Lance Gunderson of Regen Ag Labs is making soil health testing practical
The standard soil test has been in widespread use for decades. In recent years, though, many growers, agronomists and researchers have started to realize that there are better ways to measure soil health and potential.
Lance Gunderson founded Regen Ag Labs in 2019 to provide “accurate, reliable and impactful analytical testing services surrounding the principles of soil health and regenerative agriculture.” He is an expert in the PLFA and Haney tests, and in addition to these and other standard soil tests, the Nebraska-based lab offers total nutrient digest, water holding capacity, soil enzyme and aggregate stability tests.
Acres U.S.A. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got here and why you founded Regen Ag Labs?
Lance Gunderson. Sure. My background is actually a little different. I’m not a soil scientist. I’m a biologist and a chemist, and I started working at a soils lab when I was in college at the University of Nebraska. I was running a lot of conventional soil tests — the things that everyone was familiar with.
In 2008, I decided to go back to school and pursue a master’s degree. The economy, of course, took a dive, so I stayed in Kearney and created the first commercial soil health testing division in the country — a for-profit lab that focused on soil biology. I was kind of a one man show for three or four years. We offered the PLFA test [phospholipid fatty acid] and introduced the Haney test in 2012.
That really gave me an opportunity to work with farmers. I had originally wanted to go work with marine biology. But what kept me in ag was talking to farmers. I love education and learning, and I learned a lot from these growers and their struggles — what they were going through, yield, commodity prices, weather, crop insurance and ag lending and all these different issues —- they wanted to do something a little different. They just didn’t know how.
So, we started working with these growers. And in 2019, I decided, let’s create a lab that is dedicated purely to soil health. We do run conventional soil tests — it’s the same equipment —but the clientele that we work with are interested in doing something different, and the lab is there to help bridge the gap and show them the full current status of their soil.
I tell people it’s like having a medical physical. You wake up one day and realize that you don’t feel that great. You go to the doctor and you get a physical — they take all these measurements and they identify problem areas and things that are good, and then they give you general recommendations. Exercise, more sleep, try to reduce your stress, etc.
But how you do that is really up to you. We work with a lot of consultants as well as with farmers that are doing this themselves. That’s what Regen Ag Lab is really working toward — how can we figure out where you need to go; what direction should you go? And how you choose to get there is up to you.
Here at the end of 2022 we’re looking at expansion. Things are going really well. Obviously there’s a lot of interest out there.
Acres U.S.A. Earlier, when you said you developed a soil health division, I think you meant that it was a lab that focused on incorporating the element of biology into the conversation — whereas traditional soil testing only looks at physics and chemistry; is that what you mean?
Gunderson. Absolutely. And I would say physics is in really small font there. Chemistry was always the big one in bold, right? A lot of labs have the ability to run some physical measures. But where I started was with biological measures — phospholipid fatty acids for community analysis, and then the Haney test, which couples biology and chemistry together. We also run things like water holding capacity, which is mostly driven by physics, soil texture, and carbon content, but soil texture — especially aggregate stability, which of course is a physical measure — is driven by biology. So, they’re all tied together.
We try to provide a larger picture. I’m an analogy person — imagine you’re sitting there trying to build a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, but you’re only looking at 13 of the pieces. Do you know what that picture is? Unless you’ve got the box in front of you, you have no idea what it is. I’m not saying that we’re able to measure all the pieces, because soil is a giant black box; but pulling in more of these pieces allows us to see more of the picture. And then you can start to use that to guide your management.
Acres U.S.A. Historically, this magazine has provided an alternative view to conventional NPK-type agriculture. Even though right from the first issues there was a discussion of soil biology, it was very chemistry focused — albeit a different type of chemistry — balancing calcium and magnesium levels and considering other elements that mainstream farmers didn’t. Legend has it that at some point in the 90s, Elaine Ingham came to the Acres U.S.A. conference and got booed out of the room for talking so much about biology.
I think it’s possible that at that early stage of our understanding of soil biology — you know, when people come up with something new, they often go to one extreme. It may have come over as “You don’t need to worry about chemistry at all — all you need is biology.” But I think we’ve come to a point now where we’re realizing that we really need to focus on all three equally: chemistry, physics and biology.
Related to that, can you talk about microscope testing methods for soil biology — like Elaine Ingham teaches? Is that something you’ve used or that you provide? What are the possibilities and limitations of that type of testing?
Gunderson. That’s a great question. To reiterate your point, I often caution people — this is just human nature, in my opinion — that we like the extremes. I mean, look at our current political situation! We’re always pulled all one way or the other.
I often try to remind people that regenerative agriculture is not about going from one extreme to the other. It’s not about eliminating all the technologies that we’ve developed — fertilizers and herbicides and all those tools. Yes, that can be a goal, and yes, there are people that have done that very successfully. But if that is your reason for doing this, and you’re gonna do it come hell or high water, that’s not necessarily setting you up for success.
Everybody in this country 100 years ago was an organic producer — and that didn’t work well for our production systems. Now, obviously, there are some things that we could do better within that system. But at the same time, we’ve gone completely to this other extreme, where we produce a huge amount of food — calories, really — but there’s all these questions about dumbing the diet down to nothing but corn and beans.
How can we get back to the middle somewhere? The middle always scares people, for some reason, but that’s where I’m most comfortable. The middle is going to be a little different for everybody. But when I talk to people, that’s my word of caution. We don’t have to go clear back to one extreme.
On the measurement side, there are three major techniques to measure soil biology. First there’s microscopy, or direct-light culture plating. When people think of microbiology, this is what they usually think of. The advantage to this method is that if you know what you’re looking for, and you’re looking for something very specific, it’s a great way of trying to find it. Nematology is still done this way. That work has been established.
The disadvantages to this method, in my opinion, are first that it’s relatively costly — not because the equipment’s that expensive but because of the training and level of expertise required to understand what you’re looking at. You have to have a lot of really well-paid, well-trained individuals to do that kind of work. And it’s tedious.
Acres U.S.A. Do you think that in the future, AI can start to take over some of this work?
Gunderson. I think so. But the other disadvantage to microscopy is that in conventional microbiology, the way you identify species and learn about them is that you have to grow them in isolation. That works really well for human disease, or disease organisms in general — we can replicate a controlled environment. We know what the human body’s made of — the temperature, etc. — we can replicate that. We can grow organisms and can isolate them to study them.
Soil organisms are highly integrated into an ecosystem, though. If you pull one of them out and try to grow it in isolation, it doesn’t grow. We all know that old adage — one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Well, in the world of microbes, that couldn’t be more true. They all rely on each other in some way, even if they’re killing each other. So isolating them is difficult.
That’s a limitation of microscopy — you can put something under a microscope and you can see all kinds of bacteria, but unless you isolate them or can identify them in some other way, you have no idea what they are. And not only that — if you don’t know what they are, there’s no way you can figure out what they do.
The second way of measuring soil biology is molecular techniques. This is where you are focusing on a specific molecule, or a specific process that an organism carries out, that is relatively unique. So, for example, if I held up a leaf and I asked a room of people, “Where did this leaf come from? Did it come from a tree? Did it come from a dog? Did it come from a cow?” Everyone knows that a leaf is a feature that only a tree has. Now, somebody really smart in the room might be able to identify the leaf as a red oak.
When we use molecular techniques, that’s the issue. All trees have leaves. But if you’re only looking at the leaf, it’s more difficult to identify exactly what type of tree it came from. That’s the limitation of molecular techniques — you’re not going to be able to be incredibly specific. You’re not going to identify species, because, for example, fungi tend to have a lot of the same processes or same molecules within them that bacteria do.
Sometimes you’re looking for a metabolite — something that’s created from a certain pathway that only those organisms create. For example, going back to human disease, Clostridium botulinum can produce a toxin called botulism. If you can identify that toxin, then you know those organisms have to be present. You don’t actually have to see or measure the organisms.
This is what we do with the PLFA test — we look for phospholipid fatty acids. Nearly all organisms contain phospholipids, but bacteria have a different class of phospholipids than fungi do. Yes, there is some overlap there, but they have certain biomarkers that you can look for. If we find a certain marker, that means we have bacteria. But again, which bacteria? We don’t always know that.
The power of a molecular technique is that it’s relatively inexpensive. Yes, it’s expensive relative to a conventional soil test. It does require some technical training and specialized equipment. But it’s all inclusive. It includes all the bacteria in the soil that are alive and all the fungi in the soil that are alive. Ten years ago, we thought we knew about 10 percent of the soil organisms. Today I would say we think we know less than 1 percent. Every time we learn about one, we discover 10 more we don’t know about. If you’re using microscopy to do a community analysis, that’s not your best bet; but like I said, if you’re want to find something very specific that’s already known to science, microscopy can work very well.
The third technique is genomics — metagenomic analysis. Genomics has been around a long time, but it hasn’t really been used in the context of soil. It’s primarily been used for human disease — for categorizing organisms through their DNA. This technology was first used to detect soilborne disease — that was the gateway. People began testing the soil for certain strains of E. coli or listeria that cause human disease.
Today this has progressed into a community analysis. Genomics is all inclusive, for the most part. We still have to know the organisms or sequence the DNA and have that in a database, if we’re going to identify them, but the genomic background of a bacteria cell is different than for a fungal cell, so we can differentiate them.
But we’re also able to look at genomic sequences related to known organisms and identify thousand and thousands of organisms to the species level. I always tell people, “If you really want a report with thousands of Latin names on it, that’s fine.” That’s not really useful to farmers. But what’s neat is that we’re able to categorize these organisms by function. We know certain organisms are responsible for nitrogen fixation, or carbon mineralization, or phosphorus mobility — and we can start to identify those. And from a nutrient standpoint — we can also identify them from a plant-disease standpoint, or a plant-disease-suppression standpoint.
Genomics is a technology I’ve been following for eight to 10 years. I held off on it, because it was just a little too cutting edge. The interpretations weren’t there yet. And some could argue they’re still not there; it’s a constant work in progress. But we recently partnered with BiomeMakers in California to offer this type of analysis, and we’ve coupled it with chemistry, to really start to evaluate the system. That’s what’s really exciting about it.
It’s relatively expensive. It’s incredibly technical. But the price of these tests has been cut in half from three years ago, and the technology gets better. Throughput is a big issue right now, but we’re trying to increase throughput, which should hopefully start to help with cost. I believe genomics is going to be that big frontier, to measure the gap between supply of nutrients — which we measure in the soil really well — and output of the factory, which is the crop.
Acres U.S.A. Is genomic testing quantitative as well? Can you sample, say, one milligram of soil and figure out that it contained X amount of microbes, whether they’re bacteria or fungi?
Gunderson. You can. And the molecular technique and even the microscopy technique is quantitative as well. In microscopy they do serial dilutions and culture counts of the organisms they can grow.
Acres U.S.A. Can you go into a bit more depth on the PLFA test? How would a grower make management decisions with it?
Gunderson. Sure. The PLFA test is not what most farmers would think of as a soil test. When it comes to the recommendation side, most growers are used to running a soil test. They tell you what they want to grow, what their yield potential is, or what they want to get to. And then they get this prescription tablet: add this much of this mineral.
That not how PLFA works. PLFA is kind of a report card. It’s an evaluation with a broad scope. For example, fungi don’t like tillage, because they’re their like nets — they’re multiple cells linked together, and when you run tillage equipment, you cut them up and they have to start over. If we evaluate a soil and it comes back with a very poor fungal to bacterial ratio — the bacteria are dominating the system — and if the residue isn’t breaking down every year, nothing seems to decompose, the soil is hard, etc. — a PLFA test will reflect that. It might not tell the farmers something they don’t already know.
But we run PLFA to get a baseline — to find out where the field is at. The microbial community is an indicator of how well that soil is functioning. Then the recommendation coming out of the test may be to increase the fungal-to-bacterial ratio by reducing or eliminating as much tillage as possible. Maybe try to lay off on the fungicide applications a year — your residue won’t break down because you’re spraying fungicide on it, and then the saprophytes that do decomposition aren’t going to grow.
Those are large-scale management changes. That’s not buying a truckload of lime and putting it out. That being said, we run a lot of PLFA coupled with chemical analysis, and that can be very effective. I have had multiple people tell me, “My pH is 5.4, but I don’t want to put any lime on because I’m afraid I’ll hurt the microbial community.” No, you can put lime on, because if you don’t, you’re gonna hurt the microbial community. Or people have a soil test with less than two parts per million phosphorus, but they don’t want to put on any “synthetic” phosphorus for fear of killing microbes. There’s no such thing as synthetic phosphorus. We didn’t create it. We don’t make it in the lab. Microbes don’t care. The problem with synthetic fertilizers is usually a problem of dosage. It’s too much in a really short amount of time.
So, we couple PLFA with a soil chemistry test so we can work in combination to improve the biology. We have to look at the chemistry side of things too. Just looking at PLF A, the recommendations that come out are typically large, overarching things. Then growers can decide what to do. Maybe one of them says, “I can’t eliminate all tillage and eliminate herbicides tomorrow. Those two things aren’t gonna work well for me out of the gate. But I’m gonna grow cover crops with a little termination with chemistry or with some tillage.” And then we come back in two or three years, depending on how intense those management changes are, and we run a PLFA test again. And hopefully total microbial biomass went up and microbial diversity went up. Those are indicators that what you’re doing is having a positive effect on the microbial community.
It’s not your job as a farmer to just grow microbes — it’s what they do that you care about. Those are the benefits that we hope growers see. When you have more microbes, and they’re doing this work, when it rains, does the water go into your soil? Or does it continue to run off? Microbial health turns into tangible benefits. You’re not investing in the microbes just because you want more microbes. You want what they’re gonna give you.
Acres U.S.A. Do you recommend doing a PLFA zero to six inches deep and then a separate test at six to 12 inches? I know you do that with the Haney test.
Gunderson. Typically for PLFA we’re recommending zero to six. Most biology is concentrated in the top six inches, and within that six inches, most of it’s even in the top three. I’ve had some people, especially researchers, run tests on deeper samples. If I increase the depth of my soil profile — if I get roots to go down deeper — I should be carrying biology deeper, and I want to look at that over time. Makes sense. But it’s certainly not a requirement.
By and large, almost all the PLFA tests we run are zero to six. What we’re doing with the Haney test is slightly different.
Acres U.S.A. Let’s get into that. What’s the difference between Haney and PLFA?
Gunderson. PLFA is gonna give us a little more resolution on the microbial community. We get a total biomass and a functional group diversity score, looking at the different bacteria versus fungi versus protozoans.
The Haney test, on the microbial side, is really all in one basket. It’s measured with soil respiration.
Much like a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio, with soil respiration you have to understand the context. The desired C:N ratio depends on what C:N ratio you’re measuring. Is it in the crop? Is it in the soil? Is it in the organic matter? That tells you where you want it to be.
Respiration can also be measured two different ways and can mean two different things. In both cases you’re measuring carbon dioxide generated through aerobic metabolism of microorganisms. In the first instance, you go out to your field and you stick a probe in the ground, or you scoop up a little bit of soil and put it in a jar, and you measure CO2 right there in the field. What you’re measuring is basal metabolic rate. You’re measuring the activity level of the microbes at that time, under those given conditions of resource availability, temperature, moisture, etc.
Now, when you pull a sample and send it to the lab, we dry that soil, we grind that soil, we add the optimal amount of water to that soil. We incubate it for 24 hours at a desired temperature — 24 degrees C, or about 75 Fahrenheit — and we’re maximizing the CO2 output because we’re measuring microbial biomass. In other words, we’re giving the microbes the conditions to be active. That’s very different from the conditions in your field.
Acres U.S.A. That was exactly my next question — how is the Haney test variable based on soil moisture and temperature? If you took a sample on a cold, rainy day and sent it to the lab, are you gonna get a different answer than if you collected it on a hot and dry day?
Gunderson. If those events are prolonged for a couple of weeks, then yes. In other words, if your soils are wet, and they stay wet — it’s that soggy springtime — those numbers will look very different than if you’ve been in two weeks of dry weather. Yes — they’re going to be different.
Acres U.S.A. So a July test is going to be different than an April test.
Gunderson. Absolutely. The biggest thing we try to tell people is to sample consistently. Now, if your goal as a farmer is to know where your soils are in April and to compare that to what they look like in October following a growing season, then it makes absolute sense to sample both of those times and to do that comparison.
Acres U.S.A. But then do that again the next year, right?
Gunderson. Right. But if your goal is to just track change from 2022 to ’23 to ’24, then don’t pull a sample in April 2022, pull one in October 2023, and then come back and pull one in July 2024. We want to be fairly consistent. And the biggest consistencies are not the day on your calendar — it’s the conditions. Plus or minus five degrees, and the same general moisture conditions. Try to avoid the extremes.
Acres U.S.A. Does time of day matter at all?
Gunderson. I’m not going to say that it doesn’t make any difference at all, but I don’t think it’s a difference worth accounting for. It’s a negligible difference.
Acres U.S.A. That all makes sense. If you have ideal conditions weather-wise, your microbial populations are going to be better than if you’ve been in a drought for two months.
Gunderson. Right. And that’s just one part of the Haney test. There’s close to 50 numbers on the report.
Acres U.S.A. Yeah. What are some of the key highlights, other than the respiration test? Particularly, what’s the H3A extraction? Is that the key thing that makes it different from other tests?
Gunderson. So, Rick Haney developed this test after working with growers in the real world and noticing that farmers always had the same issues every year. He wanted to develop a test that would be meaningful to farmers in trying to figure out what was happening and how they could mimic nature.
One of the big questions in his mind was why soil tests were using extractants that aren’t in the soil — unless the soil is sent to a lab. It’s not that those tests didn’t move us in a positive direction; I’m not saying they’re useless. But why are we using a strongly buffered, very low-pH extract made up mostly of ammonium nitrate to evaluate phosphorus availability or potassium availability? Your soil is never exposed to Mehlich-3 extracting solution unless you send it to a lab.
Rick realized that water should be the foundational piece of the extractant for a soil test. Now, water mixes with soil to make a soil solution, and when you have a living plant community, that water is mixing with simple carbon compounds that the plants produce and put out into the soil through the roots as exudates. So Rick developed H3A to focus on three of the most commonly produced root exudates and to use that as the “acid” in the extraction process, in order to determine what nutrients are soluble in that solution.
Beyond that, all the instrumentation we use is the same as conventional tests. If we want to do colorimetric phosphorus, it’s still an ammonium molybdate reaction, just like we do with Mehlich-3. If we want to run nitrate it’s a cadmium colorimetric reduction, just like we do with KCL.
Acres U.S.A. And you’re using the same ICP-MS machines for analysis?
Gunderson. Right. The instrumentation is the same, the color development chemistry is the same. The only thing that’s changed is the extraction.
Sometimes people say the Haney test is worthless because it’s not calibrated. But if it’s not calibrated, then neither is any other test, because it’s using the same process. It’s just an extraction.
The other thing that really sets the Haney test apart is that when you send a traditional soil test in, the lab is going to evaluate the soil’s nitrogen credit based on nitrates. If they really want to get fancy, they’ll include organic matter. So, they’ll say that for every 1 percent organic matter you can get an extra 25 or 30 pounds of nitrogen credit.
The first problem with this is that nitrate is one compound of hundreds that contains nitrogen. Again, this is that 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle — you’re looking at one piece to evaluate nitrogen in the system.
The second problem is that we don’t want to give credit for nitrogen from your organic matter. There’s not a lot that every farmer agrees on, but by and large there are three things: the commodity price could be better, the weather could be better, and they don’t want to lose organic matter. They want to build organic matter. But you can’t take nitrogen out of the organic matter and still have organic matter. That’s like trying to take the flour out of your cake and still have cake. We don’t want to give credit directly for nitrogen from out of the organic matter — that contradicts what every grower I’ve ever talked to wants.
So, the Haney test still evaluates nitrogen by looking at nitrate, and it includes ammonium. These two forms of nitrogen are readily plant available in the inorganic form. But we also evaluate all the other nitrogen compounds that are soluble in water. This is a subset of the organic nitrogen in the system. Organic matter contains organic nitrogen — 1,000 pounds of nitrogen for every 1 percent organic matter. We’re measuring this little sub-fraction — proteins, soluble amino acids, amino sugars, enzymes from the microbes that are, either whole or partly broken down. All of those things are coming from biology — plant residues. It’s not the residue that you see, necessarily; the cornstalk laying on the soil surface has nitrogen in it, but we’re not measuring that with the Haney test. We’re measuring nitrogen after it’s been released and is water soluble as part of the decomposition process.
The reason we’re doing this is that as the microbes run through this process, they will do one of three things with nitrogen. They can mineralize it and turn it into nitrate and ammonium, which then goes into the soil system and can be used by a living plant — or it can be lost from the system, if there’s no living plant there. They can also tie some of that nitrogen up in their own biomass. The nice thing about microbes is that they don’t live 80 years like we do — they live a couple of weeks. So that nitrogen is constantly being cycled through the system. The third thing they can do with nitrogen — especially if it’s in excess — is they leave it tied to carbon outside of their bodies, in the soil environment, and it becomes part of soil organic matter.
All of those things happen through that biological process. But conventional soil tests only care about the nitrate. They’re missing the big picture.
So, the Haney test measures all those fractions of nitrogen. We also look at respiration as an indicator of microbial biomass. And then we look at a ratio of organic carbon to organic nitrogen in the water extract. In other words, what is the balance between energy and protein in the food the microbes are eating? If that ratio is balanced, the microbes will release nitrogen. If it’s not, and it’s high-carbon driven, then they have all the energy to do the work, but nitrogen is limiting, so they tie it up. If the ratio is too low, they have all the protein in the world, but they don’t have the energy to drive their systems. We do this with livestock every day. Energy versus protein. That’s how we balance rations.
We take all that information, and we give you a nitrogen credit beyond nitrate. And out of 150,000 samples I’ve looked at, the average credit is right at 20 pounds to the acre, additional to nitrate. That’s the average — the top 10 percent of soils are getting credits anywhere from 60 to 160 pounds from this pool. When you really think about that economically, after shipping and everything you might spend $100 on a soil test — but on a 40-acre parcel, that’s $2.50 an acre to save 20 pounds of fertilizer per acre. That’s where most of the growers that we work with are finding the biggest value
Acres U.S.A. That totally makes sense. It’s just showing how we’re just overapplying nitrogen, period.
Gunderson. Sometimes we’re overapplying it because we’re trying to put an insurance policy out there, right? The university says it takes 0.6 to 0.8 pounds of nitrogen per bushel of corn in the grain, but they’re gonna tell you to apply 1.2. That’s an insurance policy, right?
It also is an insurance policy against inefficiency — inefficiency that come from a lack of a microbiome, which are your gatekeepers. They’re going to tie some of it up because they’re starving. What are they going to use it for? To access carbon. Where is the carbon coming from? Mostly from the soil organic matter, because the field hasn’t had anything growing in it for six months. Nitrogen is a key to access that.
So, we’ve reversed that system — we’re letting the microbes feed the plants, and the carbon comes directly from the plants, and then the soil organic matter sits and builds. That’s your savings account. If you’re not dipping into the savings account all the time, and you can put $30 a month in that savings account. It takes a while, but over time you build up some substantial money in that account.
Acres U.S.A. I think this is a challenge just from a human perspective. When you hear some of these recommendations for more regenerative systems, there’s so much less nitrogen being recommended. It’s very scary for people.
Gunderson. Oh, it scares people to death. I get this call every week. A farmer calls me and says, “You’re telling me that I can reduce my nitrogen application by 40 pounds.” I tell him that I’m not telling him this — the soil is telling him this, based on this data.
But at the end of the day, you need to be comfortable as the operator. I don’t need you stressing out and not sleeping at night. But with today’s equipment, it’s really easy to change the rate of nitrogen. My recommendation would be to put in three strips — three passes — where you cut the nitrogen by 20 pounds, and then three strips where you cut it by the recommended amount of 40. You’re not going to lose the farm, you’re gonna learn something. More often than not they call and say they wish they would have cut a little more across the whole farm. Because look at the dollar savings there.
I’m not pretending that we know exactly how these systems are going to work. There are way too many variables out there to do that. But I tell growers all the time that the only thing you have control of is the front of the checks you choose to sign. Beyond that, you can’t control the weather, you can’t control the commodity price, you can’t control disease; we pretend we can, and then that just causes us to write more checks!
If you have 1,000 acres of corn and you cut back 20 pounds of nitrogen at $1 a pound, do the math. At the end of the year, you might call me and say that if you would have put on the extra 20 pounds, you could have gotten another 20 bushels of corn. Maybe — but we don’t know that. One out of 10 years is gonna be that year. On average, two out of 10 years are complete disaster years — hail, drought. And then seven out of 10 years are average. But farm managers have a tendency to manage for that one bin-buster year out of 10 every single year — because they don’t know what year that’s going to be, and they don’t want to miss it. The problem is that seven out of 10 years you’re breaking even and two out of 10 years you’re losing your book.
So I say, why not shoot for the average? You don’t lose his bad on the two years that are bad — there’s nothing you can do to stop a hailstorm — and you might lose out a little bit on that one great year out of 10. But your cost of production should be low enough that you’re still gonna benefit the other seven.
Acres U.S.A. What about total mineral assays? I did this on my soil, for example, and I had five ppm of copper; no amount of biology is going to be able to give me more than that.
Gunderson. Absolutely. We call this a total nutrient digest test — TND — and we’re using it to evaluate your soil’s net worth when it comes to fertility. The Haney test is like measuring your checking account. It’s what you have available today — what you can use. The TND is a net worth analysis — it’s what my soil’s potential is. It’s what you’ve got, but just because you have it doesn’t mean you can spend it today.
The reason we’re doing this test is because — in my opinion — soil tests were originally designed to give farmers information to make sure that they bought what they needed. Fertilizer, to me, is gap insurance. This is what I need, the soil test tells me what I have, so now I know the gap — and I will buy that insurance from the fertilizer dealer to fill the gap.
There’s nothing wrong with that at all. The issue I have is that soil test results have almost become weaponized by fertilizer companies and certain interest groups to scare farmers into buying more. They tell the farmer there’s this huge gap and that they need to buy all this stuff if they want to produce.
TND tells us that, for example, your soil test might have 20 parts per million phosphorus. That’s what you have available. But on average, in the top six inches, we’re measuring 500-600 pounds of phosphorus, 1,200 pounds of calcium or potassium, 5,000 pounds of calcium, 2,000-4,000 pounds of nitrogen. Do you truly have a nutrient shortage, or do you just have a supply shortage? We need to get the microbes out there to start kicking out nutrients.
Now, the argument then always becomes, “But if I do that, I’m just mining the soil.” I’m not saying we should never replace what we’re taking — we should. But we should be able to use fertilizer to truly replace what we’re taking — not what we’re taking plus 20 or 40 percent. That’s how we’re using these tests. They give a little power back to the farmer when the extension agent or the agronomist or the salesman says, “You don’t have any of this.” Yes, I do — and I’m going to show that to you.
Acres U.S.A. You have great analogies, and earlier you used the human body as an analogy; what about sap testing? Sap testing seems analogous to testing blood, which could be the best way to figure out what’s going on with human health. Is that something you guys are looking at?
Gunderson. Yeah. Soil is the warehouse for the nutrients, and the transport team is the biology. Now, sap analysis tells us what actually gets loaded out at the at the factory. It’s like your incoming loading dock — sap analysis is like the guy standing there with the clipboard.
Plant tissue analysis is like a post-mortem — you go back and find the average. Plant sap is like measuring blood sugar to monitor diabetes. It changes every day, depending on the conditions, what you eat, etc. Plant tissue analysis is like the average of your blood sugar over the last two to three months.
And, of course, we have the factory output, which is the yield. And then the final step, which is gaining more attention every day, is what’s the quality of the product? That’s the Holy Grail — the nutrient density.
So, yes, plant sap analysis is incredibly important. We as a laboratory are not currently looking to do that in-house. The biggest reason is that the leading technology for years was housed in the Netherlands, and that technology has a pretty hefty price tag. But we work very closely with New Age Laboratories, and I recommend people working with them for that. We are as busy as we possibly want to be. We’re all about collaborating. Other labs send us Haney tests, because that’s what we feel we do better than anybody, and we send them to other labs for some other tests.
