The Invisible Economy Under Your Feet

Welcome to the Ag and Culture podcast.

I'm Mike Usry.

I'm Joseph Boehm. And today we're going to talk about all things agriculture. Mike, why is this called the Ag and Culture podcast?

That's jumping in deep right away. So you can't separate the two. So in our society, prior to the ultra industrialization, you know, World War II post industrialization, everything was about agriculture and food. So it could be called ag and food, but I want to call it ag and culture because our societies always revolved around the dinner table and the meal and all activities were geared toward the meal.

And so your cultures come from your food. You think about the Southern culture in America. Our food is vastly different from the Midwesterners, different from the New Englanders, right? We don't have clam chowder down here, but that is part of their culture. So that is just a microcosm within of tribes in our country. So go overseas and go here and go there. Food is the tie that binds cultures together.

And so where does food start? It starts in agriculture. It starts in the planting of the foods and the harvesting of the foods. You go way back to ancient civilizations where their culture was around their grapes or around their grains or around their fishing. Occupation was built around that and it came back to the dinner table and the fireplace and that is where things with relationships and everything just started to meld is around the dinner table.

So you can't have culture without agriculture. And yeah, it's just what brings us together and I wanted to do this podcast to go back to slower times if you will where things aren't microwaved. They're not you know instant like a lot of this instant culture just gives us instant gratification and it bores us and moves us on and is not nourishment not only to our bodies but it's poor nourishment to our soul.

Very interesting. Well you seem very passionate about this, so what is your experience in all this? How do you—what is your area of expertise should I ask?

Well, let's—I'll just be transparent. I'm a business person, businessman. So Southland Organics is our company. And Southland Organics was founded on those principles. We sell humic acid products and probiotics and things like that, where we believe that the soil—we say we feed the soil that feeds the food, that feeds the family. And that is sort of the line that we go by.

You know, expertise as far as a microbiologist or an ag major or a full-time farmer or anything like that. No, but I have studied in depth soil science over the years and microbiology and chemistry just to try to get an understanding that my passion is positively influencing our food supply on a microbial level.

Interesting. Okay. So you're a businessman and you've studied all these chemicals. Can you explain how you got into this?

So sort of double-edged. It really started with me, you know, when we were about to have a child, learning like, okay, like, it's one thing for me to eat bad, it's one thing for my wife to eat bad, sorry, but we're older. I got a child coming into this world that's—it just kind of caught me off guard. And not that that caught me off guard, but just the thought process of it.

So I started thinking about these things. I was like, you know, daddy did it this way with his agriculture and there's a lot of movement now. It's organic really first was like in back in you know, 2008, 2009 when it was just sort of foo-foo dust to be honest with you and it wasn't prevalent. But I started studying it and I read a book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and the book impacted me greatly to go deeper and I think from there I just started studying it and becoming passionate about it. Once I started studying something, I just—I do. That's just what I do.

Interesting. Yeah. Well, you are quite the studier. I will ask—so you mentioned in there, your dad was a farmer. So did you grow up in farming?

Yeah. Well, yes. So daddy wasn't a full time farmer. So he, you know, again, I mean, really and truly at some point, everybody was a farmer, right? We all inherently knew we had to grow our own food. So he, you know, growing up closer to pre-World War II, pre-industrial, just pretty much everybody had a garden, right?

And Daddy's farms—they had acres. He worked civil service, but he always had—we always had a lot of cattle. We always grew our own gardens, right? And that was a big part of it. But having cattle, horses, and all that realm kind of put us in the farming, like hobby farm probably, but he did it to pay bills. You know, it was always a struggle when we lost a cow or something, right? That was a big deal to them.

So yeah, and then my—I grew up in South Georgia. My grandmother's side, they were all farmers, like legit farming, mostly leafy greens, row crops, cabbage, tomatoes, things like that. So I grew up in a very farm centered family group.

Gotcha. So, switching gears a little bit here, moving into soil biology. If there's people who are, you know, homeowners or growers even, don't necessarily understand the science of what's happening, can you give us sort of a description in a simplified version of what's going on underground?

Yeah, so the soil microbiome, as it was sort of coined years ago, it's a living, breathing, unseen world down there. They're microscopic. They're microbes and fungi and protozoa and all these other microscopic creatures.

And you're either teeming with microbes—teeming as in partnership, and teeming as in T-E-E-M-I-N-G, overflowing with them—or you have dead soil. So it's either alive or it's dead and there's rarely any in between because as you can see, alive, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

And if you don't have a functioning healthy ecosystem down there, then you're going to have an extreme lack of production and just a poor turnout on your crops, your animals, and everything else.

Makes sense. Are there signs that you can see above ground of what's going on underneath?

For certain. If you know what to look for. And the sad thing is we're not trained today to see those things. I guarantee it, if you were to go back into the 1800s and just generally ask a farmer at that point, they just inherently saw it. They could look at something and tell if it was healthy or not. And that was not due to the fertilizer that they put on their field because that didn't exist at the time.

That came from the quality of the soil—how it looked, how it felt, how it smelled. Like smelling is a big thing, but what you asked is above the soil. So you'll see, even in grass, you'll see long spindly grass that's not thick-stemmed, that doesn't stand up properly. Like I know some guys that spray lawns and they can see that.

And what happens when you get long spindly grass? The plant cell walls are so thin that the insects can smell the nectar in there. And yes, they can—they smell the sugars running up and down the grass. What do they do? They attack! Because they can. But if you had healthy microbes delivering healthy soil which delivers healthy plants—in this case grass—you have a thicker, healthier, more resilient plant. That's not going to give off 'I'm sick' vibes and get attacked.

So, yeah, if you name the plant, they all have their telltale signs.

If you were to quantify a percentage of what's impacting the plant, how much of the factors that impact the plant's growth are happening underground versus above ground?

Well, let me ask you this. When people talk about plants, they always talk about being what? Well-rooted. Rooted—the roots, the roots, right? The phyllosphere which is above—the part of the plant which is above ground—is the part you see, but everything that's happening is underground. That's where the magic is.

So yes, plants above ground they take in water. They take in sunlight. That's where photosynthesis occurs. But the base structure of it is the roots. So if you're not rooted—and that's why we say that all the time—so it's hard to quantify but it's a overwhelming percentage of it would be in the roots. They play hand in hand.

But there's—you know, think about a seed. It goes underground. First thing it does is what? It starts shooting off roots. It can survive and it does survive as it's rooted and not shooting.

Gotcha. So it sounds like there's—if it's anything like the human body, there's probably lots of different types of microbes underground that are impacting these plants. How would you describe all of the different types of things going on in the soil?

Um, I don't know if you want to say like it's a—it's a magical city down there. I mean, you know, we're talking about agriculture, we think ruralism, but I mean it—it's really hustling and bustling if it's going well, and it's very diverse, right?

Nature abhors a vacuum and I'll say that probably over and over and over again—nature abhors a vacuum. So there's always going to be something there if there can be—they're good or bad. But the more diversity you have, the better nutrients you have, the—it's a beautiful upcycle to where they feed plants, plants feed them, and then you breed more microbes. So it would be a hustling, bustling city of lots of activity.

Well, as someone who has not really been on farm much or grown up around farming, what impact in simple terms does herbicides, fertilizers, even water play on these plants and their growth?

So fertilizers and water—when we talk about fertilizers today, you know, everybody goes to what a synthetic fertilizer is. So I'm not gonna go into synthetic versus non synthetic versus you know, cow dung and stuff like that in the water.

Those things are actually going—fertilizers are going into the soil. They're nutrients and a lot of nutrients are already there. They're just locked up into different forms. They have long chain polymers that they're attached to. They're not in cation stage and I'm just trying to dive into the chemistry over there. But the microbes basically can break them down and get them to be plant ready food.

And so anytime you apply a fertilizer, or there is fertilizer already locked into the ground, the microbes are what unlock them and get them plant ready so that the plants can take them up and use them.

What about humates?

Okay, so humates—which is, so you're asking me because that's what Southland Organics does, right? We do humates and microbes. So a humate—so go back to my city analogy—a humate provides the structure. It provides the infrastructure. It provides the roads, the housing, the currency. It makes the economy flow.

Humates don't feed microbes. They give them the structure to do their job. It's not like it's housing that they live in, but it coagulates things in the soil. For example, phosphorus. We always talk here about phosphorus runoff polluting the water, nitrogen runoff. And everything runs off, but not with humic substances.

So I want everybody to think about humic substances as organic substances. Think dark, black, pleasant to the smell, and rich. That's humic substances. And so it holds it all together in a structured manner so that the microbes and the plant roots can do their thing. So look at a well-constructed, orchestrated network system is what your humates and organic matter actually provide.

Interesting. Obviously, I mean it's in the title Southland Organics. These are organic products. Are they not?

They are. Some of them are certified organic. They're all organic. Some of them are not certified. That's a whole nother legal term. But yes, they're all at least all natural or certified organic.

Gotcha. So I'm assuming that there are non-organic products. Looking at the soil and how it is impacted—what are, I don't know how to phrase this, good humates versus bad humates and how do they affect?

There's no such thing. Really? Yeah. So a humate is a humate is a substance. So now there's good microorganisms and bad microorganisms, but humates are a group of organic acids that are usually made—they are made over long periods of time from decaying matter. Decaying animals, decaying plants, decaying roots. That is what a humate is.

It's just a cycle within plant matter and animal matter decay. So it is just something that is turning back. So when you think about composting, that's what humates are. So there is no good or bad. It's just humic structure. Some may claim to have superior humic structure, and all these companies say, oh, mine's better than yours. Humate's a humate. You may have more humic acid in your formula and all that, but humates are all for plant purposes and animal purposes and soil purposes—good structures.

So why the emphasis on organics?

For us or just in general? For us? Um, it's just happenstance really. Like I—it is just the way it's supposed to be. Like if you ask me, are our products certified by X? I'm like, I don't know. I don't care. Like it's just—organics really just means carbon. That's what organic means. So organic chemistry, you're just studying chemistry based on carbon, which is the essence of all life.

So organics in America and in the UK and all over the world now means something that they don't originally mean. Organics to me means getting back to pre-industrialization, pre-fertilization, and getting back to the way the ground can achieve homeostasis through proper cycling and nutrients. That's what organics means to me, but it's technically anything that has to deal with putting carbon, fixing carbon back into the soil.

Understood. So with this being our first episode, obviously we're not diving into these super deep topics, but in regard to soil biology, what is some of the things that you think are least understood by people? What are some of the things—the most common misconceptions, if you will, that they have?

That everybody thinks that every bit of ground has the equal amount of microbes, maybe. You can go out there into a bald clay spot that doesn't have anything growing in it. And the microbial count is going to be way less. You go into a rich, earthy field and grab it up and there's plants growing. It's going to be—when you hold it, it's always the nose test. You'll know, because it's fresh smelling, that it's probably pretty loaded down with microbes.

Another misconception is, oh, I can just spray this on the soil, this special microbe, and it's going to fix everything. Well, not if the environment's not right. You may be spraying it out there, and they die instantly. Or they go into spore form instantly. So you've got to have a habitat for them.

And there's just this thing as a super bug. You want a diverse population of not only bacteria, but of fungi and protozoa. So a lot of these store bought things that they're out there—and we sell them too. Don't get me wrong. Like I'm not knocking people. That's what we do. But it's always—it's a fix with microbes with nature. We are here to supplement and augment and nourish, not to be a pharmaceutical company and diagnose and treat and inject.

If someone wants a healthier lawn or even on a larger scale a healthier farm, they may not be able to change what's going on underneath immediately, but they can shift their mindset into understanding what's going on. What is like the most crucial mindset shift that you could give someone?

I would say to go from dirt to soil. And what I mean by that is dirt is something you sweep up off the floor. Soil is something that you grow things in. Soil is living breathing ecosystem. Okay. So if you don't view your field or even your lawn as a living breathing ecosystem, you're not going to be successful.

I was speaking last week to a rancher in Texas who has his pasture set up in plots, and he rotates his animals as he should, but he rotates one species of animal. He doesn't let the land rest. It's even biblical, and the reason it's biblical—let the land rest every so often, right? You can't keep doing the same thing to it and expecting it to get healthy.

It needs diversity. It'd be like feeding a baby the same thing over and over and over again. It's just not gonna work. We need a variety of nutrients and food. So when you think about fertilization, when you think about watering, you just need to have a mindset shift that now am I trying to feed the plant or the grass or the lawn or the rosebush? I'm actually trying to nourish the soil which is a co-author in this whole thing.

Very interesting. I feel like there's a lot more we can dive into on that.

Quite possibly so.

I do believe that is all the time we have for episode one, but thank you for sharing all that.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

All right, that is Ag and Culture episode one.