The Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems
Reflections and discussions on the cornerstones of 1) agriculture, 2) the environment, 3) human health, and 4) freedom that are essential for building healthy food systems and prosperous economies.
The Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems
Sarah Burnett of Texas Earth: Part 2 Breaking New Horizons with Biostimulants
Unearth the mysteries of soil health with us as we welcome Sarah Burnett back for part two. Sarah shares her personal journey towards leadership at Texas Earth, where she is taking her father's legacy to new heights by developing new products.
Her new, cotton seed-based fertilizer boasts a staggering 328% water holding capacity, promising to help soils retain moisture important for crop growth.
In this discussion, we will pull back the curtain on the complex process of product labeling, shedding light, not just on what labels tell you, but also on what they don't tell you, and why.
CONNECT WITH GUEST, SARAH BURNETT, HER COMPANY, AND HER PRODUCTS THROUGH THE LINKS BELOW.
Disclosure: End-O-Fite Enterprises LLC collaborates with Texas Earth on research exploring the effects natural soil amendments have on plant and soil health. Host Mary Lucero is also partners on a farming operation, where her family supplements farm income through local distribution of Texas Earth products.
Watch the Rotten series, mentioned in this episode, on Netflix (not an affiliate)
NEW AND CLASSIC TEXTS ON SOIL MICROBIOLOGY (UNLESS OTHERWISE INDICATED, THE LINKS BELOW GO TO AFFILIATE SITES)
Not Too Technical
The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet
Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web (Revised)
Teaming with Fungi: The Organic Grower's Guide to Mycorrhizae
Let’s Dive Into the Science
Stress Tolerance Through Plant, Mycorrhizal Associations
Soil Microbiology and Sustainable Crop Production
Microbiological Activity for Soil and Plant Health Management (2021)
Soil Health Classics
The Ideal Soil, V2.0, by Michael Astera (not an affiliate)
Soil Fertility, Animal Health-With "The Loss of Soil Organic Matter and its Restoration" by William Albrecht
Carey Reams Intro by I
The Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems Podcast Introduction by David Lucero.
Theme music by Zakhar Valaha
This version was updated in summer, 2023, when we decided to remove the cornerstones.endofite.com website reference. The only change was to remove the word cornerstones from the website reference.
This podcast is created and produced by End-O-Fite Enterprises LLC.
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Welcome back for part two of our interview with Sarah Burnett from Texas Earth. In our previous episode, we spoke about the legacy that Jim Burnett built and we dove into some of the great things microbes do for the soil. As we continue, Sarah, I'd like to hear your story. At what point, as your dad was building this company, did you realize this is something I want to be a part of and this is something I'm passionate about?
Sarah Burnett:So I moved back to Lubbock in 2012 and my dad was kind of a one-man show and sort of asked me I was kind of had a job where I could work from home at the time and was very, you know, flexible. And he said, hey, will you come help me at Texas Earth, like really kind of be the secretary if you will and kind of take over the accounting and billing. And you know, the joke is that you know, I have a master's degree in psychology and I never used it because I had to come learn to be an accountant or whatever the case may be. But I came to work with him.
Sarah Burnett:We grew up kind of in a farming family and you know, helping our grandparents at Wheat Harvest and understanding the fluctuation of markets and cattle and all of the things, but so it was not a foreign..
Sarah Burnett:It was not foreign to me at all. But sitting in front of him in my desk eight hours a day listening to his conversations is really where my love and passion for Texas Earth and what we do in soil health really started to blossom. I began to just absorb what he was saying to people and my dad was a very passionate guy and a very intelligent person and it was just hard to believe that you know, you just you would capture that energy and you would then internalize it and become excited about what he was excited about. And so anyway, and I got to travel with him a little bit and he introduced me to people you know like Ream's technology and you know Radionics, or you know I have this whole library over here of Arden Anderson and golly, I'm looking at all these titles here: Callahan and Albrecht, and I mean these things that continue to sort of, I always joke that he left me breadcrumbs to follow, so like when I have a question,
Sarah Burnett:I can go to his library or I can call one of his peers that are still doing what they started as a group to do, because really there was five or six of them, that sort of studied kind of the Reams and the Albrecht way of you know thinking, and I'm still in contact with several of his peers and if I have questions you know I can always call and we can chat. But it's been definitely a journey for me personally when he passed away. My daughter was born one month after my dad passed away and so there was many changes and lots of new pressures and lots of learning curves and I wasn't ready.
Sarah Burnett:I guess, to the point really being is that everything comes in stages and I had to crawl before I could run and learn how to make the products, because we had people that you know worked here and things and turn over and life changes and all of that occurred. And so there's one point in recent history where I was only one that worked here and we were producing truck loads of products, shipping them all over the US, and I was doing all of it and I don't say that for any kind of you know, look at me. It's the fact that I was able to learn every facet of this business in the right season to understand, kind of the needs and the fluctuations of our particular business. I mean, if it's not raining, nobody's buying anything. If it rains too much, nobody's buying anything. If there's a global pandemic, nobody's buying anything. And it's been quite the journey. But I'm so thankful for those really stressful hard times that I sort of endured early on after my dad's death, because that really prepared me and I understand now each facet of our business and can make, you know, decisions based on the fact that I was the janitor all the way to the whatever you want to call me now, chaos manager, that's the joke. But it's been a great journey for me and there's been so much learning and I continue to learn. You educate me, I mean, daily. We've gone down some really fun roads and things that I didn't really anticipate happening for Texas Earth. I just you know when you don't. I don't feel like this is my business, I feel like it's God's business and I'm just here to be the best steward I can be and I want to teach other people how to be steward of the soil. That's really my personal passion is taking this legacy that he created and developed.
Sarah Burnett:This is going to be, 2024, will be our 20th year in business, and I think that that is an amazing accomplishment for something that is still considered kind of fringe in agriculture, even though what we're talking about occurred in the Garden of Eden. You know, I mean, this is the basis of food, is what we're talking about today, and it's kind of wild to me that we got so far away from that. But I'm thankful for the folks that come to us wanting to do things, naturally, because you know it's the way forward. I mean, organics as a world market is approaching, I believe, the 25 billion with the B dollar market by 2025. The change is happening here. People are becoming more educated and I'm happy to say that we're going to be here for another 20 years, hopefully, you know. Educating people and providing high quality products that improve soil health, which ultimately improves human health. That's the goal.
Mary Lucero:You've taken some steps in recent years to really build on and expand your father's business and bring in new product lines and develop new products. What can you share about the new directions that you're taking with Texas Earth?
Sarah Burnett:Well, I am so thankful again for the breadcrumbs and for the little, you know, the knowledge of the growth and the connections that I can make. You know, I may not be a scientist, right, but I have enough common sense to figure out that A plus B generally equals C, right? So I was able to come into contact and develop a product that we call Bio Flüf,. It is a, I call it water-wise soil support, which kind of sounds a little funky. But the point being is that our soil and our microorganisms need a couple things to survive, right, they need oxygen, they need microbial food, they need space to grow, or space to colonize, if you will. And it's like how can I enhance that rhizosphere? How can I get what needs to be there effectively? You know, because you mentioned the things, how a, how a lawn and garden person operates and grows is different from a production agriculture person. So we're sort of kind of trying to solve these problems.
Sarah Burnett:And anyway, back to the (I) created, a cotton seed-based fertilizer that had several different beneficial aspects to it. Number one it had 328 percent water holding capacity. So peat moss may only have between 25, 50, 75 percent, depending on the bog that it comes from, and also peat is generally imported and it's not sustainable. So, like that made a lot of sense for me to find an alternative. So obviously, on the High Plains of Texas we're producing lots of cotton on a good year and being able to utilize that byproduct, which is generally directed to animal feed, made sense.
Sarah Burnett:Secondly, this particular product has an NPK value of four and a half, one and a half, one and a half, which isn't a lot when you look at like a standard commercial type fertilizer, but it's occurring naturally, which that is a win for us, right? A little boost of those macro nutrients.
Mary Lucero:I think, talking across between people trained in a conventional mindset and people trained in an organic mindset, a point that doesn't often get made is that as you move into a more microbial driven system, the amounts of NP and K that you need are less, and part of this is the microbes are mobilizing nutrients that were already there.
Mary Lucero:Part of it is, as we talked with nitrogen, about the nitrogen capture from the atmosphere, but some of it just seems to be that in the microbial world one plus one equals 10 to some extent. T here are a lot of synergistic interactions that we are only just beginning to be able to trace and measure accurately enough to really explain what happens.
Mary Lucero:If you think about how we came up with fertilizer recommendations in the first place, people were basically measuring the percentage of the plant material, the tissue that was made of different minerals, and saying, okay, this is how much you need, and if you're harvesting this much biomass every year, you're taking away this many nutrients. So here's what you need to put back. But if you're working with a living system, you also have things bringing nutrients into the system that are almost impossible to measure. You've got insects, beneficials or pests, flying in and dying on site, getting eaten by something else, leaving their feces or other residues as they go, or shedding their exoskeletons as they go through their life stages, and all of these interactions are literally bringing nutrients from somewhere else and dropping them on your farm. They don't seem like big things, but when you add them up across the field, across the entire system, they seem to be replacing alot-i f you're maintaining the conditions that allow a living system to thrive.
Sarah Burnett:Absolutely! So I think about soil health as this, you know, bank account, right, and so many farmers and producers and gardeners were just taking, right, were swiping that debit card, were taking withdrawals, we're withdrawing fruit, we're withdrawing crops, we're withdrawing biomass, we're withdrawing NPKs and micro nutrients and minerals and all of this, and it's just been this take, take, take take situation. And now we have the ability, through soil amendments, to make deposits into this account, right, instead of swapping the debit card, make deposits into the withdrawals and, from my point of view, what we do is the only thing that's going to pay you back. You know it's like getting credit card points or something getting frequent flyer miles. You know you're getting something from doing something good, like it's a long-term investment in your crop or in your raised beds, or in your garden or in your kid's health, right, we are investing something instead of extracting all the time.
Sarah Burnett:And again, I think education is a huge factor to telling people and showing them the benefit of adding something back versus just taking. Plant your seeds, okay, now harvest your crop, now pull up all your plants and throw them in the dumpster. You know like, no, that's part of it, but not all of it. Let's talk about how to, you know, educate people about what to put back and how to put it back, and make it easy to do so and simplify. So it doesn't seem like such a big hill to climb for the, you know, average back home or home gardener, whatever the case may be. But, you know, we try to educate all types of growers on all levels and you know, I think, we're making some headway regenerative, quote-unquote or sustainable, however you want to say it, it's something that people are becoming more familiar with and I'm very thankful for that.
Mary Lucero:Ten years ago farmers cringed at the thought of another salesman showing up with another bug-in-a jug, sure, and it seemed to be kind of a witch potion sort of thing. And I would frequently get questions from growers that show up with some kind of microbial product in a bag or in a jug and then show me the label and ask me if this is, if this stuff's any good and scientifically, you know, we honestly kind of thought a little bit linear too. It's like, okay, can we put this stuff in the soil and then measure those microbes later on? And usually you can't. It's real hard when you add a microbial product to the soil to recover those same microbes later on.
Sarah Burnett:What are you trying to measure for the microbes or the effect? You know what are, I mean, like you mentioned the interactions and what they're actually doing? (These) are the, you know, the wild blue, if you will. It's, like you know, so limited understanding is going on and it's growing all the time. But you know you put something on, do you? Can you even measure, understand what you're trying to? You know, get back out of it. You're exactly right.
Mary Lucero:It's like you know it does this work?
Sarah Burnett:Well, what are the conditions in which it's supposed to work? And it's everything on the label that they say is really in there. Is there more, is there less? You know how are you measuring your success? Because the labeling is all over the place, which is a super frustrating aspect of the natural, or, you know, organic industry of products. It's just not real clear how you're supposed to quantify success.
Mary Lucero:And you know, to me that's been one of the biggest learning curves and most frustrating aspects of leaving the very rigid academic scientific world where everything is carefully reviewed, everything is carefully documented, every reagent you use in an experiment needs to be identified, with product number and so forth. And yet what we, what I'm learning working with you and others on labeling, is that it's really very vague in terms of what needs to be included, what should be included and what you might want to include, but it costs too much to include or to guarantee.
Mary Lucero:And so, for example, this I actually learned from working with some mining companies. We bought our farm at the dawn of the pandemic and you know, got the paper signed, moved in, and started looking at how we're going to manage the land. And of course I wanted to do everything organic and regeneratively and started talking to some of the neighbors and it's like nobody was even distributing any organic products in the area and I thought, "what about all those guys with the bug in the G?
Mary Lucero:And they kind looked at us blankly, and they're like, "nobody comes around here, and so we took care of that.
Mary Lucero:But one of the first things I did, looking to source the materials I wanted, I called some crop consultants that I interact with regularly and most of them are not in the area, but I have some pretty bright contacts and they started telling me where they're getting, for example, some of their rock phosphate and some of their humic acid from. And I actually have worked for a long time with a nutrition company. I n fact, though I often refer to them in the show notes (for health and nutrition products), they also carrey a soil product for gardeners, and I've toured the mine where that comes from, and I've seen exactly what minerals are combined with the humate in its natural form, and so I knew right away you know, the place to go is to call up these mines. And I start calling up the mines and, ok, what else is in there besides rock phosphate? And if you talk to the right people, they will send you printouts, and most of these people have done extensive studies and extensive research on what's in their product, but they don't put all that on the label, and what I learned going through this process is that there are two reasons for that.
Mary Lucero:One is that it's really hard to guarantee that if there's five parts per million of cobalt mixed in your product from one section of the mine, you dig into a deeper layer or a different layer, it might not have that cobalt at all, and so guaranteeing what's in your product becomes very expensive and very difficult to prove, and so you don't want to list something that's going to be variable.
Mary Lucero:And yet nature loves this variability.
Mary Lucero:Nature thrives on variability. So what your soil needs might be fine, even if it's missing that part per million cobalt at that time. But the other reason that they don't label it is that I was told from one mine that every state they register their fertilizer in requires them to pay a fee for every ingredient in their rock phosphate. And so if it's going to be hard to guarantee, hard to prove up, and you're paying to register it for something that only a small percentage of the growers even asks about, most people who buy it just want rock phosphate, and a lot of times it's not even growers, it's people buying it for other purposes or people buying it to blend into their fertilizers. It's just not hitting what most of your consumers need, and so they're not going to label all this, which makes it very hard to distinguish one mine's rock phosphate from another one, or one mine's humic acid for another, unless you have a unique opportunity, and the time that I had during the pandemic, when everything was shut down, to call an agency a source of all of that.
Sarah Burnett:You what I said deep dive into all of that. Yeah, pandemic and deep dive. You make a lot of really great points. Yeah, the natural formation of phosphate, for instance, is not going to be homogenous. Nature is not homogenous, it is on demand and it's there. And let's look at the different soil types. I mean it's really hard to find something that is going to be perfect every time or the same analysis every time.
Sarah Burnett:And so you mentioned fees and reporting, and I don't know how much your listeners are, how familiar they are with the different certifiers. I mean there's many certifiers that can deem a product natural, organic, and they all have their own standards. And then the folks that have to go out there and certify crops being grown as organic have to either accept or reject the certifiers practices as it relates to the products being used. So really there's three, basically, in my opinion, ways or certifiers. One is Washington State, as a Department of Agriculture, then CDFA, which is the California Department of Agriculture, and then OMRI, which is the Organic Materials Review Institute. I believe is what the acronym stands for. And so that's kind of the three places that we pay the most attention to if we're going to register our products, and California is the most, in my opinion, or experience is the most stringent. CDFA and OMRI are wildly recognized, but there's others out there that do a great job too.
Sarah Burnett:So there is not one clear way forward for a person who wants to certify a product, whether it be a rock phosphate or whatever. I mean there's just not a lot of clarity in the boxes that you're supposed to be checking. And you're 100% correct about having to pay fees. There's tonnage fees, so the amount of product that you produce in the number of tons liquid or dry, or maybe you might pay a material fee, which is the amount of dollars you sell. I mean there's all kinds of fees in all kinds of states and no one is using the same rubric, if you will, of what they want to be measured. And you're right.
Sarah Burnett:If you're going to make a claim, then you have to support your claims, and there's not even really clear definitions of how to certify your claim. There's not suggested labs, there's not methodology that they prefer. It's sort of like you're taking your best guess to be as thorough as you can. But it's this moving target all the time, and as new leadership comes into these organizations or new state laws are passed or new initiatives are instituted, it's always a moving target on how to best educate people about your product and be as transparent as possible, but not really knowing how to list it in a way that would satisfy more than one organization, or even what that means for the end user.
Sarah Burnett:I mean, ultimately, that too we should be educating is about what's in the product and what the product is intended to do. So it is a very cloudy soup most of the time and it's a hard row to hoe for a business owner that just wants to do the right thing by their certifier and by the end user. It is not easy, I guess is ultimately kind of the point. But again, what are you thinking?
Mary Lucero:I mean, this hits on something that my eyes really opened to about 10 years ago. It's just the level at which the different regulations and policies and procedures we've passed in the hopes of making things better for the consumer can really overwhelm the producer, especially if you're trying to be an honest producer to the point where it makes it very difficult to do business.
Mary Lucero:And if you look at the number of businesses that have left our country and gone overseas where the regulations are a little bit more flexible, it's not something that a lot of people who work for a conventional industry where they've got their secure 40-hour-a-week job or, now-a-days, 60-hour-a-week job (I don't know anybody who's blessed with 40 hours a week), but when you've got that steady paycheck coming in and you're focused on what your requirements are as an employee, it's often not very transparent what the person's going through who's putting food on your table or shoes on your feet or whatever it is that you're consuming every day, and I think it's real easy for consumer groups and advocacy groups to think, oh, our food has pesticide in it. We need to push this legislation so that we have better food for our children.., and maybe legislation shouldn't be the first route. You know, maybe it's learning who your producers are and opening up that communication.
Mary Lucero:And I think it's unfortunate nowadays because most of our producers are so far away from us that it's almost impossible to really find out what they're doing. It really takes a conscious effort to find out who's producing a product, how they're producing it and how that affects your decisions as a consumer.
Sarah Burnett:Right. Right. Education. Yeah, there is no standard in what you're talking about or in organic labeling across the board is just a hot mess. And we're importing so many different things and their rules are different.
Mary Lucero:And you want to...
Sarah Burnett:I don't know if you've ever heard of the I believe it's on, I believe it's Netflix a series called Rotten. Rotten.
Sarah Burnett:It is so, it is so interesting. It covers the kind of back story to food production and several of the episodes included sugarcane and garlic and honey, bees and wine production and avocados and it really kind of, I mean it has not really, it opens my eyes to the fact that we are so naive about really where our food is coming from and about just that avocado that we picked up off the you know out of the piles in the grocery store. You know what it took to even get it here and where it even came from and what's on it and who died to produce it and how much they got paid by the hour or spent on the day or whatever the case may be. It's just crazy.
Sarah Burnett:I mean I want to see the United States bring as much of our you know food production internally and to allow people and educate people about growing food. With natural importance, I mean, we are so conditioned to just spring something on it to solve our problem in the immediate that we have forgotten about growing something of quality. And again, if you're trusting that organic says organic, then you do your research about whatever it is that you're buying. You know, I heard an apple producer told me, like, don't quote me, but you know that most of the apples that you buy on the shelf were picked, you know, upwards of a year ago and shipped across the world. And you know, is that really what you want to be eating? Probably not, you know. But educating yourself about food production is the first line of defense that we've touched on today.
Mary Lucero:Yes, I was just listening to a gardening podcast yesterday and one of the people on the podcast was talking about apples and mentioned that he really didn't like apples because that peel taste always kind of sticks with him and the texture of the peel bothers him. So he doesn't eat apples. And as he was talking I thought, "well, he's eating old apples. And in fact the person he was interviewing on the podcast came back with that. You know, it might be the variety or the age or the storage of that apple that he got and I think so much of.
Mary Lucero:Several years ago we toured a farm to school garden up in Denver and it was really a fantastic setup that they had in terms of having a budget to hire a permanent keeper on the garden and then they had several classes and curriculum centered around the gardens. So students were out there all the time but all the food being grown at school was going into a cafeteria and as part of this tour they fed us at the school cafeteria and they had, I remember they had beets on the salad. And I've hated beets all my life and I just absolutely loved the beets on that salad. I've seen that with carrots that I've grown at home.
Mary Lucero:It's like you know we to, w hen neighbors would come by and visit, we'd pull a carrot from the garden and they'd eat it, and they'd just carry on and on, " Wow, I've never tasted a carrot like that. Oh, it tastes so good. How do you make carrot grow like this? And a lot of that, and I think a lot of the reason we don't eat as many fruits and vegetables as we should eat is because they've grown so far away in such sterile soil and handled by so many hands before they get to your plate.
Sarah Burnett:It's just a completely different experience when it's more local and, well, yeah, I mean commercial food production is kind of like and I'm not dissing any hydroponics people but you know we're only providing the nutrients for that plant to do XYZ. We're not enhancing the environment, we're just feeding the plant and that is commercial agriculture in a lot of ways. Is that you know a soil test will tell you how much NPK you need to put down to create X amount of pounds and yield. You know it's not taking into account any soil health metrics or mineralization or organic matter or you know all these other issues that really are what needs to be corrected and you know. So it's an approach you have to choose. How do you want to approach the health or the yield of what you're trying to get? And one is kind of commercially and one is more of a long-term investment and it's just a personal choice really at the end of the day. But they do have vast differences in the results that you'll get or in the quality.
Mary Lucero:I think back to my father's generation and the culture he described growing up and of course his father ranched, his family ranched, early in life, and then later they lost the ranch during the Depression and moved into town.
Mary Lucero:But everything revolved around that little ranching community and the culture that surrounded it. They were positioned between a couple of reservations and so they had a lot of interaction with the Zuni and Navajo cultures in Northwestern New Mexico, where my father's family had been in the region hundreds of years and so of course it was kind of a melding of all these cultures but among them all there was a sense that food is sacred. A nd I think you know, growing up in a more traditional setting for my day it was, you know families prayed before every meal because food was sacred. Today I look and I don't see that connection to food as something sacred. It's been commoditized to the point where it's something you buy. And look at the prices of food and people are angry when the price goes up and happy when the price goes down and thrilled when you go to a restaurant that has good food at a low price.
Mary Lucero:Going back to this balance that you've emphasized so much, we haven't balanced our desire for a low price with our need for all these other qualities, including the nutritional value, where it was grown, how it was grown and who, like you say, who died making this food. How, the conditions that it took to produce the, and that's unfortunate because in a time when we had more people involved in food production, there was also a greater awareness of the sacrifices that go into it.
Sarah Burnett:Absolutely. You know there's our kids. I mean, I have a six-year-old and she is, she's probably the exception when it comes to soil health and food production, but I really have a desire to... I always invite her class out here to our facility and let's talk about soil health, let's talk about food production.
Sarah Burnett:Where does your food come from? And not knowing or not seeing a plant I mean that's common, especially for kids that live in big cities it's like do they really understand where their food comes from? Do they have the opportunity to see it? Has anyone stopped and educated them about how things grow or what they need? I mean the answers probably no, or very little, or maybe they've seen it on TV.
Sarah Burnett:But accessibility to farmers' markets is a really important tool in educating people about where your food comes from. I think that you could probably agree that the resurgence of farmers' markets has been very strong in the last few years, obviously after the pandemic and the food crisis in a lot of areas, or food instability or however you want what PC term you want to use. But people are regaining access to fresher production through farmers' markets and I would love to see... if the government wants to legislate something... Let's put some funding behind farmers' markets in a really tangible way and connect local producers to food sheds that are in need, or to food banks, if you will. Let's make those connections for fresh food that was grown locally, versus giving something away to someone in need that comes in a can or that has been shipped across the world two or three times or however you want to think about it. But education is at the top of my list when it comes to helping people understand.
Sarah Burnett:Everybody can grow food in their own backyard. You can't tell me that it is a food desert when you can probably grow a tomato in a five-gallon bucket. It does not have to be hard to do. It is not hard to do, but it's the desire to want to do it and the understanding of why you should consider growing your own food. It is something that we have gotten away from. Our society has just gotten away from, you know, because we're all guilty of it to a certain degree. You know the ease of accessibility I don't want to say lazy, because that's not, I don't think, really the problem, but it's just much easier to you know, go to Wal- and United and buy the cucumber instead of waiting three weeks for it to sprout and bloom and grow and and getting it. You know. We have no patience, right, I'm gonna give that a lot of time.
Mary Lucero:I remember being at an onion grower's conference a few years ago and one of the speakers, I'm with, you know all these elderly farmers, because most farmers are over 60, and this young marketing gal from New York was speaking. She was very early career and she was talking about a service they had developed to, a food delivery service, and and how they were expanding their service around bigger and bigger areas. And basically people could call in, get on the internet and order their groceries and have them delivered. And this is pretty common now, but at the time I was at that conference it was still pretty new. And she made the comment about, " who wants to go to a grocery store and have to push a cart up and down all these aisles with all these people just to get food on the table, and I remember it crossed my mind. You know that's how disconnected we are, that a food has to come from the supermarket. Be you know, we want instant meals delivered to our doorstep now, but maybe that's having an impact on our diets, our health and our sustainability. So I wanted to circle back on something you said earlier because I think it's important to make a point about that.
Mary Lucero:When you were talking about your BioFlüf, you are using materials from a cotton growing the area to develop soil. Amendments for a for the region that address one of the biggest limiting factors in the region, and that's the availability of water. But how do you find communities responding? When you talk to your stakeholders, your customers, when you're doing outreach and they realize that you are producing these products in West Texas, for growers in West Texas, and surrounding areas, and when you buy local, 70% of the money you spend goes back into their community. So people buying from you, well, you're going to go out and spend that money somewhere in your area, right, and so that that local multiplier effect is huge when you build a business that's serving people in your region that way. Do you think customers recognize this impact?
Sarah Burnett:Honestly, its an overused hashtag without a lot of meaning, If you really like, mentioning the farmers markets, I mean generally, that is, very locally produced goods and services, right. So that's a great place to start. When I tell people about what I've done using the cotton seed material here locally and what the impact could be, I try to explain, I try to take it out more than you know, I try to peel the onion a few layers for them. So, for instance, on the BioFlüf, if you're saving water, which is our most precious natural resource, and the limiting factor in crop production in our area, you're eliminating one challenge to crop production, right. So you're adding all these benefits.
Sarah Burnett:The BioFlüf breaks down into organic matter, which helps to balance the carbon and nitrogen ratio. You're adding microbes that are enhancing, developing and changing over a period of time, the soil quality for the better. You're adding, you know, these minerals and micronutrients that are really, you're limiting factor in the soil in a lot of ways, which you and I have discussed too. So you're doing something bigger. I figured out how to do it in row crop agriculture by creating a pellet and then {} a pellet and then spread the pellet and incorporate it in the crop. If it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.
Sarah Burnett:At 328% water holding capacity, you, the grower, in theory and that's what we're trying to prove out would be able to reduce your needs for continual watering, which is a lot of what people do around here. They turn on their pivots. They never turn them off until the crop is close to harvest, which costs tons of money I'm talking tens of thousands of dollars for the grower every year and also is depleting our water table here, while in the Oklahoma aquifer, which is really like on the non-targetable side, there's a debate about that, but 500 years we won't be around to see if it recharged an inch or two.
Sarah Burnett:But using the idea that we need to save water not only for our generations to come, but also it's being a good steward, I would like to see and prove out that this material would help reduce the demand for watering by, say, 30 to 50%. So, in a bigger picture, again pilling the layers of the onions. If we were able to turn off our irrigation pumps, what does that do to the demand, to our electricity grid?
Sarah Burnett:I mean, what if so many farmers could adopt the soil health practice of using and retaining more water that we wouldn't have rolling brown outs? Okay, that would be great. Now if we didn't have to spend money on electricity. What can the overage in our budget or in the growers' budgets do for the local economy? Again, I'm sort of circling back to your question, but if you're spending $ 150, a larger-sized producer could spend easily $150,000 a year on on electricity. What could that do to the community? If they went out and they bought a new spray tank from their local spray company, like you know to water, what if they invested in soil health amendments at a company like mine? What if they paid off their banknote and operated in a different way financially? Like?
Sarah Burnett:The impacts of soil health are not just about growing a healthier piece of, you know, a fruit or a vegetable. It's about what it can do for the greater economy as well. And if we are retaining more of our natural resources and being a better steward, that will create for us more opportunities to basically put money back in the pocket of the grower. That should end up back in a local economy. So shopping local matters. It matters to the person running the business, it matters to the greater community and to the greater economy.
Sarah Burnett:And again, education, educating yourself about what is available in your community. We've been in the Lubbock area for 20 years and there's still people who don't have never heard of us, that drive by our business every single day, that haven't ever bothered to Google the web address, y ou know that's on the sign out there because they're not interested in shopping local. It's just much easier to walk into XYZ and you know not worry about who made it or who you know profited or didn't profit from the purchase of that item. And you know we complain oftentimes about businesses, these little towns that you drive through oh, this little town,
Sarah Burnett:it just dried up and blew away. Well, why did it do that? Ask yourself, where were you shopping? Where were you spending your dollars when that store was still open, when that cafe and that town was still open? Where were you? I mean businesses like mine live and die by that. Local person's, you know, desire to shop locally or to you know to inquire what's in their area, and you know we need people to shop at businesses our size. We don't. It's not all about convenience, because they're a family that needs you to shop there.
Sarah Burnett:It absolutely matters at every level.
Mary Lucero:{ } my mother grew up during the Great Depression, so thriftiness really mattered, and I think the only economic lessons I really learned as a child were that, from the religious end, money was seen as almost a bad thing. You know, "lest are the poor. And then it was be thrifty, and what that translated to was buy the cheapest product you can. And years later I started noticing you know, people who seem to be doing much better than I. Would spend a lot more on things that lasted but didn't wear out quickly. I'd go buy an $8 piece of cookware and three years later I'm buying another $8 piece of cookware to replace it, and three years later I'm buying a third one.
Sarah Burnett:Right! And so people oftentimes, I think, still lack of it. They have to shop. I mean, like I'm on a budget, you know, single mom, whatever, I want to be very cautious with my money. But buying local and buying fresh and buying good quality, you know, produce, for instance, isn't necessarily more expensive to do. I think that's another education. Piece of the puzzle is like that it's not more expensive to use natural products, not at least in our business. I don't think as it is to. You know, do the commercial route or, you know, really taking into account the quality that you're buying, but doing a little research about the cost too, because I don't think that it's any more expensive to produce a crop using some of our implements that it is to do a completely commercial route. But again, the buyer has to do some of the work.
Sarah Burnett:but it is our job as business owners to educate people that they're available and you know, in your example it's like okay, this is how long this $8 piece of cookware will last, and this is how long this $24 piece of cookware lasts.
Sarah Burnett:Does it really last that long? Or did they do a better job marketing and educating their customers? I don't know. I mean, it's something to be considered.
Mary Lucero:Right and I guess that was the point I was heading to is that price...
Mary Lucero:. . . you know, we let price be the driving factor to too many decisions, and price is important and if you're not paying attention to price, you're going to have trouble down the road. But you also need to be paying attention to these other factors that are a little bit harder to investigate and some of those are, like, I think, the reason you know, so many of us complain today about the disparities between the rich and the poor, which have just extrapolated in different in recent years. You know, we see this huge wealth gap. That wasn't the America I grew up in, and yet I think we're driving it with our consumer choices, and so you'll hear discussions about, " oh, they should. You know, they should make those billionaires pay higher taxes, or they should make those billionaires do X, y or Z, because it's not fair. They have all that money, but it's our consumer choices that are making the billionaires people out there as opposed to people within our own community, these multinational corporations that can produce for a smaller price, in many cases simply because of the economy of scale.
Sarah Burnett:Definitely check out that Rotten series. It's crazy. You're spot on 100% about w hat does it boil down to for a lot of the larger companies as profit? I mean, that's every decision, that's the only decision they care about. And again, that's just another reason to support businesses that are, you know, in your community doing good things, sponsoring your little softball teams or buying your cheerleading posters, or, you know, participating in a parade. Like why wouldn't we support the people that we're hands on in trying to make tangible, you know, change in our own communities? Where is the disconnect? And you know it's in availability, it's in the marketing, it's in a lot of different areas, but it's you're right.
Mary Lucero:I'll tell you what. I'll look up Rotten and I'll put a link to information on it in the show notes.
Sarah Burnett:Yeah, love it., yeah, definitely. There's a lot of good resources out there that people can dig into, and a lot of these streaming services have these really cool shows. Now that they've talked about farming and developed different approaches to educating people, which I think is fantastic, it's becoming more mainstream to talk about, which is an awesome thing to see.
Mary Lucero:It's becoming exciting. To have been on the fringes of agriculture for as long as I have, I've always had an awareness of what's happening in the industry, and there's never been a better time to start farming locally than there is today, absolutely. So it's good and start farming regeneratively or naturally or organically We've got so many names for different permutations of the same general, the same thing.
Sarah Burnett:It's the same thing, right.
Mary Lucero:And, in the end, that's where the real profits lie is what you can do, not only now, but for the future. I shared in the last episode, the concept of Seven Generations (the learning company). T heir whole concept, is teaching people to make decisions based on the impact it will have across seven generations .
Sarah Burnett:Wow! And I think, when we, that's big.
Mary Lucero:Yeah, yeah. When we start thinking that way, your whole reaction changes. I know I made a very conscious decision when I was doing research and I was hitting that six figure. I was really on this ideal career track and I was looking at the cost, the impact this was having on family life, on personal health and on my kids as they prepared their careers.
Mary Lucero:And I remember growing up in a family where my dad was never there. He was always traveling, always gone and watching how it affected my siblings and I and I thought I don't want my kids going through that. I stepped down took huge pay cuts, started working independently and went through some huge learning curves, because I never set out to be an entrepreneur, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. Because of the extended time I have with my kids you know I'm watching them today they're in early career and they're both doing great and I'm really proud of them. I just wonder what the story would look like. My coworkers who had children, their children were going through all kinds of chaos and personal turmoil and in and out of different kinds of trouble, and I just made the decision that that's not worth the six-figure income.
Sarah Burnett:Well, I think you nailed on the head. It's like choices what choices do you want to make for yourself? There was a crossroads and you chose the road less traveled and many, many, many ways, and ultimately people have to make the choices themselves. How am I going to live? How are my kids going to live? I mean, we all have to make money to survive. That's not you know, I'm not saying we can all just quit our jobs, but it's like small changes make big impacts. You know, if you're with your kids a few more hours a week, if you're eating a few healthier meals versus take out or whatever, just and give yourself grace. You know to learn and change and to make the adjustments. It's not going to happen overnight, but you know choices. I mean, ultimately it comes down to what is important to you and what you're willing to do or not to, and I'm I know your kids would tell you that you chose them and it made all the difference.
Mary Lucero:And those are changes that you'll see farther down the road in many cases, but it's just really important to make that transition in our thinking and I think that it's shown people don't multitask will. And now I'm getting into your field of psychology, so you may do this. I've seen things coming out of neurobiology and some, you know recent reports conclude that our minds don't multitask.
Mary Lucero:We like the simple one plus one equals two formulas and I think this kind of sets us up for this focus we have on money, because it's very tangible, it's very easy to see and some of these other things are hard to measure, but I think we need activities and cultural conditions and environments that help us see more multi-dimensionally.
Sarah Burnett:And when we get there.
Mary Lucero:That's when we move to the greater sense of stewardship, land management. We understand why the biological makes sense. It's this multi-dimensional reason. Education, yep. Yes, it leaves us to a more balanced approach, as opposed to a linear. This one pays more, and so this is the route I'm taking.
Sarah Burnett:Right, it has to. I mean, it needs to be available. People have to want that, and when people start wanting it and start going down that trail, that's definitely when we're going to see more change and more acceptance of all the things we've talked about today. It's exciting. I think we are primed and ready for change to occur and people want it and they're looking for it, and it's not so scary as it used to be. So I'm thankful for all those things.
Mary Lucero:So, Sarah, we've covered a lot of information here and it's been great visiting with you. If there are anything we have not touched on that you would like to share with the listeners?
Sarah Burnett:That's a great quetion! We have touched on a lot of topics that I think really for me people, I want people to know that it's not scary to make these choices or changes. It's not hard to make them. You just have to do a little bit of research and find people that you trust and you know, just make the choice to do something different, and small choices do add up. So don't feel like you know you have to change everything you've ever been doing and have any guilt with the way that things have been going or whatever, because we all make choices that you know. A lot of times we survive, live or die by right.
Sarah Burnett:So I'm just I'm here to help if anybody has questions and you can put my contact information in or share my information with whoever needs or wants to have a discussion about changing soil, health or just anything else they want to discuss relating to natural, sustainable or even accessibility. Like the Texas Department of Agriculture has a great website on young farmer grants, I'm part of a board that serves those folks and there's a lot of resources out there. So I would just encourage people to get energized about finding resources and reaching out and seeking, you know, advice and help and guidance from people that they trust and just know that it's not a hill that is too hard to climb. But it's very important to make a change, and a little change is okay. Just got to start somewhere, one step forward.
Mary Lucero:You know, I'll say in the height of my career, probably early career I had a motto that if it doesn't come in a box or can, I'm not cooking it.
Mary Lucero:And it was part of my persona at the time that I was really determined to succeed in a career that traditionally had been discouraged for women and I wasn't going to tie myself down with cooking and cleaning. And eventually, as the science drew me more and more to a biological perspective in agriculture and my own health problems began awakening me to the fact that you know, that box and can stuff has got to go, I remember just having this aha moment where I really made the decision to start growing my own food. And of course you can't really do that and still put in 80 hours a week, like I was putting in at my job at the time, and still get your kids to practice and all this other stuff that we do as parents. So, but I felt very much like I needed to make a change and so I started growing chives on my windowsill and putting chives in almost everything I cook and it's like those are the biggest steps I could manage at the time.
Mary Lucero:Now it's been quite a few years since then and we now have a farm, we're growing apples and raising beef and doing all this other stuff, and so more and more of our food is coming from the farm all the time. But it started with that pot of chives on the windowsill. You have to change in the increments you can manage, absolutely. Listeners, I'm jumping in here to explain that there was a little bit of a recording problem and so I've deleted a segment and we're going to jump forward into the closing. I apologize for the gap. Sarah we will do it again and, listeners, thanks for joining us today. We'll put all kinds of good links in the show notes to Texas Earth products, and I think I will also add some links to books by some of these giants that Sarah named in her library. Yes, so if you haven't read the Albright papers or some of Carey Ream's work and some of these other greats from soil health, it's worth having access to those. Okay, thank you for joining us today and we will see you next time.
Sarah Burnett:Okay, look forward to it. Have a great day. Bye.