Today we have the privilege of speaking with Graeme Sait, world renowned educator and ag specialist from Australia and founder of Nutri-Tech Solutions. Graeme could you give us a brief overview of yourself, your work and a little bit of how you got you got into this whole business of soil health?

Certainly. It was a strange kind of life changing scenario. I had a six year old daughter Rachel who was hit by car outside of the school. A four-wheel-drive going 120 kilometers an hour hitting a six year old, you can imagine the mess. All of her bones were broken and she had massive brain injuries. She died twice on the way to hospital and then was in coma for months.

We had signed up as organ donors and we got approached on a daily basis, people saying little Jane wants her kidneys, little Susie wants her eyes or whatever else was harvestable. Can we turn the machines off, because she'll only ever be a vegetable and never walk or talk? We decided to hang in and hope. After three months, all the machines she was connected to began beeping at once, and they said, this is brain death approaching. You've got three or four hours and she’ll be dead, so prepare yourself. I'm not conventionally religious but I kind of know there's someone there, so I made my first ever prayer. I said that should she survive against the odds, I would do something of value with the rest of my life. 20 minutes later she came out of the coma. She made headlines across the country as this inexplicable miracle child.

I had a sleepless night deciding what I do. I had a small acreage, and I'd recognized how precious it was in those early years with the kids. I had three businesses, and I put managers in them. I worked two very long days and nights, but I spent five days a week with these young children on this farm, landscaping it into a paradise for the kids. But there were areas that just never worked no matter what you did. I’d just discovered soil tests and developed this very embryonic interest in soils and how they work but it was very early days.

I was an A student back when I did my degrees but I've not utilized those degrees, I've just gone into business. So I decided in the end of this sleepless night that I’d become an expert in soil, plant, animal and human nutrition, that we go multinational with it. It was a big plan and it didn't happen easily, but that's what we've done. We're in 55 countries and we're the biggest exporters of biological products in Australia. We've got the largest range of certified organic products in the world. We've got five divisions, a massive soil and plant health division, a very important education division that involves one-day, two-day, three-day, five-day, four-day courses, and online training, webinars and of course the podcast and the How To Do It video series. Then we've got a home garden division, an animal health division and the human health division.

Then we've got the farm, so we walk the talk with two farms that we call nutrition farms, and we try and teach the idea of value adding to make a farm more profitable. We grow many different products and we value add them so we've got 26 products under the nutrition farms brand.

The model that has dominated agriculture for so many years is, get bigger or get out. That’s rapidly changing to a model of, diversify or get out. You can't have all the eggs in one basket as many of the growers in your country are discovering. This idea of corn, soy and wheat, such a narrow band of crops. You could grow anything in those soils but you're at the mercy of the commodity market. It’s hurting you and won't stop hurting you. When we have our field days we go to farms that are doing 10 or 12 or 15 enterprises that often dovetail together, almost like a permaculture model where one thing supports another. You're only limited by your creativity.

I used to travel frantically, teaching in as many as 35 countries a year, and then COVID came, and then some of my sons suggested, why don't you put out a podcast which I’d never even considered before, and the podcast is in 72 countries and 500,000 listeners now so it's been quite popular. It's driven my return to international travel in the last year because people want to see the thing live after they've heard so much on the podcast.

I’m a farmer myself with these two farms, and I love farming. It’s the single most important profession, there's nothing's vaguely close to it. To compare a lawyer and a farmer is a pathetic joke. there's people who honestly don’t recognize how important food production is. My mission in whatever remains my life is to is to make farms more profitable. Because it's not profitable. It's a struggle of an industry. It's the most important thing to do and the hardest, because you're the mercy of the elements no matter how good you do something.

I've had that very experience on my own farms. One of them is a very large apple farm with some stone fruit and we grow garlic and a few other crops there. But we had the perfect year this year. We had entomologists who check the crops and it was the best crop in the area and the apple growing region where we're based. We were dancing in the paddock, which you don't do you wait till harvest. We were saying we've got everything right for once. And then we got a hail storm. We lost half of a couple of million dollars worth of crop. And then we got another hail storm three days later that took out everything. Ripped all the hail nettings, $300,000 dollars worth of hail netting torn to shreds.

I can survive because I've got a company behind me, but I just shake my head and wonder how the growers get through because it's getting harder, not easier. My mission is to teach growers how to do things themselves, how to brew their own living fertilizers and how simple things like seed treatments can be tremendously productive. There's nothing that will give you more return on investment than the dollar or two per acre you're going to spend on a seed treatment.

Foliars can be very inexpensive and very effective, and you can brew up your own microbes on-farm and include them in foliars for disease control, and you can put the microbes on the seeds. There's a whole lot of simple inexpensive things that can be tremendously profitable or increase production and increase your profitability accordingly. Even everything that I formulated, I teach people how to formulate themselves if they choose to, and how to brew it out. We've got many microbial problem-solving products and I teach people how to multiply ours 100 times over. People think I'm crazy, because who does that when you sell microbes, but we just had our biggest year ever. We can barely keep up with the growth.

It's a model of give because you give, not because you want something back it's not like that Christian model where I gave 10% so I better get my 10% back. You give because you want to give. It’s just an insane phenomenon that we're experiencing because we were trying to make it cheap for farmers but there's a lot of them so it's expanding on such a scale in so many countries that the company is going crazy.

Fantastic. So I wanted to ask you about your mission statement, “helping farmers become more profitable.” For a lot of folks it's a paradigm shift, moving away from the guaranteed yield model which is how most farmers are used to realizing their income on a year over year basis. How can you convince them that pivoting to a soil health model, changing a lot of their practices and moving away from a lot of the security blankets that they're used to having that will make them more profitable.

I see it constantly. Quite simply they can't afford to move away from that. No one can take risks, everyone's leveraged up to their eyeballs and not everyone inherited their farm, and many people have got large debt and they're off riding on overdrafts and so forth. They simply can't afford to take risks. They've got a model that has proven itself in the sense that if they do this, this and this, they’ll get that. And they can’t afford to deviate, you can't ever have people take gambles. But you can do simple things to improve what they're currently doing. It might be as simple as you've not done tissue test before, ask the plant what it wants and then give it what it wants as a foliar, which is five times more efficient.

Then do some monitoring of soil life and make the small changes that get you on the road. For example, everyone's using their NPK fertilizers. If they include soluble humic acid granules with those granular fertilizers, they get about a 30% increased performance. That's not idle chatter that's seriously researched with many published papers on the capacity of humic acid, specifically to hold things and stabilize and increase what's called cell sensitization, which is this increased membrane permeability of the cell wall, so you can suck in about a third more. It’s not just with your NPK fertilizers, but a third better response with any chemicals you use including the big one which of course is glyphosate. If you include fulvic acid, which is more compatible with glyphosate you, there's an immediate potential for a 30 to 35% reduction in glyphosate requirements because of that increased uptake.

You teach people the strategies that don’t risk anything. The cost of adding the humates, which might be $15 a hectare can be subtracted from your NPK bill without any risk because you're getting a third better uptake. It's a free thing to try so you just trial half a paddock, (We call them paddocks you call fields.) and then you'll see the difference. And you’ll never ever use NPK fertilizers without including humates again when you see the difference.

That's how you open the door and get things moving, not by telling people to become organic tomorrow. Many of our growers realize that there's money in it and they've learned how to use some of these tools and strategies, so they can jump through the next two hoops, because it makes sense with 30 or 40% higher premiums the next step which is organic. It should be a financial decision rather than ideological decision, because you got to make money.

We see people often around the globe who say, I shouldn't be putting all these chemicals on the food, I should be nurturing the soil and they jump from one system to another and they crash. Occasionally, we can hold their hand and get them through it. But if we want to do it quickly there is a risk factor. The pathway is to teach people step by step, small things that aren't a risk. Then they see the changes they get excited and they move further into this pathway and then more things change.

I really love that approach. Like you're saying, there are a lot of barriers to getting involved in in soil health. I think it’s not adequately communicated across the soil health landscape, how can you take those baby steps without having to commit to minimal tillage or having to spend a lot of money on cover crops and getting a roller crimper and going whole hog from the get-go.

Just make a small start and you’ll see the difference. Even if you just look at something simple like, how does a fungal disease operate? Well, it's got to drill its hyphae through a cell wall to get to the cytoplasm, which is the yoke of the egg. It can't spread or do anything until it gets the food source. What governs the strength of that cell wall? It's two minerals, calcium and silica. A cheap, proactive approach is to build calcium and silica into your program, usually as a foliar.

Suddenly you don't need the fungicides and you don't need the insecticides because sap-sucking insects insects have to chew through that same cell wall. And now they've got this barrier that can literally wear off their mandibles. Some of the international silica conferences showed photos of insects looking like an old man who's pulled out his false teeth.

I just had an interview with a nursery guy. Nurseries are probably the most toxic of all industries because they've got to have perfect plants. It's terrible to work in a nursery because you're in an enclosed environment constantly spraying insecticides and fungicides to keep the plants perfect. He has an absolutely perfect nursery with zero chemicals, and he's just followed our systems. He claims the biggest part is that he foliar sprays calcium and silica every week. With that cell strength just he just doesn't have the disease and insect pressure. So that becomes one of the many strategies that we can look at adopting.

But the starting point is always a good soil test to find out what's lacking and address it. Plants and the soils need a certain balance of minerals and you just check and see where you're at. You might not be able to afford the three or four tons of lime that might be needed which is a really important component because calcium opens up the soil and lets that soil breathe.

Because the most important single element when you grow a crop isn't N, P or K, and it's not calcium, which is pretty important as well, it's oxygen. Oxygen is the single most important substance for all carbon-based life forms. How can I open my soil up to allow the oxygen to diffuse? The atmosphere is filled with oxygen that diffuses into your soil. The roots suck up oxygen for everything they do. The organisms surrounding those roots that form its external stomach, they all need oxygen for everything they do. The roots and the organisms around the roots breathe out CO2. The plant leaves’ tiny little mouths called stomates suck up the CO2, combine it with water and sunlight, that's called photosynthesis, the single most important process on the planet. And the better you do that the more money you make. It's really simple, you're managing gas exchange, oxygen in CO2 out. How do you manage that? You manage it biologically and you manage it from a mineral perspective.

The mineral perspective is called the calcium to magnesium ratio. Calcium has this large beach ball of an ion with two positive charges, and it grabs clay on one side because clay is is negatively charged, and it grabs a little clay particle on the other side and it pushes them apart, and that's called flocculation. Then oxygen comes in, CO2 goes out, and your soil's breathing. So calcium's huge in that context.

Magnesium is like a little golf ball compared to a beach ball, it has got two charges and it pulls the soil in and creates a close-tied soil that doesn't breathe very well. So you could say, forget the magnesium or just do the calcium, but you can't forget the magnesium. Because you're managing two things, you're managing gas exchange, and equally important, you're managing chlorophyll, the green pigment in the plant that’s housed in the little sugar factories called chloroplasts that determine your productivity and your profitability.

So what's chlorophyll made of? The standard piece of chlorophyll is magnesium. You want enough calcium to open up that soil you want enough magnesium to drive that chlorophyll that drives everything. There's a different ratio for different soils based on how much clay they've got, but there's an ideal ratio for every soil and you need to know that ratio.

That's number one and number two is the biological link called the fungi to bacteria ratio. So bacteria spit out a sticky little substance and create this little crumb in the soil and then fungi will take that and wrap it with their and tie it to clay and create this much larger aggregate or crumb structure. Now you've got a soil that breathes the plant roots move through freely, the earthworms can move and feed. The beneficial nematodes can move freely in those soils. Then comes the all-important water, which can enter because the soil is open and friable and breathes beautifully. So you've got two parts to that breathing of the soil, what we call gas exchange, the Cal/Mag ratio and the fungi to bacteria ratio.

The sad part of the story is that fungi have been obliterated in every soil you look at. There’s a simple little tool called a MicroBiometer that measures the fungi to bacteria ratio. You need a one-to-one the ratio, and most people have got nine parts bacteria to one part fungi. We need to improve that fungi to bacteria ratio and improve our Cal/Mag ratio and that's the starting point to a soil that can really kick ass as we say.

Where do you see the role of compost extracts? What kind of compost would you recommend that people use? What are you looking for in making the extracts and applying them and any other tips for leveraging them to maximize their impact?

If we look at the definition of the word science in Webster’s dictionary, it's called adherence to natural laws and principles. Looking back, what we've done in the name of agricultural science is the opposite of working with the natural system. We've had the arrogance to think we could do better than nature. If you're going to learn from nature, you start with the central principle of this wondrous blueprint called nature. And the central principle without exception is biodiversity.

The more the merrier is how nature works. Everything interrelates with everything else and you're supposed to have as much diversity as possible in every scenario. What do we do in agriculture? We said, oh, we're just going to grow one crop. We're going to do the opposite of what nature wants. That's why there's such tremendous value in cover cropping, particularly multi-species cover crops, because we can counter that mistake. My apple orchard is a monoculture that feeds the same organisms, attracts the same diseases and attracts the same insects because of that monoculture model. You counter that with a multi-species cover crop in the interrow. In cereal cropping, for example, you should have a legume under your cereal to keep all different organisms fed and supported. That same story applies to soil biology, the workforce that determines every aspect of your farming success. The greater diversity above ground, the greater the diversity below ground. I'm just talking to some people after you who've got just no diversity at all in this.

We've seriously impacted the diversity in our soils through farm chemicals and overworking soils and over-use of nitrogen (also, for every kilogram of nitrogen you apply beyond what plants needs at that time, you burn 100 kilograms of carbon). What we get with compost extracts a chance to relatively inexpensively bring back that diversity that nature loves so much. These organisms, of course, perform a huge plethora of roles. They fix nitrogen, they solubilize phosphorus, they solubilize potassium. There's a microbe behind every mineral. There are manganese reducing organisms, iron reducing organisms.

Then we've got the roles of protecting from disease, delivering nutrients, producing plant growth, stimulating substances, substances that elicit an immune response lessen the need for chemical intervention and so forth. It’s all about diversity. The more organisms, the more opportunity for those multiple roles, those ecosystem roles as we call them.

It's interesting to compare compost tea, where you take a relatively small amount of compost and add a food source and bubble it with lots of very small bubbles to give you the dissolved oxygen that's required to expand these creatures. 24 hours later, you've taken that one kilo and made the equivalent of 100 kilos. That's really inexpensive and people thought it was the best thing to do. But as we started to do more DNA analysis, particularly in relation to this diversity, we see that when you create this ideal scenario of abundant oxygen that they'd never see in nature, you select for the oxygen lovers. Instead of having this massive diversity of hundreds, if not thousands of different organisms, you get six or eight or ten that love oxygen that take over. It’s not that they're bad, because there can be some good organisms amongst them, but it's not the diversity we're seeking. It can be functional and be of benefit, but the extracts are exactly what's required in a soil that's so lacking in diversity, which is most soils that are found conventionally. Compost extract gives us a chance to correct that inexpensively. That’s why so I’m keen on getting the machine we're waiting on at the moment, because I'll be using it on both my farms at the drop of a hat when it arrives.

But when we talk about compost, there is that same little tool called the MicroBiometer also measures something called total microbial biomass. You need to have a compost with a reading of 2000, which means you've got really good number of organisms and it's a very well made compost, and ideally if you get more fungi than bacteria or at least a one to one ratio. Te MicroBiometer helps you differentiate good from bad, but when we look at research, the best compost is vermicompost, there is nothing compared to it. It's about 10 times more effective than the next best compost as long as it's a good vermicompost. So vermicompost extracted with an extractor is the example of that.

If we look at the Australian scenario we've got this quite famous broadacre, I don't know what you call it, cash cropping or something, the corn and soy and stuff. And that broadacre grows in this region of really gutless sand called the West Australian wheat belt. There's nothing in the soils, and they've become quite famous globally because they started with 600 acres and their whole system is based on liquid vermicast that they inject in-furrow. They inject 20 or 30 liters of this liquid vermicast with a little bit of whatever minerals are required on the seed and kelp and humics and so forth, which have bio-stimulating effect and kickstarts to seed. Then they'll do a couple inexpensive foliars. If they're zinc deficient, and they'll use a kilo of zinc sulfate with a bit of fulvic acid to chelate it, they do it really inexpensively. They’ve become famous globally as a hugely successful example of low input, high profit farming on a basis of liquid vermicast or compost extract. That’s one of the greatest examples of the potential of that model, but it's very important to understand that there's still horses for courses. They're working in very sandy soils that have no trouble breathing at all. Whatever they put in there gets all the oxygen at once and can thrive. Really heavy soils need a bit of calcium and need to be opened up a bit. You can't say, "Oh, what works there is going to work here” because it won't until you get that soil breathing. The organisms are going to get into the soil and say, "What the hell is this place? I can't breathe.”

What would you recommend when you're making an extract and applying it? Is that a good time to look at some of those micronutrient deficiencies that you were talking about and mixing those minerals as part of that application or are those two separate applications that you do side by side?

That’s a good question. It's part of what I call putting the microbes behind the minerals, or sending the boys off to work with a lunchbox. If you do compost extract, you've wasted an opportunity if you don't include something that's required, which might be zinc or boron or whatever. But there's one proviso there and that's that you can't use copper. Copper is just so biocidal, the mineral copper, it's incredible. Everyone knows it kills fungi because it's used as a fungicide, but it kills everything. If you put that into an extract, you'll kill a fair percentage of them. So you can't use copper with anything, but everything else can be included.

Part of the reason that you see an enhanced response when they combine something with a compost extract relates to the fact that minerals are taken up through the stomate, the little mouth on the underside of the leaf that sucks in the CO2 and so forth. That can also be an entry point for foliar nutrition. It won’t open if you’re potassium deficient, so you've got to make sure you keep your potassium at reasonable levels. But that little mouth can open up to seven times its normal size, and one of the stimulants for that opening is a sudden influx of CO2. Now, when you spray compost extract as a foliar, it’s got billions if not trillions of organisms, all breathing out CO2, and the stomate says, yes, I'm having that. It opens to its full size and the minerals go in so beautifully. We have of people who constantly have to foliar spray chelated zinc liquid fertilizer because they've got high phosphate, and phosphate shuts down zinc. If they combine it with a microbial product, they might use one liter of zinc, and without the microbes they would need five liters. It's that profound, the enhanced uptake.

Do you like to do mineral feeding as a foliar rather than as a soil application?

Yes, it’s much more effective. I mean you can do a little bit a liquid inject in-furrow, but foliar fertilizing is 12 times more efficient than putting it in the soil. This is a huge issue in nitrogen management, even from a planetary perspective. 80% of the nitrous oxide that leaves the planet ends up in that blanket that traps the heat and changes the world. You can say, well, it's only five and a half percent of that blanket. Yeah, but it's a 310 times thicker part of that blanket than what CO2 is. So nitrous oxide is a huge issue and 80% of it comes from agriculture. It's really something we've got to improve our game on from a sustainability perspective. We have to manage nitrogen more efficiently, and the most efficient way of doing that is to foliar spray urea. Urea is a form of nitrogen that converts very rapidly to protein, particularly if you add a little bit of amino acids, just a small part of a liter per hectare, whatever that comes to in your per acre model. And you can use like 10 to 15 kilos of urea per hectare as a foliar spray and put your microbial extract with it, which again further enhances its response.

We've of growers around the world that use that strategy. You're using a quarter of the normal nitrogen requirements for the same results, which is massive savings for you. We say, just try a little paddock and see what you see. We've got growers that do three sprays of 15 kilos of urea and that's their full nitrogen requirements. They put some nitrogen fixers on the seed as well so they've got that happening beneath the ground. It's yet another strategy that can be really, valuable.

Foliar fertilizers were seen as something for vegetables and strawberries and greenhouses. Now it's just become this phenomenon in every growing enterprise that golf courses use, turf growers, pasture guys everywhere, beef dairy and sheep, all foliar fertilizing, particularly with trace minerals. And if you combine put the trace minerals and extracts with it and get a really, nice response.

Would you recommend extracts for any type of crop application? In our country, we see a lot of concentration in the corn and soybean and the annual row crop model. But there's also there's permanent crops with orchards and so on. There's also pastures where you can get a pretty good result just by adaptive grazing, and you might be tempted to say, I don't really need to feed anything else because I'm getting a good result already. Is extract a good tool in pretty much any context or are there some where you prefer it over others?

No, I can't think of an exception where you won’t benefit from an extract. I mean, extracts are foliar or liquid injection, in-furrow or fertigated as we refer to in the more intensive horticulture scenarios. You're always going to benefit from that increased diversity and you're going to benefit always from including a fertilizer or supplement or whatever you're using with that liquid.

I've got two reasonable sized farms, and nothing goes out without an extract or microbial inoculation. We’ll put minerals through if we need a little bit of potassium or zinc through fertigation and we're going to have a microbial inoculant, extract or something else with that every time. There's never an exception. You're putting the microbes behind the minerals.

I also lecture on human nutrition and longevity, and we used to think of ourselves as a sack of cells. 10 trillion cells communicating thousands of times a second. All of them can do everything but tend to specialize in the human body. And so physically we're a sack of cells and we've got the second thing called our soul. But in the last decade we've learned more about the 30 foot digestive tract that houses a hundred trillion microbes and there’s a huge amount of science that's going into the microbiome. Every aspect of health without exception, including brain health, is directly dependent on those organisms, governing everything including immunity. And we’ve assaulted those organisms in much the same way as we've assaulted the organisms around our plant crops, their external stomach if you will. Soil microbes provide for their host plants in the same way that our beneficial organisms take care of their host: us.

 It's almost like a direct model, with many of the same compounds are being produced. And in both cases, we’ve thrashed the microbes and paid the price for it. We don't have resilience in our crops. Chemical inputs increased by 14.7% last year, the year before 14.4, 14.1, 13.9, 13.6, 13.3. Every single year, it's about a 13.3% increase in chemical applications. And even a 0.1% increase amounts to millions of tons. But every year, without exception, we've had more global pest and disease pressure. Literally the definition of unsustainable. Every culture asks what the next generation will inherit. In relation to food production, we're talking about 13 residues on a snow pea, 11 residues on a tomato and so forth. This is what we and our children are eating. In one US study of 1400 school children, they examined their the hair and the saliva and urine at the 13 most commonly used agricultural chemicals. There wasn’t a single child who didn't have unacceptable levels of all 13 chemicals, according to FDA standards. (You can't find the study it online anymore. I printed it out at the time, but it's been really obscured since then for the obvious reason that it was a huge red flag.)

The largest killer of our kids is childhood leukemia, which barely existed in the early 1900s, and childhood leukemia is linked to environmental chemicals. We're literally killing our kids, and there’s a way to do it better, we need to be looking for that path. But with this model, not only can you produce food with greater nutrient density and improve the health of the next generation, but at the same time, you literally can be saving the planet. 25% of CO2 emissions come from agriculture, and when you build organic matter, it's the same carbon molecules that have cycled since the start of timel; you can't make new carbon.

The carbon cycles between the soil, which is by far the largest storehouse, carbon-based life forms, and atmospheric CO2. Two-thirds of what used to be in the soil have gone into the air, from 5% down to 1.5% globally with the loss of organic matter. That two-thirds is double everything else we put up there from coal, fire, power stations and industry and motor vehicles and so forth.

But when you build carbon, say from 1% to 2% organic matter, you haven’t made new carbon. You stepped into the carbon cycle and sequestered what otherwise would have been out there thickening the blanket, trapping the heat and changing in the world. Farmers are in a position to save the planet. This model saves your children, saves your health, improves your crops’ resilience, saves the planet and makes you more money. It's the most incredible win-win scenario ever.

That's amazing. How optimistic are you that we'll be able to change towards that model within, let's say, the next generation or the next 10 to 20 years?

I just had a six-week tour of Europe and it's inspiring really to see so many good people doing good things. Large-scale farmers have adopted all these things. They've got Johnson-Su bioreactors, they've made their own large scale extraction systems, they're doing microbial inoculants, doing leaf tests and foliar spraying. We're talking many, many millions of hectares.

The EU is pouring money into the regenerative model. They’ve recognized that this is the shape of the future or there's not going to be much of one. I met with ag ministers, people driving agricultural initiatives within the EU and everyone realized it. They also anticipate food prices unlike anything we've seen before. Our company works in 55 countries and everyone's having extremes, hotter or colder weather, hailstorms, frost out of season and so forth. It's not getting easier to grow, which makes it all the more important to understand that if you can adopt this story of minerals, microbes and humans, which is what nutrition farming is about, you're managing those three things.

That's resilience. Resilience is incredibly important in the brave new world of climate change farming. We have to be able to bounce back, to have a competent immune system within the plant and a capacity to handle stress. This involves minerals, microbes and humans. You can't put your head in the sand for much longer. I'm confident that the change is happening and it's starting to happen at quite a pace.

Well, Graeme you've been very generous with your time. Could I just ask you to finish the story about your daughter?

Yeah. Well, when I say she came out of the coma, she opened her eyes and couldn't speak, and they said she would never speak. It took her three months to say her first word, which was “Dad,” very lovely. It took a year of hard work to get to get a mobile and walk again. Obviously she has massive brain damage, and she speaks about a third slower than she used to.

She's probably got half of a memory, but she's happy. We call her Joy Central; you want a dose of joy, go and see Rachel. She loves every minute of life. I fought the lawsuit for her and she got four million. You think that's a lot, but she's got epilepsy as a side effect of the brain scarring. She needs carers who are paid thousands a year to look after her, so the money is a reserve to keep her going after I'm gone. Often with brain injury you get depression, violence, all sorts of negative side effects. There's none of that. She's just loves living and she's happiest of my children, so I can only be grateful for that.

So I continue doing my part of the deal and I love every minute of it. I haven’t lost a fraction of the passion I had from day one. It's so satisfying to say, see the expansion of these concepts now, and so many people getting into it. I couldn't imagine anything more rewarding. Wherever I go, people say, my parents health changed, my son's health changed. My talks combine that whole story of soil health, plant health, human health, planetary health all interwoven. I suppose people pick up on the fact that I'm genuinely trying to help them and that I've got this passion.

I'm getting on, and at some point it's going to be hard to continue this ridiculously busy life. I've got the podcast and the videos and I’m in the middle of writing a book andI have this company that’s just exploding. And I've got a family to try and manage and a couple grandchildren as well. There's not a spare minute anywhere.

But I love the farming part of it. I mean, there's a crop called yacóns, or the Peruvian earth apple, a member of the sunflower family and they make this fruit under the ground. You dig them up and they look ugly like a sweet potato, but they taste like a cross between an apple and a pear.

We talked about how important the human microbiome is. You can nurture that with probiotic foods, but this is also something called prebiotics, substances that feed your good guys. The two most powerful prebiotics are called fructooligosaccharide and inulin. The queen of prebiotic foods has always been something called the Jerusalem artichoke. This yacón, it's got twice the prebiotics of the Jerusalem artichoke. It's the most powerful prebiotic known.

Well if you concentrate it, freeze dry it as a powder, or what’s really delicious is to juice it and slowly simmer it for 36 hours and turn it into a syrup. It tastes a little like maple syrup and has zero effect on blood sugar. One of three people in the US are pre-diabetic and need to get away from sweeteners that spike blood sugar. So it's a wonderful alternative.

When you put your teaspoon in your coffee you get this lovely maple syrup flavor, and you’ve got this powerhouse feeding your gut organisms. You cannot be constipated because constipation is directly linked to the health of your microbiome. If you have your teaspoon in your coffee, you're going to be pooing half an hour later. I'll guarantee you that because I experience it every morning myself.

It has another interesting property. The second best selling drug after cholesterol lowering medications is Ozempic, which people use to lose weight. Well in Peru, they call it the diet potato, this yacón. Because if you take it in concentrated form half an hour before a meal – and that syrup is super concentrated, three kilos to make just 250 mls– it shuts down the hunger hormone called ghrelin, and you eat half as much food. It's got mind boggling potential globally. It would grow in any soil where you grow beans or corn. We have the largest trials in Queensland, only two hectares so far because no one else even knows about it yet. But our value-added products do really well: yacón syrup, yacón powder, yacón juice combined with apples. People say, oh my God, it's life changing. They come hundreds of miles to the farmers markets just to buy it from us.

Thanks a lot, Graeme.

Thanks. Yeah, well, nice to chat. You keep up your good work as well.