Regenerative Agriculture Podcast
Technical and practical conversations about soil health, crop nutrition and regenerative farming systems.
- Host
- John Kempf
- Published by
- Advancing Eco Agriculture
- Topic
- Food & Agriculture
- Format
- Interview
- Orientation
- Sustainability
- Themes
- Regenerative, Resilience, Nature Positive
- Made for
- Professional / Practitioner, Founder / Entrepreneur
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Latest episodes
Newest first
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1 Oct 2026 · 85 min
Episode 190: What the 1980s Farm Crisis Should Have Taught Us with Wendy Johnson
Wendy Mariko Johnson farms in Floyd County, Iowa, near Charles City. She grew up on an Iowa farm, left at 18 in the 1990s for an 18-year career in the Los Angeles fashion industry, and returned in 2010 with her husband Johnny Rafkin. Having watched farms close across Iowa in the 1980s, she came back determined to follow the three things that carried her parents through that era: diversification, low cost of production, and little to no debt. Today Wendy runs two businesses from the same land. Jóia Food & Fiber Farm carries 160 ewes, 25 cows and their calves, plus hogs, chickens, and ducks acro
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24 Sept 2026 · 90 min
Podcast Extra: Why Corn Is Dying Early with John Kempf & Brody Benton
In this Podcast Extra, Brody Benton of Six B and John Kempf, founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, dig into why plants are shutting down weeks before black layer, what top dieback is actually telling you, and how nitrogen form, leaf temperature, and trace minerals decide whether a crop finishes strong or hollows out from the inside. John explains why the fungi behind stalk rot and crown rot — fusarium, rhizoctonia, pythium — are saprophytes that navigate by electrical charge, and why they only attack cells the plant has already given up on. Brody brings the 2026 weather data: 43 nights above 6
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17 Sept 2026 · 103 min
Episode 189: Why Your Nitrogen Program Is Costing You 50 Bushels with Ed Baumgartner
Ed Baumgartner is a corn breeder and co-founder of Bass Hybrids in Olivia, Minnesota. His family has been in the seed corn business since the late 1930s, when his great uncles began producing hybrid seed as Troy Farms. Ed studied agronomy and plant genetics and spent 21 years and five mergers inside the commercial seed industry, much of it running winter nurseries in Puerto Rico and doing trait integration work for major companies. At Bass Hybrids, Ed breeds non-GMO corn using a shuttle breeding model borrowed from Norman Borlaug, cycling material between Puerto Rico and Minnesota for three ge