This afternoon we'll be hearing from Steve Diver, who has a long background in biological agriculture and manages the research farm at the University of Kentucky. Looking forward to hearing from you.

All right Jesse. We have a mutual interest in compost extracts and soil biology. We've been networking and meeting for three or four years. I'm going to talk about my experience and my teaching platform for soil biology and regenerative agriculture. As you said, I’m the farm superintendent of the horticultural research farm at the University of Kentucky. We have about a hundred acres here, of which thirty acres are certified organic. We have a working organic farm at the CSA where we produce enough to supply 250 family members. We have both organic and conventional research plots. We have greenhouses, viticulture, vegetables and fruits. I do lectures around the country and I teach at Acres USA.

I really like this breakdown. The first concept is “build it and they will come.” That means you practice carbon farming: biological farming integrating multi-species cover crops and grazing and compost, aiming to build and maintain soil organic matter as a habitat for the soil biology. The biology then performs its services: everything from nutrient cycling to pest management, glues to hold the soil together. This is some multi-species cover crops that we do on our farm up there on the right.

And then the other platform is “brew it and spread it.” That’s where compost extracts and microbial inoculants and bio-fertilizers comes in. You can do seed treatments, root zone injections, soil and foliar bio-sprays.

People tend to treat regenerative agriculture like the new kid on the block, but it’s not really a new thing. It's a progression from everything that has gone on more than 50 years in organic and sustainable agriculture. For example, the Acres USA magazine was founded in 1971 and they've had a conference every year since 1975. The California Organic Farmer started in the early 70s. The Eco-Farm conference has been around since 1980. The first organic wines came out in the late 80s. The ATTRA Sustainable Ag program where I worked at late 80s, the USDA-SARE in 1988.

All these alternative or holistic farming systems like organic and biodynamic and eco-agriculture and agro-ecology and nature farming, you could call the natural systems agriculture, because the underlying concept is designing agro-ecosystems that mimic nature and taking advantage of biodiversity and mulch on the ground. They all have a common theme of building soil health, making quality local foods available and certainly reducing the toxic load. In other words, how can we reduce chemical inputs by having more resilient soil health and plant health.

This next one, I borrowed this one from Ray Archuleta. We see these blocks from nearby sites in the southeastern US. This one really resonates with farmers. They ask, “what happened here?” Agriculture happened. Everybody agrees that the one on the left richer. It’s a forest soil with 4.3% organic matter and lots of biology and great infiltration and porosity and drainage and natural fertility. Then you have this clay soil block on the right. If you do soil stabilization tests, you'll see water-stable aggregates on the left and the one on the right will just turn into mud.

Here's a USDA bulletin from the old soil conservation service from 1952. They already understood this back then. The soil on the top is a well-aggregated soil from a virgin prairie. In this instance, it's from the fence row that has never been plowed. The bottom picture is from the cornfield next to the fence row, probably on 36-inch rows cultivated like crazy, and it shows what happens when you lose this structure. It turns into a puddle.

This is helpful to understand because that's the result after rain. Do you have good infiltration? Can you handle eight-inch rain or six-inch rain, or does it start puddling on the surface? Then with puddling and a little bit of slope, you get runoff and that leads to erosion. This image, this understanding of soil health has tipped the scale for many farmers in broad-scale understand the basis of regenerative agriculture.

So can you do anything about it? Yes you can. This is from the Rodale Institute shows differences of 2% organic matter or 4% organic matter over many years just through farm management.

The picture on the left there is just getting the crop residues. The one on the right is with cover crops and animal manure. It's the same soil, same weather, the same site. It helps people understand the incredible benefits of extra organic matter and more soil biology working for you.

This is what I call the paradigm fence. This is in the Karoo in South Africa. When you go to garden centers in big box stores, you see these cool looking succulents people buy for houseplants. This is like the world's center of where these succulents come from, a desert region down in South Africa.

The one on the left has plenty of vegetation and forage cover, and on the one on the right is bare. What's going on? The side on the left of the fence is actually managed with higher animal density that is rotated through and managed properly. As a result, they're getting better forage cover, better forage diversity, greater carbon in the soil and better soil moisture. The right side has animals too, but they're not managed properly. They're allowed to graze over what they call extensive grazing, and they are just basically eating down the land.

Many urban environmentalists think we should be removing animals from national parks and BLM lands, but that is not how things work. If you think about how the prairies of the United States and other grasslands around the world, they're the natural result of bison herds stamping and trampling and depositing their manure as they feed, and moving across the land. This notion of working with animals is something that regenerative agriculture has understood and accepted.

When we talk about natural systems agriculture, we need to have a view of what natural plant ecosystems look like and function. The two big ones are forest and prairie, and wetland are be a third one. Even in grasslands, there are hundreds of different species. They have deep roots, they drop their leaves on the ground, and the ground is not disturbed. You have great biodiversity, a lot of leafy mulch on the ground, which is the carbon feeding the soil food web. We borrow from these concepts when we design agro-ecosystems.

Another concept is succession. We can say that the above-ground succession is mirrored by below-ground soil food web succession. Over time, as species composition changes from bare soil to grasslands to climax forest, you have more perennial plants. The ground is undisturbed, and you have deposition of leaf mulch and woody mulch. There’s greater fungal diversity and mycorrhizal fungal hyphae.

Mycorrhizae was one of the epic discoveries in the 1890s, the symbiosis between fungi and plants. This is the endo mycorrhizal type. There's also the ecto mycorrhizal type that lives on trees. The fungus on the left, the viticulture mycorrhizae have been around for about 30 million years, but others have been around for 450 million years or maybe even 700 million years. Land plants and the fungi have co-evolved this whole time. They have had plenty of time to figure out these relationships. These fungal species don't even live in the soil by themselves. They only germinate and grow in symbiosis with plant. The plant is photosynthesizing, providing carbon to the fungi living in the plant, sending out its hyphae into the soil, bringing in nutrients and moisture.

Recently the USDA figured out that the mycorrhizal fungi also produce glomulin, which is kind of a glue that amounts to about 30 percent of all soil carbon. The topic of the soil microbiome, and the plant microbiome has exploded in journals over the last five years. We've got the rhizosphere and the phytosphere, the three-dimensional spaces where microbes live and interact with the plants in the rhizosphere, the root zone, and the phyllosphere, the leaf zone. But they also live inside the plant or the endosphere. These kinds of tests are now available, some are farmer friendly like biome makers, and farmers are tuning into soil biology and the microbiome.

A working soil food web, the soil microbial communities interacting with the rhizosphere and the phytosphere, perform ecosystem services. They fix nitrogen, they fix carbon becuse they're building new cells. They're involved in transformation and availability of nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur. Many people know about phosphorus, solubilizing bacteria, but there's also potassium, manganese and zinc solubilizing bacteria. They provide biological control of diseases and insects. They produce millions of kinds of metabolites, including phytohormones and bioactive substances.

The two workhorses that are byproducts of microbial activity are organic acids and soil enzymes. Then the biotic glues, the various slimes and cements that they exude bind soil particles together. That’s what excellent soil health looks like. It's known as black cottage cheese. The biotic glues hold silt and clay particles together and build aggregates. You get good infiltration, good porosity, and it doesn't fall apart when it rains. It builds a home, a habitat for the soil microbiota doing all the work for you.

That introduction leads to what I've been doing. Starting in Oklahoma and Missouri in the early 1980s, I was working with farmers, including some really great organic farmers. I was learning about cover crops and I got involved in extension and in organic farm management and making doing my own cover crops and biodynamic compost.

Then I worked at the ATTRA Sustainable Ag Information Center for a long time. That's when I got into soil biology in the early 90s. Then from 1995 onwards, I've worked almost full time in soil biology, got into EM or effective microorganisms, also compost teas and Luebke compost all the same year. It was kind of crazy how many trips I was making and all the connections I was making.

Then I moved to Texas and I worked with Sustainable Growth Texas for a few years and then I went into my own consultancy and did a massive amount of soil food web testing and full time work in liquid compost extracts and liquid biological amendments. Then I've been here at the University of Kentucky where we're doing work with bio fertilizers. This is my 13th growing season. You can see the interaction with many of the players and practices in soil biology.

Life in the Soilis avideo from Japan that came out in 1990 and had a huge impact. It was shown at every organic farming conference in the country in the 1990s and helped spur understanding of the importance of life in the soil, and tied into the nature farming movement and the effective microorganisms movement.

Another important publication was the Soil Biology Primer from NRCS. The original edition came out in 1999. I think Elaine Ingham has six out of eight chapters in here. The director of NRCS at that time even said it was an epic shift in their concept of how soils work. So it all started coming together, and this knowledge base and has grown ever since then.

This picture is from one of those trips I made in 1995. This was out on the coast in California where they do all the strawberry production. That's Frank Sanchez and Elaine Ingham doing trials. At that time, there was a push to find alternatives to methyl bromide, a soil fumigant. It was very common to fumigate before planting to control weeds and disease. Strawberries are susceptible to diseases. They found that if grow the strawberry plug in a potting mix with good quality compost, you can plant it into the soil without fumigation and get equivalent yields to methyl bromide treated plots. That was a huge awakening, powerful research.

Also on that trip, we looked at other projects that were going on. This was a project that Amigo Bob Contisano put together at one of the big farms. These were early compost tea brewers, 4,000 gallon. They had the compost up here with water drizzling over it, and some other ingredients in there. They’d brew it and put it on large scale vegetable production, andthey were sometimes seeing an additional 100 boxes of celery per acre just by applying compost tea to the plant and to the root zone.

I did a ton of work in the compost tea field the 1990s and early 2000s, taught thousands of farmers about compost teas. There were many kinds of brewers, but this is one that was popular back then. It has a cone tank with aeration and a compost basket.

Then around 1997, I was in India doing some work and hooked up with the Natural Organic Farming Association of India and over to see some of these compost wormeries. They would build shade house and mix manure with biomass on the farm and raise worms and make vermicompost. They would also mix in bio fertilizers like azospyrillum and acetobacter, and they managed to rejuvenate really harsh conditions. It’s extremely hot and dry over there, and they were able to make enough to put out about two tons of this vermicompost totally rejuvenating their soils.

Around the same time, I also studied with the Luebkes from Austria. That was Siegfried Ute Luebke and their daughter Angelica. They were doing seminars and they were also some of the early pioneers of life in the soil. Here are some of the images that they were generating using really high end microscopy. That's a sample that’s stained, and those glowing dots that you see in there are microbes. Farmers are really responding to this. They were teaching this controlled microbial composting, and they got a lot of farmers and municipalities to do it in this country. It was so powerful, you could talk about before Luebke compost and after Luebke compost.

This is the one where they do clay amendments to the soil. They do inoculations and turn it, aiming for a premium grade clay humus compost.

This was over on a European trip that we were looking we were going around looking at compost facilities in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. These compost fleece blankets came out of that, compost turners, chromatograpy, a lot of technology was generated here and has spread around the world.

This is the clay humus under a microscope, it looks like a cauliflower heads. That extra surface area like canyon lands is all built by microbes.

Here’s an early flow-through vermi-reactor. You guys have one right Jesse?

Yeah, it's quite a bit smaller but it's based on the same principles.

Vermicompost is so potent. It's an incredible addition to potting mixes for greenhouses. I know several greenhouse operations that have vermi-reactors, produce their own worm compost for potting mix, so their whole fertility program starts out with vermicompost.

Then I moved to the Austin area and worked with Sustainable Growth Texas for several years. Betsy Ross and her son J.R. built a compost extractor. Betsy had a cattle operation and started doing compost teas. They were so successful they got into broad scale liquid compost extracts. This is what they were using, the Hronek compost extractor. I did know Dennis Hronek, he's since passed away. But this unit would make 2,000 gallons an hour of compost extract, then we modified it to make 3,000 gallons an hour.

We were doing this on a broad scale, loading up trucks, treating orchards, vineyards, lots of pastures and urban landscapes and highway roadside tree projects. We treated over 10,000 acres a year. You need to have Bio-Sprayer technology. We were in a network with other Soil Food Web advisors including Todd Harrington.

I was kind of their R&D soil consultant, and I developed concepts and terminology around liquid biological amendments. We came up with the concept of bio-augmentation, that is, adding biology from liquid compost extracts or from microbial teas that you ferment on the farm using mycorrhizal inoculants and other biologicals.

The second part of that is bio-stimulation, where you're feeding and stimulating microbes with microbial foods with carbon foods. There are bacterial foods like molasses and folic acid and fungal foods like kelp and humic acid. I actually borrowed this term from the bioremediation industry. Carl Oppenheimer – not the guy who did the nuclear bomb, there was another Carl Oppenheimer who was a famous professor of soil biology at University of Texas – did bioremediation of oil spills, and they do bio augmentation and bio-stimulation. It was a perfect fit for what we're trying to do in agriculture.

That leads to EM or effective microorganisms. There's a whole history in Japan where nature farming systems were very popular. There was a whole network with international conferences every other year for seven years. There have been more papers published in science journals on EM than on any other microbial inoculant in the world, except for a mycorrhizae as a general class.

How it works is you get the mother culture that you get from master brewers like TeraGanix in Texas or Terra Biosa from Canada. SCD probiotics in Missouri does the makes ProBio Balance. Then you get molasses, you activate and brew the EM. That's your primary fermentation and then you can do multiple secondary fermentations based on that. You can ferment fish or plant leaves or fruit juice. It's a powerful, versatile tool in livestock management, human health, soil and plant health.

One application is Bokashi. The most popular kind of Bokashi is made in kitchen food scrap buckets, but you can also make Ag Bran Bokashi. You moisten wheat bran with two universal inoculants, either using EM or using lactobacillus and a little molasses. You seal it and ferment it, dry it down and store it in a bag.

This is the other universal inoculant, the LABS or lactobacillus. It’s made with rice rinse water and milk.

This one is a little more sophisticated with spirulina and kelp. When you have greater diversity of substrate, then you have greater diversity of the microbial metabolites that they produce.

These are some of the ag brand Bokashis that are available. There's about half a dozen and I’ve evaluated all these in the greenhouse. We know that if you put them in there into a potting mix at 5% by volume, you get a real good kick. They’re very popular in the cannabis world.

This one is BioKashi, Ag Bran Bokashi made with LABS. It also has some biochar, Azomite rock dust, humic acid and some kelp.

This is a trial that we ran with corn in a four inch pot. On the left is nothing, just the Pro-Mix, 1%, 3% and 5% Bokashi by volume. You can see the linear growth there. It's really impressive. A little bit is effective. If you bump it up to 30% like you normally do with a compost, it’s way too much. The plants won't even grow.

This is an illustration of the concept that cells like algae cells, yeast cells, all kinds of microbial cells are powerful complex bio-factories that produce incredible numbers of secondary metabolites that stimulate and communicate with plants. You have these different categories, and many kinds of compounds within each category, from vital hormones and signaling molecules and polysaccharides, etc. That’s an illustration of how powerful microbes are.

And this is where you'll see it in action. This is an example of what we've done at the farm. This is coleus, which is easy to root in water, but it takes a certain amount of time. When we add bio stimulants to the water as on the right, we get massive early rooting and massive overall rooting. On the left is EnSoil algae. It's very popular now. It's a type of chlorella and it has live algal cells. The other one, RegeniGrow is an extract from algal cells. It's biostimulant metabolites, not living cells.

It all shows the power of microbes. This is just a taste of all the different things that are going on. I know you guys get out there. You're meeting all kinds of farmers and they’re picking up on this. I made the point that this is nothing new. The whole organic farming and sustainability movement has embraced soil biology since the mid-1990s and it's grown ever since.

One of the key points about regenerative agriculture is that has reached a larger audience, especially broad scale farmers who have been hesitant to move into this space. One reason is that regenerative agriculture is not strictly organic even though it borrows from similar principles.

Cool. One of the first things that a lot of our customers observe, especially with annual crops is that when they put out seed that's treated with extract either before planting or during planting and then pull up a few plants, within a short period of time they see massive root development. That's has to be a direct result of the microbial interaction but what exactly are the microbes doing to the plant to get it to produce that root mass and why is that important for the plant?

That plays off those last few slides. When we talk about cellular metabolism, plants have them, humans and animals have them. Microbes all operate at the cellular level. We’re complex organisms: we can walk and talk and all this stuff, but we’re composed of cells. So microbial cells are powerful bio-factories. They might produce just tens of thousands of one type of terpenoid. There's over 96,000 types of these things. There's millions of these microbial metabolites. We haven't identified all of them, but plants and microbes have co-evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

Go to forests, go to prairies, those are incredible biomass production ecosystems. Nobody is out there adding fertilizer to a prairie. We’re simply mimicking natural systems agriculture, providing the habitat and encouraging these microbes to live there and perform their work. Those plants and those microbes know each other very well, more than all science knows. Science is awesome. It's incredible what we have discovered and all the tools we have to research, and it's getting better. Like I said, in the last five years the journal articles in the whole sphere of the rhizosphere, rhizophagy, microbiome, biofertilizers has exploded. The graphics that go along with it are incredible so everybody can get the concepts. But so in terms of the rooting, that is definitely coming from the microbes through the metabolites they produce. They have figured this out over hundreds of millions of years.

The soil has its own incredible reservoir of microbes, and the more you can build organic matter and carbon in the soil, less disturbance, the more natural biological fertility you're going to have. You start off in the season, you're doing some drilling, you put seeds in ground, add microbes to it, it just gives them a little boost right at the seed phase. The roots are inoculated and growing and expanding, carrying these living microbes with them.

I love the way you frame it, “build it and they will come” and then “brew it and spread it.” That ties into what's articulated as the six principles of soil health. Minimizing disturbance, cover cropping, keeping living roots in the ground, integrating animals, those things take you a certain distance, but then when is it beneficial to add biology in with all those other practices which are setting the stage for it.

I mean the whole bio fertilizer world is big. We didn't even talk about Korean natural farming, JADM, worldwide peasant farming, there's a whole toolbox out there. Then you can get more refined. For example thinking on compost teas and compost extracts is they belong in the soil. I believe that's where they really are beneficial. But for the plant sprays or foliar sprays, I believe that's where more of the Lactobacillus-type fermentations can be helpful.

If we're thinking about compost extract specifically, you have that whole toolkit, what are the pros and cons of extracts within that? When would you reach for an extract versus something else?

As you can sign a see in my slides at one time I did a tremendous amount of work with compost teas and Elaine Ingham had a big push on that. I worked with several companies getting their equipment up and running and got farmers started with compost teas. The thing about aerated compost teas is they're very active, but they also have a short shelf life. You have to brew them for 24 to 36 hours and then get them out and apply them because they don't really like to sit around after that.

Problem is we got delays because of weather or equipment breaking down. There's a lot of things that could suddenly prevent you from taking tea out to the field. Also the time and expense of making large quantities of compost teas was an issue. That's where compost extracts came into the picture. 2006 and 2007 when I shifted from ATTRA to work with Sustainable Growth Texas was exactly the same timeframe when compost extracts really took off because we could do broad scale agriculture much with extract. It doesn't have to be taken away to the field right away. You can sit around for a few days if you know how to manage it.

You don't really put additives into the extract until you put it in the tank. You want to agitate it and go to the field then apply it. So that was kind of a practical outcome.

So the extracts really expanded up and empowered broad scale farming versus smaller scale. That was a limitation, and then also understanding that with the extracts, it's not really about waking everything up. It’s that some microbes are awake in extracts, but a lot of them are dormant. But the spores are being applied to the soil. And so they wake up at the time that the plant tells them to wake up.

And so there's a little bit of that going on. And then let's just jump to, for example, Johnson-Su compost bioreactor, which a lot of people are familiar with. This is David C. Johnson at New Mexico State University. His wife is Hui-Chun Su, so it's known as Johnson-Su. They developed this together.

It is a kind of modular compost – same thing with Bokashi, it’s kind of modular. Instead of having large wind rows and lots of equipment to turn them, a lot of farmers are just too busy or don't have the right equipment to manage wind row style composting the proper way. But with a pallet and a small scale, aerated, static compost, you can make a really high-end compost inoculant.

The other thing is that soil testing has evolved. Some of these metagenomic labs will provide tests. And so the thing about scientific work with metagenomic testing is that these labs will send data back to a person. And unless you have a Ph.D. and have computers to analyze that, they're kind of useless.

So what happened is that some companies like Biome Makers and RhizeBio came around. I've had some of my clients send compost samples to Biome Makers, it comes back and it's got an incredible report. There's 800 and up to 1000 species of bacteria and fungi in there… There's probably altogether over 1200 or more species in there. And so, the diversity with these composts is incredible.

You have much more fungal to bacterial ratio with some of these composts, which is really important. And so that's incredible diversity and what we call general suppression in biological control. Then you get into more specific suppression. That's where something like EM, indigenous microorganisms, lactobacillus – some of these things that you can brew and ferment on a farm. They don't have as much diversity, but they're more focused, and the species are more specialized. So that would be a different kind of a tool.

Now when it comes to blending in your tank, that's where you can mix and match. So you can start with an extract. You can add in a fermented thing to it. And again, you can focus on are you going into the soil or are you going foliar? And you can kind of decide that.

And so that's where the custom brewing and blending really comes into the picture. That's where the craft is. It's hard to summarize because when you do your blending, that's where you're going to put in some molasses, some humic acid, some kelp, for example. You’ve got to know how much to put in – that can change throughout the year, and the crop that you're trying to grow.

Is that your finding as well?

Yes, what I like about extracts is they are, kind of a backbone, if you will, for whatever else you want to want to do it. It's a certain base level where you know you're getting a lot of beneficial microbes out there. You're pretty well guaranteed to get some decent results just by doing that much. And one of my follow up questions as well was how do you make a good extract as far as the bio-stimulants and so on that you're adding to it?

Here's one important concept behind extracts, and I know some people kind of get hung up on it. I can do five pounds of compost and 50 gallons of water, etc. That that's not really how I worked with extracts. If we had a 500-gallon tank that's on the back of a one-ton truck we were going to fill up with a blend to go to the field, we would fill the whole thing up with mostly compost extract. Then we had a rate of molasses, humic acid, kelp that we wanted to put out per acre. Sometimes they were in quarts or they were in gallons.

So with a 500-gallon tank you can go out and treat 25 acres. In our situation we had a brewing facility, so we would pull a 1000-gallon nurse tank and we could do 75 acres with that load.

So, the other key concept is that some people are saying “hey our compost has got all this good stuff in it” but what we are after is diversity. It's usually not one single compost that we're extracting. We would get three or four kinds of compost. And so we're shoveling it into the extractor and we're getting more diversity which is what the soil and the plants are going to respond to.

If you're putting a certain population of microbes in the soil you assume that the plants will select which ones they want to work with. They'll feed them through the exudates so even if you're putting in a fairly small population, it'll grow in proportion to what the plants want.

It's a smorgasbord. We know that these concepts work but we still don't have control. We really don't know what's going on down in the soil and in plant cellular metabolism. We just provide the habitat and the tools and the ingredients for them to choose from.

One thing that's interesting for us is you mentioned you treated a lot of pastures, and right now if you look at a lot of the education around pasture management and livestock management on the whole regenerative side, most of it has to do with your grazing patterns, your stocking densities, how much you're moving, how much you're basically managing your herd through the field, the species of cover crops you're planting and so on.

So it kind of leads me to believe that a lot of people will think that if you do all of that you're going to get the maximum benefit without applying additional biology. So I'd be curious to know where you see the role of biology specifically in the pasture.

Just as an example in Texas is Betsy Ross Grass Fed Beef that is northeast of Austin on the black land prairie, roughly a 550-acre farm. They would run around 225 steers. They got another family operation in West Texas where they have plenty of steers to pull from so they would do complete grass finished beef on the farm, and they would sell it as a specialty, the quality of their grass-fed meats was through the roof.

But those herds were managed with mob grazing, and you know they started off with rotational grazing. They got into mob grazing and strip grazing. And by the way we were moving them five or six times a day – it was a lot of work, during one of the droughts like in 2009 or 2011, the whole Central Texas looked like a moonscape. It was historically dry: in 1925 Austin had 45 days over 100 degrees, and then in 2011 they had 90 days over 100 degrees. So the drought effect was scary.

But that farm was a green oasis surrounded by a moonscape because of the grazing, and the animals foraging and going around doing all the pooping and everything. The limiting factor actually became drinking water because all the ponds were drying up we had to we had to haul water from town to keep the animals alive because a full-grown steer or cow will drink a 50-gallon barrel of water a day.

So that's the most important, primary, fundamental thing of regenerative agriculture is, build it and they will come. The mob grazing, the fencing, the water, and working with your animals. You must have that whole thing together and that's the basic management approach – that’s 85 or 90% of everything. Then we were doing the tank blends and spraying. We have a lot of reasons why we knew that that was working. I literally had a situation where we were changing the carbon to magnesium ratio and other things on a soil test just by doing the bio sprays.

Let me give you a second example. There's another pioneer in Texas who did a lot of work in organic agriculture and that was Sabino Cortez, who also passed away a few years ago. Sabino was up there and Erath County, which is southwest of Fort Worth. He did organic watermelons. He did a compost operation. And one of the things that he invented for the dairy industry was a cyclone solid separator for the liquid manure. And so he took that same technology, and he made this compost tea brewer that could double as a compost extract machine.

So, what Sabino then did was develop a system known as Serengeti grazing. There was an article published in Acres USA magazine about it. He mimicked what was going on in the Serengeti plain in Africa, and how the animals come in large herds and graze and just nibble on the ground. So, what he found out is that if you have good irrigation on a Bermuda grass pasture and you are constantly grazing the pasture and you don't let them get the forage above so many inches, the Bermuda grass protein quality goes through the roof.

And they did K-line, a pod-type irrigation, and then they would do injections with the compost extract fed with some molasses and humic acids, and some fish for protein or nitrogen. That would be sprayed out onto the pasture. And man, he got these farms doing that and I'm telling you I went out there and there were dung beetles everywhere. The forage production was incredible. The animal health was incredible.

So that was another kind of example where the extract with the biology with food sources are driving the fertility of a really large scale forage operation.