My Regenerative Conversion

On a spring day in 2019, I witnessed a miracle more shocking than if I had seen Lazarus rise from the dead. Yes, friends, on that day I witnessed a scab-free McIntosh tree in the midst of an incredibly rainy spring. Not only that, it was an organic scab-free McIntosh tree.

For those of you for whom this horticultural miracle fails to inspire awe, allow me to explain. Apple scab is a fungal disease that makes black blotches on apple leaves and fruit. Its spores are activated and spread by rain. In mild cases, scab is an aesthetic nuisance (nobody likes blotchy apples), but if left unchecked it can contort and crack the apple, causing it to rot on the tree, and ruining a crop. McIntosh trees are especially susceptible to scab.

In the Upper Midwest, organic apple-growing is generally considered a death wish for orchards, given the climatic conditions that promote diseases like apple scab. Once, curious about going organic, I interviewed an organic orchardist in Minnesota, and after lamenting his numerous travails for a few hours, he basically told me, "please, for the love of God, don't do it."

During the spring when I witnessed the miracle Macs, the Macs at the orchard where I was working were riddled with scab, in spite of all the fungicides our responsible management program dared to spray. Meanwhile, the miracle orchard in question, Grandview Orchard in Antigo, WI, had had over an inch more rain than we had. And yet, no scab. On a Mac. With no fungicides.

It wasn’t just me that was astonished. Some of the know-it-all elders of the organic movement almost seemed angry when the orchardist, Lisa, a relative neophyte, walked us over to the trees to show us her accomplishment.

Her secret? Cobalt. A mineral micronutrient that, in concentrations on the order of a few parts per million, allows the plant to develop its own defensive resistance to the scab microorganism.

I was awestruck not only by the simplicity of the answer but by the fact that not a single person I knew in the apple-growing world was aware of this simple answer, and were instead pursuing far more complicated answers (e.g. N-Trichloromethylthio-4-cyclohexene-1,2-dicarboximide) with far worse results. Had I not scoured every leaf on that tree without finding a single scab lesion, I wouldn't have believed it possible.

Caravaggio, “Doubting Johnny Probing the McIntosh leaves." c. 1601-1602.

Lisa was beyond organic. She was spraying no pesticides whatsoever: strictly mineral nutrients and probiotic microbes. She was using systems developed by a fellow named John Kempf. Before I left, Lisa encouraged me to sign up for an upcoming 2-day course he was teaching. I did so immediately.

John Kempf is self-taught, about my age, and by far the smartest person I have ever heard talk about agriculture. What I learned in those two days altered the trajectory of my life. Here is the concise formula for performing a miracle. Ready?

1. Healthy plants have the ability to resist all pests and diseases--insects, fungi, and viruses.

2. A plant's health can be determined empirically by measuring the concentration of mineral nutrients in the plant's sap.

3. The mineral balance of a plant can be altered within minutes or hours by foliar sprays—applying mineral dilutions directly onto the plant's leaves, where they are absorbed immediately into its sap.

4. An average plant only photosynthesizes at 20% of its genetic capacity. Healthy plants can photosynthesize at up to 60% of their genetic capacity (higher levels are only possible within controlled laboratory environments). That means a healthy plant produces 3x as much sugar as an average plant.

5. A plant feeds its excess sugar into the soil via root exudates, which stimulate the soil microbial community. As much as a quarter of the plant’s total sugar production may be donated in this manner. The soil microbes return the favor by synthesizing complex compounds which the plant is unable to create for itself.

6. These complex compounds—think antioxidants, flavonoids, etc.—make the plant undigestible to insects and fungi, increase the flavor of the produce, and boost the health of humans that eat it.

7. This creates a feedback loop--plant, soil, and human health all improve together.

8. 🤯

Standard organic theory holds that healthy soil grows healthy plants. Kempf turns this on its head: he believes that healthy plants grow healthy soil, and the most efficient way to boost the health of the entire system is by focusing on plants. He's at the forefront of the regenerative agriculture movement, which is the idea of increasing soil health through farming.

Some of Kempf’s stories illustrate the miracle rather more shickingly than my humble McIntosh tree. He tells of a potato field that was covered with dead potato beetles—it looked as if a bomb had gone off. In a sense, it had. The potato plants were so healthy they could produce two chemical compounds that, when combined in the beetles’ stomachs, literally exploded. No more pests.

It's likely that none of us have ever seen a plant that meets these standards of health. In the U.S., our soils have been subject to 3+ centuries of extractive, degrading agriculture. Even the seemingly pristine woodlands where I live in Vermont have been clearcut 6 times since colonization, with disastrous results on soil health. These denuded soils simply can't grow plants with the requisite health to resist disease.

Here's a quantitative example of how far short of ideal health we currently are: a plant's health can be roughly gauged by measuring the brix, or sucrose content, of its sap. A tomato's brix can range from 4 (terrible) to 12 (excellent). I just took a course with Nigel Palmer, who has been practicing these methods for over a decade. The best tomato he has ever grown was a 7. He said the flavor was unbelievable. He has also measured grocery store tomatoes—they average 3 brix. Can you imagine what a 12 would taste like?

Sometimes people who don’t totally get it ask about controlling specific pests: "what about powdery mildew?" "how do you manage aphids?" The key point of this system is that a grower doesn't have to worry about specific pests, because a healthy plant can resist everything.

I think people have a hard time understanding this because it's both so simple and so revolutionary. On the one hand, it makes perfect intuitive sense: a healthy plant should be, well, healthy. But on the other hand, it runs counter to established practice: that plants are helpless beings and waging war on pests is the only way to protect them.

If one follows Kempf’s principles to their logical conclusion, it generates many interesting questions about diseases that are running rampant today. If a healthy apple tree can resist apple scab, could healthy ashes resist Emerald Ash Borer? Could healthy humans fed by those apples resist the flu? Or even cancer?

Again, our standards of plant (and human) health are so far short of the mark, that these thoughts seem to exist purely in the realm of fantasy. But the success stories show that all this could be possible.

Now, I should insert an important caveat: I am at the very beginning of my regenerative journey and have yet to enact any of the miracles I am chronicling. But the things I have witnessed make me shout my enthusiasm from the mountaintop. Thanks for being there to hear it.

This year, with a garden of my own, I’ll be able to start putting these principles into practice. My next-door neighbor is letting me experiment on his dozen bug-ridden apple trees. I’m hoping to convince a blueberry-growing neighbor to do the same. Our entire garden will get a weekly nutritional spray. A friend is saving her shrimp shells for me, which are high in cobalt, that miraculous scab-eradicating mineral. A bucket of compost tea is bubbling away in the shower at this very moment, ready to introduce beneficial microbes into our ecosystem.

Regeneration is at work.