The Plain Values Podcast EP #44 – Regenerative Agriculture, Plant Immunity, and Faithful Stewardship

John Kempf:
It’s a lot of international work. It’s over five million acres, a team of 50 people. It’s really quite remarkable the scope of the work that we’re doing today.

Marlin Miller:
You are probably one of the most interesting Amish people that I have ever had the joy to meet.

John Kempf:
Plants have the capacity to be 100% resistant to all diseases and all insects and I signed my name on it. I prefer to eat my vegetables in the form of steak. You take all the guys the entire planet, you put all of their collective hormones in one physical location, you would have a total of 70 pounds, seven zero.

Marlin Miller:
That is mind blowingly small.

John Kempf:
Contrast that with the millions of pounds of endocrine disruptors that are applied in our food supply.

Marlin Miller:
Well, John Kempf, it is a stinking joy to be with you. I really, really appreciate it. I am excited to be able to talk and learn about the journey that you have been on all these years. I have known of you for a long time. In fact, I think the first time that we met, I brought a friend up. That was probably, I mean, goodness, was that seven or eight years ago, I bet?

John Kempf:
I think you’re short. Must have been 12 or 15.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. Okay. It could very well be. If you don’t mind, let’s go back to the very beginning. By the way, Wallen,

John Kempf:
Did you just say it’s a stinking joy? That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that adjective used to describe joy.

Marlin Miller:
Well, I’m sorry. I can be a little goofy. Yeah, but it is. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. You are probably one of the most interesting Amish people that I have ever had the joy to meet. Just for the sake of the basics of your home, tell us where you live. Tell us about your childhood. What was your life like early on?

John Kempf:
Interesting is another one of those troubling adjectives. I can be interpreted in so many different ways. It’s just like there’s a very narrow … There’s a two litter boundary between the term famous and infamous.

Marlin Miller:
That’s true.

John Kempf:
Yeah. But I grew up in the Jaguar County community in Middlefield, Ohio, Northeast Ohio. In many of my discussions, I often describe what that means in the agricultural context. It means that we were historically … Well, we still are in the snowbelt, but that doesn’t carry quite the same meaning that it did 20 years ago in some ways. But that’s 25 or so miles south of Lake Erie and about that same distance from the Pennsylvania border. And historically about, I don’t know, 10 or 15 miles south of where I grew up, there is what we locally refer to as the Ravenna Arsenal, which is a major US military munitions factory that they built in that location in the 1970s for the reason that the technology at that time did not have cloud penetrating radar. And this part of the country is the second cloudiest part of the country, second only to Seattle because again, because of that lake effect.
So there’s of course variation, but usually that means about 180 days of cloud cover per year. So very cloudy environment, particularly during the winter months, we have an average of 10 days of sunshine per month for January, February, March. Excuse me, December, January, February.

Marlin Miller:
Can I go back to something that you alluded to?

John Kempf:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
You said that the snow belt doesn’t mean what it did 20 years ago. Are you implying that we have a lot less snow?

John Kempf:
Oh, without question. We have a lot less snow. We have a lot milder winters, much more milder winters now. And for people who are just listening to this and everyone remembers back to the six months that we just went through, the nine months that we just went through this past winter was very harsh. We had a very harsh winter, but I’m still a comparatively young man. I haven’t reached the 50 year mark yet. And there was no question when I was growing up, there was no question. It was a very unusual winter that you wouldn’t have ice skating for a significant amount of winter. Well, that’s no longer a given. If you have ice skating on open ponds, it’s usually a very short duration. I mean, when I was a kid, ice skates and runners leds were common gifts to give to your kids. That’s not so common anymore because their use becomes less and less.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. Well, so you grew up in, as the Amish would say, the chalggy area, right? Can I tell a funny little story?

John Kempf:
You’re asking

Marlin Miller:
My

John Kempf:
Permission on your podcast?

Marlin Miller:
When my wife was a teacher down here in Charm, Ohio, she had a first grade class of solid Amish kids. Okay. There were probably 15 or 17 Amish first graders and she one day asked the question, “Has anybody ever gone out of state? Has anybody ever left Ohio?” And a brave little boy raised his hand and said, “Mrs. Miller, we went to Choggy one time.” I just think that is hilarious Because you’re a good what, two and a half hours from us here?

John Kempf:
Not even.

Marlin Miller:
Not even?

John Kempf:
Edge of community to edge of community is probably an hour and a half max, but two hours center to center. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. But

John Kempf:
A lot of folks from down in the homes county area for them, Jaguar County might as well be another planet in some ways, which is fascinating given that we’re that close together.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. It is a pretty different community. So now let’s go back to your childhood. You work in agriculture now. Did you always have an interest in gardens and farming as a kid?

John Kempf:
I did and I had the benefit. I mean, I had some exceptional parents as well and my mother’s flower gardens and her vegetable gardens were always the admiration of everyone who came by, but also I grew up on a produce farm. We had a fresh mark of fruit and vegetable operation. I ran a roadside vegetable stand from age nine to 14 or something like that. And so I grew up there and I was always fascinated by observing how plants responded to the things that we did. And we had some really good coaches on the farm over the years, agronomists who came by and taught us to really observe plants closely. And just these close observations that, oh, on these cucumber plants we have a female bud at every node and those cucumber plants over there where we missed one day of irrigation, we’re missing three female buds that these plants over here have and it’s just- Hold on.

Marlin Miller:
You were doing that kind of thinking and noticing as a kid, as a nine, 10, 11 year old.

John Kempf:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. Okay. All right. So keep going. I am so excited to tell you that Berlin Seeds is sponsoring this episode. Berlin Seeds has become my wife’s absolute favorite seed place. Their store is wonderful. They have a test garden. They’ve been around forever. They do nothing but non- GMO. There’s no gimmicks. There’s no iffy anything at all. They are absolutely wonderful and I know that you’ll love them. You can learn more about Brenton and his team at berlinseeds.life and tell them Marlin and Plain Values sent you.

John Kempf:
Well, there’s many different directions we could take this conversation, Ben, but I think the context, there’s many pieces of important context, but in addition to … I love reading. I was an easy learner at school. I was often finished very early in the school day with my schoolwork and so we had two full sets of encyclopedias at school. I read both of those from one end to the other multiple times. I grew up only a couple miles away from the local public township public library and that became very relevant later on when I was in my upper teens and started really researching and trying to understand what was happening and going on with soils and plants. Because as it turned out to my surprise, I didn’t know this until years later, but this library, the Middlefield Public Library, has the highest per person book lending rate of any library in the nation, not in the state but the entire nation.
And I think part of that is because of the Amish community and not having television and radio and all those other forms of entertainment and the Amish culture that’s in the area as well. But then because of that, because the library was very well funded and they had really great service, they just did an outstanding job of getting books for me through interlibrary loan. I asked for books on very obscure topics. I still remember this one instance where I asked for a book on biophotonics, which was this topic of how plants transmit light from the upper parts of the plant down through the root systems and out into the soil. And I mean, this is an academic textbook that costs five or $600 and it took them a couple months. They got that book from me from Germany through interlibrary alone. There were just many instances like that.
So there was the opportunity for learning and the encouragement. I think another critical aspect is that in our vegetable operation, because we enjoyed reading, I still remember kind of in sequence, my brothers and I read this book titled Cheaper by the Dozen about this engineering father who had a dozen children and we were fascinated by the idea of the father’s work as an engineer was removing wasted motion, repetitious motion in factories and reducing rates of human air and increasing speed and efficiency. And we took that to our vegetable processing line. My brother and I, we got over about a six month period we almost quadrupled our average tomato packing speed and- You

Marlin Miller:
Quadrupled it.

John Kempf:
Yes. And the reason I’m bringing out this story is because my parents were really amazing and unique in that they gave us permission to challenge. They gave us permission to ask, why are we doing things this way? Is there a better way of doing them? And then to try them out and to make changes. That’s one thing that I now as a parent, I recognize and realize how unique and important that is because many children, particularly at that age, don’t get that permission to challenge and don’t get that permission to try to make changes and improvements.

Marlin Miller:
Are your mom and dad still are they still here?

John Kempf:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
John, what is your conversation like with your dad? Today What does he think of when he thinks of you?

John Kempf:
I don’t live in his head. I have no idea how to answer that question.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. I need to remember that you’re a bit more literal than I am. Okay, let’s try that again. Part of the challenge

John Kempf:
Is because of my leadership in the agricultural space and particularly in the region agricultural space, I have needed to learn to be very precise with my language.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah, I’m sorry that I’m-

John Kempf:
No, I’m having fun razzing you.

Marlin Miller:
I love it. So today and I’m going to go back in a second to how advancing eco agriculture began and where all of this came from, but today you are speaking with PhDs from all over the planet about the deepest of the microbiology of plants, right?

John Kempf:
That’s correct.

Marlin Miller:
How did it start? How did AEG … No, AEA. AEA, how did that come about? Do you guys still have the CSA style produce farm as well? Well,

John Kempf:
That farm has evolved over the years. My father still has that farm and my brother’s actually in the process of moving onto it right now, but most of his kids have married and moved away and the labor force has declined. So my father still has an acre of black raspberries and I expect with my brother joining over the next couple of years, that situation, that farm is going to evolve again into something more. But it’s certainly something different from what it was when I grew up at the moment. And I mean, things naturally evolve over time, but I think … Oh, let me see. I had a point here that I wanted to make and I just lost my train of thought about where I was going. What was the question that you asked me originally?

Marlin Miller:
Where did AEA start? How did it start?

John Kempf:
Well, I’m going to give you perhaps a non-traditional or a different answer. I think AEA started and many things have started over the years as a result of asking the right question. Many people have been presented with the same information that we were presented with or that other people were presented with and because they didn’t ask questions and this is something that I’ve come to really appreciate and I spent quite a bit of time thinking about as a podcast host is what is the right question? I’m of the persuasion that everyone knows something that I would benefit from knowing, but how do I find out what that is? How do I draw it out of them? And one of my biggest frustrations is as a podcast host when I’ve been interviewing people and one of these individuals, I’ll talk about the story personally a little bit, was Don Huber.
Don Huber is a PhD. He’s got close to 60 years of experience. He has 60 years of experience at this point as a plant pathologist who worked both in the private space and he also worked in the military in biological warfare, weapons development. He worked at Fort Dietrich, Maryland during the Cold War with Russia. His signature is on the treaty that ended the Cold War with Russia on the biological warfare weapons section. And so I’m asking him, and what was so fascinating about the research work that they did at Fort Dietrich back in the ’70s and ’60s and ’50s was they developed nutritional solutions for all of these different plant diseases. That their foundational mission was to identify as many potential biological warfare weapons agents as they could that were relevant to food production and agriculture and then to develop solutions for them and their solutions were almost universally nutritional solutions in nature that, oh, when plants have generous levels of these nutrients, these diseases don’t express themselves.
And one of my frustrations, and it still bothers me to this day, I mean Don is a close personal friend. He’s now in his upper 80s and he’s still here with us. But one of my frustrations is the military indoctrination that he received is you only answer the question that was asked. You don’t volunteer any additional information. And so in order to learn what Don knows, you have to be smart enough to know the right questions to ask. And in many, many cases, I haven’t been smart enough to know the right questions and I recognize that and it’s so frustrating. But to bring this back to why this matters of how advancing eco-agriculture got its early beginnings, we had a fascinating experience where we had a cantaloupe crop on two fields, two soils side by side of all the management was identical, but one section was succumbed to padre mildew and the next section got no padre mildew.
And I wanted to know what the differences were between these two fields, what allowed one plant to be resistant, the other one was susceptible. And so we had some really good resources in the library, had some good resources and we had some good coaches and agronomists, consultants that we were connected to. And I set out in pursuit of the answer to that question, I wanted to know what are the differences between these two plants? That was the question and I just kept digging and digging and digging for answers. And in so many ways I found that when we are persistent in trying to find truth and asking the right questions, then all of these things are revealed. I mean, we’re very clearly told Seek and Yi shall find. And so what emerged out of that particular question was in understanding that plants have an immune system that is even stronger than ours because they can’t run away.
They can’t run away from insects, they can’t run away from disease. So they have this incredibly powerful immune system that has been completely ignored in mainstream agronomy and that led to a very different approach to nutrition management and biology management and that led to the founding of advancing eco-agriculture and that led to, I mean today it’s a lot of international work. It’s over five million acres, a team of 50 people. It’s really quite remarkable the scope of the work that we’re doing today.

Marlin Miller:
You are testing things and playing with crops and there’s no disrespect in that of course, but you are testing on five million acres around the whole planet.

John Kempf:
Yeah. Well, we’re 20 years into it at this point. I would say we’re pretty well past the testing stage. We’re testing in the sense that we’re constantly encountering new crops and new diseases that are emerging and so forth. But about 10 or 12 years ago, maybe a bit longer than that, in 2011, I drafted this diagram that was called the Plant Health Pyramid to describe how we were observing plants becoming resistant to diseases and insects at different stages. And that thing it’s gone global at this point. It’s been translated into, I don’t know how many different languages. And when I put that plant health pyramid together, it went a couple years. It was in 2014 when I finally developed the intestinal fortitude to put a tagline on it, but it carries a tagline today that says, “Plants have the capacity to be 100% resistant to all diseases and all insects, and I signed my name on it.
” And that’s a pretty big mouthful. That’s a pretty big claim to make, and it’s one that I didn’t make lightly, but it’s also one that is born out of experience. This is not a hypothesis or a theory anymore. What’s been interesting over the last 20 years is that every year we get approached by a handful, one, two, three, four, different new disease and pest combinations that have emerged in different parts of the world where people say, “Hey, we have this new disease for which there is no known treatment. There is no fungicide or bacteriicide that we can use to solve this problem. Can you help us solve it? ” And after 20 years, our failure rate is exactly zero. We have not failed … I say we, this sounds like God gets all the credit for this because we’re just simply trying to work within his design and with his design, but the reality is that we have a perfect track record and what is interesting about that, when I say we have a perfect track record, there are many instances where we don’t know precisely what the it was, what the magic solution was to solve the problem.
And this is actually considered a downside by many people. I’ll give you one example. There’s this incurable disease in stone fruit production, particularly in cherries called bacterial canker. Bacterial canker’s been around for 50 years and there is nothing that treats it effectively because it lives inside the trunk and branches in the vascular tissue of a tree. And if bacterial canker gets pad enough, the only solution is to tear the tree out and start over. Well, we started working with bacterial canker and in 18 months, in two growing seasons, we have completely reversed bacterial canker. It was already severely present. The block was said to be bulldozed and it’s gone and people ask us, “Well, what did you do? ” And the answer is we did everything. We looked at soil analysis, we looked at leaf tissue analysis and we just systemically addressed all the trace minerals that were imbalanced.
And so we did 12 or 15 different things, or maybe in a certain scenario we did for six different things, but it was the combination of all of them together of essentially creating nutritional balance and creating microbiome balance that solved the problem. And there’s something about human psychology. Oh my goodness, do we ever love a silver bullet?

Marlin Miller:
So what I hear you saying effectively, I don’t think that you’re using a whole bunch of glyphosate, you’re not the chemical Monsanto approach, right?

John Kempf:
No, this approach foundationally removes the need. First, it starts by reducing the need and over time it removes the need for insecticides and fungicides. And herbicides are a bit more challenging because of our modern management practices, but yes.

Marlin Miller:
So effectively you’re saying if you get the chemistry and the mineralization of a plant correct, God has built it so that it will withstand and flourish in every and any situation or circumstance, right?

John Kempf:
That’s exactly right And when I say that, I include colorado potato beetles and Japanese beetles and marmore distinct bug and corner worm and everything that you think of as being a nasty pest that doesn’t have that it’s, oh, it would be impossible to prevent that. I’ll give you, I didn’t personally experience this, but one of my colleagues did. He was working with a wheat farm in Africa and the locust plagues, the locust hoards that existed back in the time of Egypt, those still exist to this day and perhaps in lesser quantities. And they had locusts invade a region and eat every green thing except the wheat fields that he was working on were completely untouched.

Marlin Miller:
I almost

John Kempf:
Caught you swearing there,

Marlin Miller:
Marlon.That would be funny. But what in the world are you talking about? Does that mean that the locusts … And we’re just talking grasshoppers.

John Kempf:
Correct.

Marlin Miller:
Right? We’re just talking normal everyday grasshoppers, but there’s billions of them. Yes. Did the wheat give something off that they knew to stay away? This is wheat that we grind into.

John Kempf:
It’s a normal common plant that normally gets decimated by locust pressure.

Marlin Miller:
What do you think happened?

John Kempf:
Well, there’s multiple things that happened. First, we now understand that insects communicate in the electromagnetic spectrum just as … I mean, we also communicate in the electromagnetic spectrum with our visual eyesight and voice it’s all electromagnetic, but insects actually communicate in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that we don’t have visibility to, both ultraviolet and infrared and far infrared and so forth. And these plants actually give off very different electromagnetic signals, visual signals to insects dependent on their state of health. So that’s one surface, that’s a relatively surface level thing. Secondly, they also give off different chemical signals that are repulsive to insects. That’s another layer. But where the rubber meets the figurative road is many plants also produce these compounds that are digestion inhibitors and they’re even digestion inhibitors. For us, we talk about phytates in beans, for example. And these are compounds that plants produce specifically to disrupt or to shut down the digestive system of herbivores, particularly herbivorous insects.
And so when plants become healthy enough, they create compounds that it’s putting it very mildly here, but they do a lot more than just give a grasshopper or a tummy ache. They will completely destroy a grasshopper’s digestive system or many other insects, for example. So what is interesting, all plants produce these compounds that in plant English will just generically refer to them as essential oils. These are all phytonutrient compounds and many of these essential oils are phytonutrients. The plant creates them as plant protectants to protect themselves from ultraviolet radiation, from insect attack, from disease attack and many of these compounds have antiviral properties, they have antifungal properties, they have antibacterial properties, some of them inhibit digestion and they are powerful, Marlin. These compounds are immensely powerful. I’ll just give you an illustration of how powerful they are. We now have all of these challenges in our hospital system and our medical institutions with antibiotic resistant staph aureus.
We have MRSA and versa and person on and on the list goes. So this is now a decade old research, but a group of scientists set out to identify how many different mechanisms or how many different modes of action cinnamon oil had against staph aureus and most antibiotics have one, occasionally two or three. Cinnamon oil had 300.
You think staph aureus is ever going to become resistant to cinnamon oil? I don’t think so. Oh

Marlin Miller:
My goodness.

John Kempf:
These plant immune compounds are incredibly strong.

Marlin Miller:
So let’s go back to the wheat. I don’t know how to wrap my head around the idea or not the idea, but the reality that a plague of grasshoppers is sweeping an African plane or a whole community and did the scout grasshopper jump into the wheat and all of a sudden is communicating back to the masses, don’t touch that, that’s going to kill you or whatever. And I realize I am oversimplifying it by a million, but that’s the reality that we’re talking about. Yeah.

John Kempf:
It’s a multitude of crasshoppers taking a single bite and developing a violent dislike for what they just tasted and immediately leaving.

Marlin Miller:
That’s unbelievable. Okay.

John Kempf:
Marlon, you know why we have such a hard time believing that this can be true as from people from an Anabaptist and Christian background? I’ve really asked this question. I think one of the gifts that I’ve been given is trying to understand root causes, first principles, how do things actually work and also trying to analyze situations like how did we get into this space in the first place? And within that framework, one of the questions that has emerged for me is that we have most farmers across North America profess to be Christians. They profess and they acknowledge that there is a need, that they are called to be stewards of God’s earth and yet when We have adopted this model of agriculture that destroys soil. It destroys human health. It destroys livestock health. How is it? How do we have this dichotomy? How is it that we have this scenario where most farmers profess to be Christians, but we engage in a form of agriculture that cannot be justified or argued as being called good stewardship.
I could talk about this for 10 minutes. I think there’s three different reasons, but for the moment, I’ll just provide one. And that one is generally most people perhaps subconsciously but many Christians believe that the earth is cursed. In Genesis, when the earth is cursed with essentially mankind is cursed and says the soil will bear thorns and thistles. We still believe that to be true to this day. And that belief, which I believe is mistaken, kind of creates the expectation that we will always, no matter what we do, we will always have diseases and insects and pests, et cetera, et cetera, when I don’t believe that to be the case at all. Now, Marlon, the next question is, why don’t you believe that?

Marlin Miller:
That’s kind of where I was going.

John Kempf:
I don’t believe that for two reasons. First, I think kind of the foundational question is, do we still live under the law or do we live in grace? That’s one question. But second, I want to be clear that I do believe there is a difference between being in a fallen state and being cursed. It is true that the earth is still in a fallen state, but I don’t believe it’s true and that that doesn’t equate to being cursed. And I would offer as evidence the verse in Genesis 8:23. When Noah emerged from the arc and he offered up a burned offering, there is this verse that gets quoted all the time in our Amish church services, many ones that I’ve been in. And there’s a great deal of emphasis placed on the second sentence of the verse, but we lose the first one. And the translation that I’m familiar with goes something like this.
It says something to the effect of, “I will never again curse the ground anymore for man’s sake, for the thoughts and imaginations of a man’s heart or evil from the days of his youth.” And everyone focuses on the thoughts and imaginations of a man’s heart are evil from the days of his youth. And we forget the first part of the sentence, which is, “I will never again curse the ground anymore for man’s sake.” So I’m of the opinion that if the earth is cursed that we are stewarding, it is a result of our beliefs and our management systems. It’s not because God has cursed it. It is because we in our ignorance and our unbelief are managing it in such a way.

Marlin Miller:
So to go back to the fallen state, I don’t think I’ve ever actually connected or looked at the differences between God’s cursing the ground when Adam and Eve fell sinned and saying, “Hey, you’re going to have pain in childbirth and Adam, you’re going to struggle to grow stuff.” That is one thing man’s fallen nature, our state of being fallen is a whole other thing. That seems to me to be a pretty clear … There’s a pretty big gap there, but you’re saying that we basically are blending the two into one that because God said this and this, that means that we’re still going to always fight that fight and that it means that the earth is cursed still today.

John Kempf:
Well, we know that our beliefs affect our behavior and our decisions and they affect how creation responds to us. And our expectation that the earth is cursed means that we will behave in a certain way and the creation will respond in a certain way

Marlin Miller:
To that thought process. To

John Kempf:
That thought process, to that expectation, exactly

Marlin Miller:
That

John Kempf:
Will manifest itself in different actions, in different management decisions. There is no question, look, we know very clearly, and this could be a whole other earthworm hole to go down, but we know very clearly that the creation responds to our prayers. It responds to our directives when they’re coming from the right place within and within alignment with the spirit. We know that to be true. That has been clearly documented and demonstrated. And if that is true, that gives us a tremendous … First of all, it gives us a tremendous responsibility, gives us a tremendous opportunity, but also it is actually a reflection of our mismanagement, or you could say our improper stewardship if we are not getting the results that God created and intended in the beginning.

Marlin Miller:
So I just wrote down a question that I do not want to forget. Can we feed the world regeneratively, basically, is the question, but let’s go back to-

John Kempf:
That’s such a backward question. You sure can’t feed it in the future on the pathway that we’re on now.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. Dog on it. Okay. John, you’re … Okay, you’re killing me. So let’s go back to, you said there were three reasons. Yeah. You gave us the first one. What is number two? This episode is being brought to you by our friends at Azure Standard. My buddy, Spencer, told me a while back about their new program called Around the Table. It is a chance for local churches to partner with Azure Standard. You can learn more at Azurearoundthetable.com. But the cool thing about this is that the church gets to become a drop point and it causes these wonderful opportunities to reach out into the community. The people in the church and the communities get to order their food from Azure. The truck brings it by every month and it actually helps raise funds for the church and any ministry that they want. It is a beautiful program.
Like I said, Azurearoundthetable.com and Tell Marlin and Plain Values sent you.

John Kempf:
Well, I’ll give you a rapid overview. Okay. So the foundational question is, what is it about the Christian perspective or beliefs that have allowed this adoption where on one hand we want to call ourselves good stewards. On the other hand, we’ve adopted this model of agriculture that is so deeply and inherently destructive of God’s creation. I think it’s a combination of three things. One is a misunderstanding of what it means to have dominion over and the second is misunderstanding of the curse and the earth being cursed. And the third is final destruction. So on the first one, what does it mean to have dominion over and what was the intention in the original Hebrew in Genesis? When you look at that, first of all, you don’t even have to go back to the original Hebrew. You just have to go back to see what it meant when it was first translated into English.
In the era when the King James version, well, it’s called the King James version because it was following the Geneva Bible and a couple of others, it was translated or interpreted, I suppose you could say in part underneath a monarchy. And if you were a monarch or a Lord and you had dominion over people, that meant that you were responsible for them. They were under your care. You had responsibility to those people and today we understand the word dominion over to mean to dominate and to subjugate, which is something entirely different from what was meant from the English even 300 years ago, 400 years ago. And it’s also entirely different from what was intended to be communicated in the original Hebrew. The original Hebrew really means that we are to steward, to nurture, to care for, to minister to. It’s much broader than just to dominate.
So that is one piece. The second piece we already spoke about, the belief that the earth is cursed and the third belief is that it’s all eventually going to burn up anyway. And you combine those three beliefs that we are to dominate, that the earth is cursed and it’s all going to burn up eventually anyway. And those three beliefs together kind of give you implicit permission to rape and pillage and destroy and to not be good stewards. And that’s the spot we’ve arrived in today with our commercial production agriculture.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. The two words, rape and pillage popped in my head immediately because it seems … I think it’s the last one, final destruction that I have actually … I have literally heard people talk about that in conversation and I probably haven’t had in your words, the intestinal fortitude to say, why do you think that that’s actually the case and to push back against that thought. But I mean, as you said, when you combine those three things, it is just carte blanche, you do whatever you want, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t really matter. I was going to say it’s okay, but it doesn’t really matter when you throw those three into the hopper.

John Kempf:
Well, let’s take it all the way to the end of the spectrum. This is now, I don’t know, probably 10, 12 years ago, maybe longer. I was speaking to a group of Amish and Mennonite farmers and this one Mennonite farmer, they had deliberately asked me, the group had deliberately asked me to talk about the challenges of pesticides and the impact that they have on the human body, which is a really freaky, scary topic when you start getting into it. And so I did, I spoke about this for half an hour.This one farmer just, he was about beside himself. He was on the edge of his seat and he raised his hand and he said, I quote verbatim, these are the words out of his mouth. He said, “God would not permit mankind to create anything that is damaging to us.” And I said, “Oh, you must never have heard of the atomic

Marlin Miller:
Bomb.” Oh my goodness.

John Kempf:
That is the belief or that was the belief of that individual. And I think it’s not confined to just that individual that God would not allow mankind to create things that are so inherently and deeply destructive. And the other version of that thought, which I’ve also heard dozens of times is that the government would not allow the use of something that is so dangerous. There is a

Marlin Miller:
Deep- I’m sorry to

John Kempf:
Laugh. Well, there is a deep disconnect from reality and a misunderstanding of the reality of what is happening in the world if you have that perspective.

Marlin Miller:
That’s awesome.That is pretty funny. That is pretty funny. It would only

John Kempf:
Be funny if it weren’t true. I

Marlin Miller:
Know. Wow. So let’s go back to my question. One of the biggest objections that I hear that a guy like Joel Salatin hears all the time is, “Well, you can never feed the world on millions of small farms doing things like they did back in the olden days before the modern huge conventional agricultural machine.”

John Kempf:
Marlon, there are so many things wrong with that question and the assumptions behind it. I can unharness that thing in five minutes flat. I could spend even more time on it, but let’s start with a few fundamentals. Let’s just correct some mistaken assumptions. So first, you could never feed the world. Well, hang on a second. We are feeding the world currently with that reality. Here’s what many people don’t realize. 70% of the total food production on the planet right now today is grown by people farming less than one hectare, less than 2.7 acres.

Marlin Miller:
70%.

John Kempf:
70%. We forget the United States is 6% of the world’s population and we are not feeding the world. In fact, we have such an overabundance and a surplus of corn that we’re turning it into fuel and the price is still in the dumps, but nobody wants our corn because we have way too much. So this whole mantra of feeding the world is wrong on that level. The world is already getting fed by small holder farmers. That is already current day present reality has been true since practically forever, since the beginning, and will continue to be true for a long time. All right, that’s point one. Point two. We do not now today and have not ever had a production problem. We have always had a distribution and socioeconomic problem. The reason there were struggling societies and people starving around the world was never because of a shortage of production.
It was because of the inability to purchase for a whole variety of political and socioeconomic reasons. So that’s the second point. And the third point is that if we truly cared about … And the reality is the United States is portrayed as this production powerhouse. Do you know that in 2020 … Two important figures that should give people pause. In 2023, the United States became a net importer of food and as if that weren’t freaky enough, even earlier data, I forget the exact date here, I want to say it’s 2019 or 2020. The United States became a majority importer of fresh fruits and vegetables. And the data, my data at this point is a couple years old, but as of a year or two ago, we imported 65% of our fresh fruit and vegetable production.

Marlin Miller:
Oh my

John Kempf:
Goodness. Now granted, we’re not going to grow bananas and pineapples and some crops like that in the continental United States, but the fact that we import 65% of what gets consumed fresh should give all of us pause. So this whole mantra of feeding the world with conventional agriculture is it’s smoke and mirrors. It’s not real. That is a mantra that was developed by agribusiness to defend their interests, not the interests of farmers.

Marlin Miller:
That is exactly what I wrote down, John. That whole thing, if I’m Monsanto, if I’m Cargill, that is the way that you fight back against a John Kempf, against a Joel Salatin, against anybody who’s encouraging people to go back to regenerative agriculture and ditch all of the things that I, as Monsanto and Cargill are trying to sell, right?

John Kempf:
And you want to know the reason of why, not just why the development of the Montrese, the Monsantos and Beyers and Cortevas of the world have very deliberately, they’ve been very smart about this. They have deliberately chosen farmers to be their ambassadors. Why? Because people trust farmers. Consumers trust farmers. And that’s just not just me making this up. There is the, I forget what the organization is called, but every couple of years they publish this index that’s called the Consumer Trust Index. Farmers rate close to the top of the Consumer Trust Index with clergymen.

Marlin Miller:
Oh my goodness.

John Kempf:
Agribusiness companies rate close to the bottom of the index with pharmaceutical companies.

Marlin Miller:
This

John Kempf:
Company, you want to get farmers to present and to represent your interests. And so that’s where the mantra of feeding the world. The Monsantos of the world have farmer ambassador trainings. They bring people in. They bring farmers in and they train them on the talking points and how to represent themselves and how to represent agriculture and how to quote unquote educate the consumer because they need the farmers to represent them because nobody trusts them.

Marlin Miller:
How do you encourage the little farmer to take seriously the claims that … I mean, is it just simply getting the word out and taking the time to sit with a guy and answer the questions and show them the evidence of the wheat field and the grasshopper? I mean, am I oversimplifying it, John?

John Kempf:
Well, there are layers and layers of answers to your question and your question is a question that I’ve spent 20 years thinking about and studying about as much as I have thinking about agronomy because knowing the answer and getting people to implement the answer are two very different things because if we collectively as a society already did many of the things that we knew to be better for us, we would live in a very different world. That’s a pretty

Marlin Miller:
Fair point.

John Kempf:
Yeah. So most people, there are a select handful. It’s a single digit percentage, probably like between one and 2% of the total population loves change. They thrive on change. They enjoy creating change, but most people are very averse to change. And this is a key important sentence that I want to elaborate on a little bit, but most people only become open to change when the actual pain of not changing becomes greater than the perceived pain of changing. And the reason that matters, the reason I’m using those adjectives, the actual pain versus the perceived pain is because as humans, we have a very vivid imagination and we can create a great deal of perceived pain of future change that doesn’t actually exist and may never come to, likely never will come to fruition.
So we live in this world where people, many people, almost it’s almost universal. The majority of us know of things that we could be doing to, let’s say, to improve our health. We could be exercising more. We could be engaging in meditation and prayer, whatever the case might be. There are things that we could do to improve our health and spiritual wellbeing, but we don’t do them, not because we don’t know better, but it would require changes to our daily schedules, our routine, the way we show up in life, whatever the case might be. We know good things to do and we don’t do them, which is the definition of sin in one particular verse. And that’s the same scenario in farming and agriculture. It’s we know things to do better and we don’t do them for a whole range of reasons.

Marlin Miller:
When you step back and you think about the work that you’ve been able to do, John, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes, which is impossible. I’m far too dull for that, but how do you see the work that you are hoping to do? Like what are the things that you get fired up about a problem that you’re trying to solve or something that you think of down the road and you go, “Dog on it, I hope the Lord helps me figure out X.” This episode is being brought to you by my friends at Kentucky Lumber. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Derek and his wife Lisa and their whole family and let me tell you, they are wonderful. They have stepped into some of the hardest situations with fostering and adoption. If you care about the least of these and the kids that are coming out of really hard places and you want to buy from a family who gets it and cares about those kids, they are living on the front lines of some of the most unimaginable situations that I’ve come across in years from siding to trim to flooring, they have it all.
You can find them at drywallhaters.com.

John Kempf:
I would love to see a world, I dream of a world where the process of agriculture and the process of growing food and fiber is deeply understood to not be about economics, but about the cultivation of human beings and about good stewardship and that the ultimate purpose of agriculture is to provide healthy medicinal quality food for people, for livestock and for everything that supports them. But I’ve come to understand that this is not about a lack of knowledge, a lack of collective knowledge. There are many people individually who lack knowledge, but collectively us as a human species around the globe, we already know enough. We already have enough wisdom. We have enough guidance. If we simply collectively implemented what the leading innovators already know, we would be in a very different space. So I’ve come to understand that the battle that we’re in is not a battle of knowledge.
It’s not a battle of education. It is a spiritual battle first, second, third, this is a spiritual battle. And there’s a part of me that even I’m hesitant to use the word battle. It is a battle, absolutely, but there are some people who the moment you use the word battle and entering in a warfare language, they perceive that you are battling against other people and other people that have bad ideas and that’s not it at all. Instead, I truly believe at its most foundational level, this is a spiritual warfare against the forces of darkness.
If I put it into that framework, then essentially what we’re describing is that if we get people to a different place spiritually, all these things solve themselves and I do believe that to be true.

Marlin Miller:
If you get this right, then a lot of these things can just be- Most foundational.

John Kempf:
Seek ye first the

Marlin Miller:
Kingdom of

John Kempf:
God and all these things shall be added unto you.

Marlin Miller:
How does John Kempf see the coming world of AI?

John Kempf:
I don’t know if you know this, you may, but I actually developed and launched a regenerative agriculture AI.

Marlin Miller:
I did not know that.

John Kempf:
So we launched an AI called Field Lark and I chose that name very deliberately. I forget where the verse is quoted, but excuse me, I think it might be in Job somewhere, although it could be mistaken. I’m drawing a blank on the reference right now, but ask the birds the field and they will tell you, ask the sea and it will tell you or ask the woods and they will inform you. And so we drew the name inspiration from that and the purpose of Fieldlark was I discovered that there is this tremendous body of knowledge on mineral and microbiome management related to all types of different diseases and insects and so forth that was largely buried and inaccessible and the vision that I had was to make this information readily accessible and I thought about the challenges of technology quite deeply. I wrote an article about how technology should be designed and should be used that’s been pretty widely published and widely cited by a lot of people, but I do think there are significant downsides to using AI.
I think it can perhaps be a useful or valuable tool, but I don’t want to minimize the downsides of it as well.
So if we use the word technology in its broadest scope, not just talking about electronic technology, but the technology of chainsaws and bulldozers and on and on the list goes of various innovations that have developed over the last, well, hundreds of years, but even before that there are several challenges with technology and one of the challenges is that as humans, we are very adaptable and we tend to adapt to the consciousness of the tool that we are using. And what I mean by that phrase is when we adapt to the tool, our pattern, our way of behavior, our way of thinking and the decisions and the choices that we make change as a result of the tools that we use. And to give you a very simple example, imagine that you send someone to prune a tree and you prune three different trees and with one you give them a small hand pruners.
With a second one, you give them a folding saw and the third one, you give them a small chainsaw. You will get three completely different results as a result of the tools they held, even though you gave them the exact same job and they have the exact same skillset. Or if you ask someone to go grade and clear a piece of land, you give them a chainsaw versus a bulldozer and you’ll get completely different, or that’s not even a good example, but let’s say you use a bulldozer versus a team of horses and a slipscraper, you’ll get completely different results and not just because of the capabilities of the tool, but because the tool shapes the way they observe the landscape and shapes the way they perceive the job That’s one challenge is that we adopt in the case of AI, this is an appropriate use of this word, we adopt the consciousness of the tool like our consciousness changes.
I’m not assigning a soul to the tool, but I’m saying that our consciousness changes as a result of the tools that we use. So that’s one significant concern. The other is that our abilities, I was just about to use the word mental abilities, but I don’t want to confine it only to mental. Our abilities change as a result of the tools that we use.
I know many people who had an incredible ability to navigate and then along came Google Maps and GPS and goodbye. They lost, or I shouldn’t say they lost, but the ability to navigate atrophied,

Marlin Miller:
The

John Kempf:
Ability to remember phone numbers. When I first started advancing eco-agriculture 20 years ago, everything was on paper at that point. I still to this day remember the names, addresses, and phone numbers of our first 400 customers. After that, it’s hit and miss. I’ve lost most of them in between and because all of a sudden it was stored digitally and I no longer had to remember, so I didn’t. So there is this aspect of you lose what you don’t use and not only do you lose what you don’t use, but you also lose other things. In the case of AI, there are so many layers to this, but The reason I deliberately chose to not frame this conversation in terms of losing mental abilities is because when you combin the change in consciousness with the loss of understanding the question clearly, thinking through the question, thinking through the answers on your own, you lose more than just mental ability and you lose more than just consciousness.
You lose or you atrophy the capacity for conscience. All of a sudden your spiritual awareness, I’m not saying this does happen. I’m saying I believe this can happen. Your spiritual awareness becomes dramatically decreased because you are no longer wrestling to find the answer. You’re no longer sitting and waiting for the answer to emerge. You’re just getting the answer handed to you.

Marlin Miller:
I think my biggest fear, John, about the whole this … I was going to say this new coming world. That’s not true. It’s here.

John Kempf:
It is here.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. It is here 100%. I think we’ve been using versions of AI for probably 10 years and just haven’t really been aware, haven’t really known to call it that. But I think at the core, my biggest concern, just like you said about our conscience and being handed these answers, John, part of what makes us human is wrestling with a moral or an ethical issue down in our soul.

John Kempf:
It’s called-

Marlin Miller:
Yeah,

John Kempf:
Sorry. It’s called developing convictions.
How many of us today have developed convictions of our own? Things that we believe to be true or not. Not even just things that we believe to be true, but things that we have convictions about that it is wrong to do X, Y, or Z that is different from what society tells us. How many of us just adopt the convictions of the people around us or adopt the convictions of the church or of the law or whatever the case might be without having though through those convictions on our own? Do we actually believe something to be true or to be appropriate or not?

Marlin Miller:
Right. When you throw AI into that mix, you’re taking exactly what you just said and you are exacerbating it by the population of the planet and the cumulative knowledge, supposed knowledge and wisdom of the entire global population, which I hasten to add is all fallen. It’s all coming at a worldview from a fallen state. And so you are looking at and getting these answers handed to you that are this cumulative knowledge of a massive people that are all sinful. I have a hunch and I guess my concern about the whole thing is that we are going to, in your words, we’re going to lose mental ability. I’ll just say it this way. I think we’re all going to get dumber. As a population, we’re going to lose the ability to think. I just think it’s going to be very, very bumpy for a while until that pendulum swings far enough and people go, “You know, this isn’t all that they sold it as.
It’s not all that it was pitched and supposedly cooked up to be for us.”

John Kempf:
I had a couple of thoughts as you were … So you were describing that, that I was going to respond to, and I’ve forgotten a couple of them now, but one of the thoughts is I’m of the persuasion as I just to state it succinctly, we’re not just going to lose mental ability. I’m of the persuasion we’re going to lose spiritual ability. If we rely on these tools heavily, that’s the key phrase. I think we need to be conscious now and make deliberate choices now and as ongoing into the future of what are our spiritual muscles and mental muscles that we want to remain toned. If we want to maintain a toned muscle of navigation, that means we stop using Google Maps for every trivial little trip. If we want to exercise our capacity for memory, that means we have to stop storing everything digitally and focus on actually remembering things and practice remembering things.
What is interesting, Marlon, is in the story of the talents, we are all given different talents and different degrees of talents and with a greater degree of talents or greater number of talents also comes greater responsibility. And one of the things that has bothered me at times over the years is people want to put me on a pedestal as I’m this amazing person doing all these amazing things and I look at that very differently. I’ve been given many different talents that I’m very grateful for and I have a responsibility to use those talents well and if I don’t use those talents well then or let me say it differently. If I do use those talents very well, I am no more worthy of praise than someone who has much fewer talents, but who will also use them well.
And the praise doesn’t really belong to me. It belongs to our creator, but where was I going with this thought? I forget that’s something important that I wanted to point out. Oh, let me see. Being worthy of praise and … Oh, memory. I have a very clear and very sharp memory that I’m very grateful for. I’ve been able to read many, many books and white papers and retain much of the information that is in them. And I’m of the persuasion that most people, we all have gifts in varying degrees, but I’m persuasion of the persuasion that most people have incredible gifts of memory and intellectual capacity in various ways, in very different ways, that are tremendously underutilized. They are underdeveloped. Just like muscles atrophy when you don’t exercise, our mental capacities atrophy when we don’t exercise them as well and our spiritual capacities atrophy when we don’t exercise them.
It’s the same principle all the way across the board.
I live in the church district and the community that I’m a part of, not the community as a whole, but this particular region, the community. We’re on the less conservative end of the spectrum. We’re permitted to use technology for work. I’ve been for quite some time. I’ve been using it for, I don’t know, now, 15 years or something like that, but I’m deliberately … I’m doing two things simultaneously. I am using AI tools and I’ve even helped develop and release an AI tool. I’m using AI tools to do some specific things because there is no question there are some things that they are simply incredible at, that they could be a useful tool. And on the other end of the spectrum, I’m using less and less technology. I’m migrating to a flip phone and to having fewer contacts stored because I’m chosen to deliberately memorize the phone numbers of people again.
And it’s not because yeah, technology could do it better, but I want to keep that clarity of mental energy and that clarity of focus and clarity of thought that comes with having a good memory. And this is one way of exercising that muscle.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. One thing that I have noticed for years for years and I think it stems back to something that I read about Bill Clinton. When Clinton was campaigning for the governorship of Arkansas and then the presidency of the nation, one thing that people noted about him everywhere was his memory, his ability to remember your name and that impacted me pretty significantly. At that point, I committed to saying, “I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to practice remembering people’s names.” And one thing that every Tom, Dick and Harry and Jonas says all the time, all the time is, “Oh, John, I’m sorry. I’m just so bad with names.”

John Kempf:
Exactly.

Marlin Miller:
They put it out there that they’re bad with it and they’re expecting themselves to be bad with it.

John Kempf:
And therefore they are.

Marlin Miller:
And therefore they are. That’s exactly right. I’ve had many times when I’ll remember someone’s name and they can’t believe it. I can see I am the last person that’s going to start a campaign for an office, but I understand the impact that it makes to someone. It makes them feel like a million bucks if you remember their name or if you remember their kid’s name or the thing that their wife is going through right no. I just have a friend whose wife is in surgery as of yesterday. She was in a pretty big surgery. Well, those things matter and if you tell yourself that you’re good with names that you can remember, you have a much better shot of doing it.

John Kempf:
Yeah. Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re correct.

Marlin Miller:
And

John Kempf:
Your point about the value of remembering people’s names and remembering what’s going on in their life, I think it cannot be overemphasized both from a personal strength, characteristic perspective, but also from a spiritual perspective, to what degree can we be our brother’s keeper by actively remembering them in prayer, not just sending them a text or saying, “Hey, we’re thinking of you. ” And I have this slight dichotomy or imbalance, relationship imbalance in that being a podcast host and speaking at conferences, there are many, many thousands of people who know me or who have some perception of me and I don’t know them, I’ve never met them. And I find that a bit of a challenge or frustrating at times because of that desire for that real authentic relationship. And I see what happens when you do have that just this last December, January, February, I guess it was February, it was only a couple months ago I spoke at a conference in Eastern Pennsylvania and one of the people who came up and talked to me there, I hadn’t seen in half a dozen years, he was one of the first 400 customers of AEA.
And so shook his name, shook his hand, immediately recognized him and I said, “Let me see. If I remember correctly, this is your phone number.” And I recited his phone number and he just got this look of disbelief on his face. Now their phone number had changed in the meantime, but I got it right of what it was 20 years ago and That is meaningful to people in ways that can’t be described verbally because it is a form of communication that you really mean something. You actually mean something

Marlin Miller:
To the other

John Kempf:
Person. Yes, that’s exactly what it is.

Marlin Miller:
You’re not

John Kempf:
Forgettable.

Marlin Miller:
Yep.

John Kempf:
And the inverse

Marlin Miller:
Of

John Kempf:
That, I’m sorry, Marlon, I’m interrupting you, but the inverse of that is if you can’t remember someone’s name, then you are forgettable to them and you don’t mean anything to them. That’s

Marlin Miller:
Exactly rightThat’s the spiritual

John Kempf:
Perception.

Marlin Miller:
That’s exactly right. Robert McGee’s book of, and now I’m drawing a blank. Oh my goodness. No, the search for significance impacted me a long time ago in more ways than I can comprehend, I’m sure. We all long for significance, like that’s at the core of every single thing to be known and to know it’s just deep within us. Two more questions if I may, and then we’ll bring this conversation to an end. John, what’s your wife’s name, by the way?

John Kempf:
Catherine.

Marlin Miller:
Catherine. And how many kids do you have?

John Kempf:
Just one.

Marlin Miller:
Just one. Looking back on your own childhood and the way that your parents gave you and your siblings the freedom to push back and to ask, why is this? Why is that? How are you parenting your son or daughter, son?

John Kempf:
Daughter, six years old at this point. We’ll soon to be six, five years old at this point. Marlon, you asked the most perplexing questions. One of the things that I’ve wished for, we all get to see the mistakes that our parents made very clearly and sometimes we see mistakes that we believe other people are making and I’ve wished for that mirror. I don’t want to wait 20 years. What are the mistakes that I’m making today that I can’t see that I’m not seeing? What are the things that I’m doing that I should be perhaps be doing differently that I don’t have visibility into? It would be so valuable to have that mirror we can ask people around us. What does it mean to live in God’s image?
If we live in God’s image and we try to be with our partner, our spouse in God’s image, what does that look like exactly? And I think the closer we come to embodying that and embodying that relationship and everything else flows from that to a large degree, but also recognizing that you can have … We only have one child at this point. We’ve had some health challenges. We hope to have more in the future, but I know from looking at my family, my siblings, my wife’s family, you can have … I come from a family of nine, my wife comes from a family of 12 and you have … I was about to say you have the exact same parents, but that’s not quite true because if you have a family of 12, the parents you are at the beginning are different from the parents that you are at the end, but there’s still the same foundation there and those 12 or nine or however many number of children, if you ask them what their parents’ weaknesses were and what their children were, what they wish their parents would have done differently, you’ll get a different answer from everyone.
You’ll get different critiques from everyone. And what that means to me is that perhaps we shouldn’t have a conversation about being a parent generally, but more specifically what after following our relationship with God, following our relationship with our spouse, what is needed from the relationship with this specific child? What do they need because their needs are going to be different from others? And of course, that’s a challenge when you have a large family. I recognize that. So Marlon, it’s kind of an answer in principle more than an answer in detail and practice, but that’s my perception with my limited life experience at this point.

Marlin Miller:
John, if you could have a cup of coffee with a biblical character other than Jesus himself, who would it be and why?

John Kempf:
Oh boy. Assuming that Job is the author of Job, I would want to have a conversation with him. Because of what he talks about in agriculture and from an agricultural context in particular, there’s this one verse, a couple of verses in Job five, verse 22 to 23, that there’s a couple of different translations translated in different ways because it’s very rich with meaning here, but it says something to the effect of, “At drought and famine, you shall laugh because you shall have an alliance with or a covenant with the stones of the field and the beasts of the field will be at peace with you. ” And there is some alternate translation of the original Hebrew which says, “At drought and famine, you will laugh because you will have an alliance with the minerals of the soil and the soil microbes will work together with you.

Marlin Miller:
” Get out of here.

John Kempf:
No, I’m completely serious.

Marlin Miller:
That’s the Hebrew translation?

John Kempf:
That is an equally apropriate Hebrew translation, yes.

Marlin Miller:
Okay, that’s amazing. Oh my goodness, that is amazing. Okay.That’s probably the best answer to that question I’ve ever had. Okay. If your farm could talk, what would be the best story that it could share?

John Kempf:
Our farms can talk and the best stories they can share is, “My steward loves me. ”

Marlin Miller:
Man, okay. We are going to do another podcast. We have to. This is way too much fun. Oh my goodness. Okay. What is one act of kindnes that someone did for you that you never forgot?

John Kempf:
My goodness, Marwan. I’ve got several. The things that we remember the most tend to occur when we are at our most distressed and I’ve had several periods where I was very distressed in a business sense where the business was in a very challenging situation because of macroeconomics and things that were outside of our control and friends stepped forward to help out. I’ve developed deep relationships with customers and people that we work closely with and I’m not going to reveal any names or details, but I had people call us and say, “Hey, we heard you’re in a tough spot and we want to help out here. We’re going to pay for our order for all of next year right

Marlin Miller:
Now.” Wow.

John Kempf:
And I’m talking six figures.

Marlin Miller:
It’s

John Kempf:
Like, wow.

Marlin Miller:
What is your favorite home cooked meal, John?

John Kempf:
It’s an interesting dimension to this question in that for many years I didn’t have a really great relationship with food and this came about because when I … Excuse me. For many years, I didn’t have a great relationship with food because when I studied, I started studying about the impacts on our body of insecticides and fungicides and herbicides and all these various toxins and started understanding how our food is being grown and how it’s being produced. I could destroy a meal pretty easily. For a period of time, it was a tradition at AEA that we would have a dinner conversation at some point when someone came to work for AEA and I would deconstruct a meal for them. That’s really not a great exercise to develop a relationship with food, I will tell you that because it can be challenging to know how the sausage is made at every level.
And so that has really changed over the years where I now have a much better relationship with food generally, but also I’ve come to appreciate that the maxim or the phrase that food that is made with love is incredibly powerful when you take it to the next level and you start having a conversation about food that is grown with love, food that has grown with love and care in gardens or on home farms, homesteads, whatever the case might be, and is prepared with love and care has value to our bodies that cannot be measured nutritionally.This has been very clearly and very well established. I’m giving you a non-bollet answer for which I apologize, but if I brought it right down to the bottom line, my favorite home cooked meal, I prefer to be a secondhand vegetarian and so-

Marlin Miller:
Wait, you have to give us more. I don’t even know what that means.

John Kempf:
It means I prefer to eat my vegetables in the form of steak.

Marlin Miller:
I am really, really glad that I asked that question.

John Kempf:
So here at our homestead, we grow a lot of fruit. We grow a lot of berries, but I’m of the persuasion spiritually and from the perspective of having deeply steadied food and nutrition, I’m of the persuasion that we generally broadly shouldn’t be eating leaves. I think lettuce and spinach and cabbage are generally really bad ideas. Now, I happen to also not care for those foods, so I am definitely biased. But in Ezekiel, it’s been a long time since I read this and I read it in German so you can look up the exact translation, but it says something to the effect of God made all of these plants and he made the leaves thereof for medicine and the fruit thereof for food. We are to eat fruits, but not … I’m with the persuasion we’re not supposed to eat large quantities of leaves. In small quantities, yes, as spices and so forth, and that they have medicinal value because many the leaves, remember the leaves of most plants contain compounds to inhibit digestion, that’s what we call it phytates and phytic acid and oxalates and on and on the list goes.
So my wife knows that I’m not a big fan of salad, but I love fruits and berries and a lot of high quality animal products, particularly beef and chicken, primarily beef and chicken.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. We just watched a documentary on … Oh my goodness, I’m blanking on the name of it, but it was about the recalls of the lettuce years ago and it was all about E. Coli, right? When you said deconstructing a meal, I didn’t know exactly what you meant by that right away, but the more I think about it, I’m guessing that knowing what you know about what goes into what is in that leaf for all of the photosynthesis to happen, all of those things, I mean, I think I get it now a litle bit more.

John Kempf:
You want me to

Marlin Miller:
Give you two

John Kempf:
Quick examples?

Marlin Miller:
Yeah, please. Because I’m sitting there and I’m thinking you would look at that lettuce and that all of those things and just all of these bad stories are going through your head. Yeah, I’m rambling. I’m sorry. Well,

John Kempf:
They’re not bad stories. They’re a lot of data. So it’s a lot of bad data, if you will. A lot of data about not great things. Well, let me give you two examples. When you get an omelet at a restaurant, do you know where the egg comes from? It’ll be a

Marlin Miller:
Very old caged.

John Kempf:
It’ll be a very rare restaurant that actually cracks the eggs to make ovals. They will get this liquid egg broth in a bag or our carton and that liquid egg, when eggs are washed at a layer facility, they are washed with this horrible, stinky water that’s loaded with fecal contaminants and the eggshell is made porous through the washing process. So some of this fecal contaminant gets into the egg in small amounts and then some of the eggs will have cracks in them or not be considered sound enough to be packed in cartons. And so all these eggs go into a large press and they are pressed and the liquid egg gets sent out through the side of the press with all the exposure to the exterior of the egg cells and everything else that it was exposed to in this chlorinated wash and that is what is used to make egg omelets.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah, that’s a good idea.

John Kempf:
That’s a good idea. You’ll never eat egg omelets again after that. And that’s not just the egg omelet, that’s the scramble eggs you get at a hotel breakfast or something like that. All right, that’s one. Second, let’s flip gears and talk a bit about pesticides, particularly insecticides, compounds that are used to kill insects. 90 greater than 90% of these various compounds that are in commercial use today function, their mechanism, their mode of action against insects is as an endocrine disruptor and they’re immensely powerful. The active ingredient is often needed to be applied measured in grams per acre.

Marlin Miller:
Oh my goodness, grams per acre.

John Kempf:
Yes.

Marlin Miller:
Oh my word. Okay.

John Kempf:
These endocrine disruptors are not just endocrine disruptors in insects, but also for our biology as well. And when we talk about endocrine disruption, we’re essentially talking about disruption of our hormonal system and you look at our hormonal system, our reproductive system, and everything that’s tied to that. So our pituitary gland, our hypothalamus, our thyroid, our entire endocrine system, our entire reproductive system. Well, what do you think is the fastest growing category of cancers today? It’s that category. It’s breast cancer, testicular cancer, prostate cancer, thyroid cancer. It’s all of those that are related to that system. And as it turns out, these endocrine disrupting compounds are applied in and on our food supply. Many parts of the country or many parts of the world don’t have an EPA, but even here in the US we apply these compounds in very large amounts and many people don’t appreciate how sensitive our endocrine system actually is.
If you were to take all of the hormones, the active endocrine compounds from our … Let’s say all the guys on the entire planet, you take all the guys the entire planet, you put all of their collective hormones in one physical location, you would have a total of 70 pounds, seven, zero.

Marlin Miller:
For

John Kempf:
All the testosterone, all everything

Marlin Miller:
Like three billion men.

John Kempf:
Three billion men. One location, 70

Marlin Miller:
Pounds. Oh my goodness.

John Kempf:
Okay.

Marlin Miller:
That is mind blowingly small.

John Kempf:
Contrast that with the millions of pounds of endocrine disruptors that are applied in our food supply. Now here’s where it’ll give you a real mental burn. Women’s endocrine system and the total hormonal combination for all the women on the planet is only one tenth that of men, seven pounds instead of 70 pounds.

Marlin Miller:
Oh my goodness.

John Kempf:
And
This is one of the reasons why women can be more sensitive to environmental toxins. They can be More sensitive to toxins that are in and our food supply. And so this whole discussion, we have this discussion like, oh, glyphosate is considered the United States, it depends on which crop you’re talking about, but glyphosate is an herbicide, but it’s a very powerful endocrine disruptor and it’s considered safe in corn at 400 parts per million. It takes just a fraction of that to disrupt our endocrine system. And so we have this epidemic of degenerative illnesses, of diabetes, stroke, heart disease, cancer on and on this. As several of my friends would say, we are living too short and dying too long. Many of my grandparents and great grandparents lived this healthy act of life up to weeks or months before they passed away and now we’ve developed this cultural expectation where we are sick for decades before we pass away.
And this is in part a reflection of the way we are using weapons to kill the pests that are in our field and the process we are killing ourselves.

Marlin Miller:
If I can go back to something that you said, Lisa and I were not able to have our children biologically and so we adopted, but we went through a whole bunch of the big fertility type stuff all the way up to IVF and then we stopped and I’m actually really glad we did although I will confess we only stopped because we couldn’t afford it at the time. It is crazy expensive and I am thankful to the Lord above that we did not have access to that kind of money because I think we probably would have tried it. And the more that I learn and dig into big fertility, the industry that is becoming this … John, they are killing more babies than Planned Parenthood because you take 10 and 20 and 30 eggs and fertilize them and then you discard those that you don’t want.
And because of our ability now to have this vision into the genetics and the overall health of the zygote, of the fertilized cell, the egg, they can literally now say, “Well, this one could have down syndrome, this one could have anything.” And they throw them away.

John Kempf:
And not discounting or dismissing what you’ve just said, but I want to ask kind of a preliminary question to that, which is why do we have such a booming fertility business? And this is one aspect that I missed touching on, but we have this rapidly declining birth rate, not just in the United States but around the world. And it is attributed to increasing affluence, increasing wealth, cultural changes. All of those are contributing factors. I’m not dismissing any of those, but there are many, many women who would desire to have children and couples who would desire to have children who were unable to do so. And these fertility challenges by men and women at epidemic proportions are a direct result of endocrine disruption from a whole variety of different mechanisms and means we have endocrine disruptors from excessive exposure to plastics and plastic microparticles and pesticides and the list goes on and on, but I think it’s necessary for us to reflect and to take responsibility for the fact that we’re doing this to ourselves.
And just to end this, our conversation on a very positive note, I’d like to share this study that was conducted by Eric Gillisarolini in France. No, this is probably a decade or more ago. This study really caught my attention.
They were evaluating the impact of glyphosate on mice when fed to the parent generation. So they raised mice for four generations. The treated group of the first generation got fed corn with 400 parts per million glyphosate, if I remember correctly, which is the permissible limit here in the States and that was the only exposure to glyphosate. The second generation, third generation, fourth generation got none. The control group got the same diet but with no measurable, no detectable levels of glyphosate. The first generation that was exposed to glyphosate had some negative health consequences, but not significant. The second generation was also slight negative consequences, but not all that significant. The third generation had 70% of the mice with severe degenerative illnesses at a very early age and the fourth generation was even worse.

Marlin Miller:
The third generation, but they weren’t fed anymore.

John Kempf:
They were not exposed to glyphosate ever in their lifetime, neither were their mothers and their parents.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. What does that mean?

John Kempf:
This is the sins of the fathers being visited on the third and the fourth generation. The question is how? What’s the biological mechanism? Here’s the biological mechanism. When you are sitting beside a lady, you are sitting beside five generations of women, the two that came before and the two that come after in addition to the one beside you. And the reason for this is because when a lady is carrying a baby girl, the ovaries, the eggs that will become that baby girl’s children are being formed while she is still in her mother’s womb. So the environment that the mother is experiencing determines the genetic tendencies or the genetic expression, what we would call epigenetics. It determines the epigenetics or the genetic susceptibility of her grandchildren. So what this means is today there’s all this discussion about various gene snips and do we have MTHFR genes or are they turned on or off, et cetera, et cetera.
The story has been described to us that we are a product of our environment. Well, as it turns out, we are only minimally a product of our environment. We are mostly a product of our grandmother’s environment because it was her environment when she was carrying our mother that determined our genetic susceptibility and turned various gene snips on or off. And what happens today when we talk about the challenges of pesticides or the challenges of tobacco smoke, let’s say for example, I’ve heard this argument or this phrase repeated dozens of times, “Well, my grandfather drank and smoked and he lived happily until he was his 90s and he never had any negative health consequences and therefore it can’t be all that harmful. It’s not going to kill me any. I’m going to die of something anyway.” Well, the challenge is from a genetic strength and a genetic resilience perspective, your grandfather was a product of his grandmother’s environment and depending on when your grandfather was born, for many of us in today’s generation, we’re talking about his grandmother or her grandmother being born in the late 1800s.
It was a very different environment then without nearly the degree of exposure to endocrine toxins and endocrine disruptors. So the reality is we are responsible today for managing the diet and the environment and the nutrition levels and all the contributing factors that will determine the genetic susceptibility of our grandchildren and of our great-grandchildren. This is not just, this is spiritual, but it is also biological. This is spirituality grounded in biological principles. And the good news, I promise I would end this on a good note. This is why the CDC reported a couple of years ago, they said that the children being born with the life expectancy in 2023 went down for the first time. That children, for the first time in the United States history, children being born today are not expected to live as long as their parents. But the good news within all of this is that humans have the highest degree of repair capacity known to almost any biological organism.
If you damage the DNA or you damage DNA sequences of a mouse, it has like 70% likelihood of repair. For a housefly, it’s like 17%. For humans, it’s greater than 99%.
So that means that, and this goes back to the phrase, “The sins of the fathers being visited on the third and the fourth generation, but I show mercy to many thousands who love me. ” So we have tremendous opportunity, tremendous potential, but that opportunity will not be expressed by us just wishing it into being. We have to actually do something about it.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. John, that is amazing that there’s an actual biological evidence proof for what the Lord said in the Bible thousands and thousands of years ago. How many other things do we just read and gloss over and not take time to dig in and figure out what he actually meant? Last question. How can we pray for you and Katherine

John Kempf:
I would say pray that we can live in God’s image and be a blessing to those around us and those are the two most important pieces, everything else and be kept close to him. Everything else flows from those foundational pieces.

Marlin Miller:
I know that all I can say is thank you, but I hope you know how much I enjoyed this and how much I appreciate the time. Are you still part of Acres USA?

John Kempf:
Yeah, I’m still the executive editor there.

Marlin Miller:
Okay, excellent. So acresusa.org or. Com? I think

John Kempf:
Acresusa.com Advancing EcoAg. You can just do a search for me and you’ll find all kinds of stuff online if people want to dig more. And Marlon, I really enjoyed this conversation and I don’t know the scope of what you do on your podcast, but if there’s ever the opportunity or the desire, I’d be happy to be back for another conversation.

Marlin Miller:
I’m already building a list of other questions. Yeah, totally fascinating. John, thank you very much.

John Kempf:
Thank you, Marlon. Blessings on your life.