I was asked to speak about nitrogen management in particular, and perhaps touch on phosphorus management as well,

and how we can think differently about managing nitrogen from a plant health perspective and from a soil biology perspective.

And particularly, when we look at the macroeconomic conditions of what's happening

and what's going on in the world, you know, many years ago on the podcast, I was having a

conversation with Gary Zimmer and I asked Gary the question, if you could wave a magic wand

and change one thing,

and with the goal and the objectives of accelerating the adoption of a different form of agriculture,

but at that point in time, Gary was referring to as a biological agriculture,

if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing, what would it be?

And Gary's answer to that question was, I would make nitrogen really expensive. And what he intended by that, what he meant by that, is that what he had discovered in 30-some years of what he called biological farming is that you can grow your own nitrogen.

And he wasn't even talking about cover crops. Cover crops were part of it, but he was speaking more about the soil biology and the discovery and the realization that soil health and the ability to fix and sequester nitrogen and supply nitrogen to a crop

is closely connected to each other.

And if you wanted to incentivize the adoption of soil health in a significant way at a large scale,

one easy pathway to do that would be to make it cheaper to grow your own nitrogen than to buy it.

And since he made that comment, it's now, I don't know, at least six or seven years ago, probably longer,

we've learned a lot more about nitrogen, the impact that it has, and the way that it changes plant

physiology, and the way that it changes soil microbiology. So for the discussion today, I'm going

to provide a quick overview of some of the ways that we think differently about nitrogen today

than we did 10 years ago.

And how we manage it differently, I want to just dive right straight into the practicalities of it,

because obviously spring is here, planting season is upon us, and what can we do differently this season that can have a very significant impact?

So there's many starting points in this conversation, but one of the things that I want to put out there for us to think about is I think it would be wise for us to, it would be helpful for us if we stopped having a conversation about nitrogen.

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