Jesse: Today we’ll be speaking with Ian Hunter from Cure Soil about compost: what makes a quality compost from a biological standpoint, and different ways of making it. Ian, could you start by introducing yourself?

Ian: I’m Ian Hunter, owner and founder of Cure Soil Compost, Inc. We are based out of Marin County, Northern California. We are one of four biodynamic compost producers in the US certified by Demeter, the biodynamic certification agency. We take that a step further. In addition to Demeter standards, we measure the microbiology and the mineral content, the mineral balancing in each one of our windrows so that we can structure ourselves as not only a compost additive, but as an inoculant-grade compost. Instead of having to apply yards per acre, it can be extracted and injected into drip lines, overhead irrigation systems for large-scale agriculture, backyard gardens, commercial, residential, you name it.

I have a background in organic agriculture. I have a botany degree from Oregon State University. We've been working with Albrecht Mineral Balancing and plant sap analysis for the past 25-30 years. I have studied with Dr. Elaine Ingham in her process of being able to develop protocols for quantifying and measuring effective microbiology within soil ecology throughout agronomic soils. Cure Soil has been in production since 2018. We started as a consulting company and quickly realized that there was a finite amount of viable compost available on the market. We began commercial production in 2020 in Santa Barbara, making a couple of hundred yards a year. Over the past two years now, we've moved the operation up to Northern California, where we're situated near California's last remaining organic dairy operations. It's a convenient, pragmatic place for a biodynamic compost operation to be located.

Why Compost Quality Varies

Jesse: You and I were part of a webinar a few weeks ago with Parker Jean from Sanctuary Farms in Detroit. I like his analogy that people tend to look at compost as if it were Coca-Cola, a standard product that's going to be the same no matter where you go, you're going to get the same thing. It's a paradigm shift for people to realize that compost describes a huge spectrum of products. It’s all broken-down organic material, but different in terms of biology and other components as well. How would you differentiate between what many people would think of as compost, something you'd pick up by the yard fairly cheaply, and as you were calling it, an inoculant-grade compost?

Ian: One of my favorite quotes is from Edwin Blosser of Midwest Biosystems, “Composting is a biological process”. Regardless of the compost source or end product, it is conducted by microbiology to make it viable. That being said, the quality of compost and the quality of the inputs are drastically different throughout the industry. I think municipal waste compost is reason a lot of people wonder why some compost costs hundreds of dollars per yard and others cost $10 to $20 per yard. The cheaper material is often your own trash being sold back to you.

Clean Feedstocks and Beneficial Fungi

That's not to say there isn't an application and a place for this. We don’t want organic waste filling up our landfills, so we need larger municipalities to create compost. However, when it comes to feeding your family and when it comes to how your food is grown, we do not want compost that is riddled with microplastics that has not been treated with inoculants or tended to under scrutiny to be injected and added to the soils that are growing our food. There is a lot of pesticide and herbicide residue that is not necessarily broken down through municipal composting. That ends up in the human genome and in our own human biomass. That is not good for the health and well-being of humanity or the world at large. At Cure Soil, we work to make sure that our inputs are clean.

When we say clean, we don't mean sterile; we mean the inputs do not have herbicide residue, glyphosate residue, harmful toxins, or heavy metal content; Demeter, as our certification agency, also checks to make sure those do not exist within our material. Step one is that we want to make sure our feedstocks are clean. Our feedstocks consist predominantly of organic dairy manure, high-lignin cellulose material, and specific inoculants, and some alfalfa hay. What separates us from the municipalities is that we pay for our inputs, they're called tipping fees. Starting with clean material is the beginning of a good compost operation. Having clean water, a clean environment, and tending to the process in a meticulous fashion are also imperative in getting a product that is high in beneficial microbiology, not in human and plant pathogen microbiology, or all of the other toxic potentialities that do exist within a compost operation. One thing that is common throughout high-quality compost and worm castings is the presence of beneficial fungi. That absolutely differentiates it from the vast majority of more affordable compost, where you’re really just getting a carbon product. What you get from Johnson-Su bioreactors, or from thermophilic, biocomplete, biodynamic compost, is an inoculant. A significant percentage of our material is lignin- and cellulose-based. That's due to the fact that only fungal microorganisms have the enzymes necessary to break down those complex molecules that are lignin and cellulose. So we end up catering to or encouraging the presence of beneficial Basidiomycota, saprophytic fungi via the introduction of lignin and cellulose. If you look at the vast majority of our soils within landscapes and ag situations, ag soils, they're bacterial-dominant and lack beneficial fungi, which are responsible for myriad plant-beneficial relationships.

Compost Types and Their Uses

Jesse: That's good. Another way I like to think about it is Jesse Frost from No-Till Growers put out a video that broke down different categories of compost by use case, why you want to have it. I like thinking about compost in those terms. The first is, I think, a mulching compost. There, you're looking for bulk material to spread out, to keep the weeds down, to slowly feed the soil. Maybe there's a lot of high-carbon material that hasn't fully broken down in that compost. You're looking for a thick soil covering. Then the second one was a fertilizing compost, where you're looking for higher nitrogen products, like maybe chicken litter or something, that'll feed nitrogen into the soil. Then the third one was more a nutrient compost, where you're looking for what's in the feedstock that's going to feed specific crops, specific nutrients.

Ian: Yeah, I would combine those two together. The fertility compost and nutrient compost are of the same derivation. What are you getting along with that nitrogen? Is it balanced? Is it something you can put down on a regular basis? What growers love about single-profile fertilizers is they might want to add phosphorus. They might want to add nitrogen. If you're bringing in compost, it can be beneficial that you get everything all at once. However, if you have specific levels of high nitrogen already in your soil and you need phosphorus, compost isn't going to give you that sniper single-pointed shot. It's going to give you the whole kitchen sink, which can also be a benefit if those nutritional elements are balanced within your product.

How Microbiology Unlocks Soil Nutrients

Jesse: Yeah, and then the last one is that inoculating compost, where you're focused on the biology specifically. To break it down like that, you're understanding that the compost that you're buying in bulk to spread out in the soil is not necessarily the compost that you're going to put into an extractor, make your compost extract, and do a targeted application into the root zone of the plants that you're growing.

Ian: Exactly, Now, the work that Dr. David Johnson did out of New Mexico State University, collecting hundreds, if not thousands, of different soil samples and running strong acids over those soils to do an extraction, found that in darn near every single soil, enough mineral content, nutrition, was available. However, it does not exist in plant-available form. I think to many of our listeners who are maybe new to soil science and horticulture botany, this concept is imperative that you can add mineral content, but it's microbiology that makes that mineral content available. Rock phosphate's a perfect example. Rock phosphate is used across the board in organic agriculture, as opposed to the phosphorus form in synthetic conventional farming, which is monoammonium phosphate, which is readily available. Monoammonium phosphate or diammonium phosphate will be easily taken up by the plant without a microbial intermediary. Also, due to that, the plant that has evolved for millions of years with these mycorrhizae, with these other saprophytic fungi, no longer sees the need to interact symbiotically with these organisms because it can get the fertilizer itself.

However, it is never as efficient a system as being able to interact with the microbiology, because that phosphorus does exist in the soil. Instead of having to constantly supply phosphorus at the rate that your plant may or may not want it, we can step back and make sure the microbiology is there, the phosphorus is there, and now the plant gets what it needs. It's also getting a lot of defense mechanisms, and it's getting it in the form that it needs at the rate that it needs throughout its growing cycle.

Oxygen, Carbon, and Inoculant-Grade Compost

Jesse: If we're looking to make an inoculant compost, we've named a few different processes and a few different products, vermicompost and Johnson-Su, the biocomplete method that Dr. Elaine Ingham taught. What do all of these processes have in common? Is there any common element to develop an inoculant compost versus another compost?

Ian: Oxygen. Plant roots are aerobic organisms. They need oxygen to live just like we do. It’s the same for beneficial microorganisms. In fact, nature is elegant in that anaerobic microorganisms are predominantly pathogenic to plants and humans, and aerobic microorganisms – those rich in oxygen, around six parts per million of dissolved oxygen is the level that Dr. Ingham spoke of. All beneficial compost has that level of oxygen present. What we do at Cure Soil and any other beneficial compost, is first and foremost ensure that oxygen exists within the habitat, the windrow, the compost pile or wherever we're making this compost. This creates an environment that favors and encourages these beneficial microorganisms.

Now, within that world of aerobic microorganisms, there are specific inputs that target different branches of beneficial microbiology. What’s also common in all the compost techniques that you mentioned is the presence of beneficial fungi. Beneficial fungi often exist in a higher carbon content environment. At Cure Soil, we create a carbon-nitrogen ratio that mimics that of beneficial fungal biomass, which is 25 parts carbon to 1 part nitrogen. By mimicking that environment, with aerobic conditions, and providing a food source that only beneficial fungi have the enzymes to break down, we can culture that biomass to be as high as possible. Bacteria will always exist. It should be said again that, not only are food inputs to compost important from a cleanliness standpoint, to make sure they're free of pesticides and contaminants and heavy metals and the like, we also want them to be full of beneficial microorganisms.

Inoculants do have their place within composting, but you can make a good compost with no inoculant if the surface of the manure, wood chips or green material that you’re adding to your compost contain a wide diversity of microorganisms and with the biomass that's necessary. You can think of it like a sourdough starter, you add a little bit of yeast, but you create an environment throughout the bread-making process that increases the volume of the yeast that you want. That comes down to meticulous monitoring of moisture, temperature, porosity, which is a function of the oxygen content within the compost.

Moisture, Heat, and the Thermophilic Phase

Jesse: What are the guidelines for measuring those things? Like what moisture level are you looking for? What temperature range?

Ian: We shoot for about 50% moisture content throughout our windrows. That's just enough free water that there's available moisture to feed microorganisms without oversaturating the pile. We can check that through the squeeze test. If you grab a handful of compost and it sounds like a sponge, you're at about 30 to 40%. If you take that handful, squeeze it, and you see a little bit of water bead through your knuckles, you're now at 50%. If it's running down your wrist, that's too much, and that very important point where the compost meets the soil will now end up saturated and will be a breeding ground for pathogenic organisms. As you turn that pile, you're turning all those pathogens back into the pile.

We also monitor temperatures. This is the elegance of biology and life on Earth again – and thank goodness for it – it makes composting very easy. Pathogenic organisms can’t survive extended periods of time above 130 degrees. One hurdle in making organic compost is maintaining 131 degrees for 15 days and turning it five times. It has to return back up to 130 within 24 hours of each turn. That ensures that we're cooking off not only the weed seeds, but the microorganisms pathogenic to plants and humans. The beneficial microorganisms persist above those temperatures because they have the ability to sporulate, and many pseudomonas forms will go dormant at that temperature and then reestablish themselves in the pile through the mesophilic process once it cools down. The beneficial fungal organisms can persist above 131 degrees for 15 days. We basically are pruning the genealogical warehouse that is our windrow throughout this heating process. Then it also needs to be said, it's important that there is that cool down period, that mesophilic period. We don’t just sell compost as soon as it's cool. Or even in the worst cases, many people are selling hot compost. Good compost takes time and you just, you can't cut that corner. When you have tended to your microorganisms, when you've tended to your windrow over an extended period of time, you get a cured product that is able to cure your soil and cure the other imbalances that you have within your soils – landscape, commercial, residential, or otherwise.

Upper Temperature Limits and Fire Risk

Jesse: Is there an upper temperature limit you don't want to exceed for those microbes?

Ian: Absolutely. You’ll start cooking off even the good guys. Unfortunately, this is what happens within a lot of municipal operations. I feel for them; they have to take in a copious amount of material without having the square footage they need. They're stacking that compost 10, 20, 30 feet high. That's another thing we do at Cure Soil that you often see in higher-end compost operations is that the higher surface area to volume ratio allows oxygen to penetrate within inside the pile. By the time you get up to 160°, you better turn that pile. If you have any anaerobic fermentation taking place within your windrow, you're creating alcohol as a byproduct. If your pile reaches ignition temperature, you could start a fire. I’ve heard of cases where even a big pile of wood chips that got wet and got turned over, a little bit of oxygen comes in starts a fire. Not only is it detrimental to the environment, but you're also ending up with cooking off all of your microorganisms in the process. We try to keep that as close to 131° as possible. That's why we mitigate our carbon nitrogen ratio. It ends up being labor intensive to have to turn compost on a regular basis just to get more nitrogen in it. We try to turn biweekly, about every 72 hours throughout the initial phase.

Curing Compost and Microbial Succession

Jesse: Then what would you expect would be a good length of time to cure afterwards? You've done your thermophilic phase, right? You've hit 130° those five times or whatever. Now you're at a point where it's curing. How long would you let it sit?

Ian: What we like to say, not only in soil agronomy but in compost making, is test, don't guess. We take samples on a regular basis from our windrows, put them under the microscope, and measure the microbiology. You see different microorganisms peaking at different times throughout the composting process. In the beginning, bacteria dominate. There's a lot of soluble nutrition readily available, so you get a bacterial bloom, and we want that. What creates high temperatures is what we call the bacteria dance; if you look underneath the microscope, there's thousands and thousands of little bacteria doing a little wiggle. That’s enough friction that at scale creates high temperatures. Further in the composting process, we'll see protozoa numbers peak at the tail end of the thermophilic stage, going into mesophilic.

Nematodes will exist throughout the whole process. As the bacteria bloom, you'll get antagonism from protozoa, as bacteria are their favorite food source. As those protozoa numbers bloom, you start to see temperatures cool down a little because they're pruning the bacterial colonization that's taking place. For fungi, the short answer is that six months is the sweet spot. That's when fungi have had their time to run, nematodes are still present, and you have a good population of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and nematodes. As you let it cure longer, the fungal biomass generally goes up. It becomes difficult to maintain the nematodes because they're susceptible to moisture content.

Seasonal Moisture and Water Quality

The longer you have to maintain that 50% moisture, from a practical standpoint at scale, you're just rolling the dice. We've gotten it down. We have good practical applications for getting moisture into our windrows. It's also about timing it with the seasons. Here in Northern California, we have a good amount of precipitation throughout the winter without it being so extreme that we're washing all the nutrition out of our material. We also cover our windrows when we have large weather events. Then in a perfect world, this is what we've done over the past few years is we'll start the compost in the fall, it's ready in March, and the vast majority of the moisture we needed fell from the sky. You can't ask for anything cleaner than that.

When we're talking about rainwater, we're talking about carbonic acid, and the ability to have carbonic acid as this redox driver of soil microbiology and nutrition within the compost pile, you can't ask for a better situation. We're also not getting these compounding issues that often happen with well water, especially in California. We have a lot of carbonate and bicarbonate in our water supply, in some cases, boron. This is not a three-month tomato crop or a two-month lettuce crop. This is six months or longer, so any imbalance or even a mineral micro or macro nutrient in the water compounds in the compost the more that we irrigate.

We're fortunate in our location. We have a good amount of rainwater getting us through six months of the year. Then we have spring water and pond water coming from surface water, living water that we can irrigate with. Moving a little more into the quantum side, we also structure our water. We use water filters that will reduce the overall aggregate size of water. We started using this filter about four or five years ago and it reduced the amount of water we use by almost 50%. It sounds like total snake oil, but water coming out of the ground or dead water is effectively a multitude of H2O molecules all stuck together, and it's not really wet. They're independent molecules, but they're interacting through Van der Waals bonds and whatnot. The surface-area-to-volume ratio is such that it does not interact readily with organisms and other inorganic and organic surfaces. When we watered, the water ran straight through the compost, and it was soaking the floor beneath the compost and that was an issue. Then we would potentially be getting anaerobic zones where the compost met the soil.

Once we started using water structuring devices, we got lateral flow throughout our compost pile. We might be watering right over the top of the windrow, but because there was more capillary action taking place with a smaller molecule or smaller conglomerate of molecules, we would get like a laminar axillary horizontal flow, and we'd keep the water where we wanted it within the material. Again, I can't even stress enough that the quality and the integrity of water that goes into composting is every bit as important as the feedstock that is going in. It'd be the same thing, imagining growing a tomato. You could have put it in the best potting soil and use the best fertilizer and everything else, but if the water you were using was from a dirty ditch in East LA, you're not gonna have a happy tomato plant.

Biodynamic Compost and Targeted Inoculation

Jesse: Cool, so do you wanna get into what your biodynamic process looks like, the different preparations and so on that you do specifically just as an example?

Ian: In truth, in a perfect world, inoculation happens through your feedstock and by diversifying the feedstock that we use in composting and by catering to that inoculant that comes in on that feedstock, we can create an amazing material. That's why Demeter, the biodynamic certification agency, is so adamant about what those feedstocks are. Biodynamic agriculture would tell you couldn't get a better manure source than manure coming from a lactating organic dairy cow or biodynamic dairy cow that also had horns. We'll leave off the horn piece for now for the audience that we have now, but let's say it definitely wants to be coming from a healthy paddock and we want that four-tummy breaking down the material in a healthy lactating cow that has a lot of energy production taking place within its body because it's already taking care of its progeny. Wood chips with no contaminants on them can be a great source of fungal spores. The green material that we use, whether alfalfa, orchard grass or green material growing in the pastures around our compost site are a great source of protozoa.

Nematodes will come in on all those different materials. They're all there, but the environment has to be right for extended periods of time to incubate their presence. Biodynamic compost is probably the origin of inoculant compost. It's not just for the microbiology, although it absolutely does have high levels of microbiology in each and every one of the preparations. We've done some work with Josephine Porter Institute over the past three or four years looking at the preparations they make underneath the microscope. Again, some might call it heretical, there is commonality that exists throughout all these different regenerative, organic, sustainable, you call it whatever you want, farming solutions and the common thread is microbiology.

We don't think that is the end all be all of biodynamics. I like to say, there are unquantifiable unseen forces that humanity does not have the ability to measure at this point in our evolution, but they can and do play a role in the process. Just because we can't see it and we can't quantify it doesn't mean it's not there. Quantum physics is just now beginning to be able to measure that which previously was unquantifiable. It will be interesting to see what the future holds in regard to all of this. In the meantime, we can say that the microorganisms within biodynamic preparations – processes that date back a bit over a hundred years to Rudolf Steiner’s protocols for biodynamic farming – there is a great amount of inoculant there.

We can inoculate with other compost from other regions and we'll do that as well. We have compost from a great producer in other parts of America that are giving us a wider genealogical bank within our compost. We're doing everything we can in our environment to vary our feedstocks, to have a large gene pool in the compost. For example, if we saw that we were low in protozoa within one of our windrows, maybe we've let this windrow go nine months or longer and our fungal biomass is fantastic. Bacteria is still there and nematodes are still there, but we're low in protozoa. We can make a protozoan infusion by taking some monocot, some grass, and brewing it to create a protozoan infusion and then we would inoculate that into our windrows.

Scaling Biology with Compost Extracts

If we were low in nematodes, we can make a nematode extract out of a material that we have that's high in nematodes and then we're gonna throw that into the windrow. Because what we want, as Dr. Ingham would say, is all of these levels, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes humming well above the minimum amounts and all while keeping pathogens as low as possible. You could take a great compost extract, apply it to an acre, a furrow slice of one acre is some 800 and some odd cubic yards. If we were to even apply 10% of that in compost, that would be an overtly heroic dose that would not be cost effective. We're taking an extract that we want to have a whole lot of microbiology, but it's gotta be enough to inoculate this massive amount of soil. The numbers we’ve worked out with Cure Soil and Hiwassee are in the ballpark of 25 to 50 gallons of compost extract per acre per treatment. That's a drop in the bucket.

We wanna make sure that not only is the compost viable, but that the environment that it's going into is conducive to the microorganisms that we're trying to grow. Then we get a lot of bang for our buck. Then when we have good flocculation of the clay, good oxygen within the rhizosphere, we can know that the 10,000 micrograms per gram of protozoa we put down are going to replicate. Those nematodes will replicate. That fungi will run. Microbiology is the gift that keeps on giving. If you add 50 pounds of monoammonium phosphate per acre, that's it. You don’t even get all 50 pounds in most cases since a lot of it is going to off-gas and some will go into the groundwater as you irrigate. Whereas with microbiology, you put down a certain amount, but it will keep growing over time. In fact, it will help you keep a lot of the fertilizer you have in that rhizosphere, actualize and make it work. There's a bunch of fertilizer, as we spoke earlier, already in the soil. Let's not call it fertilizer, let's call it mineral content. We need microorganisms to unlock it and make it available.

Soil Biology, Self-Reliance, and Clean Food

Then we start getting into a bipartisan topic, which is that we can increase our self-reliance, our anonymity, our independence. There's something common about humanity that we want to be able to take care of ourselves. Instead of having to worry about geopolitical climates that are responsible for fertilizer and all the inputs to make fertilizer that are coming from half a world away, let's do something pragmatic and be intentional about our own waste streams. Within those own waste streams exist beneficial microbiology that can feed our soils and feed us clean, healthy food that is contaminant free.

Let's face it. It's a broken system and we all know it. Even the most adopted practitioners are pretty aware that they've had to put down chemicals that in some cases, sad to say, have brought disease into their family. Non-Hodgkins lymphoma, cancer of many different forms. Unfortunately, recently, the Supreme Court passed in favor of a international chemical company saying they are no longer responsible for the effects that their product has on the American people. That's a sad day in America. No one's ever been above the law in America. This is not a dictatorship. Our country is formed on that one principle. All of us as children learned it: that you are accountable for your actions. Well, the Supreme Court just decided that a pesticide company is no longer responsible for the product they make. It’s time for companies like Hiwassee and Cure Soil and all the others out there to come together and create solutions for the American people so we can at least have clean food. I think that's a God-given right, or at least like a basic tenant of freedom.

At the end of the day, we're talking about soil science. We're getting into the weeds about this stuff and it’s interesting, it's elegant and it's cute, but above all, it's pragmatic. That's why we're doing this. If you're not fed, if you don't have basic nutrition to be able to conduct these processes within your own body and within your own family, you’re not living a good life. Cheers to you guys and everything you're doing at Hiwassee to make this available, not just for the backyard gardener, but for large-scale agriculture so we can change the face of agronomy here in America.

Testing Microbes Through the Delivery System

Jesse: Yeah, thank you, Ian and you too as well.

Ian: Absolutely. What's important to know throughout, and Dr. Elaine was adamant about this, is that it's one thing to know that the microbes exist within the compost. It's another to know that they are perpetuating themselves within the field and throughout the delivery process. Specifically within the world of compost extracts, we have to know that the pump that we're using, that the irrigation line that we're using, that the nozzle that we're using is delivering microbiology alive. It's not a chemical, that is, it's inconsequential at high pressures and whatever else is taking place with high filters and everything. This has to be something that will persist throughout the process and make it all the way into the root zone.

At Cure Soil, we inspect the raw materials under the microscope when dealing with a new provider of wood chips or dairy manure, to make sure that we have microbiology to work with. The specific numbers at that point are not important. We want to make sure the inoculant is there. Then it's throughout the composting process at high thermophilic temperatures, at the mesophilic phase, at maturation, and most importantly at the point of sale, we look at our levels. We collect composite samples throughout the windrow where we'll take random handfuls out of a specific windrow, compile them together and immediately put them underneath the microscope and see what those numbers are. We also send it to third party testing because it’s better to know that someone with no financial interest in our company is also seeing the numbers. In a perfect world, I'd like each windrow to be like a beanie baby that we could tell the story of when your compost windrow was born and this is the level of microbes and nematodes. I kid with my partner, but we're both the proud parents of some quadruple gazillion billion microorganisms that we tend to on a regular basis.

The more you personify it and realize these are living organisms that you've at least adopted, if not given birth to, then it frames the nature of what we're trying to do at Cure Soil. It’s like the work you guys did with Vanderbilt University who compost into an extract and ran it through an irrigation line make it into the field. I love the way they set up this model, very like Elaine. She was such a diligent scientist. I'll often say more than anything else that I learned from Elaine was how to think, how to problem-solve, how to think critically about a system.

If you're holding a test tube or a collection basin at the end of a drip line, it already went through the pump and already went through the line. All these pieces all the way down and that fungal biomass or that fungal hyphae is still intact. That protozoon is still alive and functioning, that nematode is still doing its thing. Now we know that our delivery mechanism is effective and I’m happy to say that you guys at Hiwassee have designed a system that does do that. Those are the parameters that are not random: forty PSI is forty PSI for a reason, right? Fifty PSI, you start blasting the hell out of nematodes and they don't persist.

Creating the Right Soil Environment and Scaling Up

What we also want to see is after the application, after the compost extract or the physical compost is in the garden, are those microbes still there? That's where we work with growers to add to their program. We believe that microbiology is the foundation of beneficial agriculture, but it's not the silver bullet and it's not the end-all be-all. We need as farmers to create an environment within the soil physically, biologically, mineral-logically that caters to the plant. That has a lot to do with flocculating our clay soils, making sure there's water retention in sandy soils that are hospitable to environments that grow plants and grow microbiology. I was happy to learn through our studies in redox chemistry, that there is an EH value or a redox number that caters to not only plants, but beneficial microorganisms and not to weeds and pathogens. Nature is an elegant system, which is why we try to mimic nature.

We've mimicked the forest and a lot of what we're doing. We're not replicating it because no one harvests a ton per acre out of the forest every single year and tills it, but there are many similarities. We're often going into environments where farmers have used glyphosate, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides for generations. They've got to dig themselves out of that corner. With the help of some redox products, along with the help of microbiology and mineral balancing, we can begin to bring them back to sustainable, regenerative, organic, biodynamic, you name it. There's no silver bullet, but when we combine all our resources – bio-stimulants, phyto-stimulants, beneficial biology – we can transition these farms back into bountiful production without the farm missing a beat, all thanks to contemporary science.

Jesse: Thanks a lot. Excellent presentation and looking forward to continuing to work together.

Ian: Likewise. I’ll say again, we've been waiting a long time within the industry for means of applying biology at the scale that Hiwassee is making possible. The days of dunking a teabag into a large tank for hours at a time are over, thankfully. Now we have a means to deliver wild indigenous microbiology at scale to living soils, thanks to the good folks over at Hiwassee. We're looking forward to a long future of being able to scale what we're doing here together.

Jesse: Thanks much.

Ian: Indeed. Thank you.