Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's show of youf're the Cure. I love interviewing regenerative ag type of folks, but the one we have today, John Kemp, is. I have a feeling this is going to be one of the most interesting podcasts you've heard of a long time. I was introduced, introduced to John Kemp many years ago by Chad Wall here locally. We've had Chad on the show before, former conventional cotton farmer to. Or organic regenerative farmer to a consultant.
And he introduced me to John. John Campbell, actually, a number of years ago. And it had got to share a stage with them recently, this past September, I think it was. But anyways, John's just a great guy.
Loves God, loves nature, loves the. The dirt turning into soil, the microbes in the soil. And he loves science and he loves research and he loves connecting all this for the glory of God. So I thought it'd be a great thing for my audience to hear from John Kemp. John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here today. I know you're a busy man.
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Thank you very much for inviting me. I've been looking forward to this conversation. It's. It's an honor to be here. And it's a wonderful world we live in. There's so much fun things to explore.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Yes. That. I love that you start that way. Creation is incredible, and I feel like we're just scratching the surface of understanding. We just went. We got distracted, definitely in medicine, we got real narrow. Treat a symptom only with a chemical. And ag. I've interviewed a number of ag guys and it seems like it's a parallel path. Ag now we're waking up to the fact that 100 years of doing this is destroyed. So much hasn't produced good fruit, and so we're being restored back to God's original intent. So I'd love for you to just introduce yourself about, you know, how. Where you came from and your journey of how you got here today, and we'll just let this conversation flow.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Well, it's.
It's been a fascinating journey with lots of.
You could call it serendipity or you could call it divine guidance, but lots of interesting moments along the pathway. I grew up on a.
I grew up on a family fruit and vegetable farm in Northeast Ohio. So we're in the snow belt south of LAKE Erie, about 25 or so miles south of the lake.
And that translates to a lot of cloud cover. About 180 days of cloud cover a year translates to very high humidity, lots of snowfall during the winter, historically you have to go back now 25, 30 years. But historically we used to get 90 to 100 inches of rain, snow during the winter months. That's a lot less now.
And so that that environment as a, as a vegetable farm, we were growing a variety of mixed vegetables for local wholesale markets, some fruits and berries as well.
And that environment was a very disease prone environment. It was the high humidity and the cloud cover, the lack of sunshine was a petri dish environment for propagating diseases.
And we, my father, in addition to farming, he was also. We were somewhat centrally located within the Amish community.
And he was asked to consider having a supply business to supply people. So we started carrying seeds and fertilizers and equipment and the supplies that people needed. And that included pesticides.
And we were, as a result, we had pesticide salesmen visiting us all the time. We were the first people to try all the newest, latest and greatest cocktails.
And then in the early 2000s, we smacked our head against the figurative brick wall where we had three consecutive years of 2002, 3 and 4, in which we lost the majority of the crops that we were growing to a variety of different diseases.
We had greater than 70% crop loss three consecutive years.
And we were completely unsuccessful in managing those diseases with the conventional fungicide applications. We were putting on fungicides every five days.
And it seemed over time, we started growing vegetables in 1994.
And over time, it seemed the more products we applied, the worse the problems became.
And then in 2004, we had kind of this two by four in the face moment or experience where we started renting a field from a neighboring farm that had been in a dairy farm rotation. So it was corn, small grains, two years of alfalfa hay back into corn, maybe one or two herbicide applications and one or two fungicide applications in that entire rotation.
And lots of dairy manure being applied and limestone being applied and so forth.
So there were these two fields that were long and narrow. They were being tilled and planted up and down the slope because of how narrow they were.
And now that we were farming both fields, we switched the road direction 90 degrees and planted across the former field border.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: And
[00:05:17] Speaker B: of course, we selected the part of the field that was out bordered along the road.
And that part of that field got planted into cantaloupe at harvest time. When we went through for the first picking, the plants that were grown in the soil that we had been farming previously for the prior decade with the pesticide applications had 80% of its leaves Infected with powdery mildew.
And on the new soil, there was no powdery mildew.
And not 5%, not 10%, zero. You couldn't find any. There was this clean knife line boundary down the former field edge where it was so pronounced. These plants were spaced 2ft apart in the row, and there were actually healthy vines growing right in among the unhealthy vines along the field border. There was this stark contrast.
And you can imagine this caught our attention. So the soil that we had been farming for the prior decade in vegetables, it was in vegetables every year, year after year, with all of the associated pesticide applications.
But we were also, we were mindful of biology to some degree. We tried to build earthworm populations, we were doing cover crops, we were doing many things, but not enough to compensate for all the damage and the destruction that we were doing.
And so that experience of this stark difference between the plants that were resistant and the plants that were susceptible really opened my eyes, and I started really asking the question, what are the differences between these two plants? What, what led to this outcome? Because, of course, at this point, we're in a desperate situation. We've had major crop losses three years in a row.
And I spent a lot of time that winter studying, researching, speaking with people, calling people all over the country and internationally trying to find answers to that question.
And that research has continued on to this day as we've continued to learn more. But what I learned, in essence, is that plants have an immune system much the same way that we do.
We understand that we all have our own immune systems, but they don't all function equally well.
Their level of functionality, their level of robustness depends on the environment that they're in. It depends on their nutritional support, on the microbiome support.
And I found that the same thing was true for plants. In fact, you could argue that plants have an even more robust immune system than humans do, because they can't run away.
So they have this very robust immune system that I discovered, to my surprise, this was ongoing. This didn't all happen in the first year, but over time, I've discovered that plants have the capacity to be completely resistant to all insects and all diseases. I believe that was the way they were originally designed and that we can still accomplish that to a large degree today and simply through managing nutrition and through managing the microbiome.
So we started implementing and making some significant changes on the farm, started managing nutrition differently, and by 2006, we completely removed all pesticides, went completely pesticide free.
I was asked to start doing Consulting work on other farms.
And I started a company called Advancing ecoagriculture. Today we have a team of, I don't know exactly, some over 50 people. We've worked on several million acres of cropland, mostly in North America, but quite a bit of international work as well.
And as of this point, working with hundreds of different disease and insect and crop combinations in all types of different environments, I have yet to encounter one that we have not been successful in reversing and treating with nutrition and with microbiome management over the last 20 years. So that's, that's been a lot of fun.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: That's an incredible statement and I just want to highlight guys, what, what going back to the demarcation in the line of the. The soil that had been for 10 years managed with the pesticides versus the other soil.
Those are the same plants, same, I mean same seeds, same. Put the seed in the ground, it grows two different outcomes. That's a bit. A clearer picture to me is terrain theory is there is that the external environment is what brings forth life.
I mean you, it came with the same input and. But what the fruit, the result, the end product was totally determined by the environment.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: And so I look at that in the human, you know, we, we come in with these genes that give instructions on how to build a structure.
But then it's this, it's the inputs, the microbiome, so many things. It's incredible.
[00:10:23] Speaker B: And we, we sometimes miss thinking about the fact that we have all of this genetic information within our DNA or within the plant DNA. And all these genes can be activated or deactivated dependent environment, depending on the terrain.
But also there is this entire other level of genetic information that is associated with the microbiome. So in the case of plants, their microbiome has 10 times more genetic information in it than the plant DNA does itself.
And when you start studying the interactions of the plant microbiome and the plant and how they synergize and work together, after a while it becomes really difficult to tell where the plant ends and the microbiome begins.
And you realize that they are so integrated that you really, you cannot separate them. One will cease to exist without the other.
And in the case of the plant's microbiome, we have all of these plant immune compounds.
There are tens of thousands of these different, what are termed phytonutrients. You would recognize some of the names such as resveratrol and lycopene and anthocyanins and so forth.
And these various. We call These compounds, phytonutrients, with the prefix phyto, as in they are synthesized by plants.
But as it turns out, when you start really digging into it, plants do have the capacity to synthesize these compounds, but many of them are also synthesized by microbes and transferred to plants.
Similarly, we have all these groups of compounds that we call phytohormones, plant hormones. Well, it turns out that large numbers of these phytohormones are synthesized by microbes and provided to plants.
So there is this close integration where, as I said, it becomes difficult to tell where one begins and the other one ends. And you realize that they really are one integrated whole and you should not try to manage them separately.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Yeah, very, very similar to the gut microbiome of the human being, which is so integral in the production of so many different neurotransmitters, brain hormone chemicals like serotonin and dopamine.
Microbes in the gut also make these different nutritional compounds, including vitamin C and some B vitamins and vitamin K and probably so many things we haven't even discovered yet. And that's where the fascination is. And also just trusting in design, if we just steward this thing, we don't have to necessarily figure all this out. It's really cool that we have, because we live by our intellect so much, we can just trust that God just wove this amazing intricate creation together in this community. And this communication, maybe we can talk about that. The communication amongst plant in the microbe, communication amongst plants, plant and other plants, trees, saplings, talk about communication, ecosystem.
[00:13:31] Speaker B: Yeah, there's so much beauty there. But I want to flag a thought that I want to come back to, and that is you pointed out something about the clear divide of the, of the terrain.
And I want to come back to a scripture quote that speaks to that. That really has given me a lot to think about.
So to talk about communication.
In the last decade or so, thanks largely to the pioneering work of Christine Jones in Australia, we have learned so much more about how these microbes and plants communicate with each other. That is so different from what we used to think was the case and this kind of the foundation.
So I should perhaps say that most in agricultural productivity and commercially grown crops, very few crops actually get the opportunity to communicate effectively with their microbiome and with their soil, because the microbiome is so depleted and its levels are so low that the communication mechanisms are, they are narrowed down. There is so little data transfer. It's the equivalent of trying to tap out Morse code on a telegram versus speaking to each other in 4K on Zoom.
So the Morse code is what is mostly happening in agriculture today, and the high degree of data transfer on zoom is what is possible, what we now understand is possible, and what some crops are experiencing.
So what's the difference between the two?
Well, I'd like to introduce this concept, and maybe you've spoken about it with your podcast audience, but I'd like to talk about this concept of quorum sensing. Are you familiar with it?
[00:15:31] Speaker A: I am, but we haven't really talked about it with the audience, so please go.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Quorum sensing is.
If you're not familiar with the term or the language, you're certainly familiar with the concept.
The concept of quorum sensing is when you have a large group of individuals that begins behaving collectively as one superorganism.
And the classical example is a honeybee colony where you have tens of thousands of individual honeybees.
And they're all individuals, but they behave with one collective consciousness, with one collective intent.
And within that collective, each individual honeybee has assigned specific roles and responsibilities at different stages of life. At some stages, they're a nurse bee, and then they're a wax producer, and then they're a guard bee, and then they're a forager.
And what happens in the microbiome? There are, there are kind of two different levels of quorum sensing within a microbiome.
The what happens when you have a very small bacterial population in the soil?
At first, when you have a few thousand or a few tens of thousands of bacterial cells, each cell behaves as an individual. They are responsible for everything. They're responsible for reproduction, they're responsible for finding food, they're responsible for self defense.
So they expend a lot of energy in doing all these things and do them all somewhat poorly.
And as they're going through this process, they also release these chemical signals into the environment that are called autoinducer 1 and autoinducer 2. And I'll describe these in just a moment. But then what happens as autoinducer 1, as the concentrations become higher and higher, as the population slowly grows and slowly builds, all of a sudden the concentration of autoinducer 1 becomes high enough that there is a flip switch, a switch flip, that there is this radical transformation that is literally from darkness to light that happens very rapidly in seconds, where this entire community now begins behaving collectively because they have high enough concentrations of this signaling molecule that they can start all talking to each other.
And they begin behaving as a Superorganism.
And as a superorganism behaving with one collective consciousness and intent, they now, all of these different individual bacteria develop specialized roles, just like the honeybees. Some of them are responsible for reproduction. Others are responsible for defense. Others are responsible for finding food.
And so at this stage, their behavior completely changes.
And it's at this stage that they begin forming biofilms and they begin forming mucus.
Then, as this is happening, they're also releasing this second chemical signal called autoinducer 2.
Autoinducer 1 is a very specific chemical signaling language that is specific to each individual species.
Autoinducer 2 is the opposite. It is a common trade language that is universal across all species.
So what happens as the concentration of autoinducer 2 increases?
All of a sudden, when the concentrations become high enough, the entire microbiome of all species collectively begins behaving as one superorganism.
And now you have these extraordinary efficiencies that show up where all these various microbes have these specialized things that they're quite good at and other things that they're not so good at. So one microbe might be particularly good at sequestering zinc or absorbing manganese or synthesizing certain phytohormones. And the rest of the microbiome supports those microbes in that purpose. They provide them with food, and they then move those nutrients around.
And what happens is that the entire microbiome begins sharing resources, they begin sharing water, they begin sharing nutrients with each other.
And the fascinating part about this is that this quorum sense, the second stage of quorum sensing, is not confined just to the microbiome. It also includes the plants that are growing in that ecosystem.
So all of a sudden you have plants that are actively collaborating with other plants in their ecosystem. They are sharing water, they're sharing nutrients, they're sharing resources.
And, you know, we have.
It's fascinating when you think about agriculture.
We've really been led astray by a lot of, I suppose I'll use the term Darwinian or evolutionary perspectives.
One, the perspective that comes to mind is this perspective of survival of the fittest and that plants are constantly, always competing with each other and fighting with each other.
And what we're actually discovering is that actually it's not survival of the fittest, it is survival of the most effective collaborators.
And this is the contrast between this.
This Darwinian perspective of competition. We've been taught that plants always compete with each other for water and nutrients. And we're finding that actually, if we have the right parameters if we have a large enough microbiome and we have enough plant species diversity.
In other words, there are some prerequisites that have to be met for this to be true, but that it is possible for plants to collaborate with each other instead of compete with each other, as we've been taught and as we have managed for the last hundreds of years. It's a beautiful. It's a beautiful system to contemplate how everything is connected.
[00:21:54] Speaker A: It just reminds me of a previous podcast. Yes, I've had Jamie Winship, Kingdom vs Empire.
And Kingdom's all about connection.
Love, no fear. There's mystery, but in the Empire's fear base and division, division, division, competition.
And that's the two mindsets you just laid out right there. You know, of course, God's Kingdom is all about community and connection. That's awesome.
Can you maybe give some examples of these plants communicating with each other? And of course, I'm thinking of some specific things I've heard you say.
Blew my mind.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, there are, there's this related topic.
Once you have an appreciation for how plants are communicating with each other and with their microbiome, then kind of the next stage of that question or a related topic is how do plants support each other and how do they communicate? How might they be interacting and communicating with humans if we were only able to perceive it and to interact in that way?
And I'll share this one story of an arboreal forest, a conifer forest in Canada.
The title of the book that this is described in is titled Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne. I'm forgetting the author's last name right now, but she described how when you have up on the Canadian Shield, where you have very challenging and difficult growing conditions, very thin topsoil, when you have a pine tree that releases seedlings.
Excuse me, releases seeds, those seeds might drift for some distance, hundreds of yards perhaps.
And when each of these seedlings emerges, the root system taps into the mycorrhizal fungi network and this larger quorum sensing microbiome.
And as it becomes connected to that wood wide web, the mother tree, where that seed came from, recognizes her daughter trees at a distance of up to hundreds of yards. We don't know how far, and we don't know if it's limited, but it's been measured to a distance of hundreds of yards. She will recognize those daughter seedlings.
And if those daughter seedlings are, if they germinated in a very challenging environment, perhaps they are on thin, stony soil, or perhaps they're being shaded out by other more mature trees.
The mother tree will send sugar energy out of her root system through the mycorrhizal fungi network to other trees, which will then pass it on to other trees, which will pass it on to other trees, all the way down to her daughter seedlings. And she will support those seedlings for years and provide them with the energy they need to successfully become established. And what's been so amazing to me about her research is she's been able to describe how this mother tree will send packets of sugar energy through this network, through perhaps half a dozen intermediary trees, until it finally reaches the daughter seedling. And none of those trees will take any energy for themselves. 100% of what the mother tree transmitted will arrive at the seedling tree.
Isn't that incredible?
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Yes, it is self sacrificial.
Amazing how in the world, I mean can and I mean they're dropping. We have a pine tree in our yard, they drop a lot of pine cones. There's a lot of seeds. And it's every year she's tracking all these babies. It's amazing. Until they're well established.
Just incredible.
Wow.
Well,
[00:26:17] Speaker B: There's kind of another step to this, another dimension or perhaps a couple of dimensions.
You spoke a bit ago about the microbiome in our gut and how critical it is for synthesizing neurotransmitters and the influence that that has on our, our capacity to think clearly and to, and to be really connected intelligently with, with our have to have our gut intelligence and our heart intelligence and of course our, our intellect as well our brains, which we all become so easily enamored with.
As it turns out, plants also have a neural network.
They use the exact same neurotransmitters that we do, the exact same neuron structure.
They also have gaba.
Their neural network is identical to our own, with the exception of when you have a.
Their neural network and their neurons are in the growing root tips. And the one exception is if you have a large mature plant that has a very robust root system, such as a mature oak tree or mature tree, mature grapevine, something like that.
The quantity of their neural connections and their neural network is substantially larger than ours.
And that's the one distinct difference. And they have.
There's a lot of fascinating research out there. A number of books have been written on this topic. There is no question plants have the capacity for informed, intelligent decision making. They do make conscious, deliberate choices all the time about how to behave and how to respond to certain stimuli.
We are largely blind to it because we're too busy. We're too much in a rush. We don't take the time to pay attention. But plants have a neural network, and they have a brain that is arguably larger than ours.
And they have demonstrated capacity for memory. They have demonstrated capacity for logical decision making to an exceptional degree.
And then you take that and you say, all right, well, if you have such an intelligent being, then it must have some way of perceiving its environment.
How does it perceive the environment? How does it. And there's a number of different means and mechanisms. There's all these discussions about how trees in the forest will know if another tree gets grazed or browsed upon by a deer at some distance away, hundreds of yards away, and will produce signaling molecules that make it less palatable.
There's this. There's all kinds of expressions of how these trees sense what is happening in their environment.
But one of the things that have been so intrigued by this is research that goes back to the 60s.
One of the foremost FBI polygraph experts of the day was a gentleman in New York named Clive Baxter.
And one day he got the idea of hooking up his lie detector to a houseplant.
And he got a response.
He got responses that surprised him of how this plant was responding to its environment.
So he proceeded over a several year period to run hundreds of experiments and to document them all very meticulously and expanded it then to multiple plants. And there's lots of fascinating things that came out of that, but I'll just focus on a few highlights. The first that was interesting is plants were the one experiment.
They took multiple plants of the same species into the room, and they had five people draw straws and go into various rooms. And one of those people got the short straw. They went into the room with the two plants, and they destroyed one of the plants, killed it, tore it apart.
None of the other participants, including the researcher, knew who the person was.
They hooked up the polygraph to the plant, to the second plant that had been in the same room.
And when they brought the five individuals into the room, the person that had murdered the plant, the lie detector went crazy.
That plant recognized who had been in the room and who had killed the other plant.
Well, from there, the experiments progressed to them trying it on spiders and on shrimp and other species. And the realization was very clear. The plant recognized and responded when something was murdered in its proximity, whether it was a spider or a shrimp or other organisms, other creatures.
Then, in the process of the spider experiments, one of the Participants noticed that the plant responded before he did something to the spider.
The moment he focused on the spider and carried the intent of killing the spider, the lie detector responded.
And that led to a whole series of fascinating experiments.
They came to the very clear conclusion that plants were perceiving and responding not just human actions, but human intentions. What humans intended to do, they responded to.
And you know this. I have several fascinating stories about how growers have used this in their work in field production, producing food crops.
But one of the things that this has given me a lot to think about. If plants can perceive the intent to kill, and it's quite clearly established that they can and that they do at a considerable distance, thousands of yards, what does that mean? And what do plants perceive when a farmer drives into the field with a spray rig that's loaded with pesticides with the intent to kill?
They certainly respond to that in ways that we don't fully understand because we've not been measuring and we've not been. We've not been trying to understand that.
There's. I have this fascinating story.
I feel like I'm on this, just this monologue here, but I'll keep going for this yet.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: Keep that one for sure.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: I have this fascinating story of a salad greens grower in Quebec. It was a several hundred acre farm and they had several fields of lettuce that were a couple miles apart. And they were both approaching. They were about two weeks away from harvest and they had quite a severe hail storm go through the area. And the hailstorm caught both of those fields that were getting close to harvest.
[00:33:44] Speaker A: So the
[00:33:47] Speaker B: grower and his agronomist went to visit the first field.
And the grower asked the question, or excuse me, the agronomist asked the grower the question. When you think about success for a field of lettuce, what does that look like to you? What does success mean?
And the grower said, well, success means that I have a cooler full of boxes of lettuce that I can sell to the markets, that I can pay my bills and pay my employees and support my family.
It drove a couple miles further to a second field, and this field was equally decimated. Plants were very light green in color, lots of shredded leaves.
And the agronomist said, now when you think about success for this field, I want you to think about a family with young children sitting down to eat dinner and they're having a salad. There's this awesome salad that is nourishing and it nourishes these people's bodies. And Provides health and sustenance for them and that they are grateful and have a lot of gratitude for their dinner.
And this is what success looks like for this field. And I want you to think about that and to hold this image and to communicate that to the field verbally.
So the farmer did.
I think he felt a little bit awkward. He was on the other side of the vehicle and kind of looking at the ground and stumbling around a little bit, but he was communicating this and praying over the field.
He looked up, looked at the field and said, oh my goodness, it's darker green.
And they both agreed that they observed the field in a matter of minutes turning a darker shade of green from what it had been previously.
Flash forward two weeks.
The first field they started harvest, they were getting about a 10 to 15% harvest and then they just stopped because the labor cost was more than the value of the crop that they were getting out of the field.
The second field they got an 80% harvest out of.
Same hail damage, two different intentions.
[00:36:11] Speaker A: Wow, that just blows my mind.
And it reminds me of a verse in the Bible. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
And I always talk about how our thoughts impact our DNA, our microbiome, our mitochondria, just our system.
But to think that a human can interact with creation in a way.
[00:36:40] Speaker B: Think about it, Ben. That's what we were here for.
Yeah, it's what we were here for. God gave us dominion over.
Not to dominate and to subjugate, but to be stewards of like we are, to be the caretakers. Like this is his purpose for us.
Why would he have designed it and intended it any differently? It is his purpose for us is to be the caretakers and to be the stewards. And therefore all of creation responds to us and responds to our intentions and to our desires.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
And going back to those two, the Kingdom vs Empire, Jamie Winship style, in the Kingdom, your other focus versus self focus. You know that first field with the hell damage, self centered. Not that there's anything wrong with provision. That's good. But when that heart motivation is so focused on self versus in the kingdom way where you're trusting God and you can be others focused, there's a whole new dimension to that kingdom versus empire thought process. That's amazing.
Well, have you seen other instances in real life? I mean, I'm assuming you kind of mostly talk to farmers about the physical inputs and get the biology back in the soil and nutrition and the things. How much do you get into more what you may be term quantum or spiritual or woo woo land.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: Well, more and more because there is, there's been a. Both a personal growth process for me, but also I think many people are ready, many people are hungry.
And it is doing the mechanical things will only get you so far because doing the mechanical things, replacing pesticides with nutrients is a very valuable and very powerful first step. But it doesn't acknowledge the fact that we are spiritual beings in a physical world, not physical beings in a spiritual world.
And so that I think the spiritual components in many cases are foundational. They're foundational to a farm success in so many ways.
And you know, a bit ago I mentioned that there's this one verse that I want to come back to and it ties into what we've been talking about from the microbiome and from a mineral nutrition perspective.
There are many agricultural related topics and themes that are discussed in the scriptures.
And several years ago I was reading in Job and this one set of verses really caught my attention.
I should look up the exact reference. I want to say it's job 821 or maybe 5 21. I forget exactly which chapter it's in right now.
But just a bit earlier in this chapter it's describing there's this description of the curses that people will experience if they don't live within God's commandments. And then there is this follow on of the blessings that people will experience if they do live within his commandments. And within that there is this.
There are a whole series of beautiful verses, but there's this one verse in particular that says, at drought and famine you will laugh, for you will have an alliance with. And some translations say you will have a covenant with the stones of the field and the beasts of the field will be at peace with you.
And when I read that those two concepts in this sentence were clearly linked. There was something about resilience to drought and famine that was associated with the stones of the field and the beasts of the field.
And I wanted to understand what that was. So I went back to the original Hebrew. And as I'm sure you know and many of your listeners know, Hebrew is this fascinating multidimensional language where there's layers and layers of meaning in so many different ways. And there are often other equally appropriate translations.
Well, it turns out there is another equally appropriate translation for this verse which is at drought and famine you will laugh because you will have an alliance with the minerals of the soil and the microbes of the soil will be in alignment with you.
Isn't that incredible?
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Mind blowing.
Yeah, it's all in there. It's all in scripture.
Wow.
Well, let's talk a little bit about, you know, to give hope and maybe shifting gears a little to, you know, West Texas. You, you know, Chadwell and the challenges of West Texas and whether that's re engaging the water cycle, rain cycle, retaining water in the soil, healing the soil, growing cotton or grass or whatever else.
You know, if a farmer sees what you're talking about and see this is resonating, what are some things that you recommend West Texas cotton farmers do if they want to start shifting and moving to what I would say is better, better stewardship, not condemning any of those practices. Just like with doctoring. We, we learned a certain way. We did the best we knew, but now we're learning more. God's revealing more of how all this really works. So. Or some practical things and to just give hope to a lot of us out here that see the water table dropping, see the dust blowing in the spring, and a lot of these cotton farmers honestly going out of business, they just can't sustain the way it is with the government, you know, assistance program, huge loans after you get for the huge equipment and just the whole thing, the whole system. And that's too big a question for the last 18 or so minutes we have.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think you have some very high quality people locally who certainly would have a much more nuanced and informed and local perspective that you may already have had on, but you should certainly consider having on Jeremy Brown and Mike Thompson a few innovators who are doing some really remarkable things in, in terms of practical application of how they are growing crops differently to reduce their water consumption and how they're growing different things.
And so there are practical things that we could talk about. I mean, cover crops are challenging in that environment. There's lots. But I think part of what needs to be said and as uncomfortable saying, it's an uncomfortable truth.
But the reality of why we are in the situation that we're in in West Texas is because our entire approach has been unsustainable.
It has a clear expiration date and boy, that's uneasy because as you pointed out, people are distressed through financial hardship, going out of business, unable to survive.
That's going to continue happening and that's going to continue to get worse as long as we insist on doing the same thing we've been doing.
And that's difficult for me to say because I, I want to, I have empathy. I am not there. But we almost lost the farm. I'VE been in very difficult financial situations several times in my life and I understand what the stress and the distress is like.
But sometimes the best comfort is in truth.
Sometimes we have to look truth square in the eyes head on and say, you know what? We can't keep doing this anymore. We have to do something different. We collectively have to do something different.
And what does that mean for me as an individual?
One of the things I mentioned Jeremy Brown's name earlier, one of the things that I really respect about the pathway and the direction he is going down is he is looking at this from a bigger picture perspective and he's saying, you know what?
In the long term, it is not going to be sustainable ecologically or from a water use perspective or financially or otherwise to continue growing cotton.
So in an area of widespread cotton production, Jeremy Brown is planting grass and he's grazing livestock because he sees a future there.
Now, is it easy? Is it perfect? I'm sure it's not.
But the reality is, if we should not expect to try to keep doing the same thing we've been doing and get different results, we have to start growing different crops. Sadly, cotton is not going to survive long term in West Texas. It just isn't. It does. I mean, we're seeing it clearly. It doesn't pencil and it's not going to get better anytime soon. It's going to get worse.
The sooner we come to grips with that truth within ourselves, the sooner we are empowered to do something different. And you know, one of the people that has really inspired me is Viktor Frankl and his work on man's search for meaning and several of the books that he's published and the work that he's done.
One of the things that I think he pointed out many decades ago that was very relevant to the public discourse here in the last half a dozen years around all of the divisiveness that was created around racism and all the division, creation, fomenting that occurred, there is this desire to assign collective guilt that I'll use racism as a hot button issue of what I think it's faded a little bit. But just because of the color of your skin and who your forefathers were and their actions or white people's actions hundreds of years ago, you were all collectively guilty.
Viktor Frankl clearly describes how that is not reasonable, not possible, not ethical.
But the flip coin, the reason I'm bringing this up is that the flip side of collective guilt is individual responsibility.
And the question for us is I very much try to take the approach within life, that I am completely responsible, working with God, through God, I am responsible for what happens and what manifests in my life and my response to it.
And part of being responsible means that you chose. You make the decision and you express the ability to respond.
And I think there are so many areas in our life and that have been true historically in my life where there was a need to respond, there was a need to change direction, there was a need to take responsibility. But instead it was easier to just freeze because going in a different direction appeared to be insurmountable. It appeared to be too difficult.
Yes, it is difficult. But with God's grace, we can go in a different direction.
[00:49:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I just keep going back to the podcast. He'll genuine ship. He.
He would say there's in the kingdom, there's mystery. And that's good, that's okay. That's that trust factor. And that failure is just learning opportunity. You can't be scared of failure because there's really no such thing as failure. You just reframe it into learning.
But I believe that creative from God, that creative flow happens where an idea will come, a connection will be made, a door will open, a thought, whatever.
And solutions are found there. Kingdom solutions. Life is found there. Eating from the tree of life, abiding in the vine. Life has to flow. It's a spiritual law. But fear shuts that all down.
Fear of what will my peers think of me? Fear of lack of provision. Fear of failure. Fear, fear, fear everywhere you go.
This is such a spiritual journey, so thank you for that encouragement.
[00:50:16] Speaker B: My version of that that I've communicated to people is people often only become open to change when the actual pain of not changing becomes greater than the perceived pain of changing.
And the challenge with that is we have very active imaginations and we can perceive a lot of potential pain in changing. That is a lot of unknown. It's a lot of fear, as you pointed out.
And so there are many individuals for which this isn't necessarily true. But collectively, most people behave as if there has to be significant pain before they are motivated to change. And that is. That's unfortunate. That is what is bringing us here in the Lubbock, Texas area. That's what is bringing us right up to the brink. Like what level do water, how low do water levels have to be depleted before we do something different? Not just less, but different.
[00:51:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:24] Speaker B: How big does the pain have to become?
[00:51:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yep. And that's not how we here designed to operate.
That would be the empire type thinking.
[00:51:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:51:35] Speaker A: There's there's no way to untangle the, the connection between the spiritual realm and this physical reality.
So we intertwined, as you said, we're spirit beings housed in the flesh, in the physical.
Not only do we have dominion over influence in what we speak, think, intention, but if we let that fear based mentality from the other kingdom be our main decision through the lens that we're looking through, making our decisions through that lens of fear, it's going to produce bad fruit. There's just no way around it.
And that's probably the number one thing to address.
Well, John, in the. We have a few minutes left. Any closing thoughts?
I mean, I still can't believe that story about the pine trees and the dotard trees and the lie detector experiment. I mean, just mind blowing. But any closing really cool research like that or thoughts or encouragement to the audience?
[00:52:46] Speaker B: Oh, there is, there is so much, there is so much out there that hasn't really entered into the mainstream. And this is, and this is interesting, there is all of this fascinating research about these various areas that hazard hasn't for the most part entered into the mainstream consciousness because there is no economic incentive there.
It's not something that can be commercialized or be developed. So there's no advertising campaigns, there's no campaigns behind it to get it out there.
But there is so much valuable information.
But the piece that I am so hopeful about and so optimistic about is that yes, we have many challenges, there are many ecosystem challenges, ecological degradation.
There are many things that you could look at and say that things are going sideways in a significant way.
But there are also many stewards who have made tremendous progress going in a different direction.
And we can, when we dig into the science of what's happening with plants and soils and the human health connection and livestock health connection, we can make it sound very complex and very complicated.
But the reality is it's also very simple because it was designed to work. And while there can be lots of doom and gloom, the reality is that there are many people collectively.
We collectively as stewards and the many people who are here, who are working together in this direction, we collectively already know enough.
We have the knowledge, we have the information, we know enough to facilitate massive transformation, which I believe is what we are called to do and called to work on as a part of God's kingdom and manifesting his kingdom here on earth.
And there is a lot of opportunity. The time is now.
And when God is with us, who can stand against us?
[00:55:14] Speaker A: Amen.
Amen. And all of creation is waiting. Groaning Waiting for the sons to stand up and do what John just said.
Bring the kingdom reality into the physical realm and we have the honor that God chose humans to as family, as sons, as opposed to orphans. We've been talking about fear based competition and scrounge for everything like money and self centeredness. That's all orphan mentality. We're not orphans. We're sons of the most high God.
That there's no lack in the kingdom, there's just a lack of vision, I think amongst the sons. There's a lack of understanding, there's lack of stewardship, lack of proper distribution of resources, utilization, distribution, stewardship, really lack of knowledge and leading to some of this fruit. It's not good. So, so good. John, always, always great hearing from you. I really appreciate and value your kingdom lens. Say that Darwinian evolution lens that you spoke of and just appreciate your love of the science and the research too. Because we are an intellectual culture that likes to be able to see so much of this cool research that you've delved into. If people want to learn more either about you, your work, Evansi ecoactivity, or just definitely we'll get the name of that book again that you said, the Mother Tree. Is that it?
[00:56:47] Speaker B: Finding the Mother Tree.
Yeah, that was one.
[00:56:51] Speaker A: Yeah, the Mother Tree. Any other books, resources, platforms, you have your own podcast, people that are intrigued. Where can they learn more about what you're doing in this subject in general?
[00:57:02] Speaker B: My personal website is john kemp.com and that's kind of the hub that leads to all the various things that I'm working on.
The company that we work with, we have a team of about 50 people that are scattered across the country that's advancing EcoAg.
The podcast has been a lot of fun. I started initially to try to capture some of the knowledge of some of my mentors and people that I saw passing away and taking a lot of their information with them.
And over the last couple of years it's, it's become a fun project and it's become the number one podcast in the earth sciences category here in the US which was rather to my surprise and astonishment.
So I have a lot of fun with that. But yeah, we've, we've shared a lot of information and put it out there and I'm, I'm fairly readily accessible in lots of different places.
[00:57:57] Speaker A: That's awesome.
[00:57:58] Speaker B: In the name of the podcast, the Regenerative Agriculture podcast.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: All right, awesome. That's amazing. Number one in the earth science category.
That's what happens when you speak the truth. In love like you do.
So thank you, John, so much.
[00:58:14] Speaker B: Thank you for having me, Ben. I've immensely enjoyed this conversation.
[00:58:17] Speaker A: Well, likewise. I know the audience has, too.
All right, guys. And you know, he mentioned Jeremy Brown. We did interview Jeremy last year and then a few years before for that. So go check that out on the archive page on our website, Veritas Wellness member. Com.
We'll have this in archive there, too, of course, YouTube and all the platforms.
And we'll be back next week with another great show. Thank you for joining us. Bye. Bye.
