challenge the status quo because that's really what has gotten me into this space.
My father was a pioneer. He was one of the first fresh market fruit and vegetable growers here in the greater Middlefield, Ohio, Amish community. And as is true of many pioneers,
he received a lot of criticism, a lot of flag for that. But his pioneering spirit also led him to establish a business to be the local supplier for seeds and fertilizer and equipment.
And he went on to help co -found a local cooperative produce auction that was now called the Jagga County Produce Growers Auction, where people sell fresh market fruits and vegetables wholesale.
And so he, and he also, he was quite entrepreneurial, helped start a number of other ventures as well for the community's benefit. And so it was within that framework,
within that context, I grew up on this family of fruit and vegetable farm, where we were not only were we using pesticides and chemical fertilizers very intensively,
but my father was also selling them as that was, that was the world that we knew. We were dealing with local county extension agents, university extension agents. that was the industry knowledge at the time.
And then we had a series of experiences in the early 2000s, 2000s, 2003, and 2004 in which we almost lost three years in a row. We lost greater than 70 % of our crops to a variety of different diseases and insects that we couldn't manage with pesticides effectively anymore.
And we were very clearly observing this trend that it seemed the more pesticides we used, the more we needed to use, the worse the problems became. And that really led me down this journey of studying and learning.
And actually, we had this really fascinating experience in 2004, the third year of this three -year period, where we'd been farming some of this land for the prior decade with intense pesticide applications,
vegetable crops every year. on the same soil. And we started renting a field from a neighboring farm that bordered right up against one of our own fields. And these two fields used to be very long and narrow.
And because they were quite narrow, they were being tilled and planted up and down the slope, which led to lots of soil erosion and just wasn't a great scenario. But now that we started renting that additional field,
and the first thing we did was we changed the road. direction by 90 degrees. So now that we were planting across the former field border. Yeah. And that first year, we planted this field into cantaloupe. And at harvest time,
the field that we had been managing and growing vegetables on for the prior decade had 80 % of the leaves infected with powdery mildew, which is disease that can completely destroy your crop. And on the new soil,
right beside it, there is no powdery mildew. And when I say no, I'm not saying that there was 5 % or 10%. You couldn't find powdery mildew in that section of the field. There was this very clear knife line boundary effect at the former field border.
And as you can imagine, that was a 2x4 in the face kind of moment as, "All right, what are the differences between these two plants? What allows one plant to be resistant to powdery mildew when the next plant looks like powdery mildew?" is susceptible?
It was the same variety, plant of the same day, management and everything was supposedly identical, but we got two completely different outcomes. Wow. I'll get you to pay attention.
Yeah. Well, I think before I pull on a bunch of threads there, you know, so I had the delight of going down the rabbit hole of your blog as I was trying to. prepare for our conversation.
And evidently, you have this deep fascination with the science of how soil and plant systems work that might cause for that divergence in the outcomes that you just spoke to in what you experienced.
I felt like I got a whole 101 introductory education just going through it on regenerative agriculture. But I think for folks tuning in, it would be really helpful just to add some context to what you've already alluded to a bit here because I think one of the things that's so interesting to me about agriculture and farming is that despite the fact that it's so integral and involved in our day -to -day lives,
speaking for the general public here, our appreciation and understanding of how food is grown. is certainly not appreciated, I think, relative to a lot of other things that we constantly interact with.
And layering on top of that, not only do we know very little, but what we do know revolves around this perception that agriculture may inherently be extractive,
which I know you may balk at the premise that it has to be that way, and we'll talk about that, and is one of the things I'm very excited to learn more about. But I think just, you know, help us understand a bit,
you know, what is regenerative agriculture and how you came to begin to explore or, you know, learning about this whole problem space and then the opportunity you saw. Oh my goodness.
Let's start with the easy questions first, shall we? Actually, I'll start with an anecdote first. We now have, as the Chief Science Officer of Organization DEA. the AEA,
we have an incredible lady working for us who used to work for Mission Control for NASA. So we literally have a rocket scientist heading up our science department. And when she started working for us,
and as she was learning about the soil microbiome and soil genomics, her common was rocket science is an order of magnitude easier than what we're working on right now.
[LAUGHTER] So with that sidebar, I think, what is regenerative agriculture and what led us to this space?
I'll actually continue with the story of what happened on our farm because it ties into this directly. With the guidance of some very good mentors and a lot of studying and learning,
I-- soon discovered that there is this foundational element of plant immune systems that all plants have an inherent immune system. They have the capacity to be completely resistant to diseases and insects,
as long as that immune system is supported with the right nutritional support and with the proper microbiome, which is the same as is true of our immune system or the immune system of any living organism.
And yet, this approach to agriculture was fundamentally different than the mainstream. So what we might call contemporary agriculture today,
balances plant... completely ignores the microbiome for part one. For part two, it balances nutritional profiles with only one objective in mind,
and that is to get the highest yield possible. So it is almost like it's unrestrained growth. The most vigorous aggressive growth we can possibly achieve must be good.
But we know it's not good. If we have unrestrained growth in a body, that's called cancer. And so what is regenerative agriculture?
If I had to coalesce it down, regenerative agriculture is a model? of managing ecosystems and managing food production in such a way that,
and there's different ways that I could say this, but it regenerates the relationships in the ecosystem. And particularly in the case of plants, the objective, the plants that we grow for food and for feed and so forth,
these plants should have robust immune systems that allow them to be completely resistant to diseases and insects. Because, when you have these plants that you grow for food and for feed and so forth, that flow after that.
First is when you have these really healthy plants that have robust immune systems, they also transfer that immunity to people and to livestock who consume those plants as a food source. And all of a sudden,
we can have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine and having agriculture as a public health service. But the second piece that happens, when you have these robustly healthy plants,
these vibrantly healthy plants that have functional immune systems, they also sequester carbon and build solar organic matter and increase soil resilience and ecosystem resilience while we are growing a crop.
And this is an important distinction because today there is this mental model in agriculture that we grow the plants that we desire for commercial crops,
for food and feed, etc. And then if we want to regenerate soil health, we have to go cover crops or we have to grow other plants to replace what is lost. So we perceive some plants as removing from the soil and other plants contributing back to the soil.
And that is simply an expression of dysfunctional plant health. When you have really healthy plants, you can regenerate soil while you're growing corn, while you're growing soybeans, or while you're growing a crop.
I think this is the fundamental insight, fundamental distinction behind how we can develop an agriculture that is truly regenerative, regenerative of soil health,
regenerative of public health, and regenerative of the entire ecosystem at landscape. Wow. So at its core, in its philosophy,
is this shift away from optimizing for yield and growth to optimizing for plant nutrition and health, optimizing for quality and immune function instead of for yield.
And you know what's funny when you do that? The unexpected side effect when you do that is that when you have a really healthy plant that is vibrantly healthy. and growing actively, what do you think is going to happen to yields?
They go up. Obviously, it's like when you increase yields, when you increase health, yield goes up. With the work of our company, when we first started back in 2006,
our initial claim to fame and what we really developed a reputation for was helping farmers grow crops that were resistant to diseases and insects. But immediately after that came the reputation,
the realization that when you grow crops that are resistant to diseases and insects, you also get significantly higher yields. And so we're starting to work with many growers who want to work with us,
not for the disease and insect resistance benefits, but because we have a track record of increasing crop yields. Right. It's doing good by doing well. Yeah, exactly. - So advancing ECRO agriculture,
AEA, tell us a little bit about what the company is, what it does, what is your vision, what is your mission, how it all came to be. - Oh, you're asking me to compress this down.
This is such a fun story, but from the experience that I had on my family farm, that then led to the genesis of a consulting company in 2006,
where I founded a dental company. We started doing consulting work with other growers to help them through this transition and to share what we were learning with plant nutrition management.
Flash forward to today, we are a team of 80 people working on about 4 million acres on over a hundred different crops here, mostly here in North America. But we're starting to do quite a bit of international work in South America and throughout Europe and parts of Asia as well.
And we're just having so much fun. We're having so much fun. It should almost be criminal, but we're just having so much fun.
And our company is necessarily very multifaceted. We still maintain that very strong consulting company pedigree and have a very consultative approach when we work with growers.
But as a result of necessity, we also started developing these specialty plant nutrition and microbiome support products. You could think of them as being the equivalent. The products that we produce for plants are an analog to probiotics and nutritional supplements for people.
So it's not your mainstream conventional fertilizers, but more of the the supplements to fine -tune the system and the immune systems performance. And then we also have a laboratory services division called Crop Health Labs.
And just a number of different spin -off enterprises that have spun off from that parent company of advancing eco -agriculture to facilitate all of the services that growers need to guide them through the transition.
Well, it sounds like embedded within all of this, you've mentioned twice now, the microbiome of the plan, you know, kind of analogy. to the, I imagine the microbiome of us people.
Absolutely. Yep. The funny part is, I read just this recently, but now I forget. I want to say there's like 60 or 70 % overlap between our gut microbiome and the microbiome of a plant in the soil.
That's a pretty incredibly high degree of overlap. So, how did you, you know, rewinding the clock to the earlier days of this? how did you learn about plant nutrition management and the actual,
you know, science and practice to, to mediate this whole process? Was this more of like undiscovered science and practices or just overlooked, you know,
things that we already knew that weren't, you know, institutionalized? The context is that I grew up in the Amish community. I'm still a member of the Amish community. And so we only, our formal education only extends to the eighth grade.
It doesn't mean we stopped learning, obviously when you graduate from school, no one should ever do that. But, and so at the conclusion, once I graduated, I was given the responsibility of doing all of our spraying and irrigation.
And so that included fertilizer applications and pesticide applications by both those delivery mechanisms. And so this was a topic that I was very fascinated by, very interested in.
and I read a lot, studied a lot. And we were very fortunate. I grew up only a couple of miles away from the relatively,
at that time, was a very small building in Middlefield, Ohio. It was the Middlefield Public Library branch of the Jagga County Public Library. And it was a fascinating statistic. The Middlefield Public Library has the highest per person book lending rate of any library in the nation.
Wow. Yeah. And I think a part of that, certainly not exclusively, but I suspect a major contributing factor is the Amish community that uses that library and that doesn't have television or radio on the internet and everything else,
of course. Right. And that library, the librarians went above and beyond to get any reference material that I asked for.
I still remember getting these very obscure books on bio photonics, on research that was being done in Germany. These were university textbooks and very expensive textbooks that they would get through interlibrary loan from Europe.
I got multiple books from Germany and France. And so it was really, it was the access to that resource combined with some of the mentorship relationships that I developed at Guide on My Learning.
What I discovered, to come back to your question, what I discovered is that there was a tremendous domain of knowledge in botany and plant physiology around plant immune systems that never got transferred into agriculture.
And this is I think one of the challenges with our modern approach to science is that we necessarily, some of us,
and there's a need for some of us as individuals do this, but we necessarily, in order to develop a deep expertise, we are required to specialize to some degree. And if you look at the domain of agriculture and plants,
if you go to any ag university, you have agronomy and botany and plant physiology and plant the And there are all of these different specialty domains studying various aspects of plants and how they interact with the ecosystem.
And the information seldom is communicated effectively across those silos. And so I just discovered this tremendous... I mean, there were... And there are scientific journals and dozens of books dedicated to publishing research on plant immune systems.
And most agronomists have never heard of it. They don't know it exists. I still remember the early days when I started talking about this concept of plant immunity. I would speak at conferences and I would get resistance from people in the audience.
They would say, "There's no such thing as a plant immune system." And yet, there are entire scientific journals dedicated to publishing plant immune research. Yeah, it is fascinating the power of interdisciplinary study and being able to connect the dots that you might miss with the blinders of true specialization.
Yeah. Well, I think I, of course, speak from the perspective of the context that I'm familiar with, the agricultural context, but the entrepreneurs, the people who appear to have superpowers today or who are,
whose skills that is in extremely high demand are not the special but the generalists. There are more than enough specialists to go around. There are not enough true generalists who can bring these various domains together and see how they intersect for the most efficient products development,
technology development, company development, and so forth. - So I wanna explore perhaps a detour for a moment here, but I am deeply curious about,
you know, how... reconcile innovation and using the most state -of -the -art technology and research with the Amish tradition and culture,
this balance of innovation and tradition. Obviously, you've quite adeptly been able to leverage this in practice, but also employ certain restraint in that I know,
for example, for those tuning in, you know, having it digital avatar in place of your actual, you know, face online, for example. But how have you thought about trying to navigate this balance of your upbringing and culture and how it's,
you know, affected your practice and business? Yep. That's a very good question. And I find it most useful when thinking about this to try to identify first principles thinking,
what is the root cause? Or in this case, what is it that we're really trying to achieve? And when you look at the foundational principles that are espoused within the Amish community and principles that I've come to appreciate and hold very dear,
I'll just broadly call them community values and family values. So when you look at many of the constraints that the Amish community kind of imposes,
on its members, constraints on flying, for example, the reason, the given reason why they do not want people to fly is to keep people closer together to foster community and not be as far -flung spread out and to dilute relationships.
And the same is true that the original rationale, this is now going back, of course, 150 or more years ago. the rationale for restricting the use of vehicles and only driving horses and buggies is to keep people closer together and close physical proximity so that you can truly interact as neighbors and as a community.
And it's the same reason why there are many different Amish church denominations. There's line that was made,
and this is now blurring and shifting, but the historical boundary line was to not permit the use of electricity. But it wasn't really electricity that was a challenge. It was the use of television and radio and the internet and everything that came with that,
that they perceived as diluting a strong family. And so from a preference of maintaining strong family values, that was the choice of where to establish. the boundaries to avoid proximity or an association with TV and radio and the internet and so forth.
And so where that, obviously we live in a changing and evolving world and we all need to adapt to the times that we live in. And so some of the less conservative Amish communities and churches and so forth are adapting to the use of.
technology, but they are making, establishing, reestablishing the boundaries as the use of those technologies being strictly for business. So you use it in the office and it stays in the office.
When you go home to spend the evening and the afternoon with your family, that is not a part of the family fabric. - Fascinating. Thank you for I think sharing a bit about that.
I was very curious. - Yes. I certainly don't have it. Oh, you never have it entirely figured out. It's a constant reassessment of where are the boundaries, where are the values, what do you hold dear in your personal life.
But the reality is that we have to decide this for ourselves from within. I guess just living in a community that has outside imposed restrictions,
like you can violate those restrictions and nobody will ever know. So you have to determine what is real to you authentically from within. What do you really care about? Where will you establish your own personal boundaries?
You mentioned first principles there. I'm curious in application to AEA, if the goal and the mission is proliferation of regenerative agriculture as a movement implemented in practice.
What are some of those? underlying principles that guide you in this quite ambitious endeavor? Yeah,
people have said that I'm obsessive about building from the foundation of first principles thinking. And so there are many layers of answers to that question. And one of the layers is that from a practical implementation perspective of how our relationship develops with a grower and how we work with a grower's crops out in the field is we always seek to identify the root cause of why a problem exists.
So from our point of view, a disease showing up in a field is not a problem. It is a symptom of a deeper underlying problem that is a trishmore microbial imbalance.
And when we see a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a
disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in
a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing up in a field is a disease showing that underlying problem, that root cause, then the symptom disappears, the disease disappears, the insect pest disappears. So that's one level of operating from first principles in terms of our day -to -day work.
But then one of the ways that has manifested itself is in who we are as a company. I've said publicly that our, my personal, mission.
what I'm passionate about is I want to see regenerative agriculture become the global standard, the status quo against which everything else gets compared by 2040. In my mind, the benchmark that I have in my mind is 80 % of all agricultural acres globally by 2040 be using regenerative agriculture systems.
And then as you think about getting to that point, how do we get there from here? This caused me to really deeply ask, what are the first principles?
What are the fundamentals of regeneration? What does it mean to be regenerative? For us as an organization, what does it mean to not be a company that does regenerative agriculture, but to be a company that is regenerative,
right down to within its very DNA? When you think about regeneration, regeneration at its most fundamental level is about regenerating relationships at all levels,
whether it's regenerating relationships between the soil, microbiome and plants, between plants and people, between livestock and the landscape, between human organizations,
between the food supply chain and farmers at all levels. It's about regenerating relationships. So, all right, when you think about regenerating relationships at all levels, when you think that exactly that you're regenerating?
What is a degraded state of a relationship? And what are you moving to? What's point A and what's point B? And so a degraded relationship are relationships that are extractive.
They are self -serving. They are win -lose. One person is one side is winning, the other side is losing. They are very transactional. On the other side,
and I could ascribe a bunch more adjectives as well, but if you look at the other side of what is a regenerated relationship look like, a truly healthy relationship. These are relationships that are truly collaborative and symbiotic and synergistic.
They are relationships that are win -win rather than win -lose. They are not selfish and self -serving. And so what that looks like is,
we actually launched this initiative three or four weeks ago or months ago. Our company trajectory has been very different. Growing up in the Amish community, we,
I founded the company in 2006. We didn't raise any investment on raising into the company until, what is it now? Roughly two years ago or something like that. (upbeat music) grew organically.
And there were a number of very good reasons for doing that. But among them is the reason that this is how healthy organisms grow naturally. Like you have to take time to build a foundation,
to establish a strong foundation as a team. And to, I mean, it's contained in the very idea of the word growing organically. You were growing as an organism would grow. To the point that I made earlier,
if you just proliferate too rapidly with mass uncontrolled growth in a human body, that would be called cancerous. There are, I think, too many organizations that receive large amounts of outside investment funding and they grow in an uncontrolled manner,
or at least there's the danger of that happening. And so we took the time to build a really strong foundation and to establish super credibility in the space.
And this was important because we are preaching a message that is fundamentally different, is fundamentally at odds with what people are mostly familiar with. So we had to take the time to establish a really strong reputation.
But we did something quite unconventional three or four months ago and that we launched a community fundraising campaign. which is odd.
Why would we do that as an organization right now? Once we are at a team of 80 people, we are profitable, we're sustainable, we're healthy, we're growing well, why do that now? And our reason for doing that now is because we have long desired a pathway for us as a company to enter into these symbiotic and aligned relationships with all of our stakeholders.
people who support us, our customers, our employees, we want them to participate and to be a part of the company's growth and success. And a community fundraising vehicle was an administratively easy way for us to facilitate that,
much easier than stock options or some of the other options or pathways that we explored. And so, that is... constantly thinking about from that first principles perspective is,
how do we develop truly regenerative relationships with our employees, with our customers, with our investors, with our supporters,
and with all of the stakeholders who aren't people with ecosystems, with landscapes, et cetera. So yeah, that's a very long -winded answer to your question, but that's how I think about.
first principles thinking in terms of regeneration. I love how just intentional you are about all of it. It's principled, you know? Lay of the Land is brought to you by John Carroll University's Bowler College of Business,
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So working back from 2040, 80 % of agricultural acres transition to this regenerative way of being.
I imagine that there are your fair share of challenges that you will have to overcome just as any agricultural business would from whether or not it's regenerative,
but you're things like, unpredictability, macroeconomic kind of factors, but also competing directly against this kind of legacy agricultural force and I think likely a financing environment that largely favors and incentivizes more conventional farming practices.
Can you just kind of lay out what you see as those hurdles to surmount R and your strategies to how you think about them and do they need to be overcome?
Can you go around them? What is the path forward? How do you actually get to where you want to be by 2040? You ask incredible questions and I struggle to mentally map out how I'm going to answer them in just a few minutes because the authentic answers are so nuanced.
I was asked a similar question. I appeared on CoInvent Science podcast twice. His podcast is investing in regenerative agriculture. And the second podcast,
he opened by asking me the question, "If you had a billion dollars to invest in facilitating the conversion to regenerative agriculture, how would you invest it?" And at the end of that conversation, he concluded by saying that...
he thought my strategy was spot on and brilliant, and he called it a bunch of other complementary adjectives, but that he thinks it would take $10 billion and not $1 billion. So I've given this a lot of thought.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how do we get from where we are right now to that point in the future. And I think that it is both simultaneously a lot easier.
It is a lot easier. collectively than we might expect. And it's much more difficult individually than we would expect. This is kind of a corollary to the phrase that we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in a year and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade.
I think we tend to overestimate what we can achieve as individuals and underestimate what we can achieve collectively. And so when we think, want to think about...
achieving that milestone of 80 % Agland adoption by 2040, it's actually, first of all,
we're much further down that road than people actually think, because adoption is not linear. It's not a linear process of one plus one plus one plus one. We're all familiar with the diffusion of innovations adoption curve where you start with the innovation.
the early adopters, et cetera. So the reality is that we need to get to around 18 % adoption in order to cross the tipping threshold where it becomes mainstream within a couple of five to 10 years after that.
And 18 % is not that far away. I mean, 10 % of all the range land in Australia is regeneratively managed right now. And there is so there's Australia and Australia is kind of the leader in the space right now because of the tremendous risk that they have,
the very challenging environment, the challenging ecosystem, the fact that they don't have crop supports, insurance, subsidies, et cetera, simply as a motivator to give them additional resilience. They are adopting a region of agriculture at a significant pace,
and that's going to come in other parts of the world as well quite rapidly. So, the U .S. is right now probably in number two or three position in terms of speed of innovation,
but they stand right on the threshold of rapidly falling behind because of the crop insurance and crop price supports that are in place. There is no risk in growing corn,
and so it means you cannot possibly lose right now. And because there is no risk, that also means there is no innovation. innovation, because there is no pressure for innovation. So those are some of the individual challenges that there are absolutely there are institutional financial gateways,
if you will, that right now if you are a farmer in the US, the majority of farms require operating loans to purchase inputs and seeds and etc to plant at the beginning of the year.
And in order to get an operating loan, you must get crop insurance. In order to get crop insurance, you must follow the recommendations for pesticide and fertilizer applications, and for planting, et cetera, and those recommendations often preclude the use of cover crops and other regenerative types of practices.
So there definitely are significant institutional hurdles that are in place at the moment, and yet in spite of those institutional barriers, there are quite a number of farmers,
particularly in the high risk environment. So if you look at the challenge climates in the US, the dry land regions of Kansas, Western Kansas, Nebraska, Eastern Colorado and so forth, where the farmers are really stressed and crop insurance and the price supports are not enough to sustain themselves.
It's in those very stressed environments where the innovation is happening as is so true of human condition. Things have to get bad. things have to become bad enough before they can get better. And so I think while there is,
there are some of these institutional challenges and barriers, the purpose of our work as an organization at events in eco agriculture, we don't have any aspirations to be all things to all people.
But what we can be and what we intend to be is to be a keystone company similar to the concept of being. a Keystone species, where our presence in the marketplace forces other people to change.
It forces them to step up their game and do a better job of managing agronomy, managing plant nutrition, purely through the market forces of competition. That is really our role,
is to be the Keystone species to force the entire ecosystem to evolve. Well, there's just, you know, a bunch of thought, but something very compelling about this idea that to optimize for plant nutrition and health is to also,
you know, increase yields and growth. You know, it's... So obvious. Like why would you not choose that? Of course you would choose that. Not only that.
not only that, but if I could elaborate on the one point that I made earlier, is all of these plants produce immune compounds as plant protectants to protect themselves from ultraviolet radiation from disease attack and insect attack and so forth.
And in plain English, we call these phytonutrients essential oils. All plants, and we're familiar with the names of a few of these compounds. Like many of us are familiar with lycopene in tomatoes or resveratrol in red wine.
and anthocyanins in blueberries. What we know about those compounds, the reason we recognize their name is because of how extensive they have been studied for their remarkable benefits to our own immune system.
These are plant immune compounds that enhance our immune system. I'm using those as a couple of recognizable examples, but plants produce tens of thousands of these different immune compounds.
that enhance our immune system. And all of a sudden, it's possible for us to have a reasoned conversation about agriculture as a public health service.
And this is so necessary in the world that we live in right now of highly processed food and a public health crisis of epidemic proportions, where we have these degenerative illnesses for now.
when you think about diabetes, stroke, heart disease, and all these degenerative illnesses, auto immune disease. Like we now have 20 % of people under the age of 18 have an autoimmune disease.
What's going on? Why would we accept that as being normal? And it's not just, it's not exclusively an agricultural problem. It's partially also environmental problems,
partially a food processing problem. but agriculture is a contributor and it also has the capacity to be a solution. Right. Well, it's just so upstream of everything else.
It reminds me of how it feels very similar in a lot of ways to what my understanding of the driver of adoption for solar energy, for example, is not fundamentally people's desire to be sustainable while that...
resonates and matters, but kind of the underlying economic irresponsibility at this point of not building out that infrastructure because it's like, you know, on a cost basis is better at this point.
You know, you can't kind of deny those realities. Right. Wow. Fascinating. So back, back to the point of, that I made that,
I think we underestimate what we can achieve. collectively. When I first started down this pathway back in 2006, there was an element of it, it felt like a very lonely world. And in the sense that there were many innovators in the space,
there were many amazing scientists, but there were very few people who had actually brought it all together and made it all work on a field scale in a significant way. And oh my goodness,
has that world ever changed? When we sat down, I still remember. the exact location where we had the meeting as a team, where we decided, what are we going to call, what we do?
It was in late 2010, November, December, 2010. And we decided to use the term regenerative agriculture. And I started using this term,
speaking about it at conferences. And we said, we will know we have been successful in launching a movement when regenerative agriculture terminology becomes mainstream." And look what has happened.
The last two years, last three years, regenerative agriculture is having its moment in the sun. And there are many people who, I think rightly so, give us the credit for launching that phrase into the public domain.
Now, will it live up to its potential and its promise? Will we, as a larger community, steward the authenticity of that phrase and what it really could mean.
That remains to be seen, but it's now entered into the public consciousness in a way that it hadn't a decade ago. Right. In that context,
what does success mean to you? How do you think about the kind of impact that you hope to have here? Well, success can mean many different things.
but what success means to me on a very deeply personal level is being able to have a small homestead where I grow food for my own family.
That is so nutritious. It is medicinal in value. And to share that. bounty, to share that depth of reward,
not just for myself and my family, but for the people all around the world. What success looks like is to have a world where the air is clean and the water is clean and ecosystems are regenerated and our streams are filled with fish and wildlife and we have these abundant ecosystems.
And where people are living in symbiosis with nature, you know, there are very two very different worldviews about people's presence on the planet.
The presence of the one worldview is that humans are a parasite and that the best way to regenerate ecosystems is to remove humans from the landscape. The other persp...
and the one that I subscribe to is that humans are a hyper keystone species and that when humans engage with ecosystems and engage with the landscape in a loving,
caring stewardship relationship, they have the ability to transform and regenerate ecosystems faster than by any other mechanism than by any other means. And that is what success looks like for me.
is when we have globally adopted a collective consciousness of being loving, caring stewards of the ecosystem and our landscapes. Wow. That's powerful.
Where to take it from here? Well, if I can just follow up on that, I'll say this, many people around the world are much closer to that. In our western civilization,
Western civilization, we have become very disconnected from natural ecosystems. There are many people around the world who are already there or who are well down this pathway of having this type of symbiotic and synergistic relationship with wild ecosystem.
It is really those of us who insist that the ideal is to live in cities and to live in concrete end hills, if you will, that we've become disassociated from nature in these natural ecosystems.
and that that disassociation results in an extractive selfish relationship. Like it is, there is no reciprocity there that we are not giving back to rural landscapes in the ways that we should be,
usually when we live in an urban environment. What are some of the other, you know, most you feel we hold about agriculture at a societal level?
It's challenging for me to answer that question because I'm so deeply embedded in the agricultural space and I grew up in that space. One thing I can ask you about, because I've seen an analogous trend in actually the world of manufacturing is that when you think about the number of people that historically used to work in both agriculture and manufacturing,
the numbers have gone down as I think automation and technology and innovation has driven those spaces forward. What would be your pitch to young people about getting involved in agriculture in a way that current trends would suggest they're not going to?
Yeah, and going to answer the two questions that you asked in this way. I think, and I'm speaking of broadly, we collectively, and obviously they're all individuals on our own pathway,
but collectively we have this hubris that we can dominate nature and that technology is the solution to our problems. And I participate as a general partner in a regenerative agriculture investment.
fund called Biome Capital. I've been paying close attention to the investment that is happening in this space from the beginning for the last decade. And it's been remarkable to me,
the tremendous amount of money that has been raised for alternative proteins, alt meats, and in vertical farming, and also in the current day with some of the carbon capture technology.
that are being promoted. Yeah. The single most efficient carbon capture technology that can ever be devised or dreamed of or conceived of is the photosynthesis process. Nothing else will ever be even a distant second place.
Right. And... Nature has figured most of it out. She has figured all of it out, and it is simply the imbalance that we have introduced into the system.
and that we have the opportunity to rectify, to bring balance back into the ecosystem that can solve all of these challenges. So, you know, and thinking about advice of where to think about getting into this landscape or into this space,
technology can be a very wonderful and powerful tool. But technology is going to be the most impactful when it is conceived of and designed and intended to make people better,
not to replace people. And I shouldn't confine that just to people, but to all natural processes. When it helps natural processes work better,
not to replace them. Don't try to replace me. with alternative meats, alternative proteins. Try to make meat better and facilitate the process that make it better.
I think it's, if I had to frame it in any way, it would be in that way. Let's try to develop technologies of all types to not replace natural ecosystems and people and natural processes of people,
but to make them better. It's when you do that that you have the most impactful outcomes. - So you're a fellow podcaster, you know, running the regenerative agriculture podcast with far more reach and distribution than the dedicated of dozens of listeners I like to joke,
"Lay of the Land" has here. But quite literally a top national podcast. I wanted to ask what you have learned from your podcasting journey with the opportunity to have connected with so many of the leading farmers and scientists that you've had on.
What are the most memorable insights from that journey? There have usually been about 10 or more incredible insights from each and every episode,
which is I think one of the reasons why it's so popular. You know, the podcast came out of a effort, came out of... not so much even from a marketing, didn't come out as a result of a desire for marketing,
although it certainly has had that effect, but from a desire to honor the principle of freely you have received, freely share, freely give. When I started down this pathway,
I was fortunate to develop a group of mentors who gave so richly and freely a their time and their insights and their advice. They guided my reading and learning.
And several of those mentors I had were just incredible. They had incredible encyclopedic knowledge that they took with them to their grave. And when that happened with the second of my mentors,
I was just like, okay, I can't live with this situation. Like there are so many people out that have such incredible knowledge that needs to be captured and shared with a much larger audience with the world at large.
And so, that was the original inspiration or genesis for the podcast. And it has been so rewarding to have conversations with people to,
I would say, if if anything, the questions that I've learned to ask and try to draw people out and now also because of the reputation the podcast has people come to the podcast expecting to have the unusual conversations expecting to be able to have the conversations that they're often not able to have because People may not be ready to hear it.
They may not be ready to perceive it on the journey that they're on and so it has really been a boundary stretching podcast, I think for many of our listeners and for myself,
even for many of the guests. And it is in that sense of constantly exploring the boundaries of what is known from a science perspective and also developing comfort with the unknown,
becoming comfortable with what is not yet known and still continuing to push those boundaries forward. You know, what I find fascinating is that is probably true of other domains as well,
but in the context that I'm familiar with, agriculture is the practitioners are so far ahead of the science. They're so far ahead. The practitioners are often decades ahead of observing how ecosystems function and how weeds show up in certain soil types or in certain conditions and how all these different ecosystems actors interrelate with each other,
they're often decades ahead of the science. The science is playing catch -up. And so it's because of that, I've actually done something interesting on the podcast where the people that I interview are a mix of scientists and farmers.
And there are many scientists that I've interviewed with that are internationally renowned that have multiple degrees. but early on, the early days we were producing the podcast,
I got into a bit of a debate with the producers and I finally gave the mandate that we will not use honorific titles. There will be no doctor, so and so.
We will not use doctor and we will not use PhD. And my reason for that is because it's not that I certainly have a great deal of respect. and awe for the work and that effort has gone into that scientific education,
but my reason for insisting on that is because in many cases, the farmers and the practitioners have incredible insights that are every bit as worthwhile of entertaining and understanding deeply as the people who have Ph .D.'s and I want there to be the recognition that their contribution to the conversation is equally valuable.
Yeah. Well, the trait, but I think deeply true thing that comes to mind immediately when you mentioned this discrepancy between the scientific and academic world and practice was that we learn mostly in practice and not in theory,
because you get the feedback. Yeah. You get the feedback, but also one of the challenges that we have with the "scientific method" is that the scientific method is most easily applied in the approach of single -factor analysis.
You remove one variable or you add one variable and then you study how the ecosystem changed. But that doesn't lend itself particularly well to the study of living systems, particularly at the ecosystem.
level, because I forget who the quote is attributed to, but this quote that, "I tried to remove one living thing and I discovered that it's attached to the entire web." And so what happens in agricultural ecosystems is if you make one change,
you add or remove one variable, the whole landscape changes, the whole ecosystem changes, the whole plant physiology express some changes. And so that concept of single factor analysis doesn't lend itself well to ecosystem observation.
How optimistic are you, and perhaps that's too leading a question, you know, on the spectrum of pessimism to optimism, where do you fall as it stands at the moment with regards to AEA and your ability to move our society towards regenerative agriculture?
- There's no question in my mind that we are already successful. We have already been successful. And in the sense that it's a little bit like rolling a snowball down the hill off of a mountain top.
In the sense that, yes, there remains a great deal of work to be done. There is a great deal of things that need to evolve in a government policy level and multiple governments around the world.
- All right. tremendous amount of work that needs to be done, but in the spirit of the sense that we tend to underestimate what we can achieve in a decade, and we tend to underestimate what we can achieve collectively,
the snowball is already rolling down the mountainside. It has already gained significant momentum. It's already significant size, and so from my perspective, it's already happened. Like, there is no stopping with snowball anymore.
Well, that's exciting to hear. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here. I wanted to ask, as we kind of bookended, a question that I know you ask almost all of,
you know, the guests who come on your podcast, which is, you know, for a question that you wish I would have asked. And so I will, I will. I'll pose that your way.
You're reflecting my challenging questions back at me now. What is a question that I wish you would have asked? Well, I don't know if there's a particular wish,
but you might have asked me about my hobbies and passions, in which case I would have answered that one of the things that I'm passionate about is honeybees and beekeeping. So,
this is my hobby. have about a hundred colonies of honeybees. I'm producing mostly comb honey, in fact, entirely comb honey. And I'm really coming to the perspective,
I think many of the people who are beekeepers and who enjoy beekeeping, amongst other characteristics, the one thing that I suspect they share in common is that they really love puzzles. I suspect many of them are an INTJ personality profile on the Myers -Briggs.
spectrum because honeybees, if you want to do a really good job with honeybees, they are this multi -dimensional, multifaceted puzzle without boundaries. You are never going to entirely figure out all of the intricate pieces in the ecosystem that influence their development from year to year.
So, I have a lot of fun with that and you know the important piece and our work is that our work needs to be playful,
not playful, but work needs to be fun. Work needs to be joyful. The things that we do need to be joyful. I was giving a keynote at a conference a week or two ago,
and out of nowhere, this was divine inspiration. It didn't come from me, but I made a comment that... if we are not finding joy in our work, that is God's way of telling us that we had better find something else to do pretty rapidly,
pretty quickly, because we are not in alignment with His design and with His plan. The moment I said that, I said that, I was like, "Wow, where did that come from? That is so true." Right,
right. Well, I think often about the inversion of that, which is the degree to which you have found joy. that looks like hard work to other people, but feels like play to you is a pretty good indication you're on the right track.
Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. Oh, that's awesome. Cool. Well, I'll then proceed to ask you my traditional closing question, which is for a hidden gem in the greater Cleveland area for something that you wish more people knew about,
you know, proximately, that perhaps they don't. That's a challenging question for me to answer because I really love staying at home. But you know,
it's springtime, the migratory birds are coming back from the south. You have all the spring bird song. And this time of the year always reminds me of maple sugaring. I have such a great time.
of, and my brothers still have our own maple sugar -produced, our own maple syrup. If you've never participated and never experienced and observed maple syrup production,
I would encourage everyone to check out, there's multiple places now, scattered throughout Joppa County. and probably even in other counties as well. We have the Burton Sugarbush,
Swine Creek Park, and there's a couple of commercial operations where you have the opportunity to tour their facilities. And I can promise you there is no smell,
the equivalent of inhaling steam coming from a maple syrup pan like that. There is no equivalent. There is no equivalent,
and I would highly encourage everyone to find the time to experience that. I think you will be forever grateful. Oh, well, now I'm hungry. Well,
John, I just want to thank you deeply for coming on and sharing a bit more about your story and the work you're doing. I personally find it quite inspiring and exciting. And really,
it's quite cool to have learned about your business as well, which I was unaware of before. So thank you. - Well, to all of our listeners, I would just say have fun.
And I'll add one thought. Community is important. And having a community of like -minded entrepreneurs who, not even just entrepreneurs, but like -minded people who share core values is so valuable.
So feel free to reach out to me. I enjoy developing community, developing deep lifelong friendships and relationships. So thank you all for listening. - Amazing. If folks had anything they wanted to follow up with you about to learn more,
to get involved in any meaningful way, what, where would you, where would you point them? - Kind of the central point for, where a lot of our information is gathered is my website, johnkemph .com.
I have a lot. you can subscribe, you can also reach out to me. I'm on various social media platforms and I can also reach out to our company Advancing Ecoagriculture. Awesome. Well, thank you again.