How To Diagnose Hidden Hunger And Mineral Imbalances In Plants

Well good afternoon friends and welcome to the webinar the the reason for having this webinar for having this conversation the purpose of this conversation is to talk about the idea that what we have come to accept as being common and what we've come to accept as being normal or how plants look might actually not be how really healthy plants look there there is what is emerged over the last several decades Let's say based on what I've spoken about with other people some of the mentors and podcast guests that I've had it seems that there is

a a new normal of plant observation of plant help that has emerged and there's there's been a both a gradual process that has happened gradually over the last 70 to 80 years and then there's also a much more pronounced much more rapid process that has occurred in a shorter timeframe perhaps in the last 30 years where crops Today are behaving sometimes very differently from the way that they have behaved in the past and we think that that is perfectly normal and that's okay and an example of this is that there's a number of examples but

I'm going to use corn comes to mind right now so it used to be 20 plus years ago that a it was considered a really healthy corn crop to be completely green and have all the leaves still be green at the top of the plant and many all the way down close to The bottom of the plant all the way right up until harvest until either got frozen off in the fall or until the crop was actually harvested and today that's not true anymore in fact you can go back and look at some of the

older agronomy handbooks and in agronomy handbooks from the 70s and even into the 80s the images of corn plants and corn crops at harvests were of corn crops that were still completely green today we've come to accept as normal that They're going to die down and that the corn plants will be completely brown but then we get to harvest and we have an entire generation of younger farmers that doesn't even recognize that that may not be what a really healthy corn crop actually looks like and another example from corn production is that today most corn

crops have leaf striping where the section between the veins is substantially lighter colored than the actual veins themselves when you hold Them up to the sunlight you can see this striping pattern where you have alternating light colored and dark colored stripes and this is also a phenomena that has to become so widespread and so mainstream that is considered to be perfectly normal and that's just the way corn leaves are when in fact that's not normal at all it's not at all what a really healthy corn plant actually looks like so the there are many phenomena

like this in in many Different fruit and vegetable crops and in many grain crops and commodity crops where what we have come to observe and to expect as being normal isn't actually what was normal many years ago and so I wanted to have this webinar to talk about some of the more subtle signals some of the more subtle subtle clues that we can look for that we can use to diagnose the hidden hunger and the nutrient imbalances that aren't necessarily immediately obvious when You're driving by a field and you see plants that are looking healthy

and they're looking dark cream there can actually be a lot more to the story than that and those are the pieces that I wanted to talk about so the I'm going to start the screen share and jump into this actually before I jump into this one quick housekeeping comment is the for questions and answers Q&A when I am because of the way that technology works when I am doing a screen share And showing a slide deck unfortunately I'm not able to actually see the questions as they come in so I'm going to dedicate some time

at the end to go through any questions that you guys might have I'm expecting this the presentation piece isn't going through the slide deck to last approximately 20 or 25 minutes and if you look at the bottom center of your screen you can see a QA box which you can type on or click on and submit any questions that you Have and I'd love to hear those there's many different directions that we can go in because they're there's a lot of room to cover here more than I can cover in 20 to 25 minutes and

any questions that you have I'd love to address in the Q&A so I look forward to that so I'm going to start the screen share and jump through this all right awesome so I think the foundational premise the piece that I would like to state right at the beginning is that from from our Perspective we should we should operate from the premise that all crops experience hidden hunger if we just begin from that place it's the exact opposite of a common place today which is to say that many people believe that when a crop appears

healthy dark green and growing well when you're driving pie when you're driving by in a pickup truck then the idea is that we believe the crop to be healthy and we should shift that paradigm and begin operating from The place that in fact every plant that we look at has some type of hidden hunger that we have not identified yet the moment we shift our frame of thinking and being in approaching that from a different perspective we're going to be looking for things and be able to observe things that we won't if we're not looking

for them the reality is that as we've started using plants aponeurosis working With many different crops and different environments we've observed that most of the crops the farmers grow today in many regions I would say in all the regions that we've worked in much of North and South America are deficient in a number of key trace out of trace elements and trace minerals such as manganese and iron and molybdenum and cobalt nickel as well as to some degree depending on geography we commonly see deficiencies of copper and boron those trace mineral Deficiency is our very

widespread it's I can say with complete confidence that every crop we have ever tested when we first started working with a farm had some or a number of trace mineral deficiencies I have yet to begin working with a crop where all the trace minerals were in alignment and balanced where they needed to be I've never seen it yet once and this to me is a tremendous opportunity it's an incredible opportunity because these trace minerals Even though they're they they haven't been given a lot of or as much consideration in the past and some of the

micronutrients they are they have a tremendous influence on overall yield and quality and plant health and vigour and so we can have a great deal of influence on overall farm profitability and performance when we start at rest addressing and taking care of some of these trace minerals we also need to begin thinking one of the pieces that we Believe to be true as well is that many soils today are unable to supply all the nutrients and trace minerals that plants need and this again is due to can can be due to any number of different

factors some soils simply don't have the geological base they're not derived from the correct rock minerals that are needed to supply all the trace minerals that are necessary and then as well many soils that do have the geological base have a dysfunctional slow biology they No longer have functional Carbon functional organic matter and so biology as they may have had forty or sixty years ago to be able to release those nutrients and make them available to plants so manganese is a perfect example of this it's the the great majority of soils on the North American

continent have an abundant supply of manganese that's locked up in the soil mineral matrix and yet the majority of the crops that we're growing today are Actually manganese deficient the reason for this is because the biology that is present in the soils and our soil management practices have resulted in much of that manganese being locked up in an unavailable form and not being released for the crop supply so there is a component of some soil geological profiles they don't have what is necessary and we may need to add it and also that many may have

the trace minerals which are needed but they're Simply an unavailable form and can be released through biology we also believe that many mainstream economic practices can actually create hidden hunger and can create nutrient imbalances with over applications of the incorrect products and I put some careful thought into the terminology and using the words incorrect products because the the reality is that many of the macronutrient applications such as Phosphorus applications using map or dap or various forms of ortho phosphates or poly phosphate fertilizers many nitrogen applications using liquid 32 liquid 28 and hydrous ammonia urea there's

in general the highly concentrated macronutrient nitrogen and phosphorus products as well as potassium particularly potassium as well often actually create nutrient imbalances for these trace minerals because they create a biological environment in the soil Profile that actually suppresses the release of trace minerals and in many cases we find that the the nutrients that growers are deficient in are a direct result of excesses of other products that they have applied that are creating the nutrient deficiencies so we had this idea with in agronomy an agronomic practice that we we look at a soil analysis we look

at a tissue analysis or a SAP analysis and we apply more of what is missing and that in many Cases can be very incomplete where in fact what we need to do is we need to stop applying the excesses that are creating the deficiencies that we are observing another key element to be aware of is that nutrient imbalances will have a substantial yield suppressing effect be before they are visually observable so I'm just about to jump into speaking about some of them what are the pieces that we look for what are some of the Nutrient

balances that we look for and so forth but what what you need to be aware of what we need to be thinking about is the fact that once you can visually observe a very subtle hidden signal that the plant has that is signaling a nutrient imbalance you've already impacted yield you've already impacted yield substantially in fact again going back to the the idea of a new normal we don't really know what a really healthy crop is capable of Anymore we don't really know what the plants that we're growing could truly do if they didn't have

all these nutrient imbalances and and we can see we know that we have genetic potential of many of the crops that we're planting that is a minimum of five times higher and many times as much as eight to ten times higher than the crop that we're actually harvesting we know that the average yields for farm production throughout the Midwest are the neighborhood of 150 To 180 bushels per acre and we also know that the record yields are greater than 500 so there's obviously a lot of factors that play into that but the bottom line is

that many of the climactic factors such as environmental factors such as rainfall and soil moisture etc all of those are mediated and buffered by having the correct nutrition and the correct trace mineral profiles so addressing these trace mineral imbalances and addressing and Observing the hidden hunger that is present can give us thinking can begin they open the door to a next generation of plant development and crop development that we haven't even begun to tap into there is for the last number of decades last 4050 years much of agricultural progress and crop development progress has focused

on improving genetics developing new genetics for higher yields there are crop performance etc and without enough Consideration given to the epigenetic expression and the realization and the awareness that we can in fact create with with these great genetics that we have we can create a much higher yield jump then we've been able to observe up to this point let me give you an example of what I'm talking about there are a number of crops which have where the nutrition and nutrient management has been studied very closely in yields have made tremendous progress an example of

a More highly developed crop would be strawberries in California 20 years ago the average strawberry yield in the state of California was 4,000 plants per acre today a it's 10,000 plants per acre it's a 250% average increase over the last 20 years that came about not as a result of genetics although there were certainly were genetic improvements in that 20-year period but it largely came about by a very close study and understanding of plant nutrition Management and spoon-feeding nutrients throughout the growing season based on the plants requirements we haven't observed that similar yield job yet

on many of the crops that were working with we haven't observed it on most tree fruit we haven't observed it on most of our commodity crops and so I would suggest that there is still a great deal of yield potential and we can tap into with nutrition based on the exceptional genetics that we have developed that we Haven't fully tapped the genetic potential of yet so I want to one one final thought before we jump into some of this is I've spoken a lot about the use of plant SAP analysis and SAP analysis is an

incredibly valuable powerful and very important tool because it is it's almost it has the capacity to give us pre cognizance where we can actually identify nutrient imbalances before they can cause hidden hunger before they Cause even very subtle visual expression of nutrient balances so this is a very powerful tool because it allows us we need to get to the next level of nutrition management and plant epigenetic expression so what I want to focus on is some of the key characteristics that we look for when we're looking at close visual observation of solar plant signals what

are the very subtle signals that plot let's give us that we can let to Evaluate whether a plant is actually at a higher level of its epigenetic potential and its photosynthetic capacity are we really getting what that crop is capable of and the reality is that we are I'm working with the team at advancing agriculture right now to create a series of online courses that will be published in the coming months and in we've just been working on actually creating an outlining a full online course for doing field Evaluations for how we look at plant

health of what's happening in the field and I realized that I could I mean literally we we have been able to identify so many of these Souls signals that I could speak about at this topic for four hours and will be speaking about it probably for that length of time in the online course so there's much more than I can cover in a brief webinar but I wanted to speak about some of the most important pieces and give You an idea of some of the things that we look for and then of course once that

online course is released then that will be available and accessible for everyone as well so some of the pieces that we look for that would pay close attention to one very important piece is inter note length so really healthy plants that this is this ties into looking at hormonal imbalances looking at vegetative versus reproductive growth Energy when you have a really healthy plant is always going to be rooted dominant the root system needs to be dominant and needs to be stronger than the vegetative growth as long as you have root system dominance that also means

you have reproductive dominance and you have the capacity to produce extremely high yields on a plant that has a dominant root system in other words it has more cytokine in production than it has aux-in production so Oh For the plants on the Left when you have these really long internodes that's going to indicate that you have a lower quality plant ecosystem overall because you no longer have root system dominance you now have aux-in dominance vegetative dominance and that is going to result even though this this plant has a lot of blossoms on it and looks

nice and yellow looks like it has the potential for a lot of fruit production many of those Blossoms are going to either not pollinate or they're going to abort and drop off because there isn't enough root system strength to actually fill all that fruit versus when you look at the plants on the right you have very short internode this tight clipped canopy or hedge appearance of the canopy that is a plant that still has root system dominance and has the potential to have really high yields and very strong reproduction something else that we look At

is the leaf width to length ratio in variability we observed that what we're observing comparable genetics that comparable species when leaves are wider and in some crops they'd become shorter but in some crops it is rid of the leaf width the length ratio that we're looking for so the one in general the wider a leaf is the healthier the plant and the more abundant yield and plant growth that will be capable of producing so we pay very close attention to the Leaf to width width to length ratio for leaves and this is true and doesn't

matter if you're talking about corn or rice or soybeans or wheat or cherries or apples or tomatoes the same rule applies across the board the leaf width the length ratio is a very valuable indicator of the overall root system energy and overall plant vitality so here's another expression these are much healthier leaves where we now have very strong leaf width almond leaves on the Left and you can see that in fact I would say depending on what plant we're talking about this can be true for beans driving soybeans Tomatoes almonds etc you can actually get

to a point where leaves are wider than they are long this almond leaf is beginning to approach that point it's not quite there yet and obviously that wouldn't be true for all these then we have a cherry leaf on the right where we can see I would also ask you to note and observe the leaf edges The serration along the leaf edge one of the things that we've observed is that the healthier plants become the sharper the definition on the leaf edges or you get more pronounced leak serrations you get more serrations and more of

them in terms of a larger number per millimeter of leaf edge or per inch of leaf edge so the the healthier the plant the greater the definition of the leaf edges and so here's actually a really important piece looking at leaf vein color as compared With the color of the leaf surface area between the veins so when you if you look at this very closely these are both cherry leaves and the leaves on the left you can see faintly this is not a perfect picture but you can still see that the veins are lighter colored

than the area between the leaves between the veins and you can also see that even when you look at the leaves overall they still are slightly pale green paint they're not as Dark green as we would like to see that they still have the capacity to have a lot more chlorophyll in them than as present at the moment and yet the veins are actually lighter colored than the leaf when you look at the leaves on the right you see that you have much darker colored veins than the remainder of the leaf even though like the

leaves on the left these leaves also don't have enough chlorophyll they're also like green so this this is this is actually very Powerful start paying attention to just this piece and you'll understand some of the comments that I made at the beginning about hidden hunger becoming the new normal leaves like those present on the left with light color veins on many crops have become the new normal light colored veins are an expression of manganese deficiency whenever you have veins that are lightly colored light more lighter than the rest of the leaf That's a signal that's

a symptom of a manganese deficiency and when you walk out into a fields today that is that is the new normal almost all weed species and many of the crops that we're producing have those light colored veins that are expressing a manganese efficiency which is why I made the comment earlier and I'm very comfortable making the comment that that this characteristic has become almost universal the majority the crops that we Observe and that we work with today when we first started working with them have manganese deficiency symptoms and for any of you who have have

heard us talk in the past about the critical importance of manganese for photosynthesis for disease and insect resistance this is one of the most foundational fundamental trace minerals that can have extraordinary impacts on yield that we haven't given I say we collectively in The agriculture arena haven't given enough consideration to you in the past here's another example of that not entirely sure I think this might be hazelnuts on the left or filbert's or again you can see this this light colored leaf our light colored veins between the leaves and on the right on the raspberries

you can see you have dark veins now on the raspberry leaf has a very interesting expression as well you notice that I can just look at this Leaf and say okay the serrations on the leaf edge are they're not very pronounced they're fairly Sol and also the the vane crinkling on raspberries of these plants are going to known for this this this leaf is nice and flat but it doesn't have strong serrations around the leaf edge and that to me is an indicator that this plant very probably has a surplus of nitrogen so that's one

of the pieces in this this leaf is generally overall very healthy it's much Healthier than many crops are it has adequate manganese which is a notable distinction right from the get-go but I would suspect that this this leaf is probably a bit on the what I would call the soft side it's a bit soft and this crop may have some insect susceptibilities as a result of that something else to look for is to compare the leaf size on the latest on the newest fully emerged mature leaf and the oldest leaf on the plant so it's

very Common for annual crops such as tomatoes for the older leaf to older leaves to be much larger and the new leaves at the top of the plant to become progressively smaller this is again an indication of gradual root system decline over the over the period over the period of planned development so we want to see at the ideal again is to have the exact same leaf size are very comparable leaf size on the old leaves and on the new leaves On perennial crops we see untreated fruit for example you may see the opposite effect

where the firstly he emerge in the spring spur leaves are often the smallest leaf on the tree and once you begin developing new growth those new Shu leaves are substantially larger than the spur leaves sometimes orders multiple times larger and again the the ideal and a really healthy treat will have identically sized leaves both on the Spur leaves that first emerge in the spring the very first new growth new shoot growth leaves that emerge in the early fruitful period and then the latest so on the the leaf size across an entire creep tree canopy should

be largely uniform you don't want to see large diversities of leaf size at different locations on the tree another factor to look for at the very beginning I mentioned looking at internode length and on a parallel to that also need to Look at petiole length so look at these tomato leaves this is not the perfect definition of a petiole since if you want to be technically correct then this entire leaf dam is called a leaf a single leaf in for a tomato plant but when you look at these leaves and left versus the right in

you you can see that from the main stem the leaves branching off you have very long petioles that are reaching out to all those leaves whereas the plant on the right you have leaves That don't have those long petioles and they're connected almost directly to the main stem so again there I know that there are differences in the stage of plaintiff element for these two crops and I don't know this for certain but I would suspect that there might also be genetic differences but yes for the purpose of illustration the similar to the inter node

length the plant on the right or you have very short petals is Again going to be a plant that is cytokine and dominant Reproductive dominant and has the potential to have really high yields something else that I observed when when looking at these comparing these two pictures look at the leaf definition the serrations on the leaf edges on the Left versus the right again the plant on the right that has short petals has much sharper leaf definition there's something else I can look at these leaves visually and I can Know instantly that these plans are

zinc deficient how do I know that if you look at an in fact both of these plants are zinc deficient its it's easier to observe on the plant on the left or the example on the left when you have zinc deficiencies the bottom of the leaf where the leaf attaches to the petiole is not uniform it doesn't attach the same stem at the same point so when you have adequate zinc the two leaf edges will attach down to the petiole at Exactly the same point and when you have a zinc deficiency they'll be offset one

will establish or attached to the stem a lower than the other and you can see when you look at these main leaves these individual leaves on this example on the left that we have many of the leaves that are attaching to the stem at a different point on the left on the right side so that would be an example of a zinc deficiency and we can see the same on The right and so again these are examples these are these are very subtle signals if you were to look at just look at this leaf on

the right on the left you would say wow that plant is doing really well it has a nice green color it's got a very large leaf size believe are relatively flat there's not a lot of leaf discoloration this is a plant that is doing really well and that's what we considered to be normal today but the reality is that that plant as we can see We can see that just looking at these leaves on the left I know automatically that this plant is a zinc deficiency we can see that has a manganese deficiency and there's

a very good probability based on the overall length of the main petiole the main stem that it also has a boron deficiency because that stem is very very long and we know a plant is is auxin dominant is vegetative dominant doesn't have enough root system growth because it doesn't Have enough root system growth we know that the plan isn't absorbing enough calcium and it's probably it's likely to be calcium deficient there's this whole logic chain that we can follow we can look at these leaves and say and in in instantly in the field we can

say oh yeah this plant looks like is really healthy and normal but in fact there are additional yield advantages and yield edges that can be gained by addressing and managing some of these trace Minerals I also wanted to share an illustration of a trace mineral nutrient excess so oh this is a green bean crop that we worked with a number of years ago that got a treatment of boron on the seed or close to the seed at planting was very very small treatment like 0.3 milligrams per acre if I recall correctly or excuse me no

three milligrams per acre was a very credibly small amount that you couldn't possibly imagine would create a boron Excess but there was a combination of environmental conditions very dry soils very acidic pH s very low calcium availability all of those combined to produce this boron toxicity effect so we worked with the grower and put on a foliar application immediately that contained two quarts per acre of whole ocal to provide some calcium to buffer out the as boron and the image on the right is of those exact same plants taken two Weeks later they snapped out

of the excess boron very quickly and we're growing very well but what I wanted to point out is look at the leaf shape that is produced by high boron levels so high levels of boron often tend to produce they tend to move sugars and nutrients to the farthest tip and to the periphery of the plant so they move nutrients and sugars upward and outward so this this expression that you're seeing where you're seeing these leaves that are [Music] very pointed and have a long exit have an extended tip that's an expression of plants that have

a surplus of boron and that that expression remained on these plants throughout their entire life period something else to pay very close attention to on all the reproductive crops that were harvesting fruit for is the reproductive parts of the plant themselves so pay close attention to buds pay close attention to blossoms and To fruit so we can look of course of pollination percentage in uniformity this this images is a perfect example a really healthy plant will have the flowers on a single cluster be completely uniform it takes time to get to this stage of plant

health this is not something that occurs even on growers that we're working with AEA this is something that often takes a couple of years to happen and this is equally true of tree fruit Stone fruit apples etc you can develop a tree that has such vibrant energy and vitality and vigor that you in effect eliminate what is termed the king blossom the king blossom position still exists but it is has the exact same size and opens and pollinates at the same stage as all the other blossoms on the cluster so the position still exists but

there isn't any dominance of one bud leading the others and so this is this cluster of tomatoes is an example where You have some of the first tomatoes that have already pollinated understanding to size and some of the blossoms at the furthest tip of that cluster are just beginning to blossom and pollinate there are many other pieces to look for as well when we're looking at at fruit and bud positioning we can look at the calyx size and the stem strength these this particular image these Tomatoes have a relatively small diameter stem for the calyx

This is this is essentially your nutrient transport pipeline into the fruit so the larger your nutrient transport pipeline the larger your potential fruit can be and there's many other pieces that you can look for you can look at leaf shape you can look at the shoulder shape on on leaves on the stem end and see auxin versus cytokine and expression and how the fruit is shaping you can observe pollination effects etc so there are many pieces That you can look for in fruit and again that's a very large topic that we could speak about more

if you have any questions on that something else to look for is to look for Trent combs on leaf surface belief hair so this is an image I took of a 300 bushel corn crop Organic corn crop with no applied nitrogen in Lancaster County Pennsylvania in 2016 and you can notice a couple of things on this leaf first of All there is none of the light and dark Leafs striping that I talked about as being common you have a very nice uniform dark green color you can still see it where the veins are present but

there's not a distinct color difference where the veins are versus where they're not and you can also see this these leaf hairs being very pronounced so something that we've observed is that the healthy the plants become the more pronounced and the larger number of leaf hairs Become evident and then become a lot stronger you can actually feel them as you brush your fingers across the leaf surface they become much stronger and much more pronounced something else that I would like to point out specifically relevant to corn corn has this one characteristic it's shared by a

few of the other grass crops where corn is growing very rapidly during the framing stage and sometimes on leaf edges you will see this zippering effect whatever Refer to the zippering effect where the leaf will have a band that runs up and down the length of the leaf for the width of perhaps several lanes with weather this rippling effect where the growth is not nice and flat the leaf is not licensed flat and that rippling effect is a signal in adequate calcium there isn't adequate there wasn't adequate calcium present when those when cell division was

occurring at that stage and so you get incomplete cell Division and you end up with the zippering effect on the plant leaf and this is true of a corn crop because of its very high speed of vegetative growth and the need excuse me and the need to have a constant supply of calcium every 24 hours throughout the growing period and and the need to have good root absorption of calcium so if one day there isn't an adequate calcium supply for that very rapid vegetative growth that's the day that the cells that are Being produced or

that day are going to have a zippering effect showing up something else to look for him very close attention to on tree fruit and perennial plants berries blueberries etc is to monitor the development of a terminal bud on the new shoots during the fruitful period so the idea is we during the fruit fill period let's say on this is true of cherries and apples and perhaps less true some late season apples but from a the apple Varieties stone fruit etc we want the plant to have a surplus of energy and be able to fill fruit

to the greatest degree possible throughout the entire fruit fill period when a plant so once we get into the fruit filling period this is a moment where a plant is a vegetative dominant so there is a dominance of vegetative growth energy and ox and production because obviously you have aux-in production in the seeds and the fruit and you have aux-in Production about the moment you get into the fruit field period is also the moment where new shoot growth gets triggered so you have aux-in production the new shoots and you have oxen production in the seeds

if a plant doesn't have enough sugars and doesn't have enough energy starts running low on energy it will stop new shoot growth before it will slow fruit fill because its ultimate desire is to successfully reproduce and it will put as much energy As it can into the fruit so what this means is the moment if a plant doesn't have enough energy during the fruit field period the first thing that will happen is it will set the terminal bud on the nude shoot new shoot growth and say oh okay I'm not going to keep growing this

new shoot wood instead I'm going to put all my energy into fruit so we can look at the the type of bud that is existing on the New shoots and see whether at the very tip of that shoot we have a terminal bud or not and our goal is to not set the terminal bud until after harvest until after the fruit filled period is complete because that now is an indicator that we have had enough energy and abundance of energy to completely fill fruit and also to maintain new chute growth throughout that entire fruit fill

period on a corn crop something else that is important to look At and to think about this is just something I'll throw out there for some of you to to research and do a bit more homework on timing of black layer development so after a corn seed pollinates and we get to the grain and the kernel filled period there are lots of sugars that are moving into each of these kernels and there is a layer of cells right at the bottom of the kernel that connect the kernel to the cob whose primary function as we

understand it Today is to transport sugars and nutrients from the plant into the kernel so they begin transporting very large quantities of sugars during the Greenville period then at some point those cells begin collapsing that layer of cells at the bottom the kernel begins collapsing for a number of reasons this is actually related to the node plugging that we can see on stalks where we had the development of brace roots so this can actually be because the of Translocation of toxins in the plant such as the incorrect forms of iron the presence of aluminum also

hydrocarbon compounds such as herbicide and pesticide residues in the soil profile can all cause cell death in this zone and there and there are other contributing factors physiological factors that can contribute this as well but what happens eventual is that we have this layer of cells that is responsible for carbohydrate Transport that collapses and dies and that cell collapse is what is referred to as the black layer so when that black layer occurs it's no longer possible to transport nutrients and you transport sugars into the kernel so you are no longer filling kernels for the

rest of the growing period the longer you can delay that black layer from happening the greater and impact the more sugars you can move into kernels the larger the kernels are going to become the greater Tessellate you're going to have the higher protein content the higher quality you're going to have and ultimately higher yields and so the development of black layer is directly there's obviously a lot of pieces that tie into it I mentioned some of them earlier but it's also related to nitrogen management and the presence of strong photosynthesis and very importantly it's also

related to the presence of calcium and trace minerals Because obviously when you have strong calcium out of a generous supply of cows and reformed strong cell membranes and trace minerals to support the internal structures of that cell that is going to be a lot longer period until that black bear develops until those cells collapse one of my mentors and colleagues actually mentioned that every day that we can prevent black lay air from occurring we will achieve a minimum of an additional 5 bushel per acre yield Game and in his experience his observation he was successful

in delaying the development of black layer anywhere from 13 to 20 days by managing nutrition so you think about delaying that by 20 days with a 5 bushel per acre yield gain that's a tremendous tremendous yield gain that can happen by understanding what is happening at this at this kernel development period so one final thought is that the this visual observation and trying to reset the Expectation of what is normal is a very necessary step and very powerful tool but I would still strongly encourage you to actually use SAP analysis to validate your observations in

the field and all so to give you an advantage because with SAP analysis you can actually see and observe these nutrient balances before they show up visually and before they are giving you an impact on crop development so I'd like I'd love to ask You the question when you look at these two pictures did this Apple these apple leaves what do you see what are you observing you can see differences in leaf width to length ratio we can see that on both these images they have like more lightly colored veins the leaves on the right

excuse me the leaves on the left tend to have from what I can see it seems that they have more sharp definition of the leaf edges more clear serrations and we can see that the apple That's present in top left center of the left leaf has a pollination challenge because of the fruit shape there's many things that we can look at and can see when we're looking at these leaves in the field so if you have any questions or you'd love to have a second opinion on what you're observing on your crop we have some

awesome technology today with smartphones you can walk into the field you can take pictures or you can be on a video live feel free to reach out to the AEA team and we're happy to share our thoughts on what you're observing in what you're seeing and give you some input on how we would manage it on what we see happening and going on I also invite you to if you haven't let yet you're really missing out listen to the regenerative agriculture podcast that I began hosting a couple of months ago which you can find the

regenerative agriculture podcast com I'm having a lot of fun with the podcast Literally every time that I begin a conversation with a new guest I I feel like a kid in a candy store or unwrap someone unwrapping a gift because we've we've had these Inc we've had these incredible guests on the podcast who have so much knowledge and wisdom to share and I never know where the conversation is going to go and what's what's going to come about but in every single conversation so far there have been these incredible insights that Guests have shared that

people have shared and we've received really great feedback lots of people are telling us they're really enjoying the podcast so if you haven't listened to the podcast yet I would really encourage you to look it up its present on iTunes that's also on YouTube it's on Google Play you can find the podcast in many different places but look at that and listen to what some of our guests had to say you'll be amazed at the insights and the Wisdom that they've had to share I've personally enjoyed it tremendously and I'm certain that you will as

well so thank you very much for being here for the webinar I'm going to stop the screen share and switch to any questions that you might have so this is your moment if you have any questions please type them in down below in the Q&A box and I'd love to be happy to respond to those we have one question that has popped through Dara and pets are asked the Question on tissue on a tissue analysis and/or a soil analysis are there important trace minerals that are not usually tested for or presented which are important further

there are many different optimal mineral levels that seem to exist how should we navigate that aspect of testing Darrin this is this is an awesome question and so a couple of questions so first of all trace minerals which are important that are not usually tested Those that are usually tested on many of the analysis that I see would be boron zinc manganese copper and and iron so boron zinc manganese and copper iron those are the six that seemed to be commonly tested and those are all very important let's say very briefly is this is a

bit of a side topic but let's just say that iron levels are almost universally going to show as being a surplus or excessive on soils and also generally on tissue and forage analysis When in reality the crops are actually deficient because the iron is in the improper form esteem incorrect oxidation state and to some degree this can also hold true of manganese particularly manganese on a soil analysis you'll often see soils that are high in manganese and Crump's 3015 manganese on the same soils so in addition to those standard trace minerals that are analyzed others

I mean there are now there's now twenty some other in total I Think that I recognize is being beneficial or useful for plant development but the the others that I would say are critical are very important that are known to have a substantial impact on plant health and quality our cobalt and nickel and selenium silicon is not particularly a trace mineral that also needs to be added to this list so say Coco selenium molybdenum molybdenum in fact is probably more important than selenium And nickel and there is one more at the fringe of my mind

I already talked about silicon those are those are the major ones so the reality is that cobalt and molybdenum needs to be addressed on every crop it's they're they're both very important enzyme cofactors we see substantial yield and quality responses when we use them and we manage that when we manage them well those are those by the way those are tests at cobalt and molybdenum are Tested on a self-analysis so they don't show up on tissue and soil unless you specifically asked for them but they do show up on the sap analysis selenium levels and

nickel levels and the other one that it was that I couldn't think of at the moment was iodine there are some soils in western part of North America that do have adequate levels of selenium and from a geological perspective and if you're in those areas you will know that but or can certainly find that Information quite readily online molybdenum and iodine it's very safe to say are practically universally deficient they are not present in many of our agricultural soils anymore so those you can add very safely and get a very nice crop response so to

your second question Darren there are many different optimal mineral levels how do we navigate that aspect of testing the key is you have to understand the extraction methods so you have melech Three extraction versus ammonium acetate extraction sure those seem to be the two predominant methods or types of soil extraction and they they will report very different desired values and very different levels so that that's getting into the details of that is kind of beyond the scope of this discussion but I am working on we are working on actually creating an online course for evaluating

soil analysis reports and making recommendations and we're going To be talking about all those pieces and that's another course that is going to be released in the next couple of months Kenneth Peters question how do you get shoots to not develop a terminal bud during the growing season so Kenneth the the key to constantly maintaining vegetative growth throughout the growing season is to have a tree or plant that has a surplus of energy throughout the entire fruit fill period so if the if the tree has so much energy that it can Move all the energy

into fruit and still have enough energy for vegetative growth then you won't set terminal bud so the key to accomplishing that of course is to have very good photosynthesis and an abundance of sugar production during the photosynthesis process so when you have that abundant photosynthetic energy you won't get that terminal bud being set during the fruit fill period that's a really great question Darren Greenfield asked the question You mentioned cobalt as a deficiency how does that show up I don't really answer that question I don't know how COBOL obviously there can be very severe couple

deficiencies that I'm sure would show up some way I would suggest that based on our experience and observations so far Oh points about cobalt first of all 90% of the cobalt that's present in a plant is present in the root system or maybe it's 80% I forget the exact percentage is Very high the great majority of COBOL that's present is present in the root system and because of that reason and the reason it's in the root system is because cobalt is present in the growing root tips where it is a key enzyme cofactor that is

needed for cytokinins synthesis so what you'll see happen as an expression of low levels of cobalt is a crop that never has root system dominance it never has cytokine and dominance because there isn't adequate Cobalt present in the root system to form that really strong reproductive energy that is needed to have I yielding crops that's kind of the best answer that I have at the moment and I'm sure there probably is a better answer than that I just don't know what it is right now Anthony Anthony Granatelli you asked the question what about Minh a

diem this is this is where we get into some of the fun stuff the answer is there are I don't have an Exact count right now but greater than 20 if I'm not mistaken trace minerals that have been identified as being beneficial for plant development they include vanadium lanthanum ruthenium silver tin iodine there's quite an exhaustive list I forget exactly what are on the list right now but there are many of these trace minerals that are present that are beneficial because they are needed as enzyme cofactors for certain parts of The plants metabolic machinery that's

a great question faith reused ask the question hi faith is leaf curl and rolling generally a copper deficiency is the same for annuals and perennials I would say the answer there is no in fact I would never diagnose a leaf currently rolling as a copper deficiency perhaps there's something that I'm not aware of but in in general we see leaf curling when the outside edges of the leaf curl upwards That is often an expression of high temperatures and often shouldn't say often yeah I think it's generally associated also with having elevated levels of potassium and

lower levels of manganese in combination with high temperatures so high temperatures and of course the the moisture stress that high temperatures produces so it's related to water as well so that this is a very relatively common symptom that we see in high tunnels and Greenhouses and tomato and pepper production etc and in high-temperature environments so I'm the the key to managing it of course is there's not one single nutrient that I would point to what we just observed in general is that when we bring about a better nutritional balance overall and the plants become healthier

you start getting higher levels of lipid formation and the plants begin using water differently you when own plants are really high in energy the Photosynthesis versus respiration cycle switches it changes it's no longer the same you have more efficient photosynthesis and you have less respiration happening and as the plant begins moving water differently you have less respiration that leaf curl effect tends to fade and disappear and I can't point to any one specific nutrient and say you address manganese you address copper and it's going to go away it's it's a bit more complex than that

and That there isn't a single element that I could point to that will change that but just general overall plant health will shift that leaf curling effect it's a very good question Darren asked the question again what is your experience using c90 as a source of trace minerals and would you recommend the use of it the short answer is no I wouldn't recommend c90 any more than I would recommend Redman salt or another type of rock salt as a trace mineral source now Using ocean minerals but let me let me add that there are situations

we're the addition of salt can be useful and valuable if you're growing forages if you're growing some crops adding a soil a very small soil application or foliar application in the neighborhood of a couple pounds per acre of sodium chloride rock salt or ocean salt can add an ec effect in electrical conductivity so they can because there's such a strong electrolyte that can increase the Electrical conductivity of the soil and give you a very nice growth response so for plants that have the capacity to use sodium in very small amounts that can be a useful

place to use it's if you're growing alfalfa or pasture forages or some of the c4 pathway plants corn for example and barley are two that can benefit from very slight amounts of sodium so you can produce a crop response with a very small amount of a salt application and I'm talking soil Applications over an entire year of ten to fifteen pounds maybe as much as twenty to twenty-five pounds maximum per acre before you go above that you're gonna start having a detrimental effect on soil biology and carbon sequestration even though you might get a greater

crop response it's like it's the equivalent of applying a salt fertilizer you we know the damaging effects of excessive electrolytes and salt fertilizers in the soil and salt is exactly the same thing So it can be useful in limited quantities the right place at the right time as a trace mineral source the idea is that it has this broad array at ninety plus trace minerals that are present in the ocean and yes they do however in our experience and observation those are not the trace minerals the trace minerals that are there are not present in

adequate quantities to address the trace mineral deficiencies that are causing the most Hidden hunger and the most crop loss we need to address manganese and molybdenum and cobalt and zinc and copper in substantial quantities we're talking grams or ounces per acre of each of these individual trace minerals that need to be applied to address hidden hunger and those those trace minerals and those volumes simply aren't present in the ocean minerals so they're a useful tool and they have their place but I don't consider them as being a Source of the trace minerals that are going

to needed to address plant nutritional requirements Anthony asks Anthony you've asked a couple of questions here I've noticed that micro PAC doesn't have iron in it and what is the thinking behind leaving this out um the the reason there's just simply a legacy reason that micro PAC doesn't have iron in it micro PAC was one of the products that was formulated before we started using SAP analysis before we Start realizing the widespread iron deficiencies that existed that weren't showing up on tissue analysis and soul analysis and many certifier as many organic certifiers didn't want to

allow the use of a product that contain iron because it wasn't showing up as a quote/unquote documented deficiency so if you want to use a iron in organic situation you need to use sap analysis because a soil analysis and a tissue analysis will always show excessive iron When in fact the plant is always deficient and when you do a SAP analysis that deficiency shows up very starkly and very in a very pronounced fashion and the crop will benefit tremendously from an iron application so for the certification and regulatory reasons micro pack doesn't have iron in

it so that it can be added on an as-needed basis for organic growers that was the original reason for leaving it out I asked a follow-up question when one Sees leaf and tip burn what are the possible causes of this besides low potassium or high sodium so in essence when you have tip burn or leaf burn around the edges the outside edge of the leaf a simple way of saying that is to say that or the all-encompassing way of saying is to say that you have leaves that have very high electrical conductivity and that high

electrical conductivity can be caused by any of the nutrients which are electrolytes which Are sodium or potassium are the two principal elements but that so high high levels of sodium high levels of potassium high levels of chloride those are the three most common that I would most beware my thoughts would first go in in looking for leaf and tip burn but it can also be produced by elevated levels of boron boron is not an electrolyte but as I mentioned earlier it will move nutrients out to the edges very aggressively and so in that sense It

can produce a leaf burn effect other nutrients which are electrolytes would be magnesium and nitrates although it's not common for those to produce a leaf edge burning effect they would have to be an extraordinarily high concentrations to have that effect we've got one last question here Darren asked the question if if tissue analysis reveals generally low trace minerals is it better to apply a balanced trace mineral product such as micro pack or Rather address each individually in trying to achieve optimal levels of each mineral question Darren it depends on the situation and the variables that

come to mind actually before I talk about that I want to speak about one background or a couple of background possibilities many soils contain many of the trace minerals that we are deficient in in a relatively generous supply manganese and iron I Mean four percent of the Earth's crust is iron why would anyone be iron deficient most soils in North America will contain upwards of 200 pounds of manganese in the top six inches higher so many crops manganese sufficient the reason this is happening for some of these trace minerals is not because they're not president

masalas geological profile but because of cultural management practices that have resulted in a certain microbial profile that is No longer releasing these nutrients and making them available for the crop to absorb we've observed a number of times on fruit production vegetable production when we have the capacity to work very closely with the soil we can actually produce a tremendous trace mineral response sometimes without applying the truck-based minerals that you might expect so for example on many food and vegetable crops when we begin supplementing and spoon-feeding Rejuvenate and calcium through the irrigation system we get this

tremendous trace mineral uptake response because all of a sudden the biology and the soil profile has the fuel that it needs to release locked-up trace minerals and make them available to plant and similarly there is also an effect that when one trace mineral is deficient and you address that trace mineral in some cases not always but in some cases you you get this tremendous effect where Now all of a sudden everything else increases so I've I've lost track of the number of times where we have a crop where zinc is low iron is low manganese

is low copper is low cobalt is low and of the various minerals that are the most efficient manganese is the most severe and so we put on very slight applications of iron and copper all these various trace metals with a heavy application of manganese the manganese needle moves Very quickly and the iron and the other trace minerals move a little bit but then two weeks later four weeks later all of a sudden zinc and manganese and iron and copper and everything else across the board jumps tremendously there's this tremendous plant response even though we didn't

apply any in fact in some cases in many cases I've observed this where there was no application of trace minerals at all if we address just manganese that was the Most severe and we got this jump kind of across the board and there is there's obviously a lot of synergistic effects happening here in this very intricate web of nutrient interactions and biological interactions that we don't fully understand or even know much about really where you can when you address some of the most severe deficiencies it can provide the nutrient source the energy source that biology

needs that plants need to actually produce this Tremendous cascade effect so with with that background with that context I would say that the the greatest crop responses that I've observed have always happened when we used individual trace minerals rather than a blend using micro Pike or using a blend can be very it can be easy to use there certainly is an ease of use factor but in general when we address what the plants specific needs are is defined by a SAP analysis that is When we get the greatest crop response irregardless of whether we're growing

a crop in in a greenhouse in substrate outdoors and top soil perennial plants annual plants kind of across the board will get the greatest crop responses when we use individuals I want to thank all of you those are the last questions that have come through thank you to each one of you for attending the webinar I hope that you found it valuable and useful and once we post this on YouTube Feel free to share it with your friends please listen to the podcast and if you enjoy the podcast please leave a review for us on

iTunes that helps us reach a more mainstream agriculture audience which I think will find this information very useful and valuable so thank you for joining have a wonderful evening and we'll talk to you soon thanks bye