I recently sat down for a fascinating discussion with John Kempf, an Amish entrepreneur who founded @AdvancingEcoAgriculture (AEA) in 2006 and who currently serves as Chief Vision Officer and Executive Board Chairman. Kempf also hosts the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. After his farm was hit by pesticide-induced crop failures, Kempf transitioned to regenerative agriculture practices that strengthen plant immunity, improve soil health, and increase the soil microbiome. AEA has worked on over 4 million acres in the U.S. and internationally, offering farmers a comprehensive approach to regenerative agriculture so that they can become more resilient, effective, and profitable.
Thank you for the riveting conversation and for all the incredible environmental work you do, John.
Hey everybody, my guest today is John Kempf, an entrepreneur, speaker, a leading crop health consultant, and a designer of innovative soil and plant management systems.
John is part of the Amish community in Pennsylvania.
He founded Advancing Eco-Agriculture in 2006 and serves as chief vision officer and executive board chairman.
He's also a host of the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where he interviews leading farmers and scientists who share cutting-edge practices and Science that accelerates the healing of soil, crops, livestock, and our relationship to the land.
As a member of the Amish community, John prefers to use artistic renderings of his likeness rather than a photograph or video.
So we're not airing a video of him today.
John, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Bobby, for having me.
It's quite an honor to be here.
I've been an admirer of your work and of your platform for a long time, and there are many exciting things happening in the world, and there is a growing awareness of the opportunities and the potential that exists when we all align and pull together.
So thank you for all the work you're doing, and thank you for having me.
Yeah, so tell me about your journey and about how you discovered this occupation, I'll call it.
Yeah, it's been an interesting journey, that's for sure.
I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm in northeast Ohio in the snow belt south of Lake Erie, where I still live, and We were growing fresh market vegetables, and in a very mainstream, men are using very intense fertilizer applications and pesticide applications.
This started in, I think we started in 1996, and then In the early 2000s, 2002, 2003, and 2004, we had a three-year consecutive period that we lost well over 70% of our major crops, our four major crops, to a number of different diseases and insects that we were not successful in managing with pesticides.
This was, we were applying ever more intensive pesticide application rates.
At this point in this three-year period, we were applying fungicides and insecticides every five days.
And it seemed the more we applied, the worse the problems became.
And then in 2004, we had a wake-up call experience that really got our attention.
Can you just tell about what your farm is, what it looks like, and where it fits in your community?
Yeah, we were one of the leading farmers in the community to first begin growing vegetables for wholesale markets.
And we had...
Four primary crops being tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and zucchini.
And it was a small family farm.
We had 25 acres altogether, 15 acres of land that was being tilled and planted into crops.
And of those 15 acres, these four crops represented probably 70% of the total crop that we were growing.
So we're located geographically in Northeast Ohio, maybe 20 miles, 25 miles south of Lake Erie and about 30 miles from the Pennsylvania border.
So being in this snow belt region, and also being in a very high cloud cover region, means that during the summer months we have lots of humidity and lots of cloud cover, which is an almost perfect petri dish environment for disease propagation.
Are there any prohibitions among the Amish about using chemical agriculture?
I know that Amish are not supposed to be using certain kinds of machinery.
What are those rules?
Well, there are many different Amish denominations, probably close to two dozen.
And so the rules and the restrictions vary widely from community to community.
So the community that I grew up in, we are farming with horses.
We're not using any electricity.
That has shifted a little bit in the last decade where we're now using more solar power and battery power tools and so forth.
But there's still no electricity, television, radio, or any of those modern electronics for the most part.
How about chemical agriculture?
Do any of the Amish communities or Mennonite communities forbid I'm not aware that there is any community where it is strictly forbidden.
There are very few communities where it is discouraged.
But the historical trajectory, the Amish community was taught to be subsurrient to government authority, to comply with governmental authority.
And to trust and respect, there's a great deal of an ethos of trust and respect for those in authority positions.
So it's quite interesting that even though we have this culture which has this very strong agrarian heritage, And a heritage of strong stewardship of the land.
Some of them, not all of them, but some Amish farmers adopted GMO technologies and adopted chemicals with a great deal of intensity.
You know, as a culture, we have culturally, I think we tend to have a very intensive work ethic, very aggressive work ethic.
And so generally when Amish farmers, and this is, of course, speaking broadly, but when we begin adopting new things, the majority of the Amish community doesn't tend to do things halfway.
They go all the way in 100%.
And so they were some of the early adopters of And also, because of the intensity with which they use those tools, they were some of the first people to see the problems, which is exactly what happened on the farm that I grew up on.
The chemical agriculture you were finding in, I think you said, was it 2016?
This would have been early 2000s, 2002, 2003, and 2004 when we had this...
Let me say that again.
So you were saying that in 2002 and 2003 and 2004, you were noticing that the more chemicals you used, the more your pest problems worsened.
The more we used, the more intense the problems became.
We were completely unsuccessful in managing a number of different diseases and pests, even though we were using a multitude of chemicals at label rates and sometimes at a higher frequency than intended in an effort to control them.
And, you know, this led to a really fascinating experience.
In 2004, The third year of this three year period, we began renting a field from a neighboring farm that had not had the previous intent, hadn't been managed, planted in vegetables, hadn't had the intensive pesticide applications.
And there used to be these two long, narrow strips of soil that were being tilled and planted up and down the slope.
Now we were managing both of them, so it made sense to try to control erosion to till and plant at a 90-degree angle across the former field border, which we did.
We planted that field into cantaloupe.
And at harvest time, the melons from the field that had the previous pesticide applications had 80% of the leaves infected with powdery mildew, which ended up costing us the majority of the crop.
And on the new soil that didn't have the previous pesticide exposure, there was no powdery mildew.
Not 5% or 10%, but zero.
You couldn't find any powdery mildew.
And it was so pronounced...
That there was this very sharp, clean boundary.
There was like a knife line right down to the center of the field.
In fact, it was so pronounced.
So these plants were all identical, the same variety, managed the same way.
But they were spaced and planted two feet apart.
And right on the field border, there were some vines that intermingled with the other vines where one vine had severe powdery mildew and the next one did not.
And as you can imagine, that caught our attention in a significant way.
And what did you do next?
Well, that was the trigger for an intensive learning journey, calling lots of people within academia, private consultants, and trying to understand what are the differences between these two plants?
What allows one plant to be resistant to powdery mildew when the next plant two feet away is susceptible?
And I was very fortunate to get some exceptional mentors in plant pathology and plant physiology over the next six months and did a lot of reading and studying.
And kind of the summary of what I learned and have continued to learn since then is that all plants have an immune system.
That has many similarities to ours in the sense, from a first principles perspective, in the sense that we know that we all have our own immune systems, but they don't all function equally well.
Some people become ill very easily, and other people practically never become ill because of infections.
And the difference between these two is how well their immune system has been supported over the course of their entire lifetime, and in fact, from even before they were born.
And the same concept holds true of plants as well.
Plants also have a functional immune system.
They have the capacity to be completely resistant to all diseases and all insects.
As long as their immune system is supported with the proper nutrition and the proper microbiome.
Exactly the same as our own immune system.
So this was a fascinating discovery to me because...
I had been very interested in plant sciences and horticulture for years before this.
And in all the research that I had done, the events that I had attended, there was no discussion in mainstream agronomy or in mainstream agriculture about plant immune systems.
In fact, when I first started talking about this, I initially received some pushback and people would say, well, plants don't have immune systems.
And yet there are entire scientific journals that are dedicated to plant immunology.
And there are hundreds of articles, thousands of articles that have been published on this topic.
And yet this conversation never made its way into mainstream agriculture.
So what did you do with that information?
Well, that led to quite a revolution on the farm, as you might imagine.
I was very fortunate to be able to attend an ecological agriculture farming conference that winter with my father and my brother.
And one of the presentations we listened to spent several hours describing the modes of action of pesticides and how they influence the human body.
And at the time, not only were we farming, but my father was also the local ag inputs retailer for the fruit and vegetable growers.
So we had all the fertilizers and the seeds and the equipment and all the pesticides.
My father was a licensed pesticide distributor.
I was a licensed pesticide applicator when I was 16 years old.
We got done with that day of events, listening to presenters talk about pesticides.
My father got to the end of the day.
We went back to the hotel room and he said, we're done.
We're over.
We're not using pesticides anymore.
And so it was that kind of conversion experience We then came back to the farm and he gave me permission to do whatever was necessary from a nutrition and microbiome management perspective to eliminate the need to use pesticides.
So in the 2005 growing season, we did some very intensive experimentation.
We still used very tiny amounts of chemical herbicides.
And then by 2006, we went completely pesticide free.
And that farm has been completely pesticide free ever since then.
So from that experience, and you know, if you flash forward to today with our consulting and the amazing team of people I get to work with, we're working on over 4 million acres of farmland across North America and some internationally we're working on over 4 million acres of farmland across North America and some internationally Yes.
And every year, people approach us to say, we have this insoluble disease, this new disease that is just emerging for which there is no known solution.
There is no known pesticide solution.
There is nothing that we have in our arsenal that works.
And at this point...
I can say that we have a perfect track record.
We are at 100%.
We have succeeded in resolving and reversing every single disease problem and every single insect problem that we've been approached with, with nutrition management and microbiome management.
And so that gives me a lot of confidence.
Earlier I made the statement that it's possible for plants to be 100% resistant to diseases and insects when you manage nutrition.
And that's quite a big claim to make.
That's a pretty big mouthful.
But it's not one that I make from a theory or from a hypothesis.
We have actually done this.
We are doing it.
And after a decade and a half of the level of experience that we've had, I think the confidence we have is born out of experience.
And so there's no question in my mind that this is possible and realistic and achievable on a large scale.
Let me go back to the Amish culture and the Amish community.
I'm very curious about your own background because you seem like a highly educated, very eloquent, articulate, and learned person in this area.
but are Amish likely to end up in an agricultural school, or where does their education end?
And what is your relationship then to the professors at the agricultural academies? - Yes.
Yeah, good questions.
So it would be very unusual for someone within the Amish community to extend their education beyond their formal education, I should say, beyond the eighth grade.
So I only have a formal eighth grade education.
And in fact, I don't know anyone personally who's remained in the Amish community who has an extended education.
It's certainly possible that it may exist, but I'm not aware that it does.
And, but we have...
And let me just, let me ask you one thing about that out of curiosity.
Are you educated in a public school in Ohio or do you, is it, are you homeschooled in an Amish community?
It is in what we call our parochial school system, so our Amish community school system, which is a two-room schoolhouse with two teachers and 30 students, roughly.
20 to 30 students is kind of the system that we have mostly here in North America within the Amish community.
So those teachers also do not have a higher education.
Those teachers are graduates from our own schools, so those are Amish teachers teaching in an Amish classroom that is within the community, gets administered by the community.
And we certainly have some testing requirements that we have to meet and some obligations in our agreements with various state governments, but that is all a community-run education system.
Okay, so then, to complete the answer to my original question, which was, what is your relationship with these agricultural professors?
You're allowed to use telephones, obviously.
Yes, yes, we're allowed to use telephones.
And here in our community, I'm a part of a community that is more progressive than some, and we're permitted the use of technology for work, which is how we're able to have this conversation.
And so, you know, I have the benefit of...
I have several gifts that I'm very grateful for and I've been blessed with.
One of them is being able to read very quickly and retain a great deal of what I read.
And our local township library has the distinction of having the highest per person book lending rate of any library in the nation.
And I think, I suspect a part of that, I don't know this for certain, but I suspect a part of that is contributed to by the Amish community.
We don't have television and radios, and so reading is a very common form of entertainment.
And we had outstanding service at that local library where...
There were a number of different scientific books that I wanted to read, and they would get those books for me through interlibrary loan from anywhere in the world.
I still remember receiving books from Germany and France and from throughout Europe on some of the topics that I was researching.
So...
To come back to the question that you're asking, I found some very remarkably knowledgeable individuals within the academic community and within ag universities whose knowledge and whose research had largely been throttled or that it wasn't widely advertised and wasn't widely known.
Just as with in the case of Plant immune systems and the domain knowledge around plant immune systems not being widely known.
You know, farming and agriculture is really a profession of generalists.
Farmers need to know so much about many different domains, many different specialties.
And in the study of, just in the study of growing crops, never mind animal agriculture, we have so many different domains of research.
We have botanists and horticulturists and plant physiologists and plant pathologists and geneticists, the list goes on and on.
And all of this amazing work on plant immune systems was being done in the botany department.
The plant pathologists, for the most part, were not paying attention, were not aware of it, or perhaps not the plant pathologists, but certainly not the agronomists.
And...
What I learned is that there is a great deal of siloing within academia.
And also, of course, funding is only available for those things.
At least this has been largely true, I think, for at least the last 30 to 40 years, perhaps longer.
Funding is only available for those types of research which contribute to commercial interests.
For the most part, there are exceptions, but they are limited.
And so I found really remarkable scientists within the USDA And some within academia who were doing very innovative, groundbreaking work that wasn't widely known.
And I was very fortunate to develop an amazing group of mentors from among the people that I met and that I interacted with.
Did they come out to your farm?
How big is your farm?
Our farm was quite small.
It's 25 acres total and about 15 acres that we were planting.
Okay.
And so they...
I think over the years that I was responsible, when I graduated from school at the 8th grade, at the age of 14, I was given the responsibility for doing all of the drip irrigation and all the spraying, which included both fertilizer and pesticide applications.
And we had various consultants and coaches that came out to the farm, partially because of my father's business as a distributor and a retailer of fertilizers and pesticides.
But once we started down this pathway, I think a great deal of my learning was on the phone and attending events and talking to people virtually because I can only recall one of my mentors, two of my mentors ever visiting the farm.
So much of it was done remotely, mostly on the phone.
How do you visit these events on your horse?
Are you Are you glad to get in the car?
Oh yes.
- Yeah, most Amish people drive and yeah, I've spent more time in a car driving across the country than I care to think about. - So you mentioned in the beginning that you have now 4 million acres.
How did you go from 25 acres that you own to influencing what happens on 4 million acres?
You know, it happens slowly and then it happens fast.
Early on, once we started having some significant successes on our farm by the mid-summer of 2006, My mentors were referring other farmers to me and suggesting that I would give them recommendations and give them advice.
We also had local growers that were driving past our fields all the time when they came to pick up supplies, and they were asking for information and support.
And by the middle of the summer of 2006, my father told me that I can either try to help other people on their farms or I can continue to try to manage ours, but that I shouldn't try to do both.
So, I really enjoyed the agronomy and the plant nutrition consulting work and opted to go in that direction.
So, that led to the founding of Advancing Ecoagriculture as a consulting company.
And, you know, Robert, what really inspired me, what really motivated me to go in this direction was When I realized the inherent potential that exists in managing plant immune systems, for a bit of context,
over the last century, Plant nutrition has been managed and optimized to achieve one outcome, to prioritize one outcome only, and that was yield, yield at all costs.
There was no consideration for quality, no consideration for nutritional integrity, no consideration for disease and insect resistance or immune support.
And so we started, as you shift the framework and you say, yes, we want to have crops that produce high yields and are also resistant to diseases and insects.
Once you have plants that have these functional immune systems, not only are they capable of resisting diseases in insects, but they are also, many of these foundational immune compounds have names that we recognize, like lycopene and resveratrol and anthocyanins.
These are phytoalexins and what used to historically be called plant secondary metabolites.
In plain English, we call them essential oils.
These are compounds that plants produce as the foundation of their immune system that are known to enhance our own immune systems.
And all of a sudden, when you realize that you can dramatically increase the quantity of these immune compounds in plants, sometimes by multiple orders of magnitude, we can start having a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine.
And when we look at the shipwreck that is our collective national health status and all of the degenerative illnesses that we have, this is certainly not only an agricultural problem. this is certainly not only an agricultural problem.
But it is a problem that agriculture can contribute to resolving, that when we can grow really healthy food, we can have a significant impact on public health at scale.
So that was very inspiring.
And then the other piece that was really inspiring was observing that when we grow these really healthy plants, they regenerate soil health and that we can build soil carbon while we are growing a crop.
And this was a bit of a mind twister because somehow...
Recently, in the last three decades or so, we have developed the paradigm that agriculture and the process of going through food is somehow by its very nature inherently extractive.
And that we need to, the process of growing a crop is going to remove nutrients and it's going to remove organic matter from the soil.
And that if we want to replenish that and add things back, then we have to do other things.
We have to grow cover crops, we have to add compost, whatever the case might be.
Well, that's a relatively recent phenomenon because the understanding as recently as the 70s was that if you managed plant nutrition very well, you could build soil health while you were growing a crop.
And so all of a sudden, when you start thinking that actually when we manage plant health to have these robust immune systems, we can regenerate soil and grow food as medicine at the same time.
That was a tremendous inspiration to me to realize that we can solve so many of our collective of the Earth's ecological challenges, soil health challenges, environmental challenges by solving the foundational issues of how we manage our agriculture production. environmental challenges by solving the foundational issues of how we It was a very inspiring idea to me.
So my vision became seeing these regenerative farming systems become the mainstream globally over the course of the next couple of decades.
What has your fan club in the farm community, how much of that is in the Amish community?
Or are you like the prophet in his hometown who nobody pays attention to, which they warn about in the Bible?
Well, it depends on how you define hometown.
So within the local community, what is interesting is that the local community that I grew up in within, let's say, a 20 mile radius of where I grew up, has shifted dramatically away from an agrarian culture to a trades craft culture where they're heavily involved in construction has shifted dramatically away from an agrarian culture to a trades craft culture where they're heavily involved in
So within my own community, there are probably less than a dozen individuals that still make their primary income from farming in a community of probably close to 3000 households.
And so that's within the local community itself.
But then within the Amish culture, we actually have a very significant following within the Amish community across the Northeastern United States, where there is a significant Amish community.
But then, yeah, a lot of our work is with grain crops and fruit and vegetable crops all across North America, U.S., Canada, Mexico, and even some international work.
Let me ask you another off-subject question about the Amish.
Do you think the Amish look at what's happening at the kind of social deterioration that is now so evident across the country, the alienation, the dispossession, the drug addiction, and just the atomization and fragmentation of society,
the separation, the separateness that has become an affliction and is feeding mental illness and all that, You think you guys look at the rest of us and say, you see, we were right all the time.
We had it right and you guys are now paying the price for the way, the separateness that you've gotten from nature and from community.
I think there is a growing appreciation for what we have as a community.
There's not particularly...
So you're not gloating.
You're not gloating.
No, no, no, no.
Why would we?
We are affected by the decay of society around us.
So there's not that judgmental perspective, but an increasing sense of gratitude for what we have.
You know, I've developed such a deep appreciation for this.
It started, you know, as you grow older and you mature, you develop a different and evolving perspective, hopefully more wisdom, perhaps.
So I started a decade ago, probably six, seven years ago, really beginning to appreciate the strong community and family culture that we have.
And then what happened the last four years with COVID just amplified that because We suffered none of the social isolation that the majority of the culture did.
Because initially, the early days, the first month, the six weeks of lockdowns, we wanted to be respectful.
We wanted to do the right thing.
There were still lots of unknowns.
And so we tried to comply with those.
A lot of schools shut down early that school season.
But after about six weeks...
That game was over.
By the time when I think we were first told that it would be masks for two weeks and then masks for four weeks, and by the time the third extension came out at the state level, it was game over.
The local community had realized that if we want to maintain our strong social and community fabric, Then we cannot permit ourselves to be isolated.
So we went on.
We continued without pause.
Our church services, our...
In fact, most churches, there were a few churches that closed for one or two weeks, but most kept going continuously.
And local businesses.
It was quite interesting.
The local community has a very significant economic presence, even in the non-Amish community that they're surrounded by.
So, of course, we necessarily support grocery stores and hardware stores and so forth.
And here in Ohio, the governor used the mandate that stores couldn't check out.
Stores were given the responsibility.
They needed to require anyone who was inside the store to wear a mask.
And within Amish customers would go into stores and have piled up grocery carts and refuse to wear a mask and they refuse to check them out without wearing a mask and they would abandon full grocery carts at the checkout counter and walk out.
And that broke the store's resolve and broke the mandates within the local community.
The only business who was successful in keeping the mask mandates alive were the local banks.
They were the only ones who were successful in forcing it.
As a result, there would be long lines of people outside doing banking through the drive-through because they refused to go into the bank and wear a mask.
That was, I think in hindsight, without question, that was the right strategy for us as a community.
Now, of course, that may not have been the right approach for everyone, because as a culture, we have different exposures.
We're around animals.
We're around the outdoors a lot more than some people are in the cities.
But that was the right pathway for us, and I'm very glad we took that pathway.
Yeah, and I just...
How old are you, John?
35, 36, somewhere in there.
So John, just some people, because there's no picture on this, so I want you to know kind of who I'm talking to.
John Kempf is a very, very good-looking guy.
He's got a clean shape.
What do you call those chin whiskers?
Yeah, a full beard.
He's got a full beard under his chin.
It's about a foot and a half long.
He's got a great smile and twinkling eyes and just a really wonderful looking person.
And then you speak to Pennsylvania Dutch or what we used to call Pennsylvania Dutch in your homes.
Yeah, English is a second language for us.
I didn't learn to speak English until I went to school.
And you call outsiders English.
At least that's what they did.
Yeah, generally.
The English.
So then, what do you think have been kind of the biggest successes of this program?
Are we referring to our regenerative agriculture work?
Yeah.
Oh my goodness, Robert.
As it's growing, it's growing around the country now, right?
And around the world.
Yeah, I think the biggest successes...
Are that it brings joy back into farming, it brings hope back into agriculture, and it brings a vision for the future.
You know, we have an epidemic suicide rate within farmers here in North America.
Well, not just here in North America, but really in many places around the globe.
And farmers have been systemically taken advantage of by agribusiness corporations for decades.
The farmers are being farmed, I think would be a very accurate way of describing it.
What happens is that as you begin this transition, we've taken a slightly different approach to regenerative agriculture transitions and helping a farm transition than some of those that are commonly described in the media,
in that we take a very practical approach Welcome to my show!
And we've taken a very different perspective, firmly grounded in the expectation, the belief that you achieve what you incentivize.
And that if we want to incentivize significant, large-scale, rapid adoption of regenerative agricultural management systems and management models, then the pathway to achieving that is to provide an economic incentive to growers, preferably a significant economic incentive.
So in our consulting approach, we have focused on developing methods that do not produce a yield loss, that immediately during the transition, we expect to see positive yield responses and positive quality responses while maintaining and we expect to see positive yield responses and positive quality responses while maintaining and
So the result is that three to five years down the road, you have gradually transitioned away from using the majority of the pesticides that you were using in the past and perhaps weaned off of them entirely.
And your input costs are a fraction of what they were historically, while your yields have maintained or increased.
And our objective, our goal, this doesn't always happen because it's agriculture and it's a highly variable system, but our objective is to achieve a greater profitability for the grower immediately in the first year.
And there are many growers who strongly desire that and are motivated by that.
And necessarily because they need it, they need it to survive.
And so I would say I could share so many amazing stories about remarkable yield increases, 50% yield increases in apples and 30% yield increases in cotton while greatly reducing pesticides.
There are many amazing stories, but the best story of all is how it is impacting our rural communities.
Because if, you know, if we back up just a step and we think about What does regenerative agriculture mean?
What is it that needs regenerative from a foundational first principles perspective?
We can talk about regenerating ecosystems and regenerating soil health and regenerating the quality of food and regenerating public health, but none of that works and none of that is possible if we don't first regenerate the capacity for stewardship.
You know, there are two very different points of view about the role of people in the landscape.
The one point of view, sometimes held by environmentalists, is that the best way to regenerate an ecosystem is to remove people from the landscape.
And the other point of view is that humans are the ultimate hyper-keystone species that And that the best way to regenerate landscapes is to have those landscapes and ecosystems be cared by stewards who have a thoughtful, loving, engaged relationship with the land and with the ecosystem.
And that is the model that I subscribe to.
I believe that humans have the capacity to regenerate far faster.
In fact, it is necessary for humans to be present and engage in regenerating ecosystems, particularly in brittle environments.
And so if that premise is true, that means we need thousands.
No, we need millions.
More people who are engaged in the ecosystem and in the landscape who have this caring, loving relationship and who have the knowledge base to work from.
In order to do that, you have to be able to pay them well, which is the fundamental problem that agriculture is suffering from right now, is that people engage in agriculture, if they put a similar level Of intellectual energy and work into almost any other profession, they would be paid very, very handsomely for their work, much more so than they are in agriculture.
And so that's one of the foundational challenges is that if we, at its most fundamental level, we need to regenerate the capacity for stewardship, which means that there needs to be this assurance of an economic flow back into rural communities.
Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time over a decade suing the big hog confinement companies like Smithfield, Tyson's, Murphy Farms, etc.
And, you know, farmers would sign contracts with them.
They'd build a hog shed.
They'd borrow money on their house, mortgage their house, build a hog shed, put 1,100 sows in it, and then, you know, And Smithfield would own the pigs.
It would own the feed.
It would dictate all the farming practices.
It would drop off the piglets and then come pick them up.
And, you know, when they hit kill weight...
And then give them another generation of piglets.
And those farmers were barely hanging onto their property for dear life.
And I remember sitting at a kitchen table in North Carolina with one of these farmers, and he showed me a calculation that he did of his hours, how much hours he put into the farm and what his salary was essentially at the end of the year.
He owned the farm, so he didn't get a salary, but he was looking at his profits and the amount of time.
He was paying himself essentially $2.50 an hour.
Yeah.
Oh, and that's, you know, and he was a smart, incredibly hardworking guy.
If he had gone and rented out his labor, he would have made so much more money.
Right.
And instead, you know, and most of them, most of the farmers that I was working for had to have two salary households.
Their wives were working as school teachers or nurses in the local town.
And it's the only way they survive.
And that's a sad thing.
It's not sustainable.
That's still a very common story today.
Farmers in many cases, just as in the case that you described, farmers are financially indentured servants.
And I think it's accurate to say that the farmers are being farmed.
Let me ask you this about that.
You're in Ohio.
If you drive across Ohio, you're looking at corn that is eight feet high.
That is GMO, Monsanto, Roundup Ready corn for acre after acre all the way to the horizon.
And they rely on an economic model of these big subsidies and also methane production and all of these kind of markets that have been drummed up to buy that product.
And they're locked into these monocultures with giant inputs coming in for carbon-based fertilizers and for chemical-based pesticides and herbicides.
And they're poisoning themselves, they're poisoning the groundwater, they're poisoning the soil, they're poisoning their children, but they're locked into that system and don't seem to be able to get out of you.
Somebody who is stuck in that economic model, does what you're doing offer any hope to somebody like that?
Or is that just too disruptive of their life to switch from that activity to some other form of farming that's consistent with actual food production rather than commodity production?
Yes, it does.
We do work with many growers who are exactly in that context, who are beginning to transition that context.
Because of course, to break free from that system, you first have to have an economic pathway to freedom.
And as you described, they are locked in from a capital investment perspective.
They are locked in from an insurance and from a financing perspective.
So there needs to be a pathway to freedom that is kind of within that model and within that system.
But then, over time, change doesn't happen first in the field.
It happens first in our hearts and minds.
And we are all on our own journey of change.
Every grower and every farmer is on their own individual journey.
And to the degree that we can have empathy with where they are, empathy and understanding for where they are in that journey, and then bring them along.
Because the reality is our current agricultural commodity production system, focusing on corn and beans and wheat and cotton, etc., is relatively easy.
It's easy from a management perspective.
It's easy from a financing perspective.
And so learning to shift to a different model is That is more management intensive and that brings livestock back to the landscape.
There are a lot of moving pieces.
It requires the participation of more people in the operation.
So I guess the point that I want to make is transitioning to a model that is more directly connected to producing high-quality food is a transition that takes time on many operations.
Now, the time to facilitate that transition could be dramatically condensed from a policy perspective, which you very well know and understand, because the reality is it is policy which has created the model that currently exists.
Let me ask you something.
Do you watch YouTube?
Occasionally.
I mean, how do you watch?
Because you don't have a cell phone, right?
Yeah, as I mentioned, I'm a part of the community that permits the use of technology for work, so I have access to it at work.
I don't have a lot of time to waste at work, but if there's a necessity, yeah, I will watch YouTube there.
So, yeah, I'm just so curious about how you've, you know, you've absorbed all this incredible information, and I guess you just did it the old-fashioned way by reading.
Well, you know, you can read faster than you can listen.
You can absorb information faster than you can listen.
Yeah, I know that.
I never watch YouTube because I tell people, send it to me in writing.
My kids would know absolutely nothing if it weren't for YouTube, you know, or podcasts or whatever.
That's where they're getting their information from.
And you do a podcast, so I guess you're allowed to give it.
Yeah, I host a podcast, and you know, I had so much fun in the podcast.
What happened is...
Early on, I met some amazing mentors.
People who were just, they were the classical definition of a walking encyclopedia with extremely deep domain knowledge.
And they had written down a lot, but they passed away and they took far more with them than they left behind.
And I knew some of the stories and the experiences, and I wanted to capture some of that and share it with a larger audience.
And that was the genesis of the podcast and to share some of the hope and the inspiration and the things that I was learning.
And I did it for myself.
I did it because it was something I felt was important and necessary to do.
And the last six months, we've been playing around with the number one spot on the Earth Sciences category and Apple Podcasts, which I never imagined or expected to be the case.
So it's been an interesting journey.
But I don't listen to my own podcast because, yeah, I don't have time to listen.
Yeah, I don't listen because I can't stand the sound of my voice.
But, you know, I was thinking as you were talking, there's a study that was written.
It's called Geyer, G-U-I-E-R. And it's a study that looks at the efficacy of vaccines and other medical interventions.
And it was published, I think, in Pediatrics in 2008.
It was funded by CDC and NIH, and it was performed by scientists from Johns Hopkins.
And they looked at mortalities from infectious disease in this country in the 20th century.
So there was a dramatic drop in mortality from infectious disease, from measles, from pneumonia, from typhus, typhoid, cholera, polio, etc.
Liptheria, tetanus, pertussis.
It looked at each of these diseases and the declining mortalities and all of them dropped dramatically.
Infectious disease was killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Measles alone in the 19th century killed on average 10 to 20,000 people a year.
By 1964, before the introduction of the vaccine, it was killing only 400, and they were almost all malnourished.
Oh, it was kids, mainly black kids in the Mississippi Delta, who just didn't have enough to eat.
And they looked not only at the efficacy of vaccines, but at all medical interventions, including antibiotics and surgeries.
And they said, did they contribute to this dramatic drop of 80% Reduction of mortalities in the 20th century and one of the greatest Medical developments and milestones of all time, the essential disappeared.
The diseases themselves did not disappear, they just stopped killing people.
So every kid got measles, they just didn't kill anybody anymore, except malnourished people.
And they said, what is the cause of this and how much did medical interventions contribute?
And what they say is, Medical interventions, all of them put together, vaccines, antibiotics, surgeries contributed less than 3% and probably less than 1%.
Wow.
And that the real cause of those mortalities, and this, remember, is a CDC study, you know, exhaustive study, were not doctors, they were engineers.
We're built through highways that allowed oranges to get up into the northern cities during the winter months.
The refrigerators, the clean water for the cities, you know, chlorinated water, and all of these other engineering innovations that gave people good nutrition.
And that's what eliminated disease because they had healthy immune systems.
And it's almost impossible For most infectious diseases to kill a person with a healthy immune system.
Infectious diseases are killing lots of people in Africa today, but if you look at what's wrong with those people, what's really killing them is malnutrition.
So it's brought them up to the edge.
And during COVID, we had the highest mortality rate in the world.
We had 16% of the COVID deaths.
We only had 4.2% of the world's population.
Whatever we were doing was wrong.
But what CDC said is not our fault.
It's not our fault.
It wasn't our management of COVID. It's because Americans are so sick.
CDC said the average American who died from COVID had 3.8 chronic diseases.
So they had obesity.
They had, you know, asthma.
They had diabetes and one other thing.
And I was reminded of this study because of the way that you began this podcast by saying, you know, a healthy plant is almost impossible to kill.
Exactly.
It's the human parallel.
It's the perfect parallel.
Yeah.
And it's called, you know, Pat Stewart had this big...
A dispute over it and it was, you know, about whether it was germ theory or terrain theory.
Was it, what was killing people?
Was it the germ that actually killed them or was it the terrain?
Was it the immune systems of the person who caught that disease?
Those were assaulted by millions of microbes every day.
Millions of pathogens, millions of bacteria are hitting our immune system every day.
So what is it that causes some people to get the disease and to succumb and other people can walk into a room full of sick people and they never get sick?
And, you know, the answer to that is what you discovered with plants.
And as you said, it's a perfect analogy.
Well, you know, Many people in the space either lack the knowledge or the intellectual honesty to dig deeper for root causes behind the surface-level information that they are given.
In plant pathology, and if I recall correctly, perhaps also in human medicine, although I'm not entirely certain at this point, but in plant pathology, we have this concept that is used to teach First-year students at the university level about plant disease susceptibility that's called the disease triangle.
And the disease triangle describes this concept that describes the three essential elements that are required in order for a disease to infect a plant.
The one requirement is you need to have the presence of a pathogen, which we could have a whole interesting conversation about what really is a pathogen, particularly, I'm less familiar with the human health context, but as it turns out in the agricultural domain, many of these organisms that we call pathogens actually serve a beneficial function in a healthy environment, and that when the environment changes, they become pathogenic.
So that could be kind of an interesting concept and idea to think about.
But then the second aspect of the disease environment, or the disease triangle, is the environment, a proper environment.
And the third is a susceptible host.
And that concept is often just kind of taken at face value, and we move on.
But hang on a second.
Let's stop and think about what defines a susceptible host.
Because not all hosts are uniformly susceptible.
Let's understand why that is.
One of the foundations for our success at AEA and the reputation that we enjoy is we try to make decisions based on good data, based on good information, and constantly seek to identify the root cause.
What's the root cause of why we have disease X expressing itself all of a sudden?
What is interesting, Robert, is we have...
We have a number of uncurable diseases that we have successfully reversed.
One that comes to mind is bacterial canker on cherries and stone fruit, where we had orchards that were ready for the bulldozer.
They were ready to be pushed out because they were no longer productive.
And those trees completely recovered in 18 months to become middle-of-the-pack yielding blocks.
And people ask us, well, what did you do?
And we don't know, I don't know what it is that we did.
There is no one silver bullet.
We can't say we applied cobalt or we applied boron and it fit because what we did is we did a thorough nutritional assessment of those trees and of those blocks and we addressed the nutrient deficiencies across the board.
You just, you do everything that is, you address everything that's imbalanced and the disease goes away.
Now, of the 10 things that we did, Was it any particular one of them, or was it a combination of all ten?
I have no idea, but I know that we reversed the situation.
So I think digging for root causes and taking a very thorough and systemic approach is something that is far too frequently missing in our discourse around health management.
Well, it's fascinating, and you're a fascinating guy, John.
So, John Kempf, how do people reach you and how do they support you?
I have a website, johnkempf.com.
I host the Regenerative Agriculture podcast, our consulting and product nutrition company is called Advancing Eco Agriculture.
You can find my icon.
You won't find any photos of me, but I have several managed social media accounts that I sometimes see, and you can certainly connect with me there.
I'm very passionate about the work that we do.
We have the opportunity.
There is so much potential and so much opportunity in agriculture right now and for the world.
You know, I think all of us are here on this earth for a reason, for a purpose.
And the greater the calamities appear to be, the greater is the opportunity.
And we are here for such a time as this.
No one else is going to solve these problems for us.
We need to solve them ourselves.
And collectively, as a human race, we collectively already have the knowledge.
We have the know-how.
We have the wisdom.
We know what needs to be done.
We just need to find the collective will and the alliance to actually do it.
