In this episode of the Ag Future podcast, David Montgomery, a MacArthur Fellow and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, discusses how soil health can affect human health and the environment. David, the co-author of the books "The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health" and "What Your Food Ate," examines how regenerative farming practices can rebuild and maintain healthy soils. Join us as we dig into the world of soil and explore its vital role in agriculture and human health.

The following is an edited transcript of the Ag Future podcast episode with David Montgomery hosted by Tom Martin. Click below to hear the full audio or listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts.

Tom:            Welcome to Ag Future, presented by Alltech. Join us from the 2022 Alltech ONE Conference as we explore opportunities within agri-food, business and beyond.

                     People, plants, food, health (and) the environment (are) all connected in some way or another, and paying close attention to those connections is our guest for this episode in the Alltech Ag Future podcast series.

                     I'm Tom Martin, and with me is David Montgomery, a MacArthur Fellow and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington. He is an internationally recognized geologist who studies the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies. His work has been featured in documentary films, on network and cable news, and on a wide variety of TV and radio programs, among them NOVA, PBS NewsHour, Fox and Friends, and NPR’s “All Things Considered”.

                     David is the co-author, with his wife Anne, of “The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health,” a book that examines our tangled relationship with the microbial world through the lens of agriculture and medicine. Their latest collaboration, “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal the Land and Reclaim Your Health,” explores connections between soil health and human health. David is here to help us sort out our tangled relationship with microbes, plants, food, health and the environment. Welcome to Ag Future, David.

David:           Well, thank you. It's pleasure to be here.

Tom:            David, you have dirt on your hands. In fact, you have literally written the book on the subject. It's titled “Dirt”. Tell us about that thing that is most vital to life: soil.

David:           I’m a geologist, so, by training, I was taught to look past the soil to the rocks underneath. But in the last 15 years, I've really come around to seeing that soil is one of our most valuable — and least-valued — resources, planetarily. We rely on fertile soil to feed ourselves. Civilization after civilization has been built on fertile land. The societies in the past that have degraded their land to the point that (it) impacted their agricultural productivity? Those are the ones that did not last.

                     We've been writing about soil and its importance for civilization health, and now, (we’re) looking at the health of us (humans) as individuals. It's something we should all pay a lot more attention to and care more about, because just like we have health — and for good or bad — the soil can be healthy or unhealthy as well. Most of us don't think about it that way. We tend to take soil for granted and treat it like dirt.

Tom:            There's a great Kentuckian, the poet and writer Wendell Berry, who has commented many times that when we scrape away topsoil, we're actually scraping away millennia of development there. I don't think we do appreciate what's at loss when we do that.

David:           Yeah, when you think about how long it takes nature to form fertile soil, you're talking centuries to millennia to form an inch, a simple inch. When you look at how fast topsoil can erode under conventional agricultural practices — tillage, primarily, because that accelerates erosion by water (or) by wind — we can lose that same inch in decades. That imbalance — something that we can lose in decades but that takes centuries to rebuild — is something that means that we're losing it, slowly but surely. That's been the story of society after society around the world. But we don't have to do that. We can actually turn it around and rebuild healthy, fertile soils, and do it remarkably fast. It just takes a different style and way of farming.

Tom:            I think we think of it as inanimate, but isn't it what's in that soil — and, to that point, what lives in that soil — that determines not only the health of a medium that plants grow in but, also, our own human health?

David:           Yeah, and the health of our crops and the health of our livestock, that — you can trace connections from soil life and its abundance, the community composition of it, its health, if you will, right on through to human health. That's what we do in “What Your Food Ate,” the new book (I co-authored), and it turns out that the life in the soil — the whole subterranean ecological system of microbes, bacteria and fungi, and worms and little arthropods, and all that life in the soil — is really important for cycling nutrients, getting them out of the mineral particles that are in rocks and getting them into the crops so that they can get into our livestock and into us.

                     That life in the soil also has a long history of partnerships, of symbiotic relationships with plants, that we kind of neglected and forgot about in our modernization of agriculture in the 20th century. We paid a lot of attention to physics and chemistry — which, of course, are very important in terms of soil health, soil fertility and crop production. But biology is the part that is now coming back into the forefront of thinking about, “Well, how do we not only maintain high crop yields today, but how do we keep doing it into the future?” Because that simple story is that our conventional mix of agricultural practices today has been degrading land for a long time, and we've been using agrichemicals to sort of cover that up and compensate for it. But to maintain it over the long run, biology is really the basis for a solid foundation for sustainable agriculture.

Tom:            How would you define regenerative agriculture, and how does it compare to traditional and organic farming?

David:           Yeah, there's a lot of arguments today about how we should define what's labeled today as “regenerative agriculture”. I consider it (to be defined as) farming practices that build and enhance the fertility of the soil as a consequence of farming. I like that simple definition primarily because, in looking back at the history of past societies in writing “Dirt,” the common element, in terms of societies that “went out of business,” shall we say, is that they degraded their land through their farming practices. We can't afford to do that at a global scale today. We need to regenerate soil fertility, rebuild soil fertility. There's lots of different ways to do it.

                     When you take the definition I just offered, it's a fairly broad-tent, broad-umbrella kind of a view of it. In relation to conventional and organic farming, there's ways to do both regeneratively, but to do conventional farming, generally, one has to so greatly reduce the reliance on agrichemical inputs and synthetic fertilizers as to be moving really close to organic farming. What organic farming needs to do to go regenerative is to disturb the soil less and do less tillage. There's sort of multiple paths, in my view, for getting to regenerative (agriculture), but they're both dependent on prioritizing building the health of the soil, which means that there's particular ways of doing things that would work in those two different systems.

                     The combination of practices that appears to work really well is to minimize disturbance of the soil, to keep living plants growing in the soil at all times — and that translates into cover crops — and to grow a diversity of crops. They're not simple two-crop rotations, but one can get that diversity in either through the cash crops or through cover crops. There are different ways to get at that same idea of trying to build soil fertility and build soil health as a consequence of farming. But when you look at it at that simple level, it would be a real sea change if that was sort of the underlying objective in agriculture, as opposed to maximizing yields over the short term, which is where we've pretty much gone for last 80 years.

Tom:            Why is that diversity of crops important?

David:           Yeah. When you think about those three practices, the “minimize disturbance” is important, because if you're plowing up mycorrhizal fungi, for example, you're breaking their connections and their life that actually are central to getting nutrients delivered from the soil into the plants. If you look at cover crops, they're essentially feeding that microbial community for exuding carbon-based substances into the soil that those microbes eat and rely on and provide benefits to the plants in return.

                     That third piece, the diversity, I like to think of in terms of, “How functional would a baseball team be if it was made of all catchers or all pitchers?” It's just not going to do the same thing, as a team, that a fully outfitted team of all-stars could do, for example. When you look at soil life, it's kind of similar. Different plants will exude different compounds to recruit different microbes, and a community of microbes in the soil can actually do more for the next crop or sequences of crops for building health. They work better as a team.

                     It's — the diversity really comes in in terms of a diverse suite of plants growing above-ground, (and that diversity) is going to be reflected in a diverse suite of organisms below-ground. And that minimally disturbed, well-fed diversity of soil microorganisms is the recipe that seems to work for suppressing pathogens, for enhancing the benefits that flow to crops (and) maintaining yields with lower inputs. That simple combination can work really well. There are opportunities to enhance that through intelligently managed livestock grazing, for example, but it's just not the way we intended to do and intended to teach it for the last 100 years.

Tom:            Well, what can the regenerative approach to farming do to support efforts to deal with climate change?

David:           The regenerative farms that I've visited around the world that have been very successful at rebuilding the health and fertility of their soil — and what my wife did to our garden at home — and turning it into a very fertile land is all reflected in the color of the soil, going from sort of a degraded khaki color with very little organic matter to a rich dark or black color, and that difference is due to carbon being integrated in the soil organic matter and that building up in the soil. That carbon all came from the atmosphere.

                     I mean, there's a very, very powerful way to take carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it, if only for the short term, depending on where it goes, and that's known as photosynthesis. Plants grab carbon from the atmosphere, build biomass out of them, and eventually, some of that gets into the soil. And the darkening of soil under regenerative agriculture can basically keep that carbon in the ground, put more of it in the ground than had been there before. Much of it will cycle. It doesn't necessarily stay there all the time. But if you have more of it coming in and less of it going out, you can build it up to it, and that's what's reflected in the darkening colors of regenerative agriculture.

There's lots of arguments today about how much carbon could be put in the world's cropland soils as a result of regenerative agriculture. I think the jury's out still in terms of the number that one might point to as, “Oh, you could do this much.” There's a lot of variables involved, and the answer is probably not the same (for everyone) depending on where you are in the world, and sort of integrating that becomes horribly complex. But the short answer is: A lot. You could probably (sequester) on the order of maybe a quarter of the world's fossil fuel emissions fairly reasonably if a lot of farmers adopted these regenerative practices. That may not sound like solving the climate problem — and it won't at those kinds of numbers — but it's a big down payment on doing so.

                     I think that what we might want to focus on, in addition to the carbon going into soils, are all the other benefits that can flow from increasing the carbon in soils and increasing soil organic matter. We can maintain the productivity of our land. We can enhance the water storage capacity of our soils and the ability of water to infiltrate, to sink down into the soil, and so not to run off over the surface. That translates into crop resilience to droughts and climate change.

                     The latest thing that we talk about in “What Your Food Ate,” the new book (that I co-authored), is looking at what increased soil organic matter and soil health can do to the traditional quality of food. We did a bit of a study around the U.S. comparing regenerative farms to conventional farms, and we found that not only could the soil organic matter content be, on average, roughly doubled in the uppermost part in the topsoil, but it also affected the nutritional profile of foods, increasing the mineral composition of certain micronutrients and certain crops but also increasing the vitamin content, again, in certain crops and, almost across the board, increasing the phytochemical content.

                     What are phytochemicals? Those are plant-made compounds — literally what the name says — but those are things that have anti-inflammatory, antioxidant effects when they then get into our body, and our microbiome in our gut diet helps us digest them and their metabolites. What they turn those compounds into (can) have demonstrated medical effects in terms of reducing many of the root causes of what we now know of as an epidemic of modern chronic diseases. There's a lot of ancillary benefits to improving the health of our soil, one of which — and a very important one of which — is the climate connection, but there's a lot of other ones that go along with it.

Tom:            Drought is becoming severe in many parts of the world, including the American West. How can soil be made to resist a loss of moisture?

David:           Well, there are two ways to make soils resist loss of moisture. One is to get more moisture in the ground in the first place, and the other is to essentially keep it there. Regenerative farming can help with both in the sense that if we're tilling land regularly, if we're plowing it all the time, you're breaking up the structure of the soil, and if you think of soil as having conduits through which the rain that falls on the surface sinks down into the ground to get to the roots of plants. But what happens when you break up those moisture highways? You create a crust at the surface. I've been in many fields that are so crusty after just a little bit of a rain. It's kind of like if you take a bag of flour and put it out in the rain. What happens? All the flour at the bottom of that bag doesn't get wet. The stuff at the top crusts over, and then, essentially, water would run off over the top of that.

                     Soil is very similar once it's been powdered by tillage. Regenerative farming can get more water down into the soil. If you always have the land just covered with a mulch, it's better at keeping the moisture in the soil. (I’ve seen) figures that, if I can remember them properly, (say) that for about every 1% increase in soil organic matter, you can store like 20,000 acre — (or) feet of water in an acre for that increase. So organic matter-rich soil, healthier, more fertile soil can essentially recruit more water — can capture more water, is a better way to put it — from precipitation, but it can also keep it there better in ways that it actually gets to the crop. That's what translates into crop resilience to drought.

Tom:            You touched earlier on carbon-capture sequestration. What advances are being made in the science of pulling carbon from the atmosphere and returning it to the soil?

David:           Well, that combination of principles: If you combine no-till with cover crops and a diversity of crops, it’s a pretty good recipe for feeding the microbes in the soil, whose dead bodies then become the soil organic matter that can turn a khaki color into a rich dark-chocolate color. There's lots of ways to do that in terms of the specific practices, but there are general principles of minimizing disturbance, keeping living plants growing in them, and recruiting a diversity of microbes, which means growing a diversity of crops. (That) is a recipe that's proven and seems to work pretty well.

                     It's not enough to just go no-till. The studies are kind of one way or the other: It can increase or decrease soil organic matter depending on the location. Cover crops tend to help increase it, but where people (have) found the biggest increases are if you do all three together. That makes a lot of sense because that's essentially how you cultivate a beneficial community of microbes in the soil. If you're basically harvesting their bodies to build the soil organic matter, you want a thriving, abundant community of life in the soil.

                     There are different ways to do that. There's a lot of arguments over how to measure it and how to think about how much to keep there (and) for how long. There's plenty of arguments, still, about that. But I think we kind of know the broad outlines of what we might think of as a new farming system that could help build soil organic matter to the (greatest) extent possible in different areas. In “Growing a Revolution,” a book that I wrote between (writing) “The Hidden Half of Nature” and “What Your Food Ate,” I visited farmers around the world who shared their methods for building soil organic matter that were very different in Ghana from Costa Rica or the United States, but they all follow those three simple principles I mentioned.

Tom:            Can regenerative farming in a farming community make a difference to that community’s local economy?

David:           That was one of the big questions that I (asked myself as I) went into writing the last couple books on (farming). What I found was — the short answer is yes. The longer answer is (that) what I found is that the farms that had been very successful at rebuilding their soil, at cultivating fertile soil and putting a lot of organic matter back into it, had been able to greatly reduce their use of synthetic fertilizers. Why? Because they didn't need so much of them. They greatly reduced their use of pesticides. Why? Because they didn't need so much of them, and they burned less diesel. Why? Well, if they're not plowing, if no-till is that first piece of the puzzle, then they're driving tractors across your fields roughly half (of) the time. If you translate that into the actual operating costs of a farm, those three things — fertilizer, pesticides and diesel — are three of the big-ticket items for modern farms in the developed world.

                     If one can basically — by rebuilding the fertility of the soil, and (if you) do it as a productive farm and cut down your input costs, if you're harvesting the same amount or comparable amounts and you're spending less to do it, it's a recipe for a better bottom line for the farmer. That's what started (to) turn me into an optimist on the issue of whether we could really turn around the state of the world (through) farmland soils, because a system that works for farmers is one that may, itself, be sustainable in terms of agricultural economies.

                     I've visited a lot of farms across North America in the last 10 years, thinking about these issues and writing about them. There's an awful lot of small towns with boarded-up main streets, and it's kind of a side effect of going from small farms to really big farms. One of the things that regenerative agriculture can do is help make smaller farms more profitable. Of course, it can make large farms more profitable as well, but there's different methods and technologies and equipment that one needs based on that. But I view farming practices that can rebuild the health and fertility of the land as, actually, a very solid foundation for trying to rebuild and enhance the economic situation of rural regions, not just in the developed world but all around the world.

Tom:            We're very busy creatures, we humans. It seems to make sense to, at least once in a while, slow down and think about that — think about how we fit into the whole food-chain picture. Do you find that, as a rule, we don't do that as often as we ought to, if ever?

David:           Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. I mean, many of us in the Western world think about food as something we grab out of the grocery store. We don’t try to trace it back to thinking about how it was grown, where it was grown, what it means for the people who are growing it along the chain. Yet one of the things that has really come into great focus for me in writing “What Your Food Ate” was (the fact that) how we grow our food actually ends up mattering to our own individual health.

                     I think that may actually help us, as individuals, put more focus on thinking about the path that our food took, from field (or) farm to fork, and thinking about that. Because the kinds of things that we've been able to see that farming practices can influence are things like the mineral micronutrient content of our food, the vitamin content, the phytochemical content, the polyphenols, the antioxidants and anti-inflammatories in fruits and vegetables, in particular, but also in even things like grains, and also in terms of the fat composition of our meat and dairy products.

                     It turns out that it matters what our food ate, for (that impacts) what is in that food and what that, then, does when it gets into our bodies. It's less about, really, sort of preventing infectious diseases. I mean, modern medicine has become really good at preventing infectious diseases, the recent pandemic aside; that's sort of a whole different story. But if you look at the kind of disease profile in the Western world and how it's evolved over the last half-century, we've pretty much got infectious diseases under reasonable control, unless there's a pandemic. But the epidemic of chronic diseases has just exploded since we adopted modern agricultural techniques after the second World War.

                     There's a number of probable causes for that. One is what we're choosing to eat, how we're processing our food. But (my wife) Anne and I became convinced, based on the research we did for “What Your Food Ate” and the bit of data and the studies that we've sort of conducted along the way, that there's another piece of that, and that's how our food is raised, how our food is grown — and that we should really all be caring about what our food ate, which, for crops is how we fertilize it, how we grow it for our livestock. It's what they're eating and how it was grown. In the book, we try and trace the scientific connections between each step along the way for how the way we treat the land affects the soil health, how soil health affects crop health, how crop health affects animal health, and how the latter two directly or indirectly affect human health.

                     The connections are complex. There's a lot that goes into our own individual health. There are our genes, our genetics. There's whether or not we get any exercise. There's what we choose to eat. There's also, I think, how our food is raised.

Tom:            All right, that is David Montgomery, MacArthur Fellow, professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, and co-author, with (his) wife, Anne, of “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal the Land and Reclaim Your Health”. Thank you, David.

David:           Thank you. It's (been) a pleasure to talk.

Tom:            For the Ag Future podcast, I'm Tom Martin. Thank you for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to Ag Future wherever you listen to podcasts.

Strengthening its commitment to Working Together for a Planet of Plenty™, Alltech Crop Science has acquired Ideagro, based in Murcia, Spain. This partnership joins two leading platforms to accelerate soil and crop research, and to enhance biological and other microorganism-based offerings to Alltech Crop Science customers throughout the world.

“We are excited to announce that Ideagro has joined the Alltech Crop Science global team, providing us with a partner who shares our vision and significantly scaling our research capabilities,” said Andy Thomas, CEO of Alltech Crop Science. "This is the strengthening of a longstanding partnership. We have worked closely with the Ideagro team since their founding 11 years ago.”

Ideagro is a leader in agri-food research and development with a team of more than 20 scientists. It is committed to improving the productivity and profitability of agricultural systems. Its expertise in developing beneficial organisms for soil aids the growth of crops, reduces the impact of chemical inputs and helps plants to resist biotic and abiotic stress. Ideagro’s analytical capabilities, with special emphasis on in-vitro research, phytopathology, soil dynamics and microorganisms, further enable growers to identify microorganisms and quantify enzymatic activity in the soil.

“We are facing a great growth opportunity for Ideagro because we are going to have better means and more technological capacity to develop our research, which will now have a global projection,” said Pedro Palazón, CEO of Ideagro. “We will no longer only study the soils of the Iberian Peninsula, but we will work with soils from all over the world to achieve more sustainable and environmentally friendly agriculture.”

Ideagro has state-of-the-art laboratories and experimental research stations and fields for carrying out trials in Spain. To date, the company has researched more than 90 different crops and performed more than 10,000 physicochemical and biological analyses. This has led to the development of new agricultural strategies based on microorganisms.

Ideagro’s three laboratories are fully equipped with the latest technologies to focus on nutraceuticals, phytopathology, research and development and molecular biology. Its services include:

• Precise diagnoses, identification and semi-quantification of more than 290 microorganisms at the species level in different crops. Through the development of multispecific detection kits, it can simultaneously detect up to 40 pathogenic microorganisms in a single sample, with results in 24-48 hours.
• Molecular identification of microorganisms as well as genetic characterization of specific strains and determination of pathotypes of a pathogen.
• Analysis of nematodes.
• Design of specific probes for specific microorganisms. As a result, Ideagro is able to detect specific microorganisms in soil, water, plant material and biostimulants.
• Mycotoxin analyses. With more than 15,000 analyses carried out to date, Ideagro can identify and quantify the risks of aflatoxin B1, fumonisins, zearalenone and deoxynivalenol trichothecenes and T2 toxin. It provides monthly data on mycotoxin contamination in animal feed and in the main crops of the Spanish and European markets.

Ideagro is accredited by MAPAMA (EOR 82/13) and has ISO 9001:2015 certification. In June 2021, it was named a Reference Regional Laboratory by GLOSOLAN, the Global Soil Laboratory division of the FAO.

“The combination of the Ideagro expertise with the reach and scale of Alltech will allow us to extend world-leading understanding of the interface between soil, crop, animal and human health to the global market,” said Andy Thomas, CEO of Alltech Crop Science. “The potential implications of these insights cannot be understated as we endeavor to improve the vitality of our global food system, from the ground up.”

For more information about Alltech Crop Science, visit alltech.com/crop-science.

Today's food system was scaled to prevent hunger, and is now facing new demands and expectations, particularly in the healthcare space. However, with innovative advancements in agriculture and nutrition, we can wage battle against diet-related chronic diseases, which are a major driver of healthcare costs.  Dr. Patrick J. Stover, director of the Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture (IHA) at Texas A&M AgriLife Research, joins the Ag Future podcast to discuss how shifting focus from producing food, fiber and fuel to promoting human, environmental and economic health can create a more efficient and resilient system.

The following is an edited transcript of the Ag Future podcast episode with Dr. Patrick J. Stover hosted by Tom Martin. Click below to hear the full audio or listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts.

Tom:                  Welcome to Ag Future, presented by Alltech. Join us from the 2022 Alltech ONE Conference as we explore our opportunities within agri-food, business and beyond.

                             I'm Tom Martin for the Alltech Ag Future podcast series. Diet-related chronic disease is among the greatest societal challenges facing the world, driving up healthcare costs and disproportionately affecting minority communities. Dr. Patrick Stover is director of the Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture at Texas A&M AgriLife Research, the world's first research institute to gather, under one roof, precision nutrition, responsive agriculture and behavioral research with the aim of reducing diet-related chronic disease while also considering the environmental and the economic effects.

                             An international leader in biochemistry, agriculture and nutrition, he has served as vice chancellor and dean of agriculture and life sciences at Texas A&M AgriLife and as director of the division of nutritional sciences at Cornell University. Dr. Stover joins us to talk about how shifting from a focus on producing food, fiber and fuel to promoting human, environmental and economic health has influenced expectations for the food system over the last decade. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Stover.

Patrick:              Thank you for the opportunity. It's a pleasure to be here.

Tom:                  Whenever we talk to a working farmer, we're nearly always struck by a realization that we're talking with a scientist. I thought we would begin by exploring that for a moment. Farming — it's inherently science, isn't it?

Patrick:              Oh, absolutely. This was recognized by President Lincoln in 1862 when he established the land-grant universities for the purpose of both advancing mechanics or engineering and agriculture. In every state in this nation, we have a land-grant university that is dedicated to advancing all aspects of agriculture, from understanding soil to understanding plants and plant breeding, animals and animal breeding, animal health, all the way to agricultural engineering — how can we mechanize better? How can we produce food faster, cheaper, more abundantly?

Tom:                  We have one of those here in Lexington: the University of Kentucky.

Patrick:              Absolutely — a very good one.

Tom:                  What is meant by “responsive agriculture”?

Patrick:              If you look at the food system that we have today, this really came out of the post-World War II era, where — during World War II, there were great demands on the food supply. There was rationing of food to make sure that our soldiers had the nourishment they need to perform well on the battlefield. At the same time, we have the Depression that led up to World War II and the post-Depression era, where there was a lot of hunger in this country. There became this sense that hunger was unacceptable, both in this country and abroad. You saw many efforts, humanitarian efforts, to scale up agriculture for the sole purpose of eliminating hunger — and again, both domestically and abroad.

                             That's the food system we have today. It was scaled to preventing hunger. Hunger is not a disease. Hunger is a physiological response to a lack of calories. Therefore, we scaled agriculture production to meet the caloric needs not only of the nation but of the world. That's the food system that we have today. But now, we see there are other demands on agriculture, new expectations. We see (that) the agriculture system we have today and the food system we have today makes hunger rare. It still exists, but it's not due to a lack of abundance of food. It's more (related to) access issues. But now, we see that there are other costs that food produces.

                             Some of those in the healthcare space, we see the diet-related chronic diseases, (which are) the major driver of healthcare costs. Diabetes alone costs about $160 billion to $170 billion a year — more than most state agencies receive in their funding. We see a total cost of about $4 trillion a year. No one can afford those costs — no government or individuals. At the same time, we also have expectations around the environment. Certainly, agriculture has an environmental footprint in terms of emissions and runoff and such. But we also see that agriculture can be the solution to some of our environmental issues and actually capture carbon from other sectors.

                             Of course, economic health is also critical. The margins in agriculture are so thin, and we are losing much of our precious farmland to other, more profitable purposes. Now we see, not only do we have to produce food to eliminate hunger, but we have to do it in a way that supports human health, environmental health and economic health.

Tom:                  A century ago, it was the Great Depression. Would you say that, today, climate change presents that same imperative to get ahead of the hunger curve?

Patrick:              Certainly, there are many concerns about climate. Climate affects agriculture, really, in two domains. Number one, we are seeing extreme variations in temperature over short periods of time. That plays havoc on our agriculture systems and our ability to produce food looking forward. Certainly, the climate has an effect on agriculture. We also see, again, that agriculture has an environmental footprint. The question is: How can we lower that environmental footprint?

There's so much innovation out there, from capture of carbon in soil to creating biomass — all of these innovations to reducing methane production from agriculture. All of these innovations we see are out there that really give us the promise of having agriculture not only have a very low environmental footprint but potentially even capturing environmental footprints from manufacturing, from travel and those other areas that have much larger environmental footprints.

Tom:                  I understand correctly that you're engaged in behavioral research. What can you tell us about what you're doing?

Patrick:              Absolutely. Well, that is really the third leg. That is so key. We can do all of this work to produce food in a way that better supports the environment and human health and the economy. We can produce food that the consumers want and (that) also supports their health. But if all this science is not accepted by society, we're not going to achieve our goal. That science will just sit on a shelf. So, what's absolutely critical is to understand human behaviors.

Everyone eats. Everyone makes food choices. We have to understand how people, how communities, how societies make those choices, and how we can use science and convince the population that a science approach to health behaviors will be better for them in the long run, for their personal health, for their community health. We have a long way to go in that public trust area, but the social behavioral science will be key so that we can adopt these important technologies to actually implement out in society.

Tom:                  What sorts of major impactful changes have occurred in recent years in each of these areas: farming, food production and nutrition? Let's take them one at a time — because it's a big question — beginning with farming.

Patrick:              Certainly. If you look at farming — and I'll put farming and food production together, if you don't mind.

Tom:                  Sure.

Patrick:              What we have seen is great efficiencies. In the United States, the average American spends less than 9% of their available resources on food. That's remarkable. It's not like that anywhere else in the world. It's never been that low anytime in human history. That's because of the great innovations that have occurred, all the way from what we grow to how we process food. We have created an unbelievably efficient system through advances in plant breeding, through advances in engineering and irrigation, through advances in pest control to how we process food. We have created a highly efficient, vertically integrated system like the world has never seen.

                             Now, during COVID, we saw some of the vulnerabilities where, while it was very efficient, it wasn't very resilient. So now, you're seeing other innovations that are trying to tap into this wonderful system that's been effective in producing food — but (we are trying to) add more resiliency through more local agriculture, through urban agriculture and other innovations that are enabling our system not only to be efficient but to be resilient, and technologies will be key to continue to drive that.

Tom:                  How about nutrition? What's been happening in nutrition that is exciting (and is) going on now?

Patrick:              Nutrition potentially is one of the most transformed fields (of) the past few years. If you look historically, the goal of nutrition has been to understand how much of all the various nutrients you need — how much iron you need, how much B vitamins you need, et cetera — and how those translate into foods you should eat so that you don't become deficient in any of these nutrients. That was the goal of nutrition, was to understand the chemistry and the biochemistry of these nutrients, and how much you needed to make sure you could carry out fundamental functions in your body.

                             Well, we've now moved the needle. Because we see that food is a major driver of healthcare costs, Congress essentially said of the National Academy of Sciences — which is charged with determining how much of each nutrient you need every day, the so-called RDAs — said, “Well, we don't really have diseases of deficiency anymore. What we have is diet-related chronic disease. So, rather than setting these nutrient standards based on preventing diseases, let's have the endpoint as a chronic disease so we can use food to lower healthcare costs.”

                             That, essentially, was the advent of food as medicine. This becomes a much more complex problem, because people respond differently to diets in terms of their disease risk. Virtually all populations — if you make them deficient in a nutrient, everyone in the population responds the same, and you can have population-based guidance, whereas, when you have a chronic disease outcome, people respond differently based on our population history. Now you have responders and non-responders — and this whole idea that, if we're going to use food to lower healthcare costs, we have to understand how food interacts with an individual at that level.

Tom:                   I guess most of us are walking around not really realizing or appreciating that what we consume, the food that we eat, actually has the ability to switch on and switch off genes.

Patrick:              Oh, it's incredible. Again, if you look throughout all of human history, populations emerged all over the globe. Those that were able to survive and expand were those that adapted to their local food environment and their local pathogen environment. That's what you had to do to survive. If you look at populations in northern Canada, they metabolize fat very, very differently than native cultures there. And the native populations metabolize fat very, very different than you and I do. If you look at Scandinavia, there's very little iron in the soil. Therefore, there was this selective pressure genetically to get every little bit of iron out of food. But now, when you put those individuals on an iron-rich diet (through) a global food system, you see hemochromatosis, and they result in cancers and other types of, essentially, diet-related chronic diseases. You can look at lactose intolerance. It goes on and on.

                             So certainly, the food systems out there, around the globe, have really shaped who we are. In turn, the foods we eat turn our genes on and off. It's a very complex system. We are all different based on our population history, but that's the opportunity to use food as medicine to understand those differences — how we interact with that food, how food changes us, and how, historically, we have adapted to food systems to understand that diet-disease connection at the level of the individual.

Tom:                  Could agriculture, food production and nutritional intelligence be made — or maybe they do work in concert — to improve public health?

Patrick:              Well, that's the big challenge. Historically, we have siloed the food system at the level of science, at the level of public policy. Even in the Farm Bill, you have the nutrition title over here, you have the ag component over here, and they don’t talk to each other — yet we know (that) if we are going to make agriculture the solution to human health, environmental health and economic health, that's what the mandate is. We have to consider this as the complex system that it is.

                             When we change dietary guidelines, that has a ripple effect back across the food system. When we have soil erosion, we lose quality components in that soil, (and) that affects the food system in the other direction. We have to understand and make decisions respecting the fact that this is a very complex system that goes from farm inputs to consumer behavior. And we have to make sure that the research that we do considers that. We have to make sure that the public policy that we have considers that.

Tom:                  We've touched on hunger earlier. Food scarcity and malnutrition remain significant issues, even in developed countries. What is agriculture's role not only in producing enough food but in producing enough nutritious food?

Patrick:              This is the challenge, and it gets down to definition. Certainly, the world population is growing. By 2050, there'll be another two billion people on this planet. And as you said, we already have food insecurity and lack of food in some places, so we have to make more. But we also recognize that we have to make better, if you will — that we have to make food that is better aligned with human health, environmental health and economic health. Technologies have to be the answer there. We're going to have to continue to be more efficient so that we can produce more and feed the world, but we have to do it in a way that both respects cultures — because there's a strong cultural component to food — so that people accept the food that's being produced. But we also have to use these technologies to make sure that it can be medicine to these populations, that it lowers healthcare costs.

Tom:                  Is there an appetite today for finding ways to more tightly coordinate these disparate sectors of the industry, the entire food ag value chain, as a strategy to bring about those improvements?

Patrick:              Well, that's a big focus of our institute, is to try to make sure that we do have this better-integrated, systemic approach. To do that, everyone needs a seat at the table. We need to do this to be successful. But, for instance, we have technologies through gene editing to create plants that have virtually any quality we want in terms of disease resistance, in terms of nutrient value, et cetera. But we have to bring along the regulators to make sure that we are producing something that not only is going to benefit society but is going to be safe as well.

                             We need to bring along the regulatory community. We need to bring along the general public. They have to accept this food that is produced that is going to improve their health, and they have to have trust in that food. We need to bring the farmers and the ranchers. They need to understand how this is going to help their bottom line. Their margins are very thin. They have to be risk-averse or they don't succeed in their business. We have to convince them that this is good for them, good for their operations. We need the related policies and incentives, again, so that technologies — so that advances in crops and crop breeding will be accepted by that group.

                             Everyone needs a seat at the table, and we need to start with the endpoints. We have a very segmented approach to addressing the food system and constituencies across the food system. We have consumers who blame producers and food manufacturers, who then say — well, they blame the consumer, because (their belief is), “We just respond to consumer demand.” We need to not have a food fight. We need to bring everybody to the table (to) decide: What are these endpoints that we want, and how can we reverse-engineer back to the food system to achieve those goals that are so critical to our society right now?

Tom:                  There is a lot of risk in farming. I'm just wondering how this holistic approach reduces at least some of that exposure to the uncertainty and the stress that it causes.

Patrick:              Certainly. If you look, currently, at the food system we have today, we have to understand that farmers and ranchers — which make up just about 1% of our society today; 1% of the population produces food for the rest of the 99% — they are businesspeople. They make decisions every day (about) what they grow, how much they grow, when they grow it, based on what the market will bear. They are businesspeople. The biggest threat to their operation is uncertainty, because their margins are so thin. With a couple of bad years, their enterprises are in danger. That has to be the role of science, and that will be the role of our institute at Texas A&M.

                             We need authoritative voices out there about what the science says related to any question around the agriculture and food value chain, from farm inputs all the way to consumer behavior, and we have to be very clear about what the science says. Right now, much of our food system is driven by preferences, values and beliefs, on both the health side (and) on the environmental side. And often, people quote their favorite study — “Well, this study says this,” “But my study says that” — rather than looking at the totality of the scientific literature like we do in medicine, where we actually don't look at papers individually, but we combine all of the research together in a statistically appropriate way. And we say, “Well, our current scientific knowledge is X, Y or Z, based on that synthesis, and this is how certain or strong it is.”

                             We don't have that in food and agriculture. That's something at Texas A&M that we would like to see happen in this country, is to have science lead. People will always have preferences, values and beliefs around the food system. There's a deep cultural component — a deep moral, if you will, component — to food, but that's not science. We have to say what the science says so that people out there who make decisions can weigh between what the science says and, then, what individual values, preferences and beliefs are.

Tom:                  Dr. Stover, we've witnessed the sudden disruption of an important source of the world's grain, and I'm talking about the war in Ukraine. Has this development inspired new thinking about the resources needed to feed the world and to keep them secure?

Patrick:              Certainly. What we're seeing going on in Ukraine is a tragedy, but there will always be wars. In fact, Norman Borlaug once said, “You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery. Food is fundamental to a peaceful world.” What we have to ensure is that all countries around the globe have the capacity to feed their populations; (it’s) absolutely essential. This was the work of Norman Borlaug in international agriculture: to build that agriculture infrastructure in every region, in every country, to avoid hunger.

                             Now, local agriculture is imperative, (but) we also need that global agriculture system as well, because sometimes there are droughts. There are catastrophes that happen that limit a given region's ability to produce food, and they need to tap into the global food system. But we need to think very carefully about how we marry capacity to grow food in every region with a global food system and how those two are integrated together to ensure that we have peace, to ensure that we have food for everyone.

Tom:                  Dr. Patrick Stover, director of the Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture at Texas A&M AgriLife Research. Thank you so much.

Patrick:              Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Tom:                  And for the Alltech Ag Future podcast, I'm Tom Martin. Thank you for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to Ag Future wherever you listen to podcasts.

Alltech is proud to continue to partner in the Women in Food & Agriculture (WFA) Mentorship Program. Applications are now open for new mentors of any gender and for female mentees from across the global food and agriculture sector. Now in its third year, the free-to-join program matches applicants based on their preferences, which can include gender of mentor, areas of expertise, language and industry sector, and offers opportunities for women in food and agriculture to develop meaningful industry connections.

“Over the past few years, all of us have come to more deeply value the power of human connection,” said Dr. Mark Lyons, president and CEO of Alltech. “A commitment to the growth and development of another person unleashes energy, inspires ideas and empowers both individuals to have a greater impact. We view our involvement in the Women in Food & Agriculture mentorship program as an investment not only in the lives of women but in the future of agriculture as the industry most integral to the nourishment and vitality of our planet.”

Findings from the annual WFA survey and ongoing feedback from all levels of the food and agriculture sector consistently suggest that a hurdle to greater success for women in the global agri-food industry is a lack of mentorship opportunities. To tackle this issue, WFA launched its Mentorship Program. In partnership with Alltech in 2022, the initiative grew with 320 industry representatives matched across two cohorts. Now in 2023, the program will be open for applicants year-round with two matching sessions taking place to help even more women in food and agriculture progress their careers. The initiative has supported a variety of people around the world from CEOs of agribusinesses to small-scale farmers, from academics to ag-tech professionals, with sector representatives paired with mentors that complement their professional objectives.

“We are very pleased to again have Alltech supporting the 2023 WFA Mentorship Program,” said Elisabeth Mork-Eidem, global chair of WFA. “Mentorship is vital in supporting women across food and agriculture in developing their careers, we’ve had very positive feedback from both mentors and mentees. Many of our mentors joined the initiative as a selfless act of support for equality in our sector, but realized they got as much out of the experience as the mentees. This is such an exciting opportunity to learn about yourself, develop your skills and support an important initiative that is working to improve diversity, equality and inclusion in the food and agriculture industry.”

For those interested in taking part in the 2023 Mentorship Program, WFA is looking for mentors of any gender who have at least one year of experience in the food and ag sector. During matching, WFA will ensure all mentors have more work experience than mentees, so this should not be a barrier to mentors applying. Potential mentees should be women working in the food and ag industry who would benefit from help, guidance and support from a senior sector representative.

Alltech believes that inclusion cultivates creativity, drives innovation and is essential to the company’s purpose of Working Together for a Planet of Plenty^TM. In 2019, Alltech selected Gender Equality as one of the nine United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to which the company committed to advancing.

Applications are open now for the Women in Food & Agriculture (WFA) Mentorship Program, supported by Alltech. For more information and to apply to be a mentor or mentee, visit https://wfa-initiative.com/mentorship-program/.

[LEXINGTON, Ky.] – Alltech is transforming its annual Alltech ONE Conference (ONE) in 2023 into a series of international events that will invite collaboration on the greatest challenges facing the agri-food industry. Instead of welcoming the world to Alltech’s home in Lexington, Kentucky, as it has for the past 38 years, the Alltech ONE World Tour will bring the ideas and inspiration of the ONE Conference to communities throughout the world.

Stops are planned in Brazil, Canada, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, the Middle East the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, the United States and Vietnam, providing the opportunity for more people than ever to experience the power of ONE and to hear from experts on trending topics in the agriculture industry. Additional stops are expected to be announced in 2023.

“As our customers and partners continue to face many challenges and uncertainties, we determined that 2023 would be dedicated to meeting them in their market,” said Dr. Mark Lyons, president and CEO. “This special edition of the ONE will endeavor to deliver global expertise to locally relevant issues. In the midst of economic and political uncertainties that fuel regionalization, this ONE reflects the responsibility we have as a global company to be a connector of people and ideas, ever advancing our purpose of Working Together for a Planet of Plenty.”

While Alltech looks forward to bringing the international conference home to Kentucky in 2024, the 2023 ONE World Tour is a unique opportunity to discuss the future of agriculture with stakeholders all over the world, offering both a global and local perspective for attendees. It will unite changemakers and thought leaders in unique forums to discuss the future, examining regional and local market trends in agriculture, business, health and nutrition.

Alltech will release more details about its international tour stops and event dates in the coming weeks. Visit one.alltech.com for more information and to subscribe to notifications on tour updates.

In 2021, HELM Agro and Alltech Crop Science announced an exciting partnership that aims to bridge the gap between traditional and biological crop input solutions in the U.S. Dave Schumacher, president of HELM Agro, joins the Ag Future podcast to give an update and share his tips on cultivating a successful partnership.

The following is an edited transcript of the Ag Future podcast episode with Dave Schumacher hosted by Tom Martin. Click below to hear the full audio or listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts.

Tom:            Welcome to Ag Future, presented by Alltech. Join us from the 2022 Alltech ONE Conference as we explore opportunities within agri-food, business and beyond.

                     I'm Tom Martin with an Alltech Ag Future podcast. We're joined by Dave Schumacher, president of the family-owned, more-than-a-century-old crop protection company HELM, to talk about the value of forming partnerships. Welcome, Dave.

Dave:            Thank you, Tom.

Tom:            In an Ag Future podcast last year, you brought us up to speed on what sorts of services HELM provides. But if you wouldn't mind, give us a refresher.

Dave:            Yeah, thanks. HELM has several businesses. In the U.S., we're based in Tampa, Florida. I'm in the crop protection business, so we supply herbicides, insecticides and fungicides to our retail partners, and then they sell to growers. Then we recently got in the relationship with Alltech, (and through) that we're offering a biological portfolio along with it.

                     HELM is also in the crop nutrition business. We have 21 river terminals in the U.S. where we supply retailers with N, P and K (or nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) for the farmers' needs. And then we also have an industrial chemicals business as well.

Tom:            When we did talk in August of 2021, HELM had just entered into a partnership with Alltech Crop Science. What attracted HELM to Alltech, and how has that partnership performed in the year since?

Dave:            Yeah. Thanks, Tom. The partnership is going really well. What attracted HELM to Alltech was the science that they had and the research and long-term vision. Alltech is a family-owned company that is in it for the long run. HELM is a family-owned company that's in it for the long run. So, our cultures were very similar in that we're committing to this partnership for the long term. We kicked off this partnership in October of last year, and it's gone really well.

Tom:            Is it fair to say that the aim of this partnership is to bridge the gap between traditional and biological crop input solutions? And I'm wondering: Are you seeing progress in that effort? 

Dave:            Yeah, absolutely. I think the biological products group, as a segment of portfolio, is growing significantly. It's probably in that 15–17% growth rate annually. That was a market that we wanted to be in. We were mostly in traditional crop protection — so herbicides, insecticides and fungicides. The biological part is still kind of a niche out there in the market. We see a great space for us to bring the traditional crop protection products and the biologicals together to give farmers more options to control their pest issues that they have and also reduce the amount of traditional crop protection used on crops.

Tom:            How can that combination of traditional and biological support sustainable practices? 

Dave:            You know, I think there are two things. One (is) the area of soil health. Soil health is kind of a buzzword that's thrown around in the industry right now, but there are products that we're going to be able to bring to market — hopefully in broad scale — to help growers address some of the soil health challenges that they have. So, that's one area. We also think that there's an opportunity to incorporate biologicals into a cropping solution, which would potentially reduce the amount of traditional crop protection used. In some crops, there's fungicides that have been used almost on a weekly basis. And if we can rotate some of those applications, traditional chemistry applications, with a biological that would give you the same or better output, that — it's going to be better for long-term sustainability.

Tom:            Does this provide growers with easier access to full-spectrum integrated crop solutions?

Dave:            Yes, I think it does. One of the things that we bring to market is our connectivity to the customer base. So, we work with all the large retail channels in the U.S. on our fertilizer side and also on our crop protection side. As we're able to bring those portfolios to the market through those channels, I think it gives growers broader access. And we want to be able to solve the grower’s problem, whether it's (through) a traditional chemistry or biological. This gives us the opportunity to bring both of those solutions and give growers options.

Tom:            We talked about the mutual benefits of the partnership between HELM and Alltech, and I just would like to focus on partnerships in general for a moment, if we could. Are business partnerships inspired by discovering mutually beneficial assets that each partner might not possess on their own?

Dave:            Yeah. I think, as we looked at this relationship, we have a very good development program, but we're not into the basic research of creating those new products, which — that's what Alltech is really good at. We're good at our go-to-market and bringing those products to customers. In this relationship, we feel we can reduce any overlap. There's kind of a clear handoff of what Alltech brings to the party and what HELM brings to the party.

Tom:            Partnerships or collaborations are all about give and take. But when it comes down to negotiating that arrangement, do the parties necessarily seem to become more protective of their brands and their assets, and do those matters have to be laid out on the table, understood and agreed upon before moving forward to a final agreement? 

Dave:            Yeah, I think so. And I think the key to partnerships is doing a lot of due diligence and really understanding the culture and being able to understand the long-term vision if you have to have an agreement to work out all the details. But something always comes up. You want to have that win-win mentality so that you can keep doing positive things together.

                     With our relationship with Alltech, we do a lot of collaboration. One of them — we have an S&OP process, sales and operation planning, where we meet on a monthly basis and provide rolling forecasts. They're looking at inventory levels. We're looking at inventory levels. So, that minimizes the risk that either of our companies could be in from an inventory standpoint. But those relationships need to be as transparent as possible and need to be (present) throughout the whole organization.

                     So, the owner of HELM is the Schnabel family. Our CEO is Stephan Schnabel, and he's about 47 years old. And (president and CEO of Alltech) Mark Lyons (is a) similar age, probably a little younger. They've created a good relationship, a good working relationship, that — we're able to take what we've started in the U.S. and multiply that in some other countries.

Tom:            You mentioned being as transparent as possible, and I take it — does that mean there are going to be certain proprietary matters that can't be laid out on the table, and that's understood? 

Dave:            Absolutely. I think, from a technology standpoint, Alltech owns the technology and the registrations associated with that technology. We're working on a product right now that — we're going to premix a synthetic crop protection product and an Alltech biofungicide together in the same jug. And that will be one opportunity for us to work out the IP associated with that and have some joint IP over new product introductions like that.

Tom:            That's actually a working example of that bridge we were talking about.

Dave:            Absolutely.

Tom:            All right. Is there a risk in a partnership of too many cooks stirring the stew? Do roles need to be clearly defined, clearly clarified?

Dave:            Yes, yes, absolutely. Because when you announced the partnership, everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon and enjoy the fun. But we needed to make sure people knew what role they had in the organization.

                     So, we're a global business. Alltech is a global business. So, making those connections between our leadership in Germany and local leadership now is critical. We have an account plan. We have “who contacts who” (plan). It's just making sure we're as clear as possible.

Tom:            Have you gotten far enough into a negotiation with a potential partner only to discover that, in the end, the proposed partnership is really not right for you or your company?

Dave:            Yeah. I think, as you explore different options, you get a sense, and as you go through the due diligence, you get a sense of the culture and you get a sense of how that relationship feels. It's kind of like dating or getting married. As you're doing due diligence in scouting that relationship out and wanting to see that there's a clear win-win in for both parties — and when you get to the end, if it just doesn't feel right, (you) probably need to go with your gut on that one.

Tom:            I've heard it described as something of a dance.

Dave:            Yes.

Tom:            Do you encourage ag businesses to be open to forming partnerships inside and outside of the industry?

Dave:            Absolutely. I don't believe that one company can do it all, so they’ve got to find their area and be really good at it and augment that route to market or business with other partnerships that can bring strong expertise into a certain area. So, I think partnerships are going to be a big part of growing our future.

Tom:            Are there new HELM partnerships that you can tell us about? 

Dave:            Yeah. We're excited about a new joint venture that we formed with Cargill about last week, actually. We had a groundbreaking ceremony in Eddyville, Iowa. And HELM and Cargill are joining together. They're building a $300-million plant in Eddyville, Iowa. That plant will consume corn and produce BDO, which — BDO is an input that goes into biodegradable plastics. So, we're launching a company and a brand called QIRA, and it's going to be sustainable, made-from-corn products.

Tom:            Biodegradable plastics. That is definitely something needed on this planet today, isn't it?

Dave:            Absolutely.

Tom:            What's been the most important thing, Dave, that you've learned so far from this partnership with Alltech?

Dave:            I think communication is key. So, we communicate very frequently. As we see opportunities and challenges come up, we have those dialogues so that nobody is surprised by either upsides or downsides. So, I think communication is key — and trust. Trust and communication.

Tom:            That's Dave Schumacher, president of the crop protection company HELM. Thank you for joining us, Dave.

Dave:            Thank you, Tom.

Tom:            I'm Tom Martin for the Alltech Ag Future podcast series. Thank you for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to Ag Future wherever you listen to podcasts.

World Antimicrobial Awareness Week, Nov. 18-24, seeks unified action to reduce drug-resistant pathogens

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development today, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In 2019, nearly 5 million human deaths worldwide were associated with bacterial AMR, of which 1.3 million human deaths were directly attributable to bacterial AMR.

Each year, the FAO dedicates the week of Nov. 18-24 to raising awareness of the deadly consequences of AMR. The theme of this year’s World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) is “Preventing microbial resistance together.”

“AMR is a threat to humans, animals, plants and the environment. It affects us all,” the FAO says on its website. “That is why this year's theme calls for cross-sectoral collaboration to preserve the effectiveness of these important medicines.”

AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites no longer respond to the antimicrobial agents used against them. As a result, antibiotics and other antimicrobials become ineffective and infections become difficult or impossible to treat, increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death.

Antimicrobials and antibiotics have been used for both disease prevention and treatment in humans and in animals, and for improving growth rates in food-producing animals. The misuse and overuse of antimicrobials are accelerating the development and spread of AMR worldwide.

The agri-food sector is severely affected by antimicrobial-resistant microorganisms, which can lead to economic losses, a decline in livestock production, poverty, hunger and malnutrition across the globe, the FAO said. There has been a global movement in recent years to reduce antimicrobial use in livestock production, in which antimicrobials are used extensively to address gut health issues.

Dr. Richard Murphy, research director at Alltech's European Bioscience Centre in Dunboyne, Ireland, said AMR is a persistent problem challenging the industry. He spoke about AMR during a recent Ag Future podcast with Tom Martin.

“The agriculture industry has made great strides in moving toward reductions in antibiotic usage, restricting their usage even further. But when you look at the year-on-year data, even though the usage of antimicrobials and antibiotics has decreased, we tend not to see a similar decrease in the prevalence of resistance among pathogens that would have human resonance — E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter,” Dr. Murphy said.

As steps are taken to move toward antibiotic-free systems, producers are faced with the dilemma of controlling pathogens and AMR at the same time.

“Rather than focusing solely on antimicrobial resistance, we need to focus on the pathogens, because of the high-level prevalence of antimicrobial resistance that's present in those pathogens,” Dr. Murphy said.

Alltech’s researchers are focused on trying to understand the link between pathogen control and the control of antimicrobial resistance, he said. They are also focused on how to utilize the gut microflora to control pathogens.

“If you can expand the richness and the diversity of the gut microflora, that enables the GI tract to self-police. You tend to get what's known as colonization resistance,” he said. “You get greater resistance to pathogen colonization of the GI tract. We found in multiple studies across multiple species that we can effect changes. We can bring about increases in species richness (and) in gut microflora diversity with the use of mannan-based prebiotics — mannan-rich fraction, for instance.”

A path toward antibiotic-free production

The use of alternative products designed to regulate and support the gut environment and its microflora will assist the move to antibiotic-free production, said Dr. Jules Taylor-Pickard, director of the Alltech® Gut Health Management platform. Among those products are feed enzymes, organic minerals, yeast-cell wall derivatives such as mannan-oligosaccharides (MOS) and mannose-rich fractions (MRF), functional nutrients and probiotics.

Alltech’s Gut Health Management offers a path to antibiotic-free production that begins with its Seed, Feed, Weed program.

“Seed, Feed, Weed is just that: It’s seeding the gut with favorable organisms, it’s feeding those favorable organisms and it’s weeding out the unfavorable or the bad organisms,” Dr. Taylor-Pickard explained.

The second step is the antibiotic reduction program, through which a team of experts helps develop an action plan to assist producers with reducing antibiotic use on-farm. The goal is to significantly reduce or even make prophylactic (preventative) and metaphylaxis antibiotic use (treating an entire group without evidence of disease) redundant.

The third step helps producers with the transition to operating without antibiotics by improving gut health and utilizing holistic nutrition and management practices across all stages of production.

There is no “silver bullet” solution for reducing AMR, Dr. Murphy said. It can be quite difficult to develop programs whereby you remove antibiotics and replace them with a single compound or a single nutritional additive.

“When we think about replacement of antibiotics, we will need to take into consideration multiple factors or dimensions, such as animal management and facility hygiene; diet certainly is going to be absolutely critical, and nutritional components play a huge role in transitioning away from antibiotic use and in transitioning toward antibiotic-free production systems,” he said.

Building a more resilient agri-food system

As part of WAAW, the FAO issued calls to action for farmers, food chain workers and consumers, policymakers, animal health and agriculture professionals and others.

“The challenges of AMR are complex and multifaceted, but they are not insurmountable,” the organization said.

Among its key calls to action during WAAW, the FAO is asking agri-food systems to:

• Implement prevention measures (biosecurity, sanitation, hygiene, etc.) to reduce the need for antimicrobials in animals and antimicrobial pesticides in plants.

• Use diagnostic tests to assist surveillance efforts and design successful interventions to reduce AMR.

• Use science-based evidence to identify, manage and mitigate AMR risks.

• Improve access to expert advice, prescriptions, appropriate antimicrobials to reduce production and productivity losses, and build more resilient agri-food systems.

• Provide a system-wide approach to keeping crops healthy, resorting to chemical pesticides only as a last resort.

The FAO is challenging policymakers to commit resources to tackle AMR and meet national AMR action plan targets. It is also asking agriculture professionals to share information on best practices for reducing the use of antimicrobials.

Alltech, a global leader in the agriculture industry for more than 40 years, is proud to introduce Egalis^®, a new range of high-quality silage inoculants that maximize nutrient quality, increase forage stability and reduce dry matter loss to help maintain optimal animal performance. Egalis drives proper fermentation and assists epiphytic bacteria to control the fermentation through the use of specific bacteria.

“The Egalis range of products brings together decades of expertise in fermentation, utilizing bacteria strains specifically selected by Alltech scientists to maximize nutrient and dry matter protection,” said Matthew Smith, vice president at Alltech. “Together with our on-farm support teams and range of services, Alltech helps to improve fermentation to produce superior-quality silage, enabling producers to hold onto more of what they grow, from field to feed passage.”

For more information on Egalis, contact your local Alltech sales representative or visit Alltech.com/Egalis.

"Are you what you eat? Or, in fact, are you what your food ate?”

With these thought-provoking questions, geologist and science writer David Montgomery opened his presentation as part of the Crop Science track at the Alltech ONE Conference (ONE) last May. The author talked at ONE in advance of the launch of his new book, which is aptly titled “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health” and is co-authored by his wife, Anne Biklé.

“The big point that I’m trying to make is that soil health is our health,” Montgomery said during his presentation. “How we treat the land, in turn, affects how the land will treat us (…) in terms of what's in our food and what that actually may do in terms of supporting our health.”

Montgomery explained the various ways that modern farming practices — including tillage and the overuse of commercial fertilizers — are unbalanced and can disrupt the necessary, healthy symbiosis between plants and the soil.

“We traded away quality in pursuit of quantity as modernized farming chased higher yields, overlooking a farmer’s natural allies in the soil.”

—David Montgomery and Anne Biklé, “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health”

The roots of good health are planted on farms

We know that our diet influences our health, and it’s safe to say that how we grow our crops and what we feed them plays a significant role in our overall health as well.

“In general, we don’t think about a plant having a diet, when, in fact, they do,” said Montgomery. “Plants absorb a myriad of elements from the soil which we can consider to be their food, and how we feed them — the ‘diet’ we present them with — will reflect directly in the final outcome.”

When determining the health of the soil, it is important to consider some basic elements of crop production, such as the NPK — or the ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in a product — of conventional fertilizers. Applying large amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium can lead to larger crop yields. But what does higher levels of those elements mean for the health of the soil where we grow those crops and the health of the crops themselves?

Currently, most farming operations are intensely focused on increasing yields, thanks in part to the pressure of needing to feed a fast-growing population. But if quantity is an important measure, quality — and, more notably, nutrient density — is equally important and, in modern societies, is increasingly worrying.

Unbalanced farming practices can disrupt the partnerships between soil bacteria and plants and can have a negative impact on soil health. They also shape the types and amounts of health-promoting minerals, fats and phytochemicals in our crops, which are transferred to us through the foods we eat.

Understanding and improving these connections could have profound implications for the food we eat and how we grow it, both now and in the future.

Farming practices, soil health and all that it encompasses

“Looking around (at) agricultural soil globally, a significantly large portion could be classified as ‘sick,’ if we thought about soil as a living ecosystem having health, which most of us probably don't,” Montgomery said during his presentation at ONE.

According to the United Nations’ (U.N.) map of global soil degradation, most of the world's agricultural soils are listed as “degraded” or “very degraded”. Furthermore, the U.N. estimates that around a third of the world's farmland soils have been degraded to the point that their lower quality could have a profound impact on their agricultural productivity.

This widespread soil degradation is partially the result of the two fundamental agricultural practices on which conventional agriculture has long been reliant: tillage and the over-use of chemical fertilizers.

While tillage has deep historical roots, chemical fertilizers, on the other hand, are much more recent in terms of their development and application. Researchers like Montgomery and Biklé are increasingly acknowledging that these practices can thoroughly degrade the organic matter of soil — which is, in essence, the very life of the soil — and can alter the soil microbial community in ways that are detrimental to both soil health and fertility. The difficult reality, however, is that farmers rely on these practices to harvest much of the food we grow today.

Another report from the U.N. released in 2015 projected that we're losing around 0.3% of our ability to produce food every year due to soil erosion and the degradation of organic matter — or, in other words, due to the loss of healthy soils. Montgomery put this statistic in perspective.

“0.3% doesn't sound like a really large number on an annual basis, but if you play that out over the rest of this century, it adds up to degrading another third of the world's farmland in this time interval,” he explained. “As the world population continuously grows, that is something that we can't afford.”

Harkening back to Montgomery’s application of the concept of health to soil, due to their remarkably low levels or lack of organic matter, many of the world's agricultural soils could be categorized as “sick”. Based on the statistics outlined above, a large percentage of soils simply cannot be called “healthy” in terms of their ability to foster soil biological activity and support strong root development, plant growth and crop productivity.

Bringing life back to the ground

Regenerative agriculture practices can contribute to rebuilding and revitalizing organic matter, which can, in turn, help rebuild soil health and fertility.

Some of the most well-known and effective regenerative agriculture principles include:

• Low-to-no tillage: Minimizing soil disturbance
• Cover cropping: Maintaining a permanent ground cover and/or growing cover crops in between cash crops to always keep living roots in the soil
• Crop rotation: Maintaining a diverse rotation of five to six crops

The combination of minimal disturbance, always having something growing in the soil and growing a diverse array of plants is essentially the antithesis of what many farmers and agronomists have been taught and are currently practicing in modern agriculture.

“Over the last 100 years, we have emphasized tillage, the overuse of synthetic agrochemicals and specializing in one or two crops,” Montgomery said. “This idea of regenerating soil life and soil health is a different way to look at agriculture and think about soil.”

Regenerative farming practices can rebuild soil health, bringing life back to the ground and fostering microorganisms’ communities, as well as their synergistic relationships with plants. These benefits can, in turn, suffuse the soil, the rhizosphere, the plants and the crops they grow with the elements they require in order to thrive, such as macro- and micronutrients, minerals and phytochemicals.

Most prominently, regenerative farming practices can increase the amount of carbon in the soil — which basically means more organic matter, as organic matter is roughly 40–50% carbon. A dark soil reflects an increasing sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere into the soil. Photosynthesis is nature’s way of pulling carbon from the atmosphere to the plant, and regenerative agriculture practices are a way to “park” more of that carbon in the soil.

Regenerative farming practices can also result in less off-site nitrogen pollution and better water quality as the result of a reduction in the use of synthetic fertilizers.

And finally, using more regenerative farming practices could translate to more sustainable and profitable farming. Farmers can achieve comparable or even higher yields by using fewer inputs and fossil fuels — the biggest expenses of modern farming — while also safeguarding natural resources.

"Solutions exist right beneath our feet, if you take the time to read the story of soil."

—David Montgomery and Anne Biklé, “What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health”

Soil life-focused farming practices hold the key to healing sick soils, allowing farmers to produce enough nutrient-dense food to feed us all and tapping into agriculture’s potential to improve human health.

So, when it comes to soil, can we have both quality and quantity? Montgomery wrapped up his presentation at ONE with a sobering yet inspiring message: “What's good for the soil is good for us, too.”

Key takeaways

• Soils have a diet, and healthy diets are required to foster healthy soils
• Billions of beneficial soil microorganisms foster the symbiotic relationship between soils and plants, making them our top allies for soil and crop health
• Just like people, soils can be in poor health or in good condition — and globally, our soils currently aren’t in top form
• The health of the soil impacts the health of our crops, our livestock and, ultimately, ourselves
• Reestablishing an underground feast for soils will alter what’s on our own plates

Nestled on the banks of the Clyde River, overlooking Vermont’s widely reputed lush, forested hills sits Poulin Grain. Proud to call Vermont home since 1932, this fourth-generation family-owned business offers personalized service — including one-on-one animal nutrition consultations, lab-based forage analysis and customized recommendations — along with the manufacturing and delivery of premium animal feeds. Poulin Grain’s diverse customer base includes livestock producers and animal enthusiasts throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada.

As noted by company president Josh Poulin, the nearly 90-year-old business “[has] always been committed to delivering high-quality animal nutrition products at a fair value, and taking care of [its] people, animals and customers.”  

Based in Newport, Vermont, Poulin Grain serves a wide range of customers throughout the eastern U.S. and Canada, including many dairy producers.

Managing mycotoxins in feed and forage

Poulin Grain maintains a steadfast focus on serving the animal and meeting their requirements, which is why they are consistently exploring new technologies that can help them implement superior quality control and produce animal feeds of only the highest caliber.

The company’s northeastern U.S. location — a region often referred to as “mycotoxin central” — led to them initially building a relationship with Alltech. The two companies worked together to implement a mycotoxin control program at Poulin’s mills while also helping their nutrition teams and customers understand more about this dynamic problem on-farm, which includes a central focus on enhancing forage quality.

Why mycotoxin testing is necessary

A 2021 study from Weaver et al. highlighted the prevalence of these toxic compounds in U.S. corn grain and corn silage by analyzing the results of almost 2,000 grain and forage samples across seven years. Findings showed that the mean numbers of mycotoxins per sample were 4.8 and 5.2 in grain and silage, respectively.

These findings are often replicated in the ongoing testing carried out by Alltech’s 37+^® mycotoxin analysis laboratory network. For example, in 2021, over 7,000 tests revealed that an astounding 95% of samples contained two or more mycotoxins.

In recent years, several factors have combined to exacerbate the mycotoxin risk in animal diets worldwide. More extreme weather patterns, such as droughts and floods, are creating extra stress on crops, which is one of the primary predisposing factors for mold and mycotoxin development. Additionally, the shift to no-till crop establishment and reduced crop rotation is leading to a greater buildup of crop residues, which only serves to increase the mycotoxin risk in subsequent crops.

How mycotoxins impact animals

Mycotoxins can be the root cause of numerous problems on-farm. However, some of the more common mycotoxin symptoms include:

• Digestive disorders, such as diarrhea.
• Reproductive challenges, such as decreased fertility and abnormal estrous cycles.
• Reduced animal performance, often linked to reduced feed consumption and nutrient utilization.
• Compromised health, related to suppressed immunity and increased disease risk.

As demonstrated by the routine mycotoxin analysis mentioned above, the presence of multiple mycotoxins in grains and forages tends to be the norm rather than the exception. This may lead to additional or synergistic effects, further compounding the mycotoxin problem for livestock producers.

Taking a proactive approach to mycotoxin management

Although mycotoxins are often chemically stable enough to survive food and feed processing — meaning it is virtually impossible to eliminate them from the supply chain — there are some key steps that can be taken to enhance control efforts.

John Winchell serves as Alltech’s Northeast U.S. territory sales manager, where he has worked with Poulin Grain for nearly two years. When working through mycotoxin challenges, John has always believed it’s best to take a more proactive approach.

“When you think of mycotoxin management, I think it’s much more than just a product — it’s a program; [one that involves] looking at pre-harvest and post-harvest strategies, and [considering] different things, such as climate, population, and varieties,” John explains. “[This paints] a total picture as opposed to [taking a] reactive [approach].”

Aided by Winchell’s support throughout the crop-growing season, Poulin Grain and their dairy nutrition customers have implemented steps to help enhance forage quality and produce superior quality dairy feeds.

For example, to manage grain and forage quality post-harvest, John introduced Poulin Grain to both the Alltech 37+ mycotoxin analysis and Alltech RAPIREAD^®.

Alltech 37+ is a lab-based mycotoxin detection method that can identify up to 54 individual mycotoxins, including those in total mixed rations (TMRs).

Alltech RAPIREAD utilizes a portable testing module to quickly detect six key mycotoxins. It is typically used directly on-farm or in the feed mill due to its ability to deliver quick results, often in less than 15 minutes.

“Working with [Alltech] 37+ to look at the different samples on different commodities and forages has really helped us get closer to where we need to be on forage quality and cow health,” states Winchell, while also highlighting how Poulin Grain were early adopters of Alltech RAPIREAD, thereby allowing mycotoxin control decisions to be activated on the same day that a challenge is identified.

Optimizing dairy forage quality is a key focus area for both Poulin Grain and Alltech.

Maximizing livestock productivity

Poulin Grain is no stranger to adaption and innovation, as noted by general manager and senior vice president Mike Tetreault, “One of the key things for Poulin Grain to continue to be leaders in animal nutrition is we must be innovative. And part of being innovative for us is having the right products, services and technologies [in place].” That is where John Winchell and Alltech come in.

According to Tetreault, “[Winchell] has been a tremendous asset for us — he’s been really committed [to serving] all our customers and covering every area. He’s been a true source of support, education and growth for all our customers and [our] company. I don’t know what we’d do without this Alltech service.”

From starting with a simple introductory webinar to today implementing the latest in mycotoxin detection, Mike feels the Poulin team has now become experts in managing mycotoxins and is far more able to make informed decisions.

What lies ahead

As Poulin Grain’s business continues to grow and develop the ways in which it serves its diverse customer base, Tetreault is excited about what lies ahead.

“When we find problems that really need further investigation, Alltech’s 37+ [program] has been there to support us dramatically for the last year,” he says. “We’ve had several situations where we’ve been able to help and correct management [on-farm]. It’s really been a great run, and I know that going forward, utilizing these Alltech services, products and technologies will [continue to] truly be an asset for Poulin Grain.”