Circle P:

Episode Transcript
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(00:02):
It is 10:20AM
Pacific Daylight Time. It's the September
2025.
This is episode ten sixty
of Bitcoin, and
it's Cathedral
five.
We're doing Cathedral
part five today. We're not going to be talking about Bitcoin, although it will be mentioned,

(00:25):
but this is going to be part of the ongoing series that I'm calling Cathedral
that describes
an immense
thousand year, thousand acre
silvopasture
farm, for lack of a better term.
If you have not listened

(00:45):
to any of the other cathedral
parts, then this is really not going to make a lot of sense to you. It can stand alone because we are going to be talking about biology today. We're going to be talking about
specifically,
microbiology
in the soil
and
on the plants and shrubs and trees and grass and forbs and legumes and all the other little

(01:09):
plants that are going on. But we're gonna so we're gonna be talking about microbiology
above the soil
and microbiology
below the soil.
Specifically though,
to get even more specific,
we're gonna be talking about biology that we add to the soil. I know we've already talked about how cows,

(01:32):
you know, and ruminants and all these other little critters that they're definitely adding to the microbiological
component of the soil,
but this is going to take it one step further. This
is part
of the infrastructure
of Cathedral. So, again, if you haven't,
I highly recommend

(01:53):
that you go back
and listen to the rest of the Cathedral series starting with
Cathedral one,
a thousand acre years.
That's the that's the name of it. That's where it starts. And then Cathedral two builds on it, three, and then four, and then now now we're at five.
And this is the outline that I have for you guys today

(02:16):
is pretty immense.
It's probably gonna take longer than an hour to do. I'm not going to split this episode up. I'm just I'm just not. I want all of these together. I don't want a part five
a and a part five b. So
let's go ahead and start treading that water. But first, I think it's important

(02:38):
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Alright.
Let's start off
doing this.
Okay. Here we are.
Coming into Cathedral
5
and I want to make sure that everybody understands

(04:29):
that
we're talking about brewing biology today.
We're literally going to brew
biology
And we're going to apply it, and we're going to talk about
what's going on with it. Why are we doing it? Why do we care?
So we're shifting in focus from the earlier episodes of cathedral

(04:53):
where we were really talking about geometry
and flow.
The way that the
tree lanes are built and the grazing lanes in between and the perimeter trees and the flow of the animals through the geometry.
It goes
cathedral goes well beyond that.
It goes well, well, well beyond that, because geometry by itself

(05:16):
doesn't build soil. It just doesn't.
But yet,
the project
cathedral needs biology
to fully come alive.
So what what why does it matter?
Honestly, why why do we care about all this? Why are you all been out of shape, David, about all this biology? Well,

(05:38):
because the microbiological
life in the soil
drives
fertility.
And it does that in many ways, one of which is nutrient cycling.
As these critters die, their nutrients they've collected become now available to other critters, including plants. Right? That is the plant. The plants are able to get all these bioavailable

(06:03):
nutrients that are being continuously
gathered from
the resources around the microbes
turned into bioavailable
molecules
that the microbe itself uses and then either that microbe gets eaten by another microbe and turned into microbe
poop,
which is all bioavailable
to plants and, well, other microbes.

(06:26):
It's this continuous
cycling
of nutrients in the soil.
And these microbes not only cycle the nutrients,
they gather nutrients,
nutrients that were that used to be unavailable to plants.
These critters can go get them
and can make them

(06:46):
available to plants, like mining phosphorus,
which all by itself is usually locked up and is not very available to plants.
You can put phosphorus on the soil and ensure for a little
while that phosphorus is available to plants, but it quickly becomes bound up
in the mineral component of the soil because the way the chemistry works. So you can just keep on putting on phosphorus and unless you've got microbiology

(07:13):
in the soil
that's going to be able to mine that phosphorus continually out and turn it into something actually useful, well then, ladies and gentlemen, you can forget about it. It's just not going it's not going to be available to the plants.
And then
a lot of this is going to to be a discussion also about biochar, which I've definitely talked about before, and I talked about it at length

(07:38):
in the last episode, which is Cathedral part four.
And I've also talked a little bit about brewing biology, but for that particular episode, but not not like we're gonna do it today. And so why to as a reminder for people, why is biochar important?
Well, it's first of all, it's a charcoal. It's almost
pure

(07:59):
pure crystalline carbon, not diamonds. I'm talking about, like, it's like charcoal, except not the charcoal you use for your grill. It's more like activated charcoal that you'd find in a water filter. It's almost pure carbon.
It acts as a water battery because it holds
seven times its weight in water chemically.
It's chemically bound.

(08:20):
It's not like it's in a sponge where you can squeeze it out. No. No. No. No. The water
is chemically bound to the biochar,
so it doesn't evaporate and it makes everything water resilient.
Again,
seven times its weight in water.
A gram of biochar will hold seven grams of water

(08:42):
chemically.
It's not going anywhere, except unless a plant actually needs it and is able to knock off those water molecules by, you know, actively mining the water.
This makes land resilient.
But more than that, biochar is a nutrient battery. So any bioavailable nutrients
are also locked away

(09:02):
into the structure of this biochar.
It's not allowed to leach away with the rain. It holds it chemically just like biochar holds water chemically.
And then biochar
acts as a habitat for all these little
micro critters. Right? It's a porous structure.
It's got a in fact,

(09:22):
one gram
of biochar, if you were to flatten it all out and look at just the surface area of pure carbon surface that it has,
it's an NBA
basketball court
for one gram.
And think about how much nutrient you can chemically adhere

(09:43):
to that surface of a NBA basketball court. Ladies and gentlemen, it's it ends up being quite a bit. And, again,
it's really taken up bioavailable,
plant bioavailable
nutrients like
nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, but also like micronutrients
like calcium,
magnesium,

(10:04):
copper, and iron. It
it all is it just sticks to this biochar like glue.
Right? So along with that, like I said, it's a habitat.
It forms apartment buildings. That same surface area that collects the water and all these nutrients.
If you fold it back up, you end up with it literally looks like an apartment building for microbes and like bacteria, protozoa,

(10:31):
nematodes.
Well, nematodes are a little large for it, but fungi,
it it it all hangs out in there where they're safe from predators.
And like I kind of described,
you know, in in last week's show, it's kind of like a coral reef.
It literally
emits new life.

(10:53):
It's like families of people that live in in in an apartment building and then they but they keep having children. They don't they're not like one and done, two and done, three and done. No. They just they keep
generating new progeny and it just spills out of the coral reef and it gets into the soil and it just it makes everything better because it's actually functioning as a habitat and together

(11:17):
the microbes
and the biochar
turn these static structures that is Cathedral
into
living
resilience.
So
brewing this biology.
We're gonna talk about brewing biology. We're gonna talk but we're we really need to talk about how it's applied.

(11:40):
How do I get the biology there? Now, if you if you were here for last week, you're going well, you already told us about this. No. I told you about how to do part of it.
Now, this is the rest of the story,
and it's a much longer story.
We have a dual delivery system that I want to talk about.
There's gonna be the top down application

(12:02):
of this brood biology,
Like, we spray the the foliage of the plants and the the grasses and the forbs and
the the legumes, but also the black walnut trees, the black locust trees, the the honey locust trees, and all the hedge rows and and anything else that that we if it's got a leaf,
it's getting this foliar application thrown on it.

(12:25):
But we're not done. We're we're not done. We we're gonna have a bottom up approach
inside the soil.
The subsoil,
we're going to be working that as well. And the top down and the bottom up
delivery systems are going to work together.
Because in the end,

(12:46):
the biology that we're laying down
is not
what you would consider
farm inputs.
Right? They're they're not like, oh, like what's okay. What's an input?
Fertilizer.
I go buy, you know, a truckload of fertilizer for my thousand acre farm. I'm growing wheat.
It's it's mined somewhere else or it's produced it's not mined. It's actually produced. It's produced somewhere else. It comes in bags. They deliver it on a truck, and then I put it on the tractor and in bin and and either broadcast it or liquid apply it. It's an input. I have to pay for it,

(13:20):
and it comes from somewhere off farm.
What I'm talking about today
is not really as much of an input
as much as it is
infrastructure.
It's infrastructure for the cathedral system.
Just like the tree lanes are infrastructure, just like the grazing lanes are infrastructure,

(13:40):
the animals are infrastructure. Any buildings are gonna be infrastructure. And there's there were there will be buildings. We'll we'll get to them much, much, much later.
But it's infrastructure. It should not be seen as, oh, it's a bug in a bag or a bug in a jug, and and we buy it from somewhere else. And, no, because all this needs to be able to be brewed

(14:00):
right there at cathedral.
And it be needs to be brewed
with
items that are coming off of the cathedral system. Compost that is made on-site is going to be a part of that system.
So for the rest of the show, the first third of this is we're gonna be talking about land stewardship and the biological

(14:22):
focus.
But the final third, we're gonna get into a little bit of economics.
And we're gonna delve into something that many of you might find
utterly distasteful.
Carbon credits.
If you've heard me talk about carbon credits before, you know two things
about how I think about it.

(14:43):
One,
carbon credits are stupid.
They are just dumb.
They are there to make, the I guess the the the ESG folks feel good about themselves so they can do whatever they want to the environment. And as long as they're buying carbon credits, hey, they're okay. Right? No. No. Okay. Well, that's sort of that's sort of true. I mean, that I mean, that that's that's the way that I feel about carbon credits.

(15:08):
Here's the other side of that coin.
If they're gonna pay me money
to put carbon in the soil,
then I'm going to take their money.
But I wanna make deadly sure
that I don't actually think that this whole carbon credit thing, the scheme is anything but that.
A scheme. Probably grifting,

(15:31):
if not grafting or whatever else you wanna put it. But I'm not leaving money on the table.
If somebody is going to help offset my cost to put a whole bunch of carbon in the ground,
I'm taking it. Right? So you you it would be helpful to me
if you kind of hold your nose as we go through the carbon credit thing because honestly it's it's

(15:55):
it's not integral, it's not a it's not a make it or break it kind of thing for Cathedral,
but it would it it would seriously
seriously help,
a lot of people who are trying to combat this, and we'll hopefully, we'll we'll get into that.
Just saying, I need you to buckle up.
Because if if you thought Cathedral was alive before,

(16:18):
honey,
you ain't seen nothing yet.
Let's redefine our inputs first.
I just briefly touched on inputs, like fertilizer.
Now, fertilizer is consumed.
You know, you you go and you buy it. You you go you go to your farm store, your ranch store. You tell them you need, you know, I don't know, 250

(16:39):
pounds of nitrogen per acre, and you've got a thousand acres, so you're gonna end up putting on, what, 250,000
pounds of nitrogen
to grow weed or oats or whatever it is that that that you're gonna do. A quarter of a million pounds is a lot of money to cut a check for.
Fertilizer costs have gone up.

(17:01):
But
microbes,
microbes
persist.
And not only do they persist,
they amplify.
They amplify themselves. And when they amplify themselves, by definition,
they amplify
everything that they do.
That's what we're getting at. We need to be looking at we need to be looking at

(17:23):
deleting our inputs.
The amount of money that we pay somebody else to bring something that's not on our farm
to our farm or to silvopasture or ranch or whatever it is that that that you're whatever way you're thinking about this.
Instead of pay money going out and objects coming in, we need to make sure that money, at least as little as money as possible, goes out and as much

(17:50):
of our
raw materials that we need to be working with are built on farm.
That is a paradigm shift from the way that we do any kind of agriculture that any of us are actually used to. Right?
And then so that's the micro part as as, like, you know, our we we need to redefine that as an input, but we also need to redefine

(18:13):
an input of biochar.
Okay? That's that doesn't wash away.
That's not like I I go and buy, however many pounds of phosphorus I would need to charge the soil,
of on a thousand acres. I
I I think it's like I wanna say it's something like 50 pounds per acre, which is, you know, a thousand acres that's still

(18:35):
that's still a lot of weight. That's still a lot of money. It's still a lot of application.
Biochar
doesn't wash away.
And if it gets a hold of bioavailable phosphorus,
it's going to stick
to that biochar,
and it's just not going to leave your farm. It's just it's just not. It all becomes

(18:57):
part of the soil matrix,
the biochar, the microbes that are living inside of it, on it, around it,
came from it, whatever.
And it's
the compost tea.
That's that's where we're gonna get the biology from. That's how we're going to do our first amplification
step of this particular input

(19:19):
that we are going to be looking at as as the microbiology of the soil.
So
micro microbes reproduce.
And thank god for the biochar because they have a an apartment to have sex in and raise their children and then kick their ass out when they're done.
But it allows them to regulate
and
defend themselves

(19:41):
once they're established.
So they don't go away, unless you do something to your soil that kills them, like put on herbicide, pesticides, and
and fungicides, and all the rest of the inputs that we put on conventional farm fields. If you don't do that,
these things never leave. They just
reproduce.
They get the population

(20:03):
gets larger and larger and larger.
Some of these micro
some of these microbes,
like fungi,
you you may ask, well, what do they what do they do? What are they doing? Now, I've I've covered this
in some of the other cathedral stuff, but for backgrounder,
fungi.

(20:23):
These things produce organic acids that mineralize nutrients
by dissolving rock. They get up they get next to, like, let's say, a phosphorus
or a phosphate bearing rock,
but the phosphates all bound up in in the the matrix of the rock. They
they digest that rock with organic acids they produce.

(20:44):
It frees up the phosphorus. They take the phosphorus in and they trade it to the plant for
in return for sugar, which is
the the carbon based sugar
is
well, that's nature's currency.
And by the way,
that currency is built like Bitcoin on proof of work. It takes work to manufacture sugar.

(21:05):
You have to pack energy
into those carbon bonds. It is a perfect
monetary
exchange
mechanism for nature.
And that's exactly what fungi do. They dissolve rock. They they harvest the nutrients out of it. They trade, like, things like phosphorus and other trace elements for the sugar.

(21:26):
Bacteria,
them sons of bitches take they take nitrogen from the air of which is like nitrogen is like 72% of our atmosphere. 72% of every breath you take is nitrogen,
yet it's plant unavailable.
But bacteria in the soil, they fix that nitrogen, which means they make it available. They make that nitrogen from the atmosphere available

(21:49):
to the plants.
They also help solubilize
things like phosphorus
that enables plants to uptake phosphorus.
They produce plant hormones, by the way,
and they those along well, those hormones
can trigger immune responses
in plants
that that makes the plant stronger. Some of these bacteria not only give them the nitrogen they need, they produce

(22:12):
they
produce hormones
that accelerate
a plant's immune systems.
Then we've got this stuff called actinomycetes.
They break down very complex organic
molecules like lignin and chitin,
and they recycle that carbon into more usable forms in the soil.

(22:35):
Lignin
is part of wood.
Chitin, by the way, is the shell of all insects and crustaceans in the ocean, like lobsters.
That shell is made out of a
polysaccharide
called well, in a polysaccharide
actually, it's a protein polysaccharide
complex. So there's protein and sugars, and it fits together in a certain way that makes

(22:57):
a hard shell.
Right? And lignin
is
is a bunch of sugars like that are that are molecularly bound together that is almost impossible for anything but actinomycetes
to break down.
It's it's amazing. It's that's how
one of the ways that we've we've come to find well, it's one of the ways that wood breaks down fully in the soil. Without fungi and things like actinomycetes,

(23:26):
we'd be buried in dead wood. We we just would. And then there's things like protozoa.
That's part of the microbe set here.
They graze on the bacteria.
They they they're like their own think of them as the ruminants of the soil.
And they eat bacteria
and they, well, they poop out nutrients that are in plant available form. It's microbial

(23:50):
digestion
as it were. And then we have getting up into, like, the little bit bigger scale,
nematodes.
These regulate microbial
populations
by essentially eating them. They're also sort of like grazers, but nematodes can be more like predators. They can get out, they can go after, you know, they can go after larger things like protozoa.

(24:14):
And they cycle nitrogen
and other micro and macronutrients
back into the soil. So this is part of the cycling.
Everything is cycling here. And it's fungi and bacteria act, tendomycetes
and protozoa and nematodes.
And they're all in the soil and there's more, much more. We just don't have time to hit them all.
But I wanna talk a little bit about, just a little bit here,

(24:37):
I wanna make mention of this thing called
endophytes.
Bacteria,
fungi,
things like actinomycetes,
they not only exist in the soil,
they exist
inside
trees,
bushes,
shrubs,
plants,
grasses,

(24:58):
forbs, legumes.
They also exist inside of us.
If you're one of these people that think that that you gotta wash your hands 10 times a day,
if you were to see what's going on in your gut and how much bacteria is in your gut,
you might get a little anxious.
I'm just I'm just saying we are

(25:19):
the beings of this planet, whether you're a deer, a giant beaver, a human, or a giant walnut tree, you are shot through
with bacteria
at least. Now in the case of plants, those things are shot through
from tip to tip, and I'm talking root tip to the top of the tree,

(25:39):
all throughout the branches, all throughout
the the the active part of the wood, all throughout the leaves
is shot through with fungus and bacteria.
And they're all working together. They're not working against each other. I mean, in in the case of disease,
yeah, that's not a good thing. But under normal circumstances with a normal healthy tree,

(26:02):
that tree is infected
tip to toe
with all kinds of living critters and so is grass,
so is forbs, so is bushes,
everything.
It's not just the roots
that have fungal connections.
Those fungal connections stretch up all the way through the plant, all the way through the tree to the very top leaf.

(26:25):
And that top leaf is shot through
with bacteria and fungus, and it's all working together. That's what an endophyte
is, and that word's gonna come back up, by the way.
I just wanted to I wanted to put that here because fungus and bacteria and things like actinomycetes,
that's that's part of that. Not so much protozoa and nematodes,

(26:47):
but bacteria and fungi,
yes.
That exists throughout every plant you see. And they're, again, they're working in concert
for the greater good.
So
the compounding effects of this application
of biology
Remember, we're talk talking about spraying all the leafy surfaces, and we're also gonna be putting this stuff inside the soil.

(27:13):
Each application,
because there should be you should be doing this. The the way that I've got the way that I think about cathedral,
this should be done multiple times a year, at least once a year, but every year.
You never stop. If you were gonna spend money putting nitrogen on your soil,
then spend

(27:34):
one tenth of that and and brew up biology and put that on your soil instead.
Because every application
layers more biology into the system.
And earlier inoculations,
they're established.
They have a huge population,
and now they're getting new genetic material added to them. They're never gonna have a bottleneck in being able to breed. Right? You're never gonna end up with a monoculture

(28:02):
of a single kind of bacteria in your soil. And that's one of the reasons why you continuously
add more
populations,
different populations
to the soil.
And that earlier layers of the applications
are gonna be are going to inform
the later layers of applications,

(28:22):
but those later layers are also going to inform the earlier layers.
It you're you're gonna have a genetic pool that is
immense, and that's critical
so that you don't end up with genetic bottlenecks or you don't end up with,
one, you know, species that is so genetically
identical to each other that one disease wipes them all out at once. Right? That's never gonna happen in a system like this.

(28:49):
And by the way, let's I just wanna
reiterate that all this is going to be associated. All this microbiology is associated with this biochar, this this charcoal, this agricultural
charcoal that we're gonna be putting in the soil.
And those particles, those biochar particles
are like emission points for new life.

(29:10):
So they themselves
will be emitting new layers of biology
all the time.
This is sort of like a circulatory
system for the cathedral system.
The foliar spray,
when we spray the leaves and the plants and the grasses and all that, it distributes biology

(29:32):
top down.
We'll get into more of that and the subsoil injection distributes biology from the bottom up
together
they mimic veins
and capillaries
and arteries
that carries fertility
throughout the system
Remember what I said about endophytes?
When we do foliar sprays, we're allowing these microbes to enter the leaf and the stem

(29:59):
and the branches.
It after a while, it's really the entry points are the leaf and the, new growth on the branches.
Barked, you know, really heavily barked over situations,
it's not really gonna the microbes aren't gonna penetrate into into the into the plant.
But that foliar spray, when it hits those leaves,

(30:19):
these microbes are definitely gonna penetrate from that side and they're gonna work their way down.
The stuff that we put in the soil is going to contact the plant roots
and that biology is gonna go from the bottom up.
And, again, together,
it's sort of like a circulatory system
for cathedral.

(30:41):
It's a bridge.
This entire thing is a bridge between the geometry or the structure of cathedral
and the function.
What why do why are we doing cathedral in the first place? We need several different outputs that we can sell at the market, and we need to be able to do it in a way where biology is king,

(31:02):
cycling is king,
management
is king,
all of these things are king.
Right? Instead of pulling
in sacks of nitrogen,
we're we're we're doing it from a different standpoint.
It's the biology
that fuses
that structure, the tree lanes, and the types of trees, and the types of grasses, and the types of forbs.

(31:24):
It fuses
that with the animals.
It fuses that with the way life works on the farm.
So it's not just about geometry and structure, and it's not just about animals rotating through the through the paddocks.
It's about tying it all together and the way this entire system is tied together is these continuous

(31:45):
applications
of biology,
which we can brew.
Yes, we can brew this stuff. So you might say to yourself, self,
how do I do this?
He's talking about all this biology. How in the hell do we make enough biology that we can put into a tank and spray on leaves

(32:06):
and however he intends to do it, put it underground? Well,
there is several ways that you can brew compost tea.
Most of the stuff that I I I come across on things like YouTube is small scale.
We need more
industrial size.
But I'm going to go middle ground here, you know, so that we can

(32:29):
I'm not gonna describe some kind of
manufacturing
plant with steel, you know,
fermenters and whatnot, although that is in my mind.
But what I really wanna do is I wanna talk about something called an IBC
tote.
You've seen them. If you don't if you don't know what an IBC tote is,

(32:50):
if I showed you a picture of one right now, you'd go, oh, those things. I see those things everywhere.
It is a like, think 500 gallons.
Right? So it's a cube of plastic,
and it's got a spigot on the bottom, and it's a big spigot because it's you know, this thing's holding, like, 500 gallons of liquid.
It is that cube

(33:10):
is wrapped in aluminum steel caging.
Right?
You've seen them. It's white plastic. Sometimes they're different colors. Most of the time, though, when you see them, they're white.
And they have this this aluminum caging around them that wraps all the way around it, and that's what gives that plastic
structure so that as it bends out when it's got 500 gallons of wood, you know, Heinz ketchup in it, that it that that structure will not collapse in on itself and and blow out. So that that's that's what I'm talking about.

(33:42):
That is honestly,
even for something like Cathedral,
a couple of those,
and and you're off to a hell of a start.
So there's this woman named,
Laura Ingram or In Kam, I think is actually her name. She,
is one of the first people in the world to actually define something called the the food soil or the soil food web. Right? And that's

(34:10):
that is part that is that is what we're building
is actually a soil food web,
except I don't wanna get into that because I think I think you're gonna understand what a soil food web is after we get finished with this discussion. So I'm not gonna go into it right now.
Her and her and one of her friends came up with
this system to brew compost tea, which is old technology. This this this isn't new. It's not like we just discovered this, but we are kind of rediscovering

(34:40):
this. Right? So it's been around for a long time. Right? So
you take what they did is they came up with a system where they would take an a standard IBC tote,
they'd cut the top of it off, not all of it, just like, it's a certain size, and I think it's like a rectangle or something like that. It's just the exact size for them to

(35:04):
put
an air compressor on top of. Now they built this air compressor. It's not something you go buy at Home Depot.
It's got special
arms and armatures and and stuff on it and but it's essentially a gigantic air compressor.
And you put that on top and you bolt it
to what's left of the frame,

(35:26):
the aluminum frame that is on top of the IBC tote. So it just gives you a port that goes in there.
You make really good compost.
And,
again, Laura Ingram, she's got, like, a $5,000
class you can take if you wanna learn how to use a microscope and identify all the good critters in the soil and make an assessment as to whether or not your compost

(35:48):
is really up to snuff. But I don't wanna get into that. That's she can if you wanna pay $5 for Laura Ingram's course, you can go do that.
Let's just assume that our compost is high quality compost.
It's got a lot of fungus, and it's got a lot of bacteria.
It's it's there's there it's not filled with bacteria and fungi that are harmful to plants.

(36:11):
That we've made the highest quality
compost that we can find. And what do we do?
We take,
kinda like a burlap bag, except it's think of it more in terms of a tube. Not a bag, but a tube. And it's about, you know, about two foot long, maybe three.
I'm sure they come in different sizes.

(36:31):
And it's like it's
designed to hold compost and you so you fill it up full of compost.
And you take that bag and you throw it into the water. Actually, let's let's back
up. You're you're ready to put the bag on.
So you've already filled up the IBC tote with just regular water from the tap,

(36:54):
except that tap water's probably got chlorine. Even if you're on well, if you're on farm, you probably got well water.
But it doesn't hurt
to fill up the IBC tote and flick on the air compressor
and let all of that air just bubble through the water for about an hour.
If you are on chlorinated water systems, this is critical because otherwise, you dip that that that bag full of compost,

(37:18):
all the critters are going to die, or at least most of them will die and a lot of them will just be severely weakened because that's what fluoride and chloride in water systems
do. They
they're not good for life, and that's why they feed it to us, I guess. I whatever. That's a that's a tinfoil hatchery right there.
Although,
I don't think fluoride should be in water. That's just that's just me, though.

(37:42):
That will boil out the chlorine and the fluorine because halogens of that's part of the halogen family.
Those gases are so volatile that if they get exposed to any amount of oxygen whatsoever,
like in a bubbling you're bubbling it through
air through chlorinated water, that goes away literally within an hour. So after you've got all the water bubbled for about an hour, you shut this thing off,

(38:05):
you put the bag of compost into the water and let it let it fill up, and then you hook it to
one of the bottom ports
of this air compressor.
You can again, there's more than one way to skin a cat, but this is this is for cathedral. So we need
we need some tonnage here. We need some some good volume.
You tie the top of that bag. There's a pipe that goes into the bag and then

(38:30):
you it's got drawstrings and you tie it around that pipe and it doesn't come off. Just trust me.
That pipe goes down into all the way to the bottom
of that bag of compost.
And it's got little holes in it and air comes out of it.
Right? So then,
on the other side or part the other part of the air compressor, the part that go the armatures that go into the liquid,

(38:55):
there's a couple of other armatures that just go all the way down to the bottom of the IBC tote and they just pump air into it. And it's all from the same air compressor.
So every all the water is moving.
So now when you turn it on,
air is bubbling through the compost

(39:15):
and the water itself is being churned by a whole other set of air jets that are coming out of the air compressor.
So that water is 100%
oxygenated
and
that compost is definitely being aerated because there's that pipe that's that's blowing air through, you know, from tip to toe on it.

(39:36):
What you're doing is you've started the tea brewing process.
Right? So then
what you do is it depends on what you want.
You need to feed this thing. And this, generally speaking, this tea process for Laura Ingraham's tea process
anywhere between one and three days that you just leave this thing on and you cannot turn it off because

(39:59):
the life in this in that water will so will just gobble up every molecule of oxygen and it will turn anaerobic and then everything starts dying.
So that's one of the other reasons we've got air being pumped into this thing.
If you feed it with molasses, let's say,
like agricultural molasses,
you will get more bacteria than fungus.

(40:22):
If instead
you feed it with humic acid
or kelp
or, I don't know, fish, fish emulsion
you will get more fungus
than bacteria.
So right there,
right there
is the basis
for how do we what effect do we want?

(40:44):
What kind of bacteria do we want in there? What else can we adjust
for our purposes?
So
the way that I would do it with Cathedral is that I would come at it from the standpoint that I want to start
with a fungally dominated composting.
Like, for two days I feed it nothing but fish emulsion and humic acid and fulvic acid

(41:08):
and kelp,
you know? And I really don't
feed the bacteria that much.
I'm really concentrated on the fungus because I want a lot of fungus in the soil.
I want a lot of fungus being able to cling to the to the leaves and the branches of all the trees and the shrubs and the grasses and whatnot.
But I don't want it to be all fungus because I need other critters in there. I need diversity. I need

(41:33):
niches to be filled. You know, what a fungus doesn't do, a bacteria does. What a bacteria doesn't do, another kind of fungus will do.
So I start
by just wanting to brew a fungally dominated
compost tea first.
Then,
I might start adding bacterial
inoculants
later

(41:54):
in that brew process so that I avoid competition with for the fungus.
By sequencing,
I can ensure
a balance and effectiveness to the tea that I'm brewing. I can use automation and control to do this too.
Dosing pumps can regulate the food inputs like how much molasses, when do you feed it molasses, and the humic acid, and the and the fish slurry. You know, dosing pumps will do that.

(42:21):
Sensors can monitor pH,
temperature,
oxygenation.
Automation
stabilizes these conditions.
I can program all of this too, by the way. I can have it set on a program
if I wanted to, probably through an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi or something like that. That's that's where that gets a little bit more technical. But this can be automated. You don't have to stand there for three days and and and or or set your timer. You, you know, you can if you wanna wake up at two in the morning and make sure that you add some more humic acid. But

(42:53):
I we could build a system with dosing pumps
with sensors,
make sure that pH doesn't get all out of whack, and then readjust it with dosing pumps with, like, maybe acetic acid or even lye or something like that that will adjust the pH up and down.
So
once we have this brewed,

(43:15):
this is when we start being able to do the applications.
And
I wanna start
from the bottom up.
Alright? Well, actually, I take that back. I wanna say one more thing. I'm not gonna be just brewing this in water.
After this is all said and done, like, I've got a good brew.

(43:36):
I'm I'm just about to start, you know, start dosing it with a different kind of bacteria set. Like I said, start with fungal dominated.
And then right before I start putting in other stuff,
I put in a whole bunch
of very finely ground biochar
to the point

(43:57):
that it's almost a slurry.
Still liquid enough that air can bubble into it. Still liquid enough that it can move around,
but it's gonna have a lot of biochar in it. To the point that it will make it a little you'll you would actually look in the bubbling chamber and say, that looks viscous.
That's starting to look more like maple syrup in the way that it flows.

(44:20):
Right? That's what I'm looking for.
Leave that in there for a couple, you know, for maybe like, I don't know, thirty minutes to an hour and then start dosing
with different
bacterial inoculants
depending on what it is that I wanna do.
This way
this way,
all of these critters that I'm brewing

(44:41):
are not
just staying in the water.
They are starting to move into their little apartment complex. They're starting to to take the TV up the stairs and and get their friends with the pickup truck that has the back the the
sticker on the back that says, yes, this is my truck. No, I won't help you
move. You you hornswoggle

(45:02):
the they're moving in
to all these nooks and crannies into the
into the that that well, that is offered by the biochar.
Now
now we're ready
that we can take this entire IBT IBC tote and think think of it this way.
This IBC tote is permanently fastened

(45:22):
to a small trailer.
We can just hitch that trailer up. We use it like either like, we connect it to the battery of the car. So because we always have to have
this slurry
being oxygenated.
We can't I mean, we
really wouldn't want the oxygen to be turned off for any longer than thirty minutes to an hour, and I wouldn't even want thirty minutes.

(45:48):
This is continuously
aerated.
And by the time we're ready to apply this stuff,
by the time we're ready, it's gonna be thick,
all the nooks and crannies of the biochar is gonna be filled with life,
and it's gonna be filled with nutrients, and it's gonna be filled with water. It's not going to take anything away from the soil. Because if you were to put raw biochar in your garden, you would actually see detrimental effects first.

(46:14):
Why?
Because the biochar is going to suck all the available plant available nitrogen out of the soil in its area, all the plant available phosphorus. It's got remember how I said
that biochar holds water and phosphorus and all kinds of stuff because it's sticky?
It's also a magnet.
If it if those spaces aren't filled,

(46:37):
those spaces will become filled and the nutrients that fill them will come from the soil.
And people have done this. And they've said the first two years that they put biochar on because they didn't charge it with biology and nutrients first,
they saw bad effects to their tomatoes. They saw bad effects to their cucumbers.
That's why we're doing this now

(46:59):
before we apply it. It has to be filled with the life. It has to be filled with the nutrients.
It has to be completely soaked in water and that's going to help us deliver it
in the bottom up delivery, which is
subsoil
injection.
There was a man in
either Australia or Tasmania

(47:20):
or or New Zealand, I'm pretty sure it was Australia,
his name is was P. A. Yeomans.
And he invented something called the Yeomans Plow.
It's also known as a Keyline Plow.
And
this is
the way that I envision
subsoil injection
of this

(47:41):
life
containing
biochar
slurry into the soil.
We need to get it
down deep.
Last episode of Cathedral, we talked about the life raft
and, you know, putting down, like, biochar
in front of the cows and letting them step on it.

(48:02):
You know, honey, it's not gonna get down any more than an inch, but it will be it will have soil contact.
Yes, it will. It's definitely going to help. And it's going to soak up in like, it will actually become inoculated
by the cow poop. So by the time the chickens get to it, and again, if you haven't
if you don't know what I'm talking about, this is cathedral four,

(48:22):
subtitle life raft. I'd go through it
at length.
Alright? So go if you haven't listened to it, go listen to that.
So, yes. And and continual
applications
are always going to help.
But what about this what about the soils, you know,
eight inches down, 12 inches down,
16 inches down,

(48:44):
three feet down?
We have done an immense
job of destroying our soils in Europe,
in Africa,
in Australia,
in America,
South America,
you name it, because of conventional ag. Because in this particular case, specifically because of plowing,

(49:06):
because the carbon
the carbon content in soils
of the like, let's just take North America. The you know, what what would become The United States back when
ain't nothing but Native Americans and buffalo and wild giant beavers and giant elk and cave faced bears and all that, whatever, all that stuff.
The the it's been theorized that the carbon

(49:29):
percentage of carbon in the soils in the Great Plains was approaching somewhere around
15%.
I think it was probably more.
Right now,
we're lucky to get 1%.
Some farms report half of 1%
of carbon in their soil
at depth.

(49:50):
Not just the surface, at depth. Why?
That carbon,
as long as it's not exposed to oxygen
in the soil,
it stays there. It doesn't leave. It doesn't turn into c o two and off gas into the atmosphere.
Until you put a plow on it, and you turn that soil over and expose it to the oxygen,

(50:16):
you can't see it.

But envision this (50:18):
a tractor pulling a plow and flipping 12 inches of oil
over on itself
to create furrows.
You might as that right behind that,
at a from a chemical standpoint,
it might as well be on fire.
You can't see the flames,

(50:39):
but they're there.
Because the oxygen in the atmosphere
is fiercely
and quickly combining with the carbon that's in the soil
to produce c o two. It is combustion.
It's just not the way that you think about combustion.
But every time we plow the soil,
more carbon goes into the atmosphere. It leaves the soil.

(51:02):
We
cannot do this shit.
So therefore,
I make assumptions about where cathedral goes. If it's anywhere in the, you know, in the Great Plains of The United States,
we need to put carbon back in the soil and we need to put it back at depth.
At various depths, but

(51:23):
getting down to three feet.
How? Well, again, this is that key line plow or the yeoman's plow.
You get a tractor
and you hitch up a yeoman's plow to it.
The yeoman's plow
can have one,
two.
I've seen them with three. Hell, I've even seen a yeoman's plow with five shanks

(51:48):
that
go into the ground
behind the trail
behind the the the the farm implement that's pulling it. Like, it's the last thing.
So just think of these these shanks, these these steel
shanks that just plunge into the ground.
Right? And it rips

(52:09):
about a half inch because the the the shank is about a half inch wide, some are a little wider.
But this is gonna take have to take a lot of stress.
Right? Because you're dragging it through soil at depth.
At the very end of that shank
is an inverted
boat hull.
Just think think of a boat, think of the the the the bow of a ship.

(52:32):
Now, flip that ship over
and take a section of that bow and then weld it
to the bottom of the the shank that's going into the soil.
It's literally
a boat hull
going through the soil
at depth.
What what does this do? So let's just just think 12 inches down, you know, one foot.

(52:56):
You've got this boat
boat hull thing
that's running through the soil.
It's not like this it's not really like the soil just says, oh sure, here, let me let me split myself for you so you can pass. No, no, no, no.
It explodes
the soil
underneath the ground.
It makes lateral

(53:17):
fractures.
It fractures
the soil, especially in compacted
soil, you want this anyway.
And for for a little bit, you know, for a little while,
those fractures
stay intact.
Eventually, it'll all collapse back in on itself. But generally speaking,
you might think, well, David, you just said if we expose this to to air, the carbon's gonna go away.

(53:43):
Yeah. If you plow it and allow a bunch of surface area
for oxygen to get to, then yes.
But if you plunge
the plow
well into the ground
and you drag it through the ground and it explodes
12 inches beneath the soil and the only thing that is exposed
is a half inch crack at the top of the soil,

(54:05):
honey you're not getting that much oxygen in there it'll be fine you'll be fine we'll all be fine and it's gonna completely decompact that soil
so how does this help us
We've got we've got I mean, a,
let me just back up a little bit.
The water infiltration

(54:26):
mechanics for your for your soils,
especially in compacted soils, has just changed.
If you if you do this
on contour,
you drag, like, three, you know, three hooks or, you know, like, three implements
behind this gentleman's plow. Right? You've got three shanks going into the ground, and they're separated by, I don't know, like, let's say,

(54:50):
three to four foot away from each other.
Like, you don't want them really, you know, you don't want them really close together.
Then if you drag that on contour,
the if it rains, the water that rolls off is going to contact one of these slits that you made in the ground and it's gonna go directly 12 inches down.

(55:10):
And that water is going to stay on your farm. It's gonna stay inside cathedral.
If it's flat, you don't really have to worry about contours because you're not on a hill. Well, then it doesn't really matter. But the water is going to be able to find its way way
way deeper as it rains
than it ever would have especially in compact soil situations

(55:31):
in which case the the water just rolls off. It rolls onto somebody else's farm and you don't get to keep the water.
You want the water.
This is a way to make sure that you harvest
all the water that you can. The problem is and it's it it eventually builds soil.
Eventually,
we can bootstrap that

(55:51):
by injecting this slurry that we've been talking about
directly into that crack.
But be if we don't do that,
even though the Keyline plow system harvest water
and build soil eventually,
in another use of the word eventually,
that soil will collapse back down and you have to subsoil again.

(56:14):
I don't want to drag implementation
through the soil all the time. It costs diesel.
And if you've got a good, you know, a whole bunch of like, you know,
really good
fungi,
you know, in the soil,
you you can disturb them. So you wanna keep even a key line plow disturbance down. You sure as shit don't wanna plow like conventional plowing.

(56:37):
But
we've got a design we got to engineer something here, ladies and gentlemen. Here comes the engineering play. We've got to manufacture a pipe that sits behind the shank
that goes down and has an inject has some kind of injection head
at the very end of it right behind the boat plane.
And we've got to be able to fill that crack from 12 inches down all the way to the top of the crack

(57:02):
at speed, which is about,
farm speed on something like this,
three miles an hour,
something like that.
So we're gonna have to have a lot of slurry.
We're gonna have to have these pipes. And the reason they're behind the shank is so that the shank, as it rips through the soil,
protects
the injection pipe.
So it's gotta be wide enough. It can't be too it can't be over, like, a half inch or whatever. It can't be

(57:28):
protruding
on from the edges of the, of the shank that's going into the soil. It's gotta be right behind it and 100 per 100%
protected by the shank so that that you don't break your injection pipe.
Let's say we and and I know we can build that. Farm engineering and ag ag engineering has been around forever. Yes. We can do this.

(57:49):
Those pipes need to be connected to the IBC tote.
Where that IBC tote goes, maybe
it's part of the implement
itself.
That we already said that we we put these on a on a a trailer, we strap it down, and we brew it right there on the trailer. Maybe we just hitch it in between the tractor and the key line plow because the key line plow doesn't need the tractor's power takeoff,

(58:13):
so we don't need an axle going there.
However we do it,
there's more there's definitely more than one way skin the cat. But we're going to need that reservoir
that is continuously
being bubbled
of that life
infused
biochar
slurry
being pumped with a slurry pump

(58:33):
into those pipes and injected
to the point that it fills up all the lateral cracks and fissures
that the Keyline plow made and all the way up to the very top of the soil level.
At 12 inches
that shit is never gonna recompact,
and it's gonna be filled with life.

(58:56):
So let's think of the grazing lanes in Cathedral.
This is what we do.
This is exactly how we're going to go about
infusing carbon,
water retention,
nutrient retention,
microbe and life retention
into the soil at depth.

(59:16):
And we are actually going to at the start, we're going to do this quite a bit.
You know? I mean, we're not gonna do, like, hopefully, after a while, we we don't have to do it anymore.
But I can load up my soil with a lot of carbon,
a lot of life,
a lot of water holding and nutrient holding capacity
with this system.

(59:38):
So we make multiple passes.
Right?
We ensure that biochar
and the compost tea are deposited
immediately before that that soil closes back in on itself, which takes time. It doesn't close immediately,
but we wanna pump it right there.

(59:58):
But we're get we can do multiple depths.
I've been saying 12 inches
which sounds like, you know, it might be a little deep
because we're dragging this
steel cutter
through soil. And if you've got compacted soil, you know how cement like that shit can be. This can do it. I've seen it done. I I've seen it done on several occasions.

(01:00:22):
Subsoiling is a thing. This isn't new technology.
This is very old technology.
It's just a new way to apply
it. But we also need
we need this stuff at six inches.
Well, can we do six inches? We certainly can do six inches. We can do 12 inches.
We can do 16 inches.
We can go down to 24 inches.

(01:00:44):
Ladies and gentlemen,
we can go down to, like, three feet.
After that,
you know, and actually between two and three feet,
depending on how compact your soil is to start with, maybe some problems.
Let's assume that we're not and we can go all the way down to three feet.
That's how far down I want this stuff.

(01:01:05):
So I might start with just doing six inches and and drag
these trenches, do this entire key line plow and subsoil
injection system
throughout the entirety of all the acreage of all the grazing lanes.
And then next year, I do it again
at 12 inches

(01:01:26):
And then next year,
maybe 24 inches
And then the year after that,
36 inches
After that depth, I'm I am I become more unconcerned with what's going on at at, below 36 inches.
But as you can see,
we can put a lot

(01:01:47):
we can put a lot of carbon and life
a lot of life, a lot of nutrient retention, a lot of water from six inches, actually all the way at the top of the surface because the cows are walking over, you know, the the biochar that we put on,
that I described in life or after last,
week's episode of the cathedral.

(01:02:09):
I can go all the way down to 36 inches
I can put a lot of this stuff in there.
So as I said, we break up the subsurface layers without disturbing the surface, so we're not really doing anything to the carbon that's already in the soil.
And
we improve the infiltration
and the root penetration

(01:02:29):
at the same time. So it's not just about water infiltration.
Since we're breaking up all this compaction,
the grassroots,
the forb roots, the the legume roots,
all of a sudden,
you you they they're like, holy shit. I can put roots everywhere.
I I'm I'm not blocked in any direction.
And when those plant roots start contacting

(01:02:52):
all that life and all that soil,
oh, honey,
That's when things start to really fly.
And since we've done this all the way down to 36 inches
we've got a lot of room for those roots
to flow down.
We can now they're gonna start really doing some photosynthesis for us. They're really gonna be able to store their energy and bounce back after a heavy grazing. They're really gonna be protected against disease and drought and

(01:03:21):
nutrient deficiencies because we put a huge
water nutrient
immune system life giving battery
square inch to square inch everywhere in the grays.
This
is a long term carbon reservoir.
Whole

(01:03:42):
channels
of microbiological
highways that spread biology
beyond the injection line
because it's it's I mean, it's not just about the when when that boat hole went through the through the ground,
it not only fractured, like, everything where the boat hole is being the the tip of the key line plow is is, the, you know,

(01:04:02):
exploding the subsurface soil. It's cracking
12 inches sometimes 24 inches to either side and all of that's going to be infiltrated with this carbon.
And all of it's going to act as a microbiological
highway
that that's the circulatory
system
we're now talking about the very circulatory system that connects everything together

(01:04:28):
The biochar part,
along with all the other stuff that it does, this is long term carbon reservoir.
It's forever carbon in practical terms, and that'll come back when we talk about carbon credits.
And again, just to remind you, this thing is like it holds all this carbon to hold seven times its weight in water.

(01:04:50):
It
gloms on to nutrients and doesn't let it go.
And all the microbiology
that that it contains
is
purpose built to go
either mine rocks for more nutrients
or pull nitrogen directly out of the air and make it biologically available to all the plants that are connected to all this biology in the circulatory system in the first place. You see where I'm going with

(01:05:15):
this?
The biochar,
again,
it's the housing development
for all this microbiological
life. And unless you do something
rather stupid,
like
use a side on it, herbicide, pesticide, fungicide, nematicide,

(01:05:35):
all these sides,
they'll always be there. And they will it's the herd underneath the ground.
You feed the herd on top of the ground with grasses and forbs and herbs, but you've got to feed the herd that lives underneath the ground because they're going to make sure
you have something to feed the herd above the ground

(01:05:55):
up and down and down and up from the top down
from the bottom up
it all works together in a symphony so
What about the trees though Dave?
What do we do in the tree lanes? You're not dragging a a key line plow through that. You could do some some serious damage to the roots.

(01:06:19):
Yeah, you could. Yeah, you could. So there's another type of injection system that we can use.
It's called a VOT injector system
V O G T I believe it's manufactured in Germany, but think of a jackhammer
this injection system is just like that It's a pneumatic jackhammer style tool

(01:06:41):
for a single point injection
of whatever it is you want to inject and you know what we're talking about. We we can inject this this life infused nutrient infused biochar directly into the ground, But instead of as a trench,
we can do it as a single point. Why would we wanna do that? Because we got tight quarters inside the tree lanes. I'm not gonna be dragging,

(01:07:03):
you know, I mean, I could. We've got enough room to drag it through there, but you'll do you'll do the kind of damage to the root system that you don't wanna do. You you really will. You'll be hitting really heavy roots,
and that is a disease vector
just waiting
waiting to kill, you know, kill out an entire tree lane. But we can use a single point injector like the VOD injector

(01:07:27):
system, and it does the same thing. It fractures the soil from below, and then it delivers
our life infused slurry.
It's also ideal for things like residential lawns and golf courses and orchards and, you know, other high traffic areas because when you do this, when you when this jackhammer goes down to the ground and you hit the button in this giant air compressor,

(01:07:49):
you know, you've got this this huge reservoir of highly compressed air and it all releases as a slug and just shoves this stuff down. It explodes
the the ground
but fills all the cracks with this carbon, this life, these microbes.
It's not gonna compact again.
It's not and and water will infiltrate.

(01:08:10):
So, yes, this thing works in all kinds of places.
And this is what I would use for the tree lanes.
And every once in a while, I would go through and I would like find find the parts of the tree lanes
where
the root lines or the the
the the root balls or rather what's called the drip lines of the root system

(01:08:32):
where they're all connected together.
You know, I don't want to do this by by a trunk of a tree. I want to come out to the drip line, so I need to find out where where most of the drip lines are connected
to, like, the honey locust tree, the black locust tree, the black walnut tree, and that's my injection point.
Because that's gonna fuse help fuse all those trees together with that mycorrhizal

(01:08:54):
fungi I keep talking about. Yeah. That's already gonna be there in the first place, but there's no reason
not to keep injecting this stuff into the soil because of its water retention, because of its nutrient retention, because it's going to continuously
spill life
to the very things that are built to harbor that life, not just the biochar, but the tree roots.

(01:09:15):
They form these associations with all these trees.
They
harvest minerals and nutrients for the trees and the trees in turn give these critters
the best currency since Bitcoin.
Sugar,
which is a proof of work currency.
I'll do an entire article on that. I promise. But

(01:09:38):
that's
how we're going to start injecting
all the carbon that we want into our soil to do all the good things that we wanted to do in our soil
from the bottom up.
Next,
we go top down.
So
foliar spray. This this is how we're going to get this biology

(01:09:58):
introduced
from the top down.
We we've taken care of the grazing lanes. Hell, we've even taken care of underneath the tree lanes, and all that's gonna work for us. But now
we need to start thinking about
foliar applications
of this exact same thing.
So
compost tea

(01:10:18):
brewed with fine biochar particles.
Maybe
quite not as slurry like, maybe a little bit lighter of a mix, maybe even a little bit heavier.
This
I am I am not going to pretend like I know exactly how all this is gonna work. Because like I said before,
like Mike Tyson says,

(01:10:39):
everybody's got a plan till you get punched in the face. Things will change.
So I have to be flexible about how I think about this. So I'm thinking though that we probably wouldn't want to have as much biochar
applied in this particular
brewed compost tea, but we would do the compost tea the same way fungal dominate dominated at first

(01:11:01):
and then adding whatever bacterial critters that we want to it depending on what effect we might want to to get. And I'll get to that here in a second.
Once we've got it brewed,
we need to spray
the leaves
and the stems
with the inoculated biochar. So what are we spraying?

(01:11:21):
All first of all, we're gonna get a spray rig like we were spraying,
I don't know, applying,
herbicide to an, you know, to an early crop of GMO corn. You know, it's like
it's it's a trailer that goes behind a a tractor,
a power takeoff from the back of the tractor, drives an axle, which drives pumps on the sprayer. And as long as you've got a reservoir of whatever the hell it is that you want to spray, well, there you go. Except these sprayer heads are gonna have to be able to handle some of this fine particle stuff. So it's not it's gonna again, some engineering is gonna have to be involved, but I know we can do it.

(01:12:00):
That spray probably be like 30 foot wide.
And you just go up and down the lanes, all the grazing lanes, because 30 feet is standard agricultural width. And I've designed
the grazing lanes to be 150
foot wide, which is five passes with a 30 foot wide combine header or in this case, a 30 foot wide maybe well, I wouldn't do a 30 foot wide key line plow, but I would definitely do 30 foot wide spray head.

(01:12:27):
And you just spray the grasses.
You just spray the forbs.
Spray the entire
surface area of the grazing lane.
That's going to inoculate
all of those plants with what it what it is that we want it to be inoculated with, and we'll we'll get to that in a second.
It essentially turns
every brand new stem,

(01:12:48):
you know, new growth stem and leaf surface
into sites
of microbiological
colonization.
And that sounds bad.
Sounds like it so, hey, it sounds like you're making them all sick. It's a that's how diseases get in. Exactly.
But I want to make sure that they're always dosed with something that gets into them that are good,

(01:13:10):
that help fight disease help fight infection
and more and more we know what those things actually are
You know, I need to spray the leaves
with good
types of fungus
with good types of bacteria
and they will as long as if they've got long enough contact with that leaf, they will find their way in and they will become

(01:13:37):
endophytes.
Remember I talked about endophytes at the beginning of this episode or towards the front of this episode.
These
critters, what's
they're bacteria
with as long as they're outside
the the plant. But the minute they take up residence,
long term residents inside the plant,
they are now effectively

(01:13:59):
endophytes.
They are endophytic.
They are inside, endo.
Right? So
they will do
what they do. And in a lot of cases,
they're they're doing
all kinds of wonderful stuff. They're doing plant hormone regulation.
They're they're
boosting the immune system.

(01:14:20):
And I mean there's so much stuff we could go through it's like that's a whole a whole other episode.
I'm not gonna do that here. But you want this stuff
inside the tree. Sure, it's gonna get in from the roots.
I wanna make sure
every single year, maybe even twice a year, that every leaf surface of every tree,

(01:14:43):
of every hedge,
of every grass, of every form, of every legume
is coated
with the biology that I want
to have there.
Why or how,
basically, how do we do this?
I got an idea about that. Remember how I said I want a fungally

(01:15:05):
dominated
compost tea to begin with before I start adding in other stuff?
I got a theory. Now, it's gotta be proven out,
but just bear with me.
There's this stuff called glomalin.
And I don't think I've talked about it in the cathedral series before, but I've been on several other podcast talking about soil. I've talked about it there. I've had a couple of other episodes

(01:15:31):
where I've talked about it, but it the short version is is that glomalin
is a glycoprotein.
So it's got sugars
and
protein or, well, amino acids and short amino acid chains.
Yeah. Oh, you know, oligopeptides
is another way to put it. They're not like a whole huge protein, but they're complex molecularly

(01:15:53):
complexed
together.
And they're they're bonded. They're molecularly bonded to each other, so they don't really
break off of each other.
Right? This glomalin
is like glue
and it's produced by arbuscular
mycorrhizal
fungi in the soil. And this is probably a couple of other things too, but what we really know about

(01:16:16):
is that we know at least our buscular mycorrhizal fungi in the soil, and this is the same fungi
that connects tree to grass
and grass to legume and legume to shrub and shrub back to the original tree in a giant communications
and trading loop. It's like it's like the Silk Road and the sugars from one tree actually feed the grasses

(01:16:39):
and
it's amazing the way they trade water and resources and nutrients and information.
But this is the you've heard me talk about it before, but this is the same stuff.
One of the things that it produces in
spades is something called glomalin.
Why is it called glomalin?

(01:17:00):
Because it gloms on. It
gloms on to soil particles especially. It's exuded outside the arbuscular mycorrhizal
fungi
in the soil
and it permeates into the soil and it causes
friability in soil which means it's like soil it makes soil looser

(01:17:20):
it aggregates soil particles together
and without it you get highly compacted soils there's other reason for compacted soils but this is one of them But it's very glue like. It's a very high molecular weight
molecule.
It's
predominantly carbon,
you know, and a little bit of nitrogen because it's a glycoprotein,

(01:17:43):
but the way it acts,
it's like a glue. So if I have
and again,
everybody has a plant until they get punched in the face.
The theory is is that if I can get arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi or any
fungi that is okay for plants
to produce glomalin
while I'm brewing it up in a compost tea, then part of the liquid component

(01:18:08):
is glue.
Well, wouldn't wouldn't it be great
if not only did I have this glue in there and not only did I have this life that I'm brewing in there that is very diverse between fungus and bacteria and some other stuff Wouldn't it also be great if I have some biochar that was loaded up with these part with these

(01:18:29):
particles of fungus
and bacteria?
And as I sprayed,
that particle
contacts a leaf and sticks to it because of the glomalin.
See what I'm what I'm getting at here? Because it's the longer I can have these critters contacted with the leaf surface,

(01:18:51):
the more chances there is that it will be able to infiltrate the plant
and become endophytic,
which is exactly what I want. If I were to just spray I mean, it it's not that it wouldn't work if I just sprayed it, you know, as as water or whatnot.
It sure some of them would get in, but I want to increase. I wanna maximize this. So if I can select a species to brew first that produces

(01:19:16):
as much glomalin as I can,
it can't do anything but help stick
everything to the leaf,
including
a big old chunk well,
microscopically speaking, a big old chunk of a half of a piece of an apartment building that's filled with families just waiting

(01:19:36):
to kick their kids out of their apartment and have them go find someplace else to live
in the plant
where they do their thing,
which is exactly what I want.
Endophytes.
Little baby endophytic
infections everywhere. That's what I want. I want endophyte colonization.

(01:19:58):
Because here's some like, here's some of the fungal players.
Trichoderma
or
trichoderma,
depending on how you wanna pronounce it.
It thrives
in these brew in these compost brews. What does it do for the plant?
Boost plant immune responses.
I want that. I want that in my plant. I want Trichoderma

(01:20:21):
being able to get inside the plants, in the trees, the grasses and all that stuff, and I want them to help boost the plant immune responses.
And then there's, something called
boviria
fasiana.
What does it do?
It deters
pest
fungus.

(01:20:42):
Because not all fungus is good fungus.
I want something in there that says, hey, this fungus isn't really helping you out. I can help you with that. Damn, Skippy. You damn Skippy. I want this buerivera
or veria in there. I want it in there. That's going to be something that I add
into this
compost tea.

(01:21:02):
What about bacterias? What bacteria? What do they do? Well, there's something called bacillus
subtilis.
Right? What does it do?
It supports nutrient uptake.
It also defends the plant against pathogens.
There's Pseudomonas
fluorescence
that, enhances root and leaf health.

(01:21:24):
So this is alive in the roots,
it lives in the leaves.
I've put it in the soil, I've sprayed it on the leaf.
Then we've got Azospirillum
brazillinesse,
I think is how you pronounce it.
Fixes nitrogen, dude.
It's an endophyte.
Could what would be better
than to have

(01:21:46):
bacteria
that takes nitrogen out of the soil
and feeds it to the plant
right where the plant wants it. Because all the activity in the summer, ladies and gentlemen, it's going on in the leaves.
It's going on in in in fruit production.
This this is exactly
where I want nitrogen. I don't want nitrogen to wait as it travels up the super highway of the the the the from the tree roots all the way to the leaves.

(01:22:15):
I can just put it right there at the leaf. I can have it burrow into the leaf. I can have it live and and party down and and and and I don't know, call for fast food takeout right in the leaf while it's watching movies and fixing nitrogen
right where it's needed.
That's what this stuff does. That's what endophytes do. If you thought you pulled a tree off of a or a tree, a leaf off of a tree and there was nothing but the leaf, you are wrong. You are just as wrong with that assumption

(01:22:48):
as if you think your intestines
don't have more bacterial
cells in it than are present in your entire body.
Because what I just said is true.
You have more individual bacterial cells in your body
than your body itself has human cells.

(01:23:09):
What do you think about that?
So
endophyte setup inside plant tissues,
and they sort of act like market stalls,
right where they they're at. I've talked at at length about the market stalls that are set up in roots by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.
Well, now I can do it directly
in the leaves,

(01:23:31):
in the stems.
You know, the new growth stems, not the old growth stuff. That's probably at this point kind of impermeable. But new growth? Yeah. Yeah. It'll happen.
I I can get stuff right in there. That that skin is is pretty thin. And as long as I got glomalin
and I can make sure that I've got, like, you know, I can chuck, you know, a whole, you know, Chicago

(01:23:54):
projects, you know, half of a freaking apartment tower and have it stick onto the leaf or the the stem.
Yeah.
It it endophytes are going to just run freaking rampant. And as long as I make deadly sure
that I'm not introducing a pathogen to that tree,
dude, I'm golden.

(01:24:15):
Next,
we're gonna come up and talk about
some service models and client applications
because we've kind of gone through
what it is that I need to touch on as far as Cathedral is concerned. We've got it in the soil,
Now, every leaf surface is coated with it. And by the way, to coat the leaves, it's a different kind of sprayer,

(01:24:37):
but they have them.
Again, I'm not having to build anything that much new except for like an inject the injector on the back of the shank of the Yeoman's plow is about the only thing that I really need to mess with and to make sure that the spray heads on the sprayer would be able to take at least a little bit
of, you know, particulate matter without clogging up. After that, man, everything else is golden.

(01:25:03):
And the the sprayers that orchards use to do foliar applications and in some cases, they're foliar applying compost tea because they know what's good.
This
I I can I can literally just drag one of these tree sprayers
inside the tree lane and just point it straight up and drive it down one one side of the black walnut trees and down the other side and every all the underside of the leaves are coated?

(01:25:30):
Then I can go to the outside of the tree lanes and I can just put it up at an angle and I can just spray it and go up one tree lane and down the other and all the outside
of the leaves are done.
And
I I just know
I just know that I would be able to get enough surface area contact

(01:25:52):
to have enough sites of infiltration
for these critters
that this is going to be some of the healthiest trees, most well defended trees
ever. But it doesn't have to necessarily stop there because cathedral
is about integration.
Would I want to buy a sprayer just to only do it two times a year?

(01:26:15):
You know, would I wanna buy a a like and that would be like for the grazing lanes. Do I really wanna buy something like a tree sprayer
and only do it like a couple of times a year? What if I can offer this service
to other people and they pay me money?
That's
where
this is sort of like a, kind of like a foreshadowing of what we're gonna talk about with the entire system of Cathedral.

(01:26:41):
But we can build
a company
around this
entire system
that's just spraying compost tea and doing foliar application
and doing soil injection, we can build an entire business, an on farm business
that not only does its business on farm, like to do the grazing lanes and the trees, but offers that service

(01:27:05):
for profit
outside of the system. What does that look like? Remember Kim Lawn?
They'd come out to your house and they'd spray your lawn with that that that green goo and it was just nothing but just high high powered chemistry.
Yeah. We could do the same thing with this system. We can you we could use the exact same application systems that Kimlon used to use, and they've become something else. That service is still around, and they put all kinds of nasty chemistry on your lawn. But we could do we could use that same

(01:27:35):
exact application,
use that same application
infrastructure
to do a residential lawn.
Charge them the same amount of money.
Right? I could I could make I could get portable equipment, you know, that to to do this on lawns without, you know, damaging their sprinkler. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna I mean, that's at least for, you know, the foliar application, but what if I wanted to get,

(01:27:58):
you know, like, inject this stuff into their subsoil? Well, I'm not gonna drag a key line plow across a half acre or or quarter acre
or or even one fifth of an acre front yard. I'm gonna I'll kill their sprinkler system and that's where that VOT injector comes back in.
Right?
I've already got the gear.

(01:28:19):
I'm
not applying
foliar applications and subsoil applications
every day to Cathedral.
I should have a whole crew
that goes out into the nearest city
and says, hey,
you know, we can do we can make your lawn look awesome without chemistry.
We're just gonna put life onto it.
We're gonna put life underneath it. And I can use all the same stuff except the key lime plow. But I've got the Vaught, right? I but I could. I could offer this service to ranches and farms where I could use the key line plow for slurry

(01:28:51):
injection.
I could cover thousands of acres in a season.
I could do multiple depths to ensure permanent
decompaction of their soil and give them long term
fertility as well
as water holding capacity.
Golf courses?
Well, I'm not gonna key line golf courses, but again, we've got the VOT injector.

(01:29:14):
We we and we can do foliar
applications on on on a golf course.
We might be able to get some real money out of that, guys.
We could deliver biology without tearing up any of these sensitive surfaces.
Orchards?
I could I could deliver these services to orchards.
I'm
not applying this every day to cathedral. I don't and I don't want idle equipment. That just doesn't make sense. I don't want a depreciation

(01:29:40):
schedule on something that's, you know, got a weed growing next to it because it doesn't need to be moved
for two more months and hasn't been moved for the two months before. It's just sitting there doing nothing.
I can wrap a crew around that equipment easily.
I can tell golf courses and ranches and farms and and the residents inside cities that they can reduce chemical use

(01:30:03):
and use less water
and
disease, you know, make their their
lawns disease resistant.
Who doesn't want this shit? Especially if I can prove it. Right?
So we've got homeowners
as a market. I got ranchers as a market. Organic farms as a market. I got turf managers

(01:30:25):
as a market. That's the thing, by the way. That's a real job. It's just you'll find them at golf courses. They're called turf managers. But guess who else might want this?
Municipalities.
Parks and recreation, bro.
I've seen some very large parks with very large sprinkler systems.
Do you think they'd want to reduce their dependence on water and how much water they actually use?

(01:30:50):
Do you think they'd want to be able to capture more water from rain events? You betcha.
You betcha. They just need to be educated.
But what I've just described, this brewing biology section,
this I can take off farm.
I can use it on on Cathedral
and I can use it outside Cathedral.

(01:31:12):
And this is the first time we start getting into
a little bit more. Like I said, I'm foreshadowing what's to come, but this is sort of the first thing about
how do we get double duty
out of everything that we do.
And this is the first instance
of that. This is a lawn care business.

(01:31:33):
This is a a ranch care business. This is a farm care business. This is an orchard care business. It's a municipality
parks and recreation
contractor.
It can make money all year round. Well, maybe not in the winter, but you you get what I'm saying.

(01:31:55):
This is the way the cathedral needs to work.
Everything about it needs to do not just its function.
It needs to be able to perform another function.
It needs to be completely
maximized
as much as humanly possible.
Right?

(01:32:15):
How might we get help
from world governments?
Oh, let's talk about that. They're gonna help us build this business.
I wanna talk to you about
integration into, yay, the carbon economy. It's coming.
Whether you like it or not, it's like AI,
like automobiles. It's like the invention of the telephone.

(01:32:38):
Everybody
hated it. They were all gonna fight against it. It was a terrible idea and they were gonna be able to stop it in its tracks. And guess which one of those technologies
got stopped?
None.
The Internet's still here. We've got electric electricity.
We've got telecommunications.
We got automobiles. It didn't go away. You can you could you could red flag law automobiles

(01:33:02):
all day long and the writing was on the wall, ladies and gentlemen. This shit was gonna happen and it wasn't ever gonna go away.
I'm going to presume
that the carbon economy
isn't going to go away.
Is it dumb
because of the way that it's being introduced? Oh, you betcha.
But that doesn't mean I can't make it work for me

(01:33:25):
because biochar
is sequestration
of carbon. They talk about they wanna pump c o two into the ground.
Like that's gonna work. No. You need recalcitrant carbon in the ground, ladies and gentlemen. Here. My name is David Bennett. I got this project over here. I can pump
hundreds of tons of carbon into the soil and it will stay there for ten thousand years. You don't think they're not gonna love me? Of course, they're gonna love me because carbon is 85%

(01:33:55):
or well, biochar is 85%
carbon by weight.
Now that's a maximum
figure. There's
some biochar or less than that, but let's go with 85%.
It's essentially permanent storage.
You know, literature
ranges its storage carbon storage inside the soil in well, in a biochar storage, you know, type thing.

(01:34:19):
Literature said anywhere between a 10,000
of stability. I'm going with 10,000.
I'm just gonna do this long enough to matter for any landowner,
and it's certainly long enough to matter for any municipality
or sovereign government that decides to get into the nonsense,
but it doesn't matter.
The soil benefits

(01:34:39):
happen regardless of whatever carbon credit accounting you choose to do or for whatever reason you choose to do it for.
Because one pound of biochar
is about 3.67
pounds of sequestered
carbon dioxide, which is gonna kill us all.
Well,
I want one pound of biochar in my soil. I want

(01:35:02):
tons of biochar in my soil because of all the cool shit that it does, that you already know that it does.
Right? I got I got biochar acting as both the soil amendment and a verified
carbon lockbox.
It's measurable.
I know how many pounds of carbon I can put in the soil. It's auditable because I've got that all written down and certified.

(01:35:26):
And those numbers allow me markets
that normally people don't get a chance to get to.
Specifically, it allows me entry into the carbon market.
Like, for example,
a thousand acre deployment
of, like, this subsoiling
thing we've already talked about.

(01:35:46):
Like, I've already done it
to Cathedral. Right? Let's say that I've made my first pass
on a thousand well,
okay, well, just say look at a thousand acres. Before we even plant all the trees, I got a thousand acres. I the soil's jacked anyway. I got I'm gonna have to do these applications anyway
because I need to put cows on there so I can start making money so that it kick starts this whole system. I'm gonna do the entire thousand acres and I'm gonna pay special attention to putting this carbon where the trees are eventually going to go. But I'm gonna do all thousand acres

(01:36:18):
and at one pound
of biochar
applied per linear foot,
I can probably sequester about 12,000
tons of CO2
every year. 12,000 tons, not 12,000 pounds.
We're talking 24,000
pounds. That's just on one shank.

(01:36:38):
Let's say I got three shanks. All of a sudden, our our numbers start going up really hard, and I honestly believe these numbers are rather low. I think it's a hell of a lot more than 12,000 tons at one pound per linear foot on a thousand acre deployment because one pound per linear foot
isn't enough to fill up all the nooks and crannies of the exploded soil underneath the ground and fill up the half inch trench left behind.

(01:37:06):
I can put a lot of carbon in the soil, ladies and gentlemen.
Multiple passes at different depths compound
the carbon tonnage that I can store even further.
I got that. If we're doing if we're if we're charging for services to go do this for, you know, residential places,
I can I can I can log that carbon

(01:37:28):
onto the books?
Carbon credits?
They currently trade anywhere between $42
and $100 a ton.
If
I can sequester
one ton of CO2
in the form of biochar,
right?
And remember, one, you know, one gram of biochar is 3.67

(01:37:52):
grams of CO2,
so I don't have to put down that much biochar to do it, right?
40
to a $100
per ton is what they're gonna cut. I can sell those credits on the market, like I'm selling stock certificates or I'm selling futures or I'm selling some weird derivative.
That's a lot of money because 12,000

(01:38:13):
tons, even though I think those numbers are way low,
$500,000
to $700,000
per year
of potential revenue. Again,
everybody's got a plan till you get punched in the face, but we gotta start somewhere, so I'm starting here.
Half a million
to 3 quarters of a million dollars per year for me to do what I was gonna do anyway?

(01:38:36):
Sign
me up.
I would do this anyway for soil health.
But, hell, if they're handing out money,
I'm not going to leave it on the table.
I get a double revenue stream, man. I mean, landowners
pay for services like me coming out to their ranch or their park

(01:38:56):
or their lawn or whatever.
I get to inoculate. I get to do the resilience and the fertility.
And then the I log all the carbon that I use and the carbon markets pay for the carbon stored in those processes.
Or
or I could offer the service for free.
Or at least at a hell of a discount. I could say, look, this would normally cost you, you know, a $150

(01:39:19):
for me to do. I'm gonna do it for a 100,
just because you're you. And then keep that price. Always have your price at a discount because I'm gonna make up that $50 on the back end anyway when I send my logs in
to get them certified
and then basically
change those carbon sequestration logs into futures or or or credits that I can sell on the carbon market. You see how this works? It's doing things

(01:39:46):
twice. It's getting
well, not doing things twice. It's getting
double duty out of something that I do only once.
Right?
One action,
two sources of revenue.
That's a fundamental feature of almost everything that I can think of trying to do in Cathedral.
That's one of the points of Cathedral.

(01:40:10):
Because carbon credits are it's a ledger of ecological work, according to these people, and Bitcoin is a ledger of energy.
Both of them convert invisible processes into measurable
and tradable assets.
And Cathedral
sits at the intersection.
Biology,

(01:40:30):
energy, and economics
all reinforcing
one another.
Because I'm gonna end up talking about that
next,
of course, not next, but in the next episode
of Cathedral.
Because the next episode of Cathedral is going to dive into
what I'm calling the carbon group.

(01:40:51):
I'm gonna show how biochar production,
energy generation,
and Bitcoin mining
all integrate
with,
well, brewing biology, for lack of a better term.
So let's close this episode out.
I wanna ask a couple of questions. I want you to start thinking about

(01:41:12):
these questions as I leave you alone to go on about your hump day this Wednesday.
We need a different way to think about inputs. Like I said, you know, bags of fertilizer.
What if fertility wasn't something that you bought in a bag?
What if fertility could be brewed, inoculated,

(01:41:34):
and made to self replicate itself
all
on farm
or on cathedral or on your ranch?
What would your ranch or what would Cathedral look like if the pastures never got compacted ever again?
How would your farm change

(01:41:55):
if water stayed in the soil
through every single drought?
How would
how would your lawn look, your golf course look,
your orchard, if you didn't depend on chemical rescue,
but instead biology
glued to every leaf and root?

(01:42:15):
At least for a day. I mean, it is it's gonna wash off, you know, the glomalin is not gonna stay around forever outside in the atmosphere. It's gonna
it's gonna get solubilized by rain, and it will go back into the soil, which is great, but
what what would that look like
you're not having your your plant is healthy it's being its immune system is being boosted from the inside

(01:42:40):
by things that we can brew
Can you see the biology as infrastructure?
Can you see it as not being an input?
I mean, are are we ready to design for resilience instead of just reacting to bad things that happen to us?
What part of your lawn, your land, your golf course, your ranch, your farm, your orchard? What

(01:43:03):
what part of that
could be the test bed for something like brewing biology if you did it yourself and you didn't even have to go full hog? You could look for a smaller,
compost tea brewing system. What part would you test?
Every organism,
no matter how big or how small, needs some kind of circulation.

(01:43:25):
But it also needs a heart.
And that is the next episode.
It'll be Cathedral six,
the carbon group,
the living heartbeat
of energy and carbon.
Catch you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.

(01:43:49):
Have a great day.

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