Greetings cultivators worldwide. Jordan River here back with more grow cast podcast, this time with a brand new song. That's right song. This guy is a soil remediation specialist, and let me just tell you, he has a really wild background, and he's involved in some super unique work. This is the type of interview you're not really gonna hear anywhere else, and he really hit it out of the park for a first appearance. But before we jump into the song, shout out to AC infinity. That's right. Acinity.com, code grow, cast one, five, and free shipping on orders $99 or more through the website. Now don't forget, if you do grab AC infinity through Amazon. Code grow, cast 10, that's grow. Cast one zero works on Amazon for 10% off, but I highly recommend you go right to the website. They ship it so super fast, and use that 15% off get some bigger savings. Grab yourself a new Grow Tent. Check out the new propagation kit that they have going on. You can grab a humidifier. Some cloud Ray fans. I just upgraded to the bigger cloud Ray fans, and they are circulating the air. Real nice that air circulation is so important. You know, talk about all these different parameters, heat and temperature and VPD and all these things. Don't forget that air exchange and that air flow within the tent is key to a healthy garden. Get that air moving with AC infinity. Huge. Thank you to AC infinity for powering some of our big upcoming giveaways. Don't miss out on that. Stay tuned and one more time. Huge. Thank you to the best grow gear in the game, acinity.com, and make sure to use code grow, cast one, five. And, of course, code grow, cast 10 on Amazon. Thank you to AC infinity. Alright, let's get into it with song. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. You Jordan. Hello podcast listeners, you are now listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in today before we get started. As always, I urge you to share the show, tell a grower about grow cast, or turn a smoker on to growing. That's the best way you can help us on our mission of overgrow. Make sure you're subscribed. Hit that subscribe and like and check us out. We're at growcast.com the brand new website there you'll find everything, the membership, the classes, everything's all waiting for you, the seeds, it's all@growcast.com Special, thank you to the members. Today, we've got a brand new guest on the line again. I'm very excited to speak with this individual. He is a regenerative agriculture specialist. He knows a ton about soil remediation and soil health, and he's got a very interesting humic product that I really want to dive into and learn the implications of these types of products when it comes to soil health and soil life and growing these plants that we all care about so much, from Gaia tech and Guy Nate fertilizers, we have song on the line, what's up? Song, how are you doing? Man, I'm doing good. How are you? Jordan, doing excellent. Doing Excellent. Thank you for coming on the show. You were referred by Farmer John, one of my close friends and one of our team members here at growcast. He spoke very, very highly of you, and a lot of people look up to that guy in our community song, I'll tell you what. So for him to kind of say, You got to have this guy on, you got to have this guy on. You know, he loves your product. And I said, Okay, let's talk. And then in the preliminary conversations, you seem very knowledgeable, man. You're super, super passionate. Your product is super unique. So I'm very excited to get into all of it today. Thank you for coming on the
program. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. Well, let's start right from the top. The website
is Gaya tech.us. If you want to learn more about song and his work. But song, can you give us a background on yourself and what brought you into the world of regenerative agriculture and eventually, soil remediation?
Sure. Yeah. My name is San Jin. Last name is spelled j, i n, first name, s, O, N, G, as in, sing a song, and I am in Fort Collins, Colorado. I am a scientist, deterrent, entrepreneur. That's kind of my own definition. I have spent over 25 years in developing technologies for environmental remediation and sustainability, and my journey into regenerative agriculture began when I realized how serious the soil crisis we were facing, which you don't always hear from radio or learn from media, and I kind of learned that through my practice of environmental remediation. So we're basically, we're rapidly losing organic matter, and I think that defines soil, and that makes soil fertile. That's
very fascinating. Where did you get your background song like, where did you learn about this sort of thing? Like you said, we don't talk about it enough in media and in society. Usually you got to go to go to a university or find a garden a passion for gardening at a very young age. What was that like for you? Well,
that's basically through my my schoolwork, and I studied biochemistry for my undergrad program, and then went to molecular biology and. But with focus on plant molecular biology. So I was dealing with dirt, not dirt, soil and plants and pathogens related to that. And for my PhD program, I was doing environmental microbiology out there in Colorado. You did that? Yeah, actually, University of Wyoming. You know, that was what, almost 30 years ago, and so at the time, a term called Bio remediation was still a new a new thing. Now it's in common practice. So basically, you're using biology to treat environmental issues. To make it simple, we're using bacteria to eat contaminants. That's
so exciting. That's really exciting. Work song, is this like, are you so thrilled to be working in this very niche and very important field?
Oh, yeah, definitely. I, I'm still working in that field, but through that practice, especially, you know, through the contaminants cleanup and degradation of different contaminants. I also got into the niche of what's called Vital remediation. And even from the term, you can see that it is to use plants to clean up contaminants. Okay, so
there's a lot we got to talk to, let's, let's, we got to dive into this, because that's a big thing in the cannabis world, you know, and this idea of cannabis being this bio accumulator, and what that could possibly mean, but, but let's start from the beginning. Talk to us about how we should be thinking about soil health and how the state of soil has changed, you know, like on this show. And just kind of, if you follow this stuff, you kind of been told that, you know, before bacteria and fungi and the soil food web was even really considered, we switched over to petrochemicals Post World Wars, and that's when you got the Dust Bowl and it hurt. The soil did all this stuff. And then now, modern day, we're getting more complex with it. But like, how should we think about how soil health in the state of soil has changed since the introduction of petrochemicals, all the way up to now, where you're talking about people studying bioremediation and using bacteria to fix these things. And how should we think about that timeline? Well,
I mean, you probably you know the history of petrochemical or chemical fertilizer, and it started from haber bosch process, right for to make ammonia, which is a very good nitrogen source and nitrogen producing process, and that can produce pure nitrogen, and it's highly water soluble, and you feed that to soil, you can enhance plants growth. You know, I think the positive influence from petrol fertilizers, nobody can ignore them. It's very significant. It actually saved the world with the fast growing population, and without that chemical fertilizer, I think, you know, we wouldn't be able to produce that much food. But through that process, there is a simultaneous process that's going on the same time. So when you feed a lot of highly water soluble chemical fertilizer or chemical nutrients in soil, and you would suddenly feed the soil microbes with lots of energy or lots of nutrients, and you would boost their activities, so they would degrade lot of soil organic matter. That process is happening the same time, while the chemical fertilizers are enhancing plants growth, so it's basically degrading soil at the same time. That's why you're seeing I think there's a term called, was it chemical fertilizer utilization factor or some kind of a percentage? It's basically the amount of chemicals you put in and the amount of plants growth enhancement you're getting. And I recall there's data from India showing it, it dropped like five folds within the past decades.
So there's points of diminishing returns with these types of systems, exactly,
but you're still adding the same amount or even more, right? I mean, people are used to that. We're almost glued to certain you know, like for our landscaping, we apply almost the same amount or even more year after year. And with that ratio decreasing, that majority of that excessive amount would penetrate the soil, would go, would leave the soil, go further deeper, you know, beyond the plant root zones, and go to groundwater. And groundwater goes to surface water. Then we're seeing more and more like algo boom. And, you know, seeing the algae, and what was it called, that eutrophication of lakes. So, you know, we're pretty much polluting the environment with excessive use of chemical fertilizer. I
had not thought about the organic matter fraction shrinking being a result. Result of what you said. You know, I know, if you over apply some types of fertilizers, you harm the microbiology, but there's this other side, like you just said, Where, if you're boosting these plants to grow really fast, and you're pouring them on year after year, and you're harvesting that plant matter from your harvest year after year, but you're not replacing the organic matter. That organic matter fraction is going to shrink year over year. If you're not applying it back, where else would it come from? That's very interesting. I never really put that together until you mentioned that song.
Well, that's, that's one part of it. And also, you know, like in soil, the organic matter is, is, is the main food to microbes. So when the organic matter is decreasing, now you're starving the microbes. I mean, they're part of the players in there to deplete organic matter in the same time. So it's that little cycle, but it's a vicious cycle. So then you have less and less on the soil organic matter, then you would have fewer and fewer species of microbes in there, and a lot of them are essential species. They have to co exist to make the soil healthy. And when that amount, the number decreases, the species decreases. Then you know, we're causing a shrink in the soil microbes. You know soil microbes are playing a big role in plant growth, because plants are relying on these guys to feed them. You know, some like trace elements, even just essential nutrients, they're relying on that too. Yeah, as you know, like phosphorus, that's another big component of the key nutrients, right? NPK, that's the P and the phosphorus in soil. A lot of times they are trapped on soil particles, so it's not accessible or readily accessible to plants. And a lot of plants are actually relying on bacteria and fungi, almost to use them as miners for phosphorus so they can transport them to plants, right?
And, you know, we as cannabis growers, cannabis has big implications in this field. Song, I know that it's kind of on your periphery. I know that you focus on fertilizers and remediation and things like that, but I also know it kind of gets into your world, because, yes, it has some bioaccumulation properties, which we're going to get into, but it's also just a really good, fast annual crop. The fibrous hemp is extremely useful for textiles and things like that. They just approved hemp seed as a agricultural feed for the FDA, or whatever it is. The agricultural federal regulations just approved hemp seed for cattle and livestock and things of this nature. The federal building codes just approved hemp Crete, which is concrete made out of hemp as a actual building material that you can use and be within code. Now. So, you know, cannabis is this really interesting thing, all the way down to the soil in the microbes, like you said, it demands a lot of phosphorus. It grows really big pretty fast, and you chop it down and you got all these uses. I think there's a lot to be learned about the soil from this crop, because it's cash crop, right? Like, yeah, who's funding these studies for carrots? Man, big carrot isn't gonna come in and give a grant to the genius scientist song to study carrots. It's just, there's just not enough money in carrots. But cannabis is this cash crop, so we're really learning a lot about how it works. Let me ask you this while we're on the subject of cannabis, talk to me about how plants that are, quote, bio accumulators can play into, as you said, phytoremediation. Because I don't even know how true this is song, but I've heard that cannabis is a great bioaccumulator. There are some studies that show that it can pull things like toxic heavy metals out of the ground. I even heard that they planted hemp near Chernobyl after the Chernobyl disaster. Again, I don't know if that's just an urban legend, but supposedly they're trying to use hemp to clean up, you know, toxic, radioactive disasters. Is that a thing? As a phytoremediation specialist, like, how does that work? Have you heard of cannabis doing this? And tell me what you think of
that. That's a very interesting topic. Yeah, absolutely. Cannabis. It is known as a bar accumulator, and some of them can be considered as hyper accumulator, and this means that they can uptake and concentrate substances from soil.
So what other plants do that? What is phytoremediation when you're studying this and working in this field, what is it? What does it look like in practice? What types of plants do you use and and what do you do with that material?
Well, it depends on what kind of contamination you're dealing with, for example, like if you're talking about just surface soils contamination with metals and things like that, plants, just like cannabis, can be planted for that purpose, because it's known to take metals like cadmium, nickel and lead from soil. But when you're dealing with contaminants that are deeper, like in. Beyond the root zone, or even in groundwater. And now there are technologies in there, and people are trying to plant trees. To do that, they use the the root system of the trees to be in touch of the contaminated zone and extract those contaminants out of it,
because they reach deep enough, because obviously our cannabis roots, that's wild, different roots are mining down there.
People are even using the tools like this genetic editing tool like CRISPR, you probably heard that word, and you can actually cut genes from some accumulating plants and transport that to some plants that have deep roots. So those plants with deep roots will be able to accumulate more. So, you know, that's a, that's a pretty, you know, I think it's a fascinating field in plant science right now, and people are using that for environmental and for some other purposes too. Yeah, phytoremediation could be phyto mining. That's another new term. Actually, I just came back from a Department of Energy Summit in Washington, DC, because we're one of the seven awardees from DOE for this project called Fido mining. What does
that, what does that look like? What are you working with? Well, it's,
it's basically, you know, now we have this geopolitics going around, right? So, you know, every country is trying to protect their valuable resources, and the US is not really rich in, you know, a lot of like, metal deposits, but we have a lot of areas with, for example, concentrations on certain metals at a level that's high, but it's not extremely high, and not high enough that you can use excavators, all those massive macro scale of mining equipment, and the area is huge. So for that kind of area, and they are plants, you know, I'm not sure if I think cannabis might be, you know, one of the candidates in here. I mean, that's a great point he just mentioned. I'm going to do some more homework on that, but we are looking at some other indigenous plants that can grow in this areas, and then if we could make that soil condition better, to enhance the growth of it so these plants, plus the soil microbes associated with the plants and soil in that region, they can accumulate the metal. In our case, we're trying to accumulate nickel, which is a very important metal for batteries.
Wait a second, accumulated in the plants. How do you get it
out? Oh, you burn it. What? Yes, you burn the biomass, and then you can bear off the shelf. Procedures so you can, you know, use acid and things like that to extract it, then it can purify that, and then it can produce what's called Bio metal. Well, it's not really metal mined by plants, yeah, it's an it's a really exciting area, and I was glad I was there and learn more from, you know, our other team members, they're mostly universities doing very advanced researches on doing genetic work, and try to select the best plants, the best genes, and see if they can manipulate that and transplant the genes to some plants that can grow better so we can increase the efficiency.
That is one of the wildest things I've ever heard. Song, which is you can literally mine the metals out of the ground by growing plants in them. And like you said, I'm sure that it gets pretty highly formulated, that you're using microbes that are specifically designed to solubilize nickel, and you're using plants, like you said, that may have even been like edited for a certain but Jesus, you can pull the metal out of the ground, put them in the plants, burn the plants, and then process the ash into pure nickel. Can I ask a really stupid question,
like, how much you can produce? I
was going to say, Can you do it with gold? I
That's not stupid at all. That's, you know, that's a great question.
It's the next natural progression. This
time, I think it's difficult, because we have to deal with soluble or metals that can be water soluble. I
know that, like copper, for instance, is a is a nutrient. When it comes to cannabis, like cannabis takes up copper, but silver and gold aren't in those categories. So I'm sure there's a very simple chemistry answer, like, you're saying solubility. That's like the number one thing. But, uh, wouldn't that be fascinating to find out a way for the plants to uptake gold and then mine gold through that's one of the most interesting things I've heard said on the show in a long time. Song that is, that's absolutely
a great topic. You're, you're giving me a lot of new ideas too. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna do research and see I know that, yeah, copper definitely is feasible. It's very similar to nickel. And for gold, the reason I said gold might be tough is it's because it's, you know, it's really tough to solubilize it, right? People are using cyanide and things like that to do a very strong acid. But if you're turning the condition that much. To that extreme, then it's hard for plants to grow. That's just my guessing. Yeah, maybe there's some other ways to solubilize and make it mobile. I mean, that's the whole thing. I
only want 10% song. That's all 10% royalty. Now I'm just kidding. Really crazy. I cannot believe that you're using plants to mine metal, and the Department of Energy is working with you on this?
Yeah, yeah. I know it's a little bit less kind of a little bit off topic, but I think, no, it's awesome. It is definitely related to the bar accumulating feature of cannabis that might even add another value to the plants. Right to cannabis, exactly. But I think the main function of it, we all know that we want to harvest cannabis. We you know, we want to produce some other chemicals out of it. So if they are hyper accumulator or accumulating plants, I think there is a caution side, right? Yes, if you you don't want the plants to accumulate too much of metals, or especially toxic metals in it, because then we're consuming them, then there's an issue. So for that, the better way, or, you know, the more scientific way is you look at the soil and water you're using when you're planting it. I'm not an expert at all. I, you know, don't prevent to be a an expert in cannabis
plant. Oh, you're right. You're right on, yeah. You got to treat the problem at the source, yeah. So I
think in that case, soil could play a very big role. If we could make sure that the soil contains high enough or sufficient organic matter it has a very balanced microbial population, then not only the cannabis plants, will grow better. I think because the organic matter and those biomass in soil, they can help keeping those some toxic metals in there. Let's
talk about locking those metals away. That's exactly what I want, because you're right. It's a double edged sword. Big 420, sales starts today. It's a BOGO That's right. Grow cast seed CO is having a BOGO limit too. You go ahead and pick two packs of your choice. You get two packs Bogo, and you get the bonus freebie. Okay, so that's five packs. Now here's the kicker. Members get $20 off per pack. It's five packs for $100 everybody join up. It's growcast.com check out the membership hop on in. Use the members only discount. You'll find it right there in the Patreon. Now you're getting five packs for $100 this week only. It's only around for a limited time. It's a 420 sale. So yeah, through next week, make sure and grab this, folks. It's gonna be gone. Quick. Grow cast.com, grab the membership code. Do yourself favor, and then you're gonna get five packs. We have all the key lime madness. Fems up there. Don't sleep on the key lime shuffle. We got the chocolate Mojito. I really like that Junior Mints cut that rich used. It's a Double Stuffed Oreos, which is a white truffle cross to Oreos, and the fino that rich got, I'm telling you, I'm the one who named it that smells just like a box of Junior Mints, dead on. So I'm super excited to see all the different finos that are coming out of the chocolate Mojito. And go ahead and grab two packs. You'll get two for the Bogo, and you'll get a freebie that's five packs. Use your member codes for $100 out the door, free shipping and a huge thank you to riser rich for putting on this 420 BOGO. Go grab it. Everybody. Growcast.com, I'll see you in membership. You get a bunch of other discounts as well. Load up on those FEM seeds people killing it with those key lime madnesses. So come and join us. We'd love to have you along and make sure you grab the BOGO before it's too late. Grow cast.com, thank you. I'll see you all there. Happy growing. If you're growing cannabis for smoking flour, you need to be so careful, because I see products, you know, licensed products or whatever, get flagged for heavy metals because they took something up, or there was a bad batch of something or other, and that's crazy. So if you're using it for hemp Crete, the bio accumulation is a good thing. But if you're using it for flour, you got to be super, super careful. So obviously, soil quality, microbes, things of this nature, very important. How much do humic acids play a role? I want to start to enter the world of your product, because we talk about humic acids on this show from a cannabis perspective all the time, when you're looking at it from a bioremediation perspective, how do you think about humic acids and what roles they play in the soil?
Well, humic acids, that's actually a cluster of compounds. Actually, sometimes we group them as humic substances, so that's a definition for very large organic compounds and with undefined structures. But they're just a huge cluster of organics in there, and it's a very important fraction of soil. And sometimes we refer that as black gold. I don't know if you heard that term of soil is humic substances, sure,
like humus is kind of like that forest compost, right? That's full of these acid chains,
exactly. I think the name probably came from like the remaining part of the decomposed. Plants and animal materials, which is true. So it's a mineral, you know, partially mineralized biomass. That's the material. It has very large surface area, very large molecules, as you can imagine. So they can change or improve the soil structure. So make the soils more porous, and it can help holding more water, it can hold more nutrients, and it can even provide like houses for microbes. So that's the big thing for human material and some of the if you dive into the humic acids, let's say just go by molecular sizes, the large side, the huge molecules, they are very stable, and microbes will not be able to digest them, and they're going to be stable in soil for very long time, as some people are even talking about, hundreds of 1000s of years. Oh, let me just rewind a little bit on humic acid. The reason we're talking about we're defining that as humic acid is is defined as the fraction that can be extracted by alkali solution. Okay, got it. You know how that's made is you use alkali to extract it and then you use acid to buffer it back. So it's not that basic, right? You want the neutral pH in there. So the commercial humic acid, usually it has a pH in neutral range, but when you use the alkali to extract it, it's going to be very basic, so you have to use the acid to dial it back. And during that process, most of the humic acid were precipitated, so it's a solid, but there's a very small fraction of that, which is called Fauci acid. And these guys are actually soluble, so that's why we're calling them. These are very small molecular humic acid, sure, and they can serve as direct food to microbes. And there are evidence showing that those water soluble humic acid actually got into plants, and they participate in plant metabolism, serving as either, you know, a signal compound, or sometimes as a food, food source. So, you know, humic material or humic acids. It's just this mixture of good stuff, I think the more humic substances you have in soil, the better it is. That's the simple way of putting it. You know, it's
such a broad category of substances, like you said, I didn't know the larger ones were like, so large that they can kind of house microbes. And then some of these smaller compounds are so small that they kind of feed microbes?
Did I get that, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, literally, all you need, it's
all you need for your microbes are some humics and some fulvics, and you're good to go. And I always wondered how they made it because, yeah, like you said, you know, I know some of the higher quality brands, you know, get lake bed or sea bed humus, right? And then what do you do with it? So running an alkali solution through it to extract it and then rebuffering it with acids. Makes sense. Makes sense that that's how we get the bottle. But your product is a little bit different. How does your product differ from that? Like you talk about, you've told me off air about how you kind of use some sort of processing, or digestive process. Can you tell me what makes GYN eight different from those types of products,
yeah. And before I talk about that, I want to touch a little bit about another source of organic matter. I mean, humic acid, definitely. That's one of it, right, sure. And you mentioned different sources and and also, one of the feed stocks for humic acid is coal. You probably heard about that. You can, you can do that. You can extract humic substances from those younger coal, like lignite, lignite coal, sure, yep, and then extract that that you make humic substances, or humic acids. And another source for the organic matter is compost. And everybody knows that, right? So, animal manure, biomass, you know, the crop biomass and things like that. You just compost it and that part of organic matter. I just try to simplify that with, you know, this is not scientific at all. I call that, you know, the mid range organic matter. So these guys are large enough molecules, but they're not as large as some of the humic substances. They're going to last, not going to last for 1000s of years. Most of them will last for one season. So that's why you're when you're using the compost, you have to apply that every season, because they will be digested and consumed. And an issue associated with compost, especially animal manure, is the pharmaceutical residuals. So we know that most of the animals now get antibiotics in them,
right? Dewormers, things like you have to
use antibiotics, yeah, especially for chicken farms and things like that. And hormones. So these things are not really degraded during the composting process. They need much more aggressive processes to be distracted, so the regular compost process will not get rid of them, and they're going to stay there. And the plants can take it in cannabis industry the same way, especially there are hyper accumulators, or accumulators, they can easily take those things into the plants, the biomass, and then you know when you consume them that that could be an issue. But now let's get to your your question about about guy named, what makes that unique? I think the first thing is the feed stock. Guy in aid is made from lower rank coal, C, O, A, l, partially or a mineralized biomass, but it's not that much mineralized. We're not talking about coal from Pennsylvania. You know, those anthracite coal with very high heat value. We're talking about some, you know, the lignite coal, brown coal, as what they're calling Australia and some other places. So some of them, could, you can, you know, it's not really peat, it's something more mature than peat, but much less matured than this gold metallic coal. So that's our feed stock to make kynate
So is every humic product basically going to have a different feed stock, and that could drastically play into the quality of the product. Let's just put it that way, like not all coal is created equal,
right? Yeah, they're different. But let's say, if we just want to have the large molecules from coal, that's a much easier job to do, because majority of them is very large molecules of what we call that polyphenolic structure. It's the skeleton, huge skeleton, of those carbonaceous compounds mixed together. Nobody can even draw a molecular formula for it. It's so complicated, but that's they're very stable. That's why they're still there. And I would bet, if you just take coal and grind it and apply that to soil, it's going to still, still going to be there for, you know, 1000s of years, right, right? But from that perspective, you can use lignite, you can use anthracycle, any coal, it would have that fraction. But what's different is that's the only fraction you have. What we try to do in Guyana is, and the reason we use lignite and sub bituminous coal, these are the two, only two species we're using is because of the other good stuff trapped in the coal. In this kind of coal that we use a, you know, it's basically a train of process of electrochemical digestion, plus a biological digestion, and we use these two processes to weaken the bonds of our feed stock. We're breaking apart, breaking it apart partially, and then so we can release these compounds out. So the end product of guy in eight is basically some very large humic substances, which is very similar to biochar. I can't even say it's the same as biochar for that fraction. But then, in addition to that, we have a large pool of intermediate compounds, almost like compost, but it's not made from compost, because it's just partially digested from coal. So we're making that that middle range molecules that can stay in soil and serve as food to microbes and some to plants. For a long time, it's like a slow releasing source. And in addition to that, some of the fractions are very small organic compounds, we have actually detected eight different organic acids in Guyana. And these compounds are highly water soluble. It's, they're just like fulbric acid, you know. And and more than that, we have, we even found acetic acid in there. And then they can feed microbes immediately. Some of them get into the plant metabolism, you know, so they can actually enhance plants growth directly, but most of them would enhance the soil microbes. And in addition to that, because of the mineralization or codification process of coal, some soil microbes got into that cosine and you also have mineral compounds formed within that, lignite and submiss coal. So we have lot of a trace amount of mineral elements. Is a very important stuff, actually. Now more and more studies are on the food quality and food nutrient intensity, and data are showing that actually these two parameters are closely related to the trace elements in soil and in that's a different topic, but I just want to mention that quickly, because you probably noticed that nowadays. Is even, you know, comparing to, you know, just a few decades ago, where we were kids, we didn't have that many different kinds of allergies, but now we have so many different kinds of allergies. People are allergic to weird stuff. But do you have, you know, all sorts of allergies that's that's an indication of the degradation of immune system? Yeah, absolutely. And which is related to our microbiome in our guts, right? And it all starts in the soil. You can track it all the way to soil, yeah, soil, to food, to ourselves. Now
to micronutrients, though, because I gotta tell you a song that we've been talking a lot about, trace minerals, right? These ones that are needed in very, very low amounts, elements that weren't even considered like necessary right back in the early days of agriculture. Now, as we try to grow this cannabis plant, we don't just try to get it to survive from beginning to end song. We try to grow this thing like we're building a Ferrari. We try to make everything perfect, like we're like, we're engineering like, you know, the Russian experiment, Boxer guy, you know what I mean? We're using anything we can to make these flowers as bulky and as sticky and as frosty and as perfect as possible. And one of the things that I see is a lot of these products that you're supposed to use towards the end to really ripen up your flowers, to really help them finish and become potent and produce these compounds, like terpenes and all these delicious flavor and stuff. A lot of these products have fulvic acids in them, because, like you said, with helping the uptake and actually being uptaking themselves and helping with biological processes, and then I see they'll have, like, a dash of micro nutrition and trace minerals. They'll have a little bit of molybdenum, they'll have a little bit of manganese, they'll have a little bit of iron. And, you know, there's somebody at this company who figured that out, but clearly there's a link between microbiome health, bacterial health, plant health, and these trace minerals. So it's just something I've observed, yes,
exactly because those soil micro, well, soil just like us. If you treat soil as a body, the microbes is their guts or microbiome, right? So they're relying on them to extract things from soil and feed plants.
Yeah, and I feel like, as humans, if we have a deficiency, you know what I mean? Like we have all these problems. And same with the soil. Maybe they just need a little bit of boron. You know what I mean, to really be themselves, to be to be their best possible plant self, just something I've thought about.
Well, exactly, you know, actually, there's, you know, that that is a subject in the scientific realm about hydroponics and soil planting. Because you could, you could argue that, you know, hydroponics, we can, we can almost artificially put everything in there, right, right, and it's all soluble. But the thing is, we only know, I don't want to throw a number in there, but I know it's a small percentage of those, especially those trace elements, micro elements that are important to enzymes, to immune system, to both plants and human being? We only understand small amount of that. Yeah, small portion of the So, how can you make a recipe that's so complete and put them in hydroponics, you know, with so you can get rid of soil, get rid of the soil microbes and grow your plants. I mean, you can't argue that is so that's why we're now talking about this food on the nutrient completeness and the nutrient intensity, these are the two definitions in there which are very important. I think it's essential to the health of our immune systems. Wow. So now it's
just not about growing enough. We got to make sure that we're growing good food. And I liked song what you said earlier about, like, you have an honest take on, like, the the inventions of fertilizers and what that did to famine worldwide, what that did to our food supplies. You know what I mean? Like, it's easy to look here now and go, Oh, look at all the stuff we messed up. But like, No, we got here off of huge accomplishments and huge strides. So now, can we go back and improve the quality of this food? I think we can. And people like you are doing it, man,
yeah, well, I'm not a, you know, like, I like organic planting, but I don't think that's something. I want to go to the extreme. As you mentioned, I think the chemical fertilizers they I mean chemical fertilizers is synthetic chemicals. Synthetic nitrogen is nitrogen. It's, it doesn't matter if it's from a industrial process or is from beans, right, right? It's the same element. It's the same element. Yeah, it's, if it's ammonium, it's H, you know, NH, four plus. That's the the ions in there. But I think the best approach is to realize that issue we you know, we want to grow our plants good, but in the meantime, we don't want that process to degrade our soil and compromise the food quality. I think the good approach is to lay a solid foundation so we can maintain. The good soil health. And in the meantime, you know, for example, some soil, if it's really missing key nutrients. And if you, you know, unless you want to put a USDA organic label in there, you know, you can use some chemicals, but we don't want to abuse that. We don't want to overdose it, and it definitely don't want to get addicted to that, because it's gonna only make that you're gonna have to use more and more eventually, yeah,
especially when you talk about, like, actual, AG, right? Like us home growers, I think that if you wanna grow at home, you're already saving so much waste. Yeah, that your fertilization style, I feel like, is pretty low on the list. But if you're out there in the field and you're growing, like you said, next to waterways and stuff like this. This matters, and that's why your product I'm excited to get into my cannabis garden, because I want to see what this does to a controlled, indoor home cannabis grow. Like I said, I know. I know. Farmer John loves this stuff. Your product is a granular Have you ever thought about making a liquid? We
do have a liquid version, but that liquid, you know, if you make it liquid, it would have to be all soluble. Otherwise it's hard. So you lose out on that biochar fraction exactly. You would miss some. But we do have powder form. We have granules. And for small, I think, for cannabis growing, you know, powder form is, is much more effective because it's the largest surface area, and you don't have to wait till the you know, those colors to release, to release, yeah, to go to the powder, right?
That sounds fantastic. Can people who are interested? I know. Listen, we're going to tease there could be some collaboration coming between us in the future. But for now, if somebody's interested in getting this product, can they go and order it, or is it not available right
now, it is available, and at this time, we're not really doing the online, the E commerce yet. We're trying to put that together so at this time we can take orders, you know, just by people can send us emails or just fill that contact form on our website. At this time, we're mainly dealing with like business entities, like municipalities for for example, in Front Range area, we have the city of Fort Collins, got four golf courses. All of them are using it. And the city of Timnath, they're using that for parts, because they have seen the degradation of the soil in there. They and they don't want to use that much chemical fertilizers because they also have the water issue. Oh,
that's so funny. Because, like, you know, it's all environmentalists and tree hugging hippies like myself who are who are talking about soil until it hits the golf course, and it's, you know what I mean, it starts affecting the business, right until it's the front lawn of the hotel, and now suddenly everybody wants to learn about soil. Yeah, do you see big results when you go to like, a golf course that's not doing so well, and the grasses are all effed up? Oh, you buy this product? Well,
you know, actually, we started from a golf course called Colindale golf course. That's one of the public courses in Fort Collins. And we actually, you know, our office is located probably, like, 200 yards from the from the course. There's a trail in there. I always walk on that trail, and I saw some bare spots in there. So I have, you know, I just ran into the superintendent of that golf course one day a few years ago, and we just chatted. And he said, What do you guys do? And I said, Well, you know, this is we do remediation, and we have this, this new soil enhancer, this product we have, and that's really good for soil quality. And he said, really, you know, Ted. So he took me to some of the fairways in there. He said, Well, this one, we have tried every chemical possibly we can find, and it's like this, you know, it just don't have any growth. And they said, Well, could you guys try it? I That's that was like end of October, few years ago. And I said, Yes, let's do that. So I brought one bag over there, just for a small area. So we set a control, and we did that the last day of their irrigation. So they shut off the water right after that application. We used the powder, they covered it. And then next May, I got a call from this guy, you know, Randy. He said, Son, I gotta come over here. I went over there. It's full, yeah, so since then, that was it. And he said, Well, could you explain it? Then we worked with Colorado State University. We took samples, so we looked at the microbial population, and, yeah, the microbial population increased dramatically, not necessarily on the different types of species that did increase, like the diversity increased, but more importantly is the quantity, the density of population in there. And then we looked at organic matter, it increased, not the amount we added. So we actually attributed that to the underground, you know, maybe from the. Grassroots, and also from the the microbes, the biomass from that, that increase, wow, total organic matter. Yeah,
that's really awesome stuff. And listen, the product is dirt cheap, like, it's really cost effective. So if you're looking to apply this to, like, a large scale, something definitely reach out to song. And like I said, stay tuned, because I'm going to do some trials in my garden. And there could be a cool collab coming up that you guys will be excited about. But listen song. This was a fantastic interview. Really, really good stuff. You are a smart guy, and so I want to make sure to ask you, for people who are really interested in this subject, stuff you talked about today, the remediation type work that you're doing, do you have any resources to recommend them. Like, are there any books or films or papers that you would want to recommend to people who want to go deeper on this?
Yeah, of course. I well, I guess depending on the depth of your interest, right? You can, you can definitely go to, like a university library and to use the reference index and search for papers. Those are scientific papers. Sometimes they go very, very deep, to molecular level, to genetic level, if you're very interested in that. But personally, I think just on the topic itself, there, there are a bunch of, you know, actually, there's a movie that's called, you probably watched that already? Jordan, kiss the ground. Have you seen that? Right?
I've not sat down and watched this movie. People love this film. This is, this is about regenerative. AG, right, exactly.
And I, you know, one of my favorite singers, Jason Moraz, he was one of the producers as I as I heard of that movie, too. Oh, wow, yeah. And, and also, there's a book called a dirt to soil by Gabe Brown.
I heard you say earlier. Now, I'm not talking about dirt. I'm talking about soil. And I know those are all very like specific dirt to soil,
so you get cool dirt to soil, yeah, and there's a Oh, yeah. That's very good book by Jeff Leuven fells and Wayne Lewis, and it's called teaming with microbes.
Oh, fantastic. We've had Jeff on the show. That's great, that you shout them out.
Yeah, he's great. I think I called him once. Just wanted to share what we do. Yeah, he's, that's so cool. He's, yeah, he's great, great.
Okay, fantastic. Some good recommendations, man. Well, what are you going to be up to next? Like, are you working on developing anything new, or are you just focusing on guy, Nate the product? What's on your horizons?
I think what, what I try to do, because now, guy named, what we have, the guy named we have now I call that version one, is kind of the base product. So it's mostly organics, right? Mostly carbon. We have some, you know, just a baseline of nutrients. We have only, like, 7% of total NPK, so it's pretty low, with a lot of mineral compounds mixed with it. So this is really a good base. What I'm trying to do is to, for example, like I'm learning, like the cannabis industry, if the cannabis plants need some specific element during the growth, or, do you know, or for the flowers, and we can definitely blend these components into the base and make that more specifically, an enhancer for cannabis growers or for tomato growers. You know what might be a different recipe? That's the stuff I'm trying to do. Okay,
fantastic. So going with like crop specific blends, yeah, it's exciting stuff, man. Listen, if you enjoyed this show. I know you did listeners. You can find song well, shoot them an email. Shoot them an email at gaiafertilizer@gmail.com that's an easy 1g. A, I a fertilizer@gmail.com or you can go to Gaia tech.us to learn more about the product. Really, really cool, man. I'm excited to get this in my garden. Like I said, Farmer John swears by the stuff. So what else do we got anywhere people can find you? That's the email, that's the website, and that's pretty much it, right? Song, you're not on IG or anything like that. Good for you.
Yeah, that's about it. Email is the best I don't I don't mind sharing my phone either.
Listen, let's hit him, hit him an email, and then you can take it to the phone date, okay, that sounds fantastic. Song, we appreciate you, man, all right. Song, listen, we would love to have you back on in the future. Thank you for all you do. Really fantastic show today. Really appreciate
it, man. All right, thank you, Jordan. Thanks for having me, of course.
And you listeners, I know you enjoyed it. We got plenty more stuff coming at you, and you can expect song back on the program in the future. Guarantee it. That's all for today, though, we are signing off. This is song and Jordan, and we're saying to you, be safe out there everybody, and never grow alone. Bye, bye, now bye. That's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody. I appreciate you lending us your ears. Dear listener for this show, quick shout out to rooted leaf nutrients. That's right, they sponsored the upcoming cult cup. Oh my God, by the time this is airing, the cold cup has come and went. Huge shout out to rootedleaf. Rootedleaf.com carbon based, actually loaded with carbon and no pH required. It's rootedleaf.com code growcast. For 20% off, they got a whole new generation of products that's rolling out. All of them. Have improved from the potassium input, their root anchor, their silica input, the silica skin. They've reformulated them, and I gotta say, they're better than ever. They're more shelf stable than ever. They can withstand temperature swings better. Really interesting. Nick is working hard over there. So if you're not completely satisfied with the nutrient line, go to root relief.com. Use code. Grow cast for 20% off. And I'll see you guys next time on this show, stay tuned. Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube that's youtube.com/grow cast. Make sure you join our newsletter for so much good stuff in there. If you're not on there, we've really kicked up the newsletter a notch. That's at grow cast.com, and sign up for the newsletter on any page at the bottom there. And most importantly, be safe out there, everybody and I'll see you next time bye bye.
The more humic substances you have in soil, the better it is you.
