FarmTogether Investing Podcast Episode 3: Farmland Investing: Income & Impact on a Massive Scale

Welcome to the third episode of the FarmTogether Investing podcast. This podcast series is brought to you by a partnership between FarmTogether, a unique investment company, and Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture.

The goal of this series is to help you understand how farmland can be an investment tool, why it works, and how it can help support sustainability and the regenerative farming movement.

This episode features David Chan, founding team member & COO of Farm Together, interviewed by Ryan Slabaugh, General Manager of Acres U.S.A.

In this episode, we will talk about the current state of farmland and what is threatening it, how these types of investments can help drive sustainability, and get to the bottom line — what is the value of investing and let’s talk real-world examples.

If you missed it, you can find Episode 1: Access to the Inaccessible: Pioneers in Farmland Investing, here.

Then listen to Episode 2: Smart Farming & the Future of Agriculture, here.

Want to get notified of upcoming podcast episodes from this series or other podcast series by Acres U.S.A.? Sign up for the News & Announcements email newsletter here!

FarmTogether Investing Podcast Episode 3: Farmland Investing: Income & Impact on a Massive Scale

The goal of this series is to help you understand how farmland can be an investment tool, why it works, and how it can help support sustainability and the regenerative farming movement.

This episode features David Chan, founding team member & COO of Farm Together, interviewed by Ryan Slabaugh, General Manager of Acres U.S.A.

If you missed it, you can find Episode 1: Access to the Inaccessible: Pioneers in Farmland Investing, here.

Then listen to Episode 2: Smart Farming & the Future of Agriculture, here.

Want to get notified of upcoming podcast episodes from this series or other podcast series by Acres U.S.A.? Sign up for the News & Announcements email newsletter here!

FarmTogether Investing Podcast Episode 2: Smart Farming & the Future of Agriculture

Welcome to the second episode of the FarmTogether Investing podcast. This podcast series is brought to you by a partnership between FarmTogether, a unique investment company, and Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture.

The goal of this series is to help you understand how farmland can be an investment tool, why it works, and how it can help support sustainability and the regenerative farming movement.

Our guest of honor this episode is Jason Kosareff, farmland asset manager at FarmTogether. He is interviewed by Acres U.S.A. General Manager Ryan Slabaugh.

As we learned in Episode 1, farmland is a large asset class in the United States for investors with a lot of history. In this episode, we will dive into learn about sustainable farmland management, including why soil and plant health is essential, how technology can be leveraged to conserve water usage, and how utilizing compost and soil amendments can improve long-term soil health.

If you missed it, you can check out Episode 1: Access to the Inaccessible: Pioneers in Farmland Investing, here.

Once you’ve listened, don’t forget to move on to Episode 3: Farmland Investing: Income & Impact on a Massive Scale, here.

Want to get notified of upcoming podcast episodes from this series or other podcast series by Acres U.S.A.? Sign up for the News & Announcements email newsletter here!

FarmTogether Investing Podcast Episode 2: Smart Farming & the Future of Agriculture

The goal of this series is to help you understand how farmland can be an investment tool, why it works, and how it can help support sustainability and the regenerative farming movement.

Our guest of honor this episode is Jason Kosareff, farmland asset manager at FarmTogether. He is interviewed by Acres U.S.A. General Manager Ryan Slabaugh.

If you missed it, you can check out Episode 1: Access to the Inaccessible: Pioneers in Farmland Investing, here.

Once you’ve listened, don’t forget to move on to Episode 3: Farmland Investing: Income & Impact on a Massive Scale, here.

Want to get notified of upcoming podcast episodes from this series or other podcast series by Acres U.S.A.? Sign up for the News & Announcements email newsletter here!

Soils in Relation to Human Nutrition

This excerpt is brought to you by Book of the Week – offering you a glimpse between the pages and an exclusive discount of a new book each week. Get the Book of the Week email newsletter delivered directly to your in box! This week’s Book of the Week is Albrecht’s Soil Fertility & Human & Animal Health, Vol. VIII, by Dr. William Albrecht.

National consciousness has recently become aware of the great losses from soil erosion. We have also come to give more than passive attention to malnutrition on a national scale. Not yet, however, have we recognized soil fertility as the food-producing source that reveals national and international patterns of weakness or strength. Soil fertility, in the last analysis, must not only be mobilized to win wars, but must also be preserved as the standing army opposing starvation for the maintenance of peace.

What is soil fertility? In simple words, it is some dozen chemical elements in mineral and rock combinations that are slowly broken out of the earth’s crust and hustled off to the sea. Enjoying a temporary rest stop enroute, they become part of the soil and serve their essential roles in nourishing all the different life forms. They are the soil’s contribution — from a large mass of organic essentials — to the germinating seeds which empower the growing plants to use sunshine energy in the synthesis of atmospheric elements and rainfall into a wide variety of plant food. The atmospheric and rainfall elements are carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, so common everywhere.

Soil minerals constitute the 5% that is plant ash. It is this small handful of dust that also makes up the corresponding percentage in the human body. Yet it is the controlling force that determines whether Nature shall construct plant foods of only fuel and fattening values, or of body service in growth and reproduction. Because soil minerals make up only 5% of our bodies, we are not generally aware of the fact that they dictate the fabrication of the other 95% into something more than mere fuel.

We are in the habit of speaking about vegetation by names of crop species and tonnage yields per acre. We do not yet consider plants for their chemical composition and nutritive value according to the fertility in the soil producing them. This failure has left us in confusion about crops and has put plant varieties into competition with, rather than in support of, one another. Now that the subject of nutrition is on most every tongue, we are about ready for the report that vegetation as a creator of essential food products is limited by soil fertility.

Protein rich vegetation, and its synthesis by many unknowns which also help to remove hidden hungers and encourage fecundity of both man and animal, are common in the prairie regions marked by moderate rainfalls. It is the soil fertility, rather than the low rainfall, that gives the midwest, or those areas bordering along approximately the 97th meridian, these distinctions:

Its selection by the bison in thundering herds for the “buffalo grass.”
Its wheat which, taken as a whole rather than as refined flour, is truly the “staff of life.”
Animals on its range nourish themselves so well that they reproduce regularly.
The greater number of more able-bodied selectees for military service, of whom 7 out of 10 were chosen in Colorado in contrast to 7 rejected out of 10 in one of the southern states.

Carbon rich vegetation abounds in the high temperature, heavy rainfall regions of eastern and southern United States, as the forests, the cotton plants, and the sugarcane testify. These soils have been leached of much fertility, and plants must draw heavily upon air, water and sunlight rather than the soil for their materials. Annual production as tonnage per acre is large in contrast to the lower yields of the western prairies, but the fuel and fattening values are more prominent than the aids to growth and reproduction.

Life behavior is more closely linked with soils as the basis of nutrition than is commonly recognized. The depletion of soil calcium thru leaching and cropping, and the almost universal deficiency of soil phosphorus, directly affect animals, since bones are the chief body depositories for these two elements. In forests, the annual drop of leaves and their decay are a prime necessity for tree mainetnance. Is it any wonder then that animals struggle so desperately to find the necessary calcium and phosphorus to make their bones?

Antlers are quickly consumed by the porcupine, pregnant squirrels, and other animals living on the highly weathered, or rocky, forest soils. Deer in their browse will select trees that have been given fertilizers in preference to those untreated. Pine tree seedlings along the highway transplanted from fertilized nursery soils are taken by deer when the same tree species in the adjoining forests go untouched. Wild animals truly “know their medicines” when they take plants on particular levels of soil fertility.

Man shading his eyes with his hand and looking over a black forest meadow where cows are grazing.

The distribution of wild animals, the present distribution of domestic animals, and the concentrations of animal diseases, can be visualized as symptoms of the soil fertility pattern as it furnishes nutrition. It is on the lime-rich, unleached, semi-humid soils that animals reproduce well. It is there that the disease rate is lower and some diseases are rare. There beef cattle are multiplied and grown to be shipped to the humid soils for fattening. Similar cattle shipments from one fertility level to another are common in the Argentine.

The influence of added fertilizers shows itself markedly in the entire physiology of the aniaml. Tests on sheep reveal differences not only in the weight and quality of the wool, but in the bones, and more pronouncedly, in semen production and reproduction in general. Rabbit bones vary widely in breaking strength, density, thickness, hardness and other qualities, as well as mass and volume. Male rabbits used for artificial insemination become sterile after a few weeks when fed on lespedeza hay grown without soil treatment, while those eating hay from limed soil remain fertile. We now have conclusive evidence that the physiology of an animal, seemingly far removed from any slight change in soil conditions, faithfully registers the fertility or sterility of the soil.

The instincts of animals are compelling us to recognize soil differences. Not only do the dumb beasts select herbages according to their carbon or protein content, but they select from the same kind of grain the offerings according to the different fertilizers with which the soil was treated. Hogs select corn grains from separate feeder compartments with disregard of different hybrids, but with particular and consistent choice of soil treatments. Rats indicate their discrimination by cutting into the bags of corn chosen by the hogs, and leave uncut those bags not taken by the hogs. Surely the animal appetite that detects soil fertility so correctly can be of service in guiding animal production more wisely by means of soil treatments.

The pattern of distribution of human beings and their diseases can be evaluated nationally on a statistical basis as readily as crops of wheat or livestock, but these are not yet seen in terms of the soil fertility. Man’s nomadic nature has made him too cosmopolitan for his physique, health, facial features, and mental attitudes to be labeled by the particular soil that nourished him. Our collection of foods from far-flung sources also handicaps our ready correlation of our level of nutrition with the fertility of the soil. In addition, we have finally come to believe that food processing and refinement are denying us some essentials. We have not yet, however, come to appreciate the role that soil fertility plays in determining the nutritive quality of foods, and thereby our bodies, and our minds. Quantity rather than hidden quality is still the measure.

Since any civilization rests on its resources rather than on its institutions, changes in the institutions cannot be made in disregard of so basic a resource as the soil. Researchers in soil science, plant physiology, ecology, human nutrition, and other sciences have given but a few years of their efforts to human welfare. It is to be hoped that our national consciousness can be made aware of a dangerously declining soil fertility, and that we will call on our sciences and industries to rebuild and conserve our soils as the surest guarantee of the future health and strength of the nation.

About the Author:

Dr. William A. Albrecht, the author of these papers, was chairman of the Department of Soils at the University of Missouri College of Agriculture, where he had been a member of the staff for 43 years. He held four degrees, A.B., B.S. in Agriculture, M.S. and Ph.D., from the University of Illinois. During a vivid and crowded career, he traveled widely and studied soils in the United States, Great Britain, on the European continent, and in Australia. Respected and recognized by scientists and agricultural leaders from around the world, Dr. Albrecht retired in 1959 and passed from the scene in May 1974 as his 86th birthday approached.

Titles of Similar Interest:

Food, Farming & Health, by Dr. Vandana Shiva
Nourishment, by Fred Provenza
Poisoning Our Children, by André Leu

FarmTogether Investing Podcast

Welcome to the FarmTogether Investing Podcast, brought to you by a partnership between FarmTogether, a unique investment company focused on sustainability, and Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture.

The goal of this podcast series is to help you understand how farmland can be an investment tool, and how it can help support sustainability and the regenerative farming movement.

Diversify your portfolio and increase your passive income by investing in farmland with FarmTogether’s all-in-one investment platform.

Episode 1: Access to the Inaccessible: Pioneers in Farmland Investing

FarmTogether CEO and founder Artem Milinchuk discusses how farmland can add to your investment portfolio, and how you can invest without breaking the bank. Read the full episode article.

Episode 2: Smart Farming & The Future of Agriculture

In this episode, we will dive into learning about sustainable farmland management, including why soil and plant health is essential, how technology can be leveraged to conserve water usage, and how utilizing compost and soil amendments can improve long-term soil health. Read the full episode article.

Episode 3: Farmland Investing: Income & Impact on a Massive Scale

Stay Informed!

Want to get notified of upcoming podcast episodes from this series or other podcast series by Acres U.S.A.? Sign up for the News & Announcements email newsletter here!

FarmTogether Investing Podcast Episode 1: Access to the Inaccessible

Welcome to the first episode of the FarmTogether Investing podcast. This podcast series is brought to you by a partnership between FarmTogether, a unique investment company focused on sustainability, and Acres U.S.A., the Voice of Eco-Agriculture.

The goal of this series is to help you understand how farmland can be an investment tool, and how it can help support sustainability and the regenerative farming movement.

In this episode, Acres U.S.A. General Manager Ryan Slabaugh interviews FarmTogether CEO and founder Artem Milinchuk about new ways to invest in farmland. They promote themselves as working “to ensure peace and plenty by investing in the sustainable agricultural revolution.”

Listen to learn how farmland can add to your investment portfolio, how you can invest without breaking the bank, and what this looks like in the future.

Next, check out Episode 2 of the FarmTogether Investing podcast, which will focus on the connection between agriculture technology and the future of investing in farmland.

Then, make sure you don’t miss Episode 3 of the FarmTogether Investing podcast, which will feature a discussion on the current state of farmland and what is threatening it, how these types of investments can help drive sustainability, and what is the value of investing, with real-world examples.

Want to get notified of upcoming podcast episodes from this series or other podcast series by Acres U.S.A.? Sign up for the News & Announcements email newsletter here!

Carbon and Carbon Dioxide

Finnish Nobel Prize winner Artturi Virtanen ended his well-received speech at an international convention in Lindau, Germany, with the words: “The biological process of compounding nitrogen and collecting and using bacteria is, apart from the assimilation of carbon dioxide, a process of fundamental significance not only for plant nutrition but for the whole of life on earth.”

This statement by Virtanen could serve as the maxim for the following treatment of carbon and carbon dioxide.

Carbon

Carbon refers above all to the gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and to the soil-borne carbonic acid upon which all biological activity in the soil depends.

Carbon is, like atmospheric nitrogen, no article of commerce and cannot be bought!

All plant and animal matter consists of carbon compounds. Without carbon dioxide the plant would cease all activities; it could not continue living. Uncompounded carbon is rare. In crystal form it occurs as diamonds and graphite.

Plants can gather almost all the nutrients they need from the steady stream of passing nutrients, except for carbon, which is most important because the plant must build up almost half of its solid matter out of carbon. In plant nutrition and for humus development the important element in terms of quantity is carbon, followed by nitrogen, and then all other elements occurring in the soil cycle.

It is easy to forget that carbon in the soil in the form of released carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important raw material for the plant, other than nitrogen. Historically, however, nitrogen has been given a superior position in soil science and carbon was generally considered relatively unimportant.

Carbon Dioxide

It is first worth mentioning that carbon dioxide is a gaseous nutrient and that both components of carbon dioxide are important building blocks for plants. Carbon dioxide is a colorless gas with a slightly acidic smell. It is one and a half times heavier than air, has low reactivity, and is noncombustible. Carbon dioxide is dissolved in all natural waters; there can be up to one part of CO2 in each part of water. Although it is true that atmospheric carbon dioxide is generally referred to as “carbonic acid (of the air)”, true carbonic acid (H2CO3) is produced when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water (CO2+H2O). Their salts are the carbonates. But carbon dioxide used for artificial mineral waters is also referred to as carbonic acid. By comparison, carbon monoxide (CO) is a toxic gas, without color or smell. Carbon monoxide can be found in the fumes produced by defective coal ovens, car exhausts, and feed silos and can lead to gas poisoning. Carbon dioxide stems from soil respiration, the burning of coal and oil, volcanic eruptions, and the respiration of superior living beings. Through the consumption of carbon dioxide plants keep up the cycle of carbon dioxide.

Soil-Borne Carbonic Acid

The varied locations of soil-borne carbon dioxide include:

in the air around the plant, close to the soil
further up where there is no more foliage
high above the plant

Carbon dioxide amounts are naturally higher in the air near the soil than above the green shield and in the (upper) free air. Carbonic acid located above the leaf shield cannot be taken up by the plants.

Nature has designed plants so that soil-borne CO2 can be absorbed most effectively through the stomata, located on the underside of the leaf.

Between two and three hundred stomata can exist on one square centimeter of leaf surface “inhaling” carbon dioxide. The width of the stomata is regulated by the stomata guard cells. After passing through these stomata guard cells, CO2 molecules find their way into air pockets and then move farther down into the green leaf tissue where they are dissolved into water and processed. In addition to the stomata, there are very tiny openings on both sides of the leaves, the so-called micropores through which water and the substances dissolved in it can pass. By means of this mechanism it is possible to increase the nutrient supply of the plant by applying nutrients and growth substances in solution to the leaves, a practice called foliar nutrition.

Atmospheric air, besides 21 percent oxygen and around 78 percent nitrogen, contains approximately 0.05 percent carbon dioxide (CO2). Oxygen contents below 20 percent frequently can be found in the air directly above the ground, whereas the carbon dioxide level here is often over 0.2 percent and can reach even higher concentrations (2-3 percent). Thus, carbon dioxide contents above the surface can be ten to a hundred times higher than in the atmospheric air.

The CO2 concentration in the air surrounding the leaves is crucial for the plants’ carbon dioxide supply. The plant cannot make direct use of carbon dioxide that has accumulated overnight, mainly due to the vertical air currents in the early hours of the morning and when there is not a closed shield of leaves. An evergreen field thus is aways an advantage.

Soil Respiration

Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide freed by respiration processes in the soil stems from the activity of microorganisms, less than a third stems from the activity of microorganisms, less than a third stems from root respiration, and the remainder comes from the respiration of the soil-dwelling creatures. All the biological activity of a soil becomes apparent through the soil respiration.

As a result of the assimilation by the plant roots and the respiration of the soil organisms (oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production), the composition of the air in the soil is different from that in the atmosphere. Most significantly, the content of carbon dioxide in the air just above the soil is greatly increased. If the exchange of gases is inhibited (for example, in a compacted soil without stable crumb structure) the carbon dioxide content can rise above 10 percent, and the oxygen content can sink to below 10 percent, which inhibits root activity.

The Ratio of Carbon Dioxide to Nitrogen

The carbon/nitrogen ratio (C/N ratio) is a useful way to measure organic matter’s ability to decompose as well as to the biotic activity of a soil. The carbon/nitrogen ratio necessary for cellulose decomposition is 30:1. Aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, actinomycetes, and fungi all take part in the decomposition of organic substances. Cellulose, the most important building material in vegetal walls, is the most resistant carbohydrate.

Microbial activity becomes inhibited if there is not enough protein — nitrogen available for their construction. If the carbon/nitrogen ratio is greater than 25:1, as is the case in straw and strawy manure, there is less decomposition of matter and nitrogen is temporarily biotically fixed in the microbes. Organically bound nitrogen can only be released when the organic matter has decomposed and the carbon/nitrogen ration decreases, for example below 20:1. Highly fertile soils should have a low carbon/nitrogen ratio of 10:1 (the actual ratio can be determined in a laboratory).

About the Author:

Erhard Hennig was an agronomist who devoted himself to agriculture from an early age. He worked extensively as a farmer, agricultural consultant, journalist, author, and lecturer and worked and taught at Humboldt University in Berlin. Hennig died in 1998.

Titles of Similar Interest:

The Farm as Ecosystem, by Jerry Brunetti
Humusphere, by Herwig Pommeresche
A Grower’s Guide for Balancing Soils, by William McKibben

Tractor Time Episode 60: Talking Plants, Smart Insects and a New Farm Language

On this episode we’re discussing talking plants and smart insects with entomologist and author Dr. Joe Lewis.

Lewis spent his career in entomology with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service at the Tifton Campus of the University of Georgia. It was there that he worked to unlock the secrets of how plants and insects communicate with one another, particularly how plants use SOS signals to recruit beneficial insects to their defense. Based on those groundbreaking insights, Lewis and his colleagues developed holistic and sustainable approaches to pest management within agricultural systems. In 2008, along with his colleagues John A, Pickett and James H. Tumlinson, Lewis received the prestigious Wolf Prize in Agriculture.

Although Lewis has published papers in many academic and scientific journals, he’s just published his first book for Acres U.S.A. It’s called A New Farm Language: How a Sharecropper’s Son Discovered a World of Talking Plants, Smart Insects, and Natural Solutions.

The book tells the story of Joe Lewis’s humble beginnings as the son of an illiterate Mississippi sharecropper and the hardscrabble, yet happy childhood he spent raising chickens and growing cotton. It was on that small, rented farm, which had no electricity or indoor plumbing, that Lewis developed a fondness for nature that would set him on an unlikely path toward becoming an eminent scientist and innovator. More than a memoir, A New Farm Language is a manifesto and mission statement confronting the abuses of industrial agriculture and defending the value of strong communities and natural solutions.

Why Considering Soil Biofortification & Including Priming Practices is a Long-Term Response to Climate Stresses

Priming

To maintain healthy soils and plant vitality, the soil must serve as a carbon source, nutrient reservoir, and habitat for beneficial bacteria. Priming can advance this process as new carbon is incorporated into the soil, stimulating the decomposition of old soil carbon unlike nitrogen, which has a negative effect and inhibits priming in soil.

Since such a process involves diverse substrates that will be readily available for plant uptake in days – rather than hundreds of years – plants should be primed with carbon that is readily available.

NUE (Nutrient use Efficiency)

It is crucial for agricultural crops, most notably cereals and grasses, to have a high root density to efficiently capture Nitrates. Moll et al. (1982) defined NUE as being the yield of grain per unit of available N in the soil (including the residual N present in the soil and the fertilizer).

Soil biofortification and priming will increase the availability of nutrients, which can be a challenge for any crops requiring a large amount of nitrogen. Traditionally, in cereals, for which large amounts of N is required to attain maximum yield, NUE is estimated to be far less than 50% (Zhu, 2000; Raun and Johnson, 1999).

Increasing NUE isn’t the focus of priming, but a by-product of increased plant tolerance and vigor to environmentally induced stress. This game-changer of adaptive strategies is needed to improve tolerance to the stresses of today’s farming practices.

Heat Stress

Priming is a very promising strategy in modern soil management. Multiple results are noted, such as both enzyme activity and protein abundance being highly induced by cold priming. Plant tolerance to heat stress will depend on the plants’ ability to adapt to the environmental stimulus, signaling transduction, and provide physiological and biochemical adjustments.

It has been confirmed in some studies that heat priming could effectively improve thermo-tolerance to later recurred heat stress in several plant species (Wang et al. 2014; Zang et al. 2016).

Drought Stress

With the introduction of stress priming, abiotic stress priming can be used to stimulate cross-tolerance to later abiotic stresses that may include cold, drought, and waterlogging. The implementation of drought priming at earlier stages effectively alleviates drought stress during the later stages of growth (Selote and Khanna-Chopra 2010). This is because drought-primed plants are more tolerant to oxidative stress, a complex chemical and physiological phenomenon that accompanies virtually all biotic and abiotic stresses.

Murphy’s Law appears to be directly related to the timing of plant stressors. Drought stress in the reproductive stage will negatively impact production since this will be the most critical stage. Evaluations for plants pre-exposed to drought priming acquired a stress imprint that alleviated the subsequent drought stress during the later stages of growth, as evidenced by improved water status, photosynthesis, biomass, and yield. Drought-primed plants maintained lower natural stimulants (ABA) and higher (IAA) than plants without priming due to better water status for primed plants.

Priming has improved plant defenses by activating genes for faster and stronger transcription in response to stress (Conrath et al.2015).

These studies have shown that primed plants consumed less water by increasing water productivity and reducing water use efficiencies. It is now suggested that drought priming during the early growth period can be a viable strategy to save water use for irrigation while improving water productivity in regions where water is scarce.

Priming Practices

Freshwater algae extract is a perfect example of a naturally occurring organic substance of low concentrations that will directly influence plant developmental processes. Soil priming with an additional L-Amino acid package can support the efficiency of enhancers, activators, and promoters such as electron transport chains that complete processes such as the citric acid cycle (KREBS). Amino acids are closely correlated with active transcription of genes (Ruthenburg et al. 2007).

Prior to priming, soil tests should be taken to determine overall Soil Organic Matter (SOM). If the SOM is less than 2%, an application of soil amendments should be increased by 10-15% if the budget allows.

Sponsor Message

Soil applied rates of Nutri-Plus™, Universal™, and Microelements™ can be used to greatly accelerate the biofortification of soils through controlled priming. Learn more at https://ferticellusa.com/products.