The Natural Fertlizer Podcast

The book values most farmers use to plan manure applications came from a handful of states in the late 1990s. Feed rations have changed, equipment has changed, water management has changed, and those old numbers no longer reflect what's actually coming out of the barn. Nancy Bormann, Ph. D. spent 14 years in swine nutrient management before going back to earn her doctorate working on the USDA-fund...

You sprayed once, then twice, and the weeds are still standing. The herbicide didn't fail you, your water did. When your spray water sits at a high pH, the calcium in it wraps around the herbicide molecule before it ever reaches the plant. You mixed expensive water and called it a day. We get into two things here. First is gypsum, what it actually does to your soil, why high magnesium locks your g...

Fertilizer prices aren't coming down, input costs keep climbing, and most farmers are still buying nutrients from the other side of the world when the answer might already be on their own operation. Abe sits down with Kelly, a row crop and livestock farmer from Griswold, Iowa, to talk about what happens when you actually close the nutrient cycle, what it costs to farm today, and why the next gener...

We’ve been talking a lot about soil health and natural fertilizer systems, but this one is a little different, this is real, long-term experience from the field. I sat down with Bill, a farmer, neighbor, and customer I’ve worked with for over 10 years. We go back to the early days when we first started testing soils and experimenting with compost, and he shares what he’s actually seen change over...

We’ve been talking a lot about soil health and natural systems lately, and this conversation really puts things into perspective. I sat down with Wolfgang from Bio xG to go deeper into what they’ve been building with Bioferm and why taking a more natural, biology-first approach might be the key to improving soil performance long term. We get into how complex these systems really are, why isolating...

We talk a lot about waste, but what if most of it isn’t really waste at all, just nutrients in the wrong place? That shift in perspective changes everything. What the food industry throws away every day still holds value, and the real opportunity is figuring out how to put it back where it belongs. That’s where Waste Into Nutrient Recovery (WINR) comes in. The idea is simple: take those organic st...

Healthy soil is the foundation of productive farming. When soil structure, biology, and nutrient management work together, crops grow stronger, yields increase, and farms become more resilient over time. The Soil First system focuses on renewing soil health, fueling crops with nutrients at the right time, and supporting plant development throughout the season. By improving soil structure, stimulat...