When people think about regenerative agriculture, most of them think about regenerating the soil. But for John Kempf, founder of regenerative agronomy consulting company Advancing Eco Agriculture, it’s also about regenerating public health.
The key, he says, lies in plant immunity. When farmers grow healthy, nutritious plants that are naturally resistant to illnesses and pathogens, the crops can transfer that immunity to the livestock and the people who eat them—the animals as well as the plants.
“These more nutritious foods increase the function and performance of our immune system, and they reduce our susceptibility to degenerative illnesses,” Kempf said.
He cited scientific papers that describe the use of selenium as an effective treatment to both prevent and treat cancer. “One hypothetical possibility is simply to make sure that the foods that our farmers are growing are biofortified with selenium by having adequate selenium levels in our soil.”
A Wake-Up Moment
Kempf comes from a farming family in northeast Ohio that grew tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and zucchini. Following Amish tradition, he started working on the family farm after finishing eighth grade. He was put in charge of irrigation and spraying fertilizers and pesticides.In 2004, the Kempf family started cultivating a field on a neighboring farm, one with less pesticide exposure. They planted cantaloupe in both fields. At harvest, the plants on their soil—that had a great amount of pesticides applied to it—had 80 percent of their leaves infected with mildew. To Kempf’s surprise, there was no mildew on the plants growing in their neighbor’s soil.
“Not 5 percent or 10 percent. You couldn’t find any.”
This experience led him on a search to understand why some plants were more susceptible to powdery mildew when other, identically treated plants a yard away were resistant.
Through extensive reading and discussions with teachers and mentors, he discovered a vast body of knowledge about plant immune systems that has been thoroughly studied yet remains unutilized in large-scale agriculture.
“The idea is that plants have an immune system much like ours,” he explained. “But we know that our immune systems don’t all function equally well—some people become ill very easily with the first cold or flu bug that comes along, and other people practically never become ill. It’s because of how well their immune system has been supported throughout the course of their entire lifetime.”
In the photo on the right, wheat seeds were given a germination catalyst from AEA, BioCoat Gold, with nutrients and beneficial soil microbes. The seeds of the wheat plant on the left did not receive the same treatment. Courtesy of Advancing Eco Agriculture
The same concept holds true for plants. “Plants have the ability to be resistant to diseases and insects and all types of pathogens as long as their immune system is supported with good nutrition and with a good microbiome.”
On his farm, he found that the herbicides and fungicides applied to the soil had harmed the microbiome and diminished nutrient availability so severely that it resulted in what he refers to as “disease-conducive soil.” This nutritional imbalance allowed an influx of insects to target the cantaloupes grown in that environment.
“Diseases and insects are simply nature’s survival-of-the-fittest mechanisms,” he said.
“They are here to take the unhealthy plants out of the system. Diseases and insects don’t attack plants indiscriminately—they always go to the weakest parts of the field first.”
He added that modern agriculture uses genetic modification and fertilizers to facilitate significant growth. However, those conventionally grown plants lack the nutrition needed to develop a functional immune system.
“Much the same as people. We talk about how we are consuming empty calories, we’re consuming all these carbohydrates and sugars without good mineral nutrition, and that’s because we treat our plants in the field in the same way.”
Benefits
When Kempf learned that it was possible to grow plants resistant to diseases and insects, he started implementing these systems on his farm. Soon, he discovered that having remarkably healthy plants had other benefits as well.First, he discovered that the healthy plants were regenerating the soil as they grew.
“There’s been this idea that somehow agriculture is by its very nature inherently extractive and that the very process of growing crops means that we remove nutrients and we remove carbon from the soil,” he said. “But what we observed was the opposite, that when we were growing very healthy plants, they were actually storing carbon in the soil and increasing soil organic matter and increasing nutrient availability.”
Secondly, he realized that the plants not only have functional immune systems, but they also have the capacity to transfer that immunity to the animals and humans who eat them.
“We could have a legitimate conversation about growing food as medicine,” he said.
Healthy plants create healthy soil, according to John Kempf. Here, an onion field grows. Courtesy of Advancing Eco Agriculture
From his perspective, regenerative agriculture doesn’t just regenerate soil health and ecosystems. “It is also a form of agriculture that regenerates public health.”
The third benefit was economical. As plants become healthier, yields increase. “It seems obvious because when you have really robustly healthy plants, you can’t stop the yields from increasing. This was in direct contrast to many people who suggested that we should expect reduced yields from regenerative agriculture.”
This third benefit is motivating more farmers to embrace regenerative agriculture. But it wasn’t always like that.
When talking to other farmers, Kempf discovered that even though the idea of cultivating crops that can restore both soil and human health sounded appealing, concerns about potential economic losses caused many farmers to be reluctant to make the switch.
Kempf decided to change the approach of his consulting firm. He started focusing intensely on economic outcomes. His promise to “help farmers make more money with regenerative agriculture” attracted many clients. So far, he and his team of more than 80 employees have worked with over 10,000 farms in North America, helping over 4 million acres of land transition to regenerative agriculture practices.
One example shared by Kempf is the story of a cherry grower in the Pacific Northwest named Mike Omeg, owner of Omeg Orchards. At their first meeting, Omeg made it clear that he didn’t care about reducing pesticides or fertilizers. Rather, he wanted Kempf’s advice on how to grow large, firm cherries that would qualify for the export market and long-distance transportation.
They worked together on improving tree nutrition. In an annual review meeting three years later, Omeg told Kempf that his trees had no powdery mildew or bacterial canker anymore, and they had developed freeze resistance. He no longer needed to apply fertilizers and pesticides, so his cherries could even qualify as organic. At the same time, both his yields and profitability had significantly increased.
A Change in Paradigm
Kempf firmly believes that if more farmers switched to regenerative agriculture, it could have a significant impact on public health. But before that happens, he said other things need to happen first.One important factor would be switching from the perspective of “humans as parasites that degrade ecosystems”—which proposes that the way to regenerate a landscape is to remove people from it—to one of humans as caretakers.
Potato flowers in bloom. Healthy plants resist disease better. Courtesy of Advancing Eco Agriculture
“I hold the point of view that the fastest way to regenerate an ecosystem is not to remove people from the landscape, but to get more people who care about ecosystems and who love the land and who love the soil to be engaged as caring, loving stewards,” he said.
For Kempf, regenerating the capacity for stewardship is key. Rural communities lack talent, as many young people move to the cities searching for better opportunities. “If we want to regenerate agriculture at its most foundational level, we need to regenerate agricultural economics so that farmers are compensated well. In so doing, we regenerate the capacity for good stewardship.”
To drive this change, Kempf said that there are two main things people could do. The first is to support farmers who use regenerative practices and produce healthy food by buying from them directly. This isn’t limited to local farms, as many accept online orders and can deliver nationwide.
The second is to join the conversation about the health crisis in America and what can be done about it.
Kempf believes agriculture is in a “unique position” to prevent diseases and enhance public health; however, a shift in food policy is essential for widespread impact. He noted that for nearly a century, the United States has followed a “cheap food policy,” resulting in a rise in degenerative diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, along with significant healthcare expenses related to these conditions.
“So rather than a cheap food policy, we would be much better served to have a quality food policy, where we focus on producing food that has exceptional nutritional quality.”
The current policy incentivizes farmers to produce cheap food; that’s why Kempf thinks that a change in policy is needed to get more farmers to produce high-quality, nutritious food. “Because the reality is, farmers today are doing exactly what has been asked of them,” he said.
Kempf thinks that the current Make America Healthy Again movement is “an opportunity for us to inspire and motivate significant change at the policy level in a way there never has been before.” For him, the transition to adopting regenerative agriculture on a wider scale doesn’t start in the farmers’ fields.
“Transition happens first in our hearts and minds.”
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
