Jesse: Today, we're speaking with Dr. David Johnson and Hui-Chun Su Johnson. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while. I know many people out in the field that are using your methods, building their own bioreactors. The work that you've done hasn't quite reached critical mass, but almost everyone trying to improve their soil health is aware of, or adopting your methods.

David: That's humbling to hear.

Hui-Chun: It is. I don't know about critical mass, but it’s awesome to hear that are learning from open-source information and making a go of it on their farms. Hats off to them.

Natalie: I agree. I am so deeply honored to have you joining us, Hui-Chun and David. I cannot wait to hear where you're at and what's happening in the world of the bioreactor and soil biology and how we can improve the health of our soil and grow in community together.

Jesse: Could you start by giving us a bit of background? What got you started down this path? How you got involved in soil biology, fungi in particular, and take us as far as you want to go.

David: There's a bit of serendipity in all that. On my second day working at NMSU, they gave me a project. It was called Organic Waste, and it was all about dairy manure; do something good with dairy manure. I started out the hard way, with a shovel turning the compost pile. I said, there's got to be a better way, and Hui-Chun chimed in and said, let's work together on this. We came up with the bioreactor. Little did we know the impact that it could have by allowing compost to come to maturity. We saw that if it's allowed to process for a year, there's a definite change in the microbial community, the fungal community as well.

Hui-Chun: It was to preserve his back and his muscles. We don't mind working hard but want to work smart. Also, I'm a lazy housekeeper, and those extra-smelly, dirty clothes were an incentive to develop a method that didn't require daily turning, that also allows the fungal and microbial communities to develop.

Through observing the process and the data, we realized that when you don't turn compost, the fungi can flourish, the worms can do their thing, and you allow all those communities to develop organically and synergistically. In the end, the product is brimming with life and diversity. It's amazing to see the metagenomic data and the analysis David put together, and to see what all is in the compost.

David: Not only that, we're seeing that you can do this anywhere on the planet and come up with an identical product, which in the world of microbiology, doesn't happen. We see in Australia, there are two different compost samples there that we analyzed, identical to what we have here. We saw the same thing in Montana and Texas. It's interesting to see how consistent nature is in this degradation process.

Hui-Chun: It makes us hypothesize that perhaps it is the journey allowing everything to reach the same endpoint. Of course, there needs to be more research to confirm our hunch. It is based on what we have seen so far. Looking at different input materials, locations, and elevations, we still see the Johnson-Su compost bioreactor producing the same end product after 12 months, as long as people adhere to the instructions and the direction.

We often tell people that different systems have different paths or maturation periods. Try hard not to mix all the different instructions from different systems. If you are doing someone else's composting process, and they have good results, try to follow the instructions closely. Don't mix different methods and then try to figure out why it doesn't work.

Jesse: If I could back up a little bit before we move forward in your journey. David, what was your academic background? What landed you the job at New Mexico State? Hui-Chun, you must have some background in biology as well, to come up with that idea.

Hui-Chun: Full disclosure, my day job is real estate broker. In the last 21 years, I’ve learned a lot by being curious and observant. I admire so many of those progressive farmers and ranchers. They're observant, and they're smart. I try to follow their example, and I'm privileged to have a front-row seat here with David, learning along the way. I always say, keep your curiosity up, observe, and don't discount anything. If something looks like an anomaly, pay attention. Anomalies often gave us an in-depth understanding of why things work.

David: She's also a victim of me coming to say, “You won't believe this!”

Hui-Chun: We often get that. As a supportive wife, I say, “tell me all about it”

David: My background is molecular biology, studying metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and microbial communities. The dairy manure project came along, and I was able to follow it through and get a better understanding every time we did an experiment, until we got to what we're seeing today and the potential not only in farming but also in rangeland. There are similar things happening when you're grazing properly. Nature is consistent, and you need the resources for the microbiome to thrive and start working together with plants.

Jesse: When you first developed the bioreactor, you must have been trying to employ fungi: not turning it, introducing oxygen throughout the system. Was that originally as a way to break the material down, or were you looking at it specifically as a soil amendment?

David: When I started, I was naive about what was going on. We had to test along the way to see what's developing, what's changing, what part of the community is fading away, and what part of the microbial community is coming back strong. Little by little, we started to build our understanding. We also did microscopy to look at that community, the fungal-to-bacterial ratio, which is important. Fungi do so many things in the soil: they work with the plants, break down organic matter, furnish nutrients, and furnish different biochemicals that will stimulate growth.

Hui-Chun: At the beginning, David took the workshop with Dr. Elaine Ingham. I got in for one morning and one afternoon of that five-day workshop; she generously let me sit in. When David was doing that project at New Mexico State University, he was turning the compost daily, like everybody else with windrow compost. We did not like that, so we fell back and thought about what we had learned from the workshop. One thing I remembered was aerobic conditions.

We noticed that the system we developed did not have the air shafts formed by those pipes, and the center part of that structure would become anaerobic. My contribution, and I like to take the credit for this, was introducing those pipes. David made a lot of contributions, but I can take that little bit of credit. I said, if the air cannot infiltrate through the entire pile, maybe this will help.

We developed the no-turn process and the irrigation system, with the pipes allowing air shafts to develop. That was one of those moments: the day after we put everything together, he came running back into the house and said, you wouldn't believe this; you have to come over and take a look at it, because the fungal hyphae moved through the entire pile in 24 hours. We could pull those pipes out, allowing those air shafts to develop. Every bit of the surface area became the starting point for ambient air to infiltrate the material.

That allowed the entire pile to stay aerobic the entire time, without having to pump air or do anything else. From that point on, we never had to smell that awful anaerobic pile smell, and we had no house fliest. Dr. Elaine Ingham contributed to our process here. We respect her smarts and all the things she's been doing as well.

Jesse: If you started with dairy manure, at what point in the process did you realize that you wanted more of a carbon-dominant mixture in the compost?

David: We're seeing that it's not that important. We've composted carbon-to-nitrogen ratios from 85-to-one down to 15-to-one, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference in this system because it is aerobic, at 70% moisture, and ideal for the worms and fungi. We don't adhere to a certain carbon-to-nitrogen ratio. If the pile needs nitrogen, we see a significant number of free-living, nitrogen-fixing species in there. Even at the beginning and at the end, about 5% of the population is involved with nitrogen, either fixing it, converting what's been fixed as ammonia to nitrite, or reducing nitrite to nitrate so it's available for plants or other organisms to use. The carbon-to-nitrogen ratio didn't seem to matter that much.

Hui-Chun: At the beginning, the reason why we incorporated the cow manure was because the project itself required using it to reduce the amount of waste from the dairy. We used about one-third manure and small pieces of wood chips to make it bulkier. Another one-third was more like shredded leaves or hay, things like that. The consistency of the material is important because it allows air infiltration, but it can't be so bulky that you end up not having much material left at the end. Since then, we have used 100% moldy hay and 100% shredded leaves, so it's all in the consistency.

The lab analysis from the moldy hay and the shredded leaves came back the same, and that's why we said that it seems nature has a way to bring it to the same endpoint if you allow the process to go through without being disrupted.

Natalie: Can I ask a quick clarifying question here? You said it's all about the consistency. When you say consistency, specifically do you mean that the ratio from carbons to nitrogen or the greens can vary?

David: The consistency would be the texture that allows air to flow, so it's not too dense. If you put in all manure, it's going to compact, and you're not going to have the airflow. You will have anaerobic conditions.

Hui-Chun: You'll know the smell, I tell you. Yes. It will stink to high heaven and your neighbors will hate you.

David: The consistency is more about texture than having certain ingredients. Nature doesn't discriminate too much on organic material. It has ways to break it down if you provide the right environment.

Hui-Chun: We always shred up the leaves, hay, or different materials and then put them through the water-bath process. The water-bath process is not just rehydrating or wetting the material. The bath also settles the dirt and sand out of it, so you get material as clean as possible going into the bioreactor.

You don't have all those minerals taking up space between the organic material, which allows the air to flow through. In the finished material, you also won't end up with a lot of minerals. We've seen people skip that step, and at the end it appears to be nice material. When you look under the microscope, you see a lot of minerals in there, a lot of clay particles. Think about it: if you are using only two pounds of mature compost per acre, if most of the weight comes from minerals, clay, or soil, then that weight is not coming from the microbes or from the organic material in there.

David: Shredding also opens leaves up. If you have tropical leaves, they have a protective coating, and they can make it through the composting process if they're not broken open. Once broken open, the microbes can get inside and degrade them from the inside. Does that answer your question, Natalie?

Natalie: It does, and the other part of that would be the moisture content because it's about 70% moisture. The moisture is coming from the drenching or the rinsing of the material.

David: What I do is put five or six spot sprayers at the top, and I'll irrigate it for two minutes a day. They create a fine mist over the whole pile, throwing a lot of it to the edge so the edges stay wet. It slowly goes through the pile. You don't want to see any moisture coming out the bottom, but you do want to make sure that the pile is around 70% moisture content.

Hui-Chun: It keeps the worms and the fungi happy.

Jesse: How much water would you say that is in a liquid measure?

David: Probably close to a gallon a day.

Hui-Chun: You have to adjust. We've heard from people who failed because they went away somewhere, decided to stay longer, and things dried out. Once it dries out, the microbes form a hydrophobic layer around the organic material, and you have to re-shred it, water-bath it, and do all that work before you can put it back together. You cannot re-wet it. Different people told us that when they tried to re-wet it, it didn't seem to work.

David: You don't want to redo it. It's so much easier if you allow it to go through the process, keep it the right temperature and the right moisture content.

Hui-Chun: It's like if you have a child, a baby, or a toddler. If you feed them on time, keep track of changing their diaper, and allow them to go to sleep when they need to, they're happy and you are happy. If you're trying to follow the schedule you prefer, they're miserable and make sure you are miserable too. It's no different.

David: Also make sure it doesn't freeze. If you're up north, you don't want a frozen pile. You could put it in a greenhouse or something like that or in a barn. That's adequate. We've seen temperatures here minus 15 for three days, never got above zero and it survived all of that. It didn't freeze.

Hui-Chun: Three days. He likes to use an extreme example. That happened maybe once in a lifetime. In Southern New Mexico, we typically don't see that temperature. If you live up north and think, we'll get those temperatures and we will be okay, don't go there. Somebody asked me that question before. They said, “the soil will freeze and thaw, and then things seem okay,” but it's a different environment from a composting environment.

Keep this in mind: you want to keep the system happy and allow the process to go through to maturity. I asked him, if you take your five-year-old out there and they freeze over the winter, do you think they thaw out in the spring, bounce around? It doesn't work that way when it's a system that we're talking about.

Jesse: Is there an extreme temperature on the high end that you want to try to avoid?

David: We haven't seen any problem here and we get to 105, 107 in the summers. Percs right along.

Hui-Chun: If your area has higher temperatures and a much drier climate, like here where we're high desert at 4,000 feet and it sometimes gets windy, especially in the spring. In the summer, we regularly get 100 degrees. You need to keep an eye on it and adjust the watering regime if needed. On your first and second try, you learn from it. Everybody has to fine-tune a little according to their environment. That's why context matters and you need to pay attention to it. For us, one gallon seems to be okay, but there might be times when we have extended 110-degree days and you need to add extra water.

Jesse: Is it fair to say that because you're watering from the top and gravity will pull the water down, if the surface level or just below the surface seems fairly moist, then you're good? If that starts drying off, then it's probably time to add some more.

David: You can put your hand in. The way the bioreactor is designed, there's a seam on the side you can stick your hand in and you can feel it at different depths. Or you can stick a probe in and see what your moisture content is there.

Hui-Chun: On the edge, what you have is overlap like this: the fabric inside the metal wire-mesh cage. Where you overlap it, you don't sew it together, but you can stick your hand inside to check the moisture condition. I know people have sewn that together before, so don't sew it; just overlap it like this.

David: The worms go in, about 100 of them, right after the temperature gets down to pretty much ambient degrees.

Jesse: Would you consider it a form of vermicomposting or is there so much other stuff going on that it's different enough than normal?

David: It is definitely vermicomposting. They go through the whole pile. It starts out all the way up at five feet and ends up at about a foot and a half at the finish, so they degrade it pretty well. Fungi are degrading it, and every organism is doing its part in degrading all the organic matter.

Jesse: While we're still talking about the design, what is the exact spacing of the channels into the material and how did you determine that's the right spacing of the airflow?

David: I tried to keep it less than a foot away from ambient air. There's one pipe in the center and five around the ring that's about halfway out, which makes everything in there less than a foot away from ambient air.

Hui-Chun: Some of the innovative farmers have modified the design using what they have. If it's a square, the pipes need to be placed differently. You don't want places where the material inside is more than one foot away from natural air infiltration. They utilize whatever they have on hand; some wind up using woven landscaping cloth, and some drill holes into plastics and things. They have a lot of trial and error, and some of them have good success. Again, hats off to them. We love that they try it successfully and then innovate. They're sharing their innovation with other farmers and helping other farmers, and we love them to pieces.

Jesse: One of the things that often comes up when talking about innovating different practices is, I want to find a way of doing this process so it doesn't take so long. My understanding is that the longer you go, the more fungi will develop because they have time to build out their networks. Or do you think if there was a way of reducing the time window, you'd still get the full fungal benefits?

David: From what I've seen in the research, you seem to get a lot more spores as you allow it to develop.

Hui-Chun: It's not just the number of spores. It's also the diversity.

David: The diversity changes completely as you allow it to mature. Some people think it's ready at 24 weeks, but the diversity will change fourfold over the process. I think that's a big key. Diversity in nature is important for systems to function properly. I think what we're doing is bringing back that diversity into the farming system because we've farmed it out. We've destroyed those soils.

We did a pretty good job of that. The nice thing is, you can bring it back. I think a lot of farmers have gotten to the point that they're not seeing a profit from using fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. In the project in Turkey, they liked this so much in their cotton farming. We started out on five hectares, and they've taken it to 2,000 hectares in Romania. That's how much faith they have in it. They're a large organization that grows a lot of cotton.

Jesse: That's what I want to pivot into now: the agricultural side of this. At what point in the process did you realize that you ended up with an incredible soil amendment that could be incorporated into fairly large acreage of agriculture and get good results?

David: That happened at the university when I saw oilseed sunflowers getting seven and a half to eight feet tall; normally, they're only four feet.

Hui-Chun: No, you need to backtrack a little bit. You started applying it before that.

David: That was our third year. We saw year after year increases in productivity and biomass growth. In that third year, with sesbania at 12 feet tall and black oilseed sunflower at about nine to 10 feet tall, we started looking at applying it in regular agriculture.

Hui-Chun: He started out in the greenhouse so he could control how much compost went into what we used, which was raw sand. It's poor and pretty much devoid of anything. Even the bacteria in there were scarce. He would put different proportions of the compost in there. We knew the fungal-to-bacterial ratio in the compost, and by mixing it into the sand in such proportions, we knew the fungal-to-bacterial ratio of each pot. We tested the growth of the plant.

David: Then you track carbon in the soil building and in the plant, and nitrogen as well. We tracked everything through that process to see where the energy flows. We saw such a significant increase in the flow of carbon fixed into the plant, even nitrogen.

Hui-Chun: Typically, we don't think that chili plants will fix nitrogen. To our surprise, there are free-living nitrogen fixers in the compost and in the soil with the chili plant. Each step, as I said before, is about curiosity, observation, your data, and what's going on in front of you. Those little cookie crumbs will reveal a lot more information to you if you're paying attention. Starting out in the greenhouse trials allowed us to understand how the fungal-to-bacterial ratio has a big impact on plant growth, contrary to what people are talking about with the NPK or organic matter.

We were surprised that organic matter was not ranked high in that trial, but the fungal-to-bacterial ratio was. That led us to more trials and more research, and then he started using about a one-third-acre experimental plot at the university's experimental farm. That gave us a farm-scale trial and allowed us to see how it would affect things at that scale. It's interesting that each season when we roll cover crop, it seems to improve with the inoculation of the Johnson-Su compost.

We would say that it's inoculation because it is not an amendment. You inoculate the soil and allow the microbial communities to work with the plants, create their synergy, work together, and then create the positive feedback loop. What is important to remember is that synergy, the positive feedback loop in that living system. If you interrupt the living system, you interrupt the positive feedback loop, you interrupt the synergy, and then it can go in the other direction.

Jesse: I would say up until now, we've been working with the first generation of farmers trialing these practices. They're still the early adopters who maybe saw something from you or from Jay Young, who has done a great job putting material out on YouTube.

Hui-Chun: He's awesome.

Jesse: A number of like-minded farmers said, I want to do that too. That's who we've had as our first generation of customers, the early adopters who are willing to take risks. They may or may not be collecting a lot of data, but they are paying attention to the anecdotal things they're seeing. Oh look, everyone around me is spraying for Goss's Wilt. My plants don't look like I need to spray. Simple things like that. Now our first customers are three or four years into it. They're turning in some impressive results. The first year was, I'm seeing a couple of little things; I got good root development, not sure what that means. Now, you can see the visible difference in the health of their crops.

Hui-Chun: That's important for the farmers who are looking to transition to understand. I use an airplane as an example. When it starts to take off, it takes a lot more energy to get off the ground. Then it takes even more to reach cruising altitude. Once it gets up to cruising altitude, you don't need that much energy. It's that transition, and getting up there is important.

It’s the same with human health. When we've been sick and haven't been feeling well, we cannot simply say, I'm over the flu; I can go out and run five miles. You need to nurse yourself back to health first. Yes, you don't have the infection anymore, but your system is down. You need to have everything functioning before you can go out there and run five miles.

Your soil is the same way: if your soil has been disturbed and its health is poor, you cannot expect that growing cover crops, sprinkling something, and everything will make everything fine. The system has to get back to a certain standard, allowing those microbes to become established. That cover crop is important, especially the living roots.

David: It's a system that you need. It's not just putting the microbes in and expecting it all to happen. You have to have the cover crops in there to feed the microbes so they can increase their population and increase the availability of nutrients for those plants.

Hui-Chun: It's getting into the positive feedback loop. It's analog, not digital. It's also not linear. What we notice in our research data are that it will take off, but at the beginning it takes a little while. Eventually, it starts to take off.

David: Definitely. That's what we were seeing in Turkey. We were tracking the cover crop growth each year: it was 400 grams of dry biomass per square meter the first year, 760, I think, the second year, and almost 1,200 grams of dry biomass per square meter the third year. You see that you're able to grow more year after year. The carbon we tracked in the soil, normal carbon accrual in the soil, is about 0.3 to 0.5 tons of carbon per hectare per year. We're seeing 6.59 tons of carbon per hectare, 10 to 30 times what is normal. We are seeing 590 pounds of nitrogen per acre increase per year.

Hui-Chun: The ecosystem services as well. They told us that at the beginning, they didn't see any worms in the soil. Big fat zero, no worms. Then they started seeing worms, biodiversity, and the ecosystem coming back. One farmer told us they were seeing things he used to see as a child and hadn't seen until now.

David: In four years, we went from zero worms to 100 worms per square meter. It's a dynamic change in that soil. When they were kids, they'd run behind the plow, and they could see the worms.

Natalie: The farmers that you're working with in Turkey, are they still incorporating chemicals and chemistry in their farming? Are they moving 100% towards biological? What's the ratio?

David: They cut down 100% on herbicide and 57% on insecticide, so they're moving away. They're finding beneficial insect populations in these cover crops. If they can avoid it, they cut back about 65% of their fuel cost. They're not in the field all the time and they're not having to go out there and cultivate, because they lay down the cover crop and plant right into it with a no-till drill. They're happy.

Hui-Chun: I know we love organic, and we've bought organic for 20 years now. The thing is that too often in the real world, it's hard for people to transition. It is hard for them to simply do nothing. You have to allow the transition to happen. Also, keep in mind, this little five-hectare block is in a sea of conventional farming. Imagine when they spray herbicides and insecticides: what happens to that little island in the middle of all that? Where do those pests go? They're still able to survive with decreasing the amount of pesticides and herbicides they use. It's amazing.

Natalie: That is amazing. That's awesome. I don't know if you have the research paper that they're referring to. Jesse, I'm going to put it in the chat here so you can look into that.

Jesse: Sure. We can make it available with the release of the video too.

David: That would be good. It's a little lengthy, but it's got a lot of data in it. It's got four years, showing what happens as you go along and what you can see. Getting that carbon and nitrogen back in the soil is so important for your soil health and for that microbiome to be able to survive.

Hui-Chun: The nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle can't be separated if you want to make progress.

Jesse: People collect information, but as you're saying, the observational stuff is good too.

David: Observations are good, but showing the data and having the data to back them up matters.

Hui-Chun: A lot of farmers have noticed things for many years, but what they appreciate is that we share information openly on the open-source platform. It's not behind a paywall. The other part is that we have the data to back them up. People say, “Oh, well, they are farmers. They say things.” I wish people wouldn't do that because it's discounting other people without verifying whether they are correct. It's not honest to me, and it's not nice. These people on the ground are seeing things, and shouldn't that be seen as a great opportunity to look a little further into what they're seeing?

David: Data like this helps. It's an order of magnitude greater than what anybody else has seen anywhere. Having the data helps support and back that maybe this thing works. It's nice.

Jesse: You've coined the term BEAM, biologically enhanced agricultural management. Do I have that correct? What are the principles of that? You're advocating it as guidelines to follow, I suppose.

David: Low disturbance; minimize it as much as you can. The inoculation does seem to help, and you won't have to do it forever. I think you'll finally be able to build your soils up where, after maybe six or seven years, you may not need to inoculate again.

Hui-Chun: It all depends on your practices and how you implement them. For people like, let's say Gabe Brown, his soil is so rich and full of a diverse microbial community that putting Johnson-Su compost on his soil is a waste because he does not need improvement. He's already got the proper grazing going on for his own inoculation. He's in the positive feedback loop, sustaining that high level already.

For many in transition, they need a certain amount of inoculation because their land is devoid of that microbial community. This helps them get going. If they don't have livestock, and not everybody has that capacity, then it all depends. I'm going to borrow what Gabe, Ray, or Alan always say: it depends. It's all about the context. Those guys have so much experience, and what they say deserves deeper thought. Take it apart and visualize in your head what they're saying.

David: You also have to have energy flowing into your system; you always have to have cover, something growing all the time to feed those organisms and let them start building their communities. Other than that, it's about keeping it up: keep doing the same thing and bring the biology in.

Hui-Chun: Somebody sent us a picture of incorporating livestock, and we almost fell off our chair because they grazed everything down to like a putting green. That's extraction again. In other instances, they chose the wrong species of cover crop. It was not right for the seasonality or for the subsequent cash crop they were going to use. If you're putting all grain, it's going to mop up all your nitrogen. Then what happens to your corn crop? You don't have any nitrogen, so you're going to have to put tons of nitrogen down in there. Also, if they pick the wrong season cover crop, it won't naturally terminate when summer comes, and then you have to fight those cover crops. All those little details are important.

When farmers want to transition, it's important to talk to those people who have gone before so they can tell them about some heartaches or mistakes they might have made. Otherwise, they will have to use chemical termination or mechanical termination. It's one step forward, two steps back. Those are the little details that people need to know. Respect the seasonality and the species you're using. It's all part of the system. You're not looking through a tunnel.

David: I neglected the most important observation: keep an eye on what's happening in your system. You can make adjustments here or there. Not everybody's going to be the same. It's not going to be the same all over from north to south or east to west, so there's a lot of observation in this. That takes years to start figuring out for each particular location. The biology is key.

Jesse: We can round out the last bit of time by talking about the extracts, how you prepare them, and how you get them out there. I assume that's your best way of getting your compost out into the soil.

David: I see that as the most practical. If you're applying two pounds per acre, it would be tough if it was regular compost. If you can inject it into the furrow at planting, that's our preferred way to do it.

Hui-Chun: Because you have seed contact with the extract. That part is important, and David did a trial on our own plot here where we live. He did a one-pound-per-acre, two-pound-per-acre, five-pound-per-acre, and 10-pound-per-acre rate. He noticed that two pounds per acre had the optimum result; five pounds and 10 pounds didn't seem to be any better than two pounds. Why waste it? He also did the trial where you plant and spray the extract on the seed versus planting, covering it, and then spraying the extract on top of the soil. Again, the seed contact is important. You get a much better result in that case.

David: For large acreage, the easiest approach seems to be inoculation, injecting the liquid into the furrow. On smaller acres, you might be able to coat the seed and not let them completely dry. They flow through a planter pretty well with a little moisture content on them. I've done it that way as well.

Hui-Chun: When you coat the seed, it looks like it's dusted.

Planting it moist had the best germination rate compared to drying it or planting without that inoculation. We found that when you coat the seed and plant it moist, it's 100% germination; drying it out was 90%, and without coating was 80%.

David: That does help on germination too.

Jesse: What's your typical dilution rate? You're looking at the poundage of compost per acre, but how many gallons?

David: We've been doing it at about 20 gallons per acre. That seems to be adequate from our experience so far.

Hui-Chun: You'll have to adjust the quantity of the spray and the speed of the tractor.

David: In my email, I think I have links to mixing of the compost. I think there's a video on how to prepare it for injection.

Natalie: My dad's been farming for decades, and he has so much deep gratitude for the research and data that you are showing to help farmers understand work like Dr. Elaine Ingham's and James White's. All these different researchers don't have the experience, right? They're showing and validating this information that farmers have a deep understanding of. Farmers understand what good soil smells like, feels like, tastes like, and looks like; how water runs through it; how evaporation happens; and how it absorbs inches and inches of rain. Having people like you come through with the numbers and the data validates what farmers are doing, and it also gives agency to other farmers to try it and to understand why they might want to do it, with some tools and resources.

It's cool. Dr. Elaine Ingham, even in the soil summit, I think it was in the biodynamic and KNF session, likes microscopes and data. I asked her about what biodynamics is doing, and one of the things that came up was that she met an old-time farmer. She said, I don't know how he did it, but he could smell good soil and tell me why it was good. She said, I need the data. I need to be able to look through the microscope and say, there's a nematode, there's bacteria, and all these different things are going on. The marriage of what you are doing with the knowledge and wisdom of the farmer and the people with their hands in the soil is so powerful.

David: We've been fortunate.

Hui-Chun: We are so grateful for other people sharing their wisdom and experience, those people who have been in this arena for many years and have been discounted or even marginalized. I'm talking about researchers as well, like Dr. Elaine Ingham, Dr. Christine Jones, Dr. Richard Teague, and all these different people. They're wonderful researchers. I know I'm not mentioning enough people, but they know who they are. It's so good to see that, in recent years, things are starting to turn around, and I hope it continues to go this direction so that all those people's work can benefit all the farmers. As we validate those people who have been in this for so long and wanted to do the right thing by the farmers, we are now able to utilize their information and knowledge to help the farmers and ranchers as well.

David: I think they would catch on because they make more money. It's a no-brainer. Over $400 a hectare more profitable in Turkey, and to do it on 2,000 hectares, that's more proof than I need.

Hui-Chun: For us, until we are able to help them find a reliable path forward that they can count on, nobody has any right to point fingers, because they're only trying to do their best. We are here to try to find solutions, and we need to focus on solutions. Bickering with each other about who's right and who's wrong is a waste of time and energy. If we can focus on each of us doing what we do best, and from that, as we collaborate, we find that synergy, then we can find the positive feedback loop again right there.

David: That's why we're looking at the metagenomics on this. The microbes are the foundation, and they make everything work. Knowing that your compost is beneficial by looking at that community structure, I think, is going to be helpful to a farmer. I've got that right; now what do I need to do next? Get the right cover crops in and keep it covered. Things all start to work together in that system that we were talking about.

Jesse: Huge thank you for all the work you've done over the years and your contribution to all this.

David: Thank you for the interest as well; without you guys, this goes nowhere.

Hui-Chun: It takes everybody. It's that positive feedback loop. Without everybody working together and creating the synergy, if each of us is doing our own thing, not sharing, and not able to utilize each person or entity's talent, then there is not going to be that much benefit at all. It's like quorum sensing.