AEA Small Grower Resources | Regenerative Agriculture

What can market growers and personal gardeners do to further the regenerative agriculture revolution?

Regenerating soil health, plant health, and ultimately human health, starts with the commitment of growers like you. AEA offers an array of liquid mineral fertilizers and biological inoculants, but applying our products alone will not make you a regenerative grower.

We also recommend incorporating an array of practices to use in tandem with AEA materials like composting, tillage reduction, diversity, and cover cropping. We know every farm is different. It may not be practical or necessary for every operation to receive personalized consulting or sap analysis testing; yet all growers can incorporate regenerative practices.

Below, you will find several resources to get started.

The Plant Health Pyramid™

is a self diagnostic tool formulated by AEA founder John Kempf to help growers asses crop health while identifying disease and pest issues.

As soils and crops transition with regenerative farming practices, they pass through stages of increasingly better health. The progression to better health restores the natural and biological abilities of the plant and soil system. During this process, plants will demonstrate increasing immunity to soil and airborne pathogens, better resistance to insects, improved production of lipids leading to stronger cell membranes for tastier fruit with better shelf life, and more.

Levels one and two of plant health are purely a function of nutritional integrity and are usually not

difficult to achieve with most crops and most soils, especially when we have the opportunity to use foliar applications of plant nutritional supplements. On most crops, we usually expect to reach level one and level two in the first 3-4 months.

Levels 3 and 4 are not as straightforward to accomplish as the first two levels. In order to get to level 3, it is imperative that we have a healthy, vigorous soil digestive system capable of providing a majority of the plant’s nutritional requirements. Without this microbial digestive process in place, the plants will never have the surplus energy required to achieve high levels of lipid production and energy storage.

In the first two levels of the Plant Health Pyramid™, changes are taking place in the plant chemistry. The third and fourth stages involve changes in biology and are only achieved through regenerative agriculture.