The Advancing Eco Agriculture Blog

Flea beetles can be a bane of our consulting mission, because there is no special nutritional sauce that knocks them out. We often encounter the worst flea beetle problems on very young brassicas, like arugula or kale, and on spring eggplant.

The problem is that beetles have...

How can you expedite the health of your crops? While it’s known that healthy soils contribute to the overall health of a crop, what may be less well known is that, when supported correctly, a crop can also greatly improve the health of the soil. In fact...

Regenerative Agriculture is nothing short of a revolution that continues to gain traction across the globe. With the mainstream success of documentaries like “Kiss the Ground” and a growing consumer base looking for high quality, nutrient-dense food, people are looking to cultivate healthier soils and some are starting in their own backyards.

Of all the products from AEA, BioCoat Gold™  is simply the most economical way to get your plants off to an optimal start. Over the years, it has become one of AEA’s most popular products for its effectiveness and ease of use. 

It’s time to plan the planter. How much N do you need? We’re all for less. 
Take stock of your current cover crop success and what contribution will likely come from that, as well as crop residues.

#1 Soak and stir dry inoculants like Spectrum, Mycogenesis, or OP8 in a small amount of clean, lukewarm water to rehydrate and activate the microbes. 10-15 minutes of soaking is usually sufficient. Not much more, as many species in inoculants will be active after four hours contact with water...

On September 7, Advancing Eco Agriculture hosted an event at the Haskell County fairgrounds where John Kempf and David Miller presented some new information on how to manage and prevent spider mite problems in cornfields.

I came up with the phrase “critical points of influence” to describe a window in a plant’s growth cycle in which a great deal of its future yield potential or disease susceptibility is being determined.

AEA products are equally as effective for flower production as for food! These pictures from a Wisconsin bedding-plant and hanging-basket grower show the kind of vitality and production we expect from AEA nutrition. 

Based on our work with crops for disease management and fruit quality, we know that nutritional integrity of plants is the foundation for producing extraordinarily healthy crops. A tremendous body of research correlates specific diseases with specific nutritional imbalances. For instance...

We get excited when crops become so vibrant that they regenerate soil health and build soil organic matter while the crop is growing. We are passionate about growing crops so healthy that they transfer their immunity to people and could be considered food as medicine.

In Greek, phytón means “plant” and phthorá means “destruction.” “Plant destruction” sums up a Phytophthora infection quite well. Outbreaks occur primarily with wet, warm weather, and more readily on compacted soils than on well drained. Mainstream agriculture has very limited management options, offering these standard suggestions...

Many nutrients are locked in the soil and become available to plants only as they are digested by microbes. Phosphorus and calcium tend to bind to each other and be unavailable to plants. Minerals—iron, copper, zinc, manganese, molybdenum—are often found only in an oxidized state that’s almost completely unusable by plants.

In regenerative agriculture systems, spring begins in the fall. Both annual and perennial crops have their most important Critical Points of Influence (CPIs) in the spring. For annual crops the most important stage is at planting and transplanting. For perennial crops, the most important stage is blossoming and pollination. These stages are critical, especially from a plant health perspective.

A terrific host, informative speakers, good weather, and awesome audience of close to 80 people combined to make a great evening on July 1 at Spence Farm in central Illinois. Spence Farm is a diversified farm that uses biologically friendly inputs for soil fertility, and grows vegetables, grains, and other crops. The produce is sold to chefs at high-end Chicago restaurants. 

Eli Yoder was seriously considering quitting farming. His farm was losing money year after year. His CSA customer base was dwindling. Energy levels, both in the crops and the farm personnel, were at their lowest ebb. Farming had become a chore. But an aggressive attempt to rescue the farm using AEA foundational soil building products Rejuvenate and SeaShield turned the farm around more quickly than anyone thought possible. 

Under most conditions, a cow will eat for eight to nine hours a day and will take 55-60 bites per minute. With these constraints on the amount of material that can be consumed per day, the quality of the feed being offered becomes fundamentally important to the amount of milk or meat a given animal can produce.

Farmers are quickly recognizing the strong movement toward quality in production. Although yield is important, the market is demanding higher quality crops with better storability, better taste, and higher nutrient density. In addition, the push toward organic food is putting pressure on traditional farming conventions. Our objective is to...

Adequate levels of functional organic matter and a robust soil digestive system are sorely lacking in most agricultural soils. This lack of humic substances and biology significantly reduces a soil’s water-holding capacity and the ability to release nutrients, all of which leads to large losses in crop quality and yield.

Most of you have a healthy skepticism of “snake oil” products touted as the only thing you'll ever need, or the one thing you've been missing. So do we! Since healthy plants and soils depend on dozens of minerals, thousands of distinct chemical reactions and trillions of microbes, it’s extraordinarily unlikely for one single input to be THE solution.

Earth Day is an important holiday to us at Advancing Eco Agriculture. Earth Day began in 1970 as part of an effort to bring awareness to the mounting environmental problems of that era—soil erosion, air pollution, and drinking water contamination. Since that first Earth Day, some advances have been made, but there are still many important issues to solve.

Repeated tillage passes, monocropping and herbicide applications can burn up soil organic matter, degrade soil structure, and tie up critical micronutrients.  These tight, compacted soils choke off plant root development and mineral uptake, robbing crops of the water and nutrition they need for maximum development.

AEA partnered with a strawberry breeder in Watsonville, CA and a farm in Santa Maria, CA for a series of replicated trials evaluating use of AEA products and nutrient management programs for strawberry production.

Developing disease suppressive soils is a fascinating area of research with the potential to completely change how we manage plant diseases in the very near future. As we learn more about the factors which allow soils to suppress potential pathogens, we are better able to manage these influences in the field and produce soils that can greatly reduce or even eliminate plant infection by a broad range of soil-borne pathogenic organisms.

Genetics are not our limiting factor. The mineral nutrients in the soil, which are the building blocks for growing plants, are the limiting factors in producing quality and stress-resistant crops. I believe that plants have the opportunity and the genetics to consistently surpass what we accept to be normal.

The commonly accepted model of plant nutrition holds that plants absorb soluble mineral ions from the soil solution through root hairs. In this model,  plants are dependent on soluble ions and adequate water supply in the soil to allow the transport of those ions to plant roots. This dependency on water and solubility has several potential weak links.

At Advancing Eco Agriculture, we have the privilege of working with many different farms, and many different types of farmers and farm managers. We have observed that farm managers tend to be on a spectrum of management intensity. Some farmers measure and manage everything they can. Others don’t.