AdAgrA 2019: True Success

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Seminar 1

John Dysinger

Starting Transplants

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for the things that we're learning, the things that you're teaching us, the fellowship that we're having together.

And Lord, in this class, we just ask that you will guide and direct my thoughts and words.

And those who are here, Lord, if I'm going to say anything, I shouldn't guard my lips.

And I just pray that this time together will be profitable.

So how many of you grow your own transplants?

How many of you are satisfied with the transplants you're producing?

I hope, I'm going to try to keep this simple.

This is supposed to be a beginner class, but I hope that there's just a few simple things that I'm going to share this morning that I think will improve the quality of your transplants tremendously.

And let's just start with a quote to ground us here.

The cultivation of the soil, the sowing of the seed, the care bestowed on the seed by the sower, represent different stages of Christ's work for the soul.

First appears the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.

So as we talk this morning, I want you to be taking the things I'm saying and applying them in the spiritual realm.

And I think specifically, starting Transplants is a lot like parenting and working with young children.

What kind of environment do you want for your children?

So the beauty of the natural world is God has all his spiritual lessons there.

If you're trying to understand something in the natural world, look to the spiritual and apply it in the natural and vice versa.

If you're trying to figure out something in the spiritual world, the natural world has the answers for you.

Just quickly, number 1, it lengthens your growing season.

I think that's clear, especially things like tomatoes.

If you plant a tomato seed outside when it's warm enough, you know, some places you're lucky to get mature fruit before the first frost.

So it just lengthens your growing season.

This is a picture of our starter house in mid-March.

Those are all tomato and pepper plants ready to go out.

We've just added 8 weeks, 8 to 10 weeks, to our growing season.

And if you're like me, a little bit on the OCD side, it's like, I just hate that.

You know, there's all these, all these empty spots and it's wasted space, especially if you have a small garden, you can't afford to have a bunch of bare ground.

Helps you use your garden space more efficiently.

You know, if you're on top of your game and you pull out, you know, you harvest your lettuce, then you could have transplants ready to go immediately where those, that lettuce came out.

And so it's a much more efficient way to use your garden space.

Also, a strong, healthy transplant is better able to withstand pests and diseases as compared to direct seeding.

I don't know if you've had this experience but you direct seed, I've really had this a lot with beets.

You direct seed beets and you're waiting, OK, where are they?

And then the next day, it's, where did they go?

It's like they start disappearing after they've just come up.

There's a lot, you know, it's a big bad world out there.

A lot of things that are after your little seedlings.

So, and then of course, this is a huge 1.

How many of you had the experience you go out and you seed your garden and you come back a week later and it's like, whoa, it's green.

I know my plants are in here somewhere, and you're trying to figure out, OK, that's a weed, that's a weed.

And your weeds have already won the battle, unless you're super, super perseverant.

But with a transplant, you can have it Cleanly cultivated.

You can cultivate the next day if you want.

And I'll just tell you, market gardeners make their living on using transplants.

We direct seed the absolute minimum we can.

We transplant beets, we transplant corn, sweet corn, all our sweet corn is transplanted.

Now, I'm going to be talking about equipment that's really helpful and it can be a fairly hefty initial investment, but do you buy all your transplants at the store?

I mean, if you do and you're getting quality transplants, it can be hundreds of dollars just for 1 season.

You go to the store and you get what they, broccoli.

There's dozens of different kinds of broccoli.

I can produce better quality transplants, and I say I.

I don't want to take credit myself, but I've never found transplants as good as what we can grow.

Grow and plant on your schedule, not when the box stores have the plant.

And in Tennessee, I guess it would be the same here.

But we can have spring cool weather crops and then fall.

But in the fall, we have to be sowing our brassicas, our broccoli cabbage, by the 1st of July.

So that means they're ready to transplant by the end of July.

Where do you find broccoli transplants at the end of July?

I don't know where you're going to find them.

Usually, in our area, By the time it starts getting cool, August or September, you'll find a few transplants.

But I hate to tell you, it's too late by then.

And so they're just making money off you.

They're selling you all these plants that are never going to mature unless maybe you have a greenhouse and they might mature in a greenhouse at that point.

And of course it's fun, you know, Especially if you have children or something, this is great.

Every time those seeds pop out of the soil, it's like, wow, this is amazing.

OK, so I have 3 challenges that I think you are going to identify with.

I think the first 2, I think, are the big ones.

Thom Mayer

Agriculture in Our Soil

Dear Gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, we are in need of your wisdom, in need of your counsel and your guidance.

And Lord, we ask for your Holy Spirit to be here with us.

We realize that we are all students in the school of Christ and Lord we pray that as we move forward, especially in the realm of education, that you guide us in the direction that you would have us go.

So basically the 3 questions we want to answer about true education are what is the aim of education, how does agriculture help to achieve that aim, And why is agriculture important anyway?

And I'll start with the first paragraph here from the book Education.

Our ideas of education take too narrow and too low a range.

There is need of a broader scope, a higher aim.

The True education means more than the pursual of a certain course of study.

It means more than the preparation for the life that now is.

It has to do with the whole being and with the whole period of existence possible to man.

It is the harmonious development of the physical, the mental, and the spiritual powers.

It prepares the student for the joy of service in this world and for the higher joy of wider service in the world to come.

We're gonna be continuing to serve in heaven.

So we better learn how to do that here, right?

My grandmother recently died and we got a bunch of her books.

And this was a book by Haskell, the story of Daniel the prophet.

And I was just kind of glancing through it before I came and I came across this quote here.

It says, God had an object in calling the Jewish nation to separate themselves from other nations of the world.

It was that His people might stand before the world as lightbearers.

As a beacon set on a hill, Israel was to send beams of light to the world.

The plan of education made known to Israel through her prophets was the means of keeping that light burning.

When this God-given plan was neglected, the light as a candle deprived of the life-giving oxygen burned dim.

Then It was that the nation was pressed upon all sides by the foe.

There is a Hebrew maxim which says that Jerusalem was destroyed because of the education of her children was neglected.

The prophecies of Daniel and the connected history prove the truth of this maxim.

It may be added that the Jews were restored to Jerusalem as the result of the proper education of a few Hebrew boys.

It's a pretty sobering story, the story of Daniel and his 3 friends and their stand in Babylon and that whole, I mean just that whole story is absolutely amazing to all of us, right?

And I really believe, as I've been more around this, it's only my fourth year at Daystar, and I'm not saying I'm an expert on these things or anything, and I feel very humbled that the Adventist Agriculture Association asked us to share some things that are happening there at Daystar, but I really believe that agriculture is 1 of the best analogies for how we share the gospel.

God works through types and symbols, does he not?

And really, we have 1 of the best analogies for how we are to share the Gospel.

He had his hands on the gospel plow and 1 day he got old he couldn't fight anymore we said stand up what and fight anyhow.

Fighting, like it's this battle song, right?

That two-edged sword is there in the soil.

We are all, we all have a field of influence.

It's all the people that you come into contact with.

I loved how he brought out last night that The gospel is about relationships, right?

You're building a relationship with the soil.

You're going out into your field and you're understanding it and you're going back and forth and you're working with that soil, right?

You don't just go out there and plant seed, right?

The Bible tells us in Jeremiah 4 3 to break up the fallow ground and to sow not among the thorns.

There's a lot right there in that 1 sentence, is there not?

Look at this quote from Christ's Object Lessons.

She says, the sowers of the seed, and she's not talking about farmers here.

The sowers of the seed have a work to do in preparing hearts to receive the gospel.

In ministry of the Word there is too much sermonizing and too little real heart-to-heart work.

There is need of personal labor for the souls of the lost.

In Christlike sympathy we should come close to men individually and seek to awaken their interest in the great things of eternal life.

Their hearts may be as hard as the beaten highway and apparently it may be A useless effort to present the Savior to them, while logic may fail to move an argument be powerless to convince." How many have been in an argument over spiritual things?

Trying to convince somebody, God even exists, or whatever it is you're trying to convince somebody of, right?

These things are powerless, but the love of Christ revealed in personal ministry may soften the stony heart so that the seeds of truth can take root.

You see, there's a science to sharing the gospel.

We don't just go out any old time, any old month, and we just plant whatever we want.

If you want to be successful in farming, there's a whole progression of working with that soil and soil testing and breaking up the fallow ground before we even bring out this amazing bag of seeds, right?

But it's what's guiding us the whole time.

I mean, the plow, the gospel plow, it's you've taken those seeds by faith into your heart and they have grown something in you that then you desire to share that with others amen the plow right education page 125 the plow the gospel is the central theme of the Bible.

The restoration of God's image in the souls of men.

And really the purpose of education you'll see here as we move through this is the same.

Because really, this is just a bag of seeds.

We can know this thing forwards and backwards.

We can speak with the tongues of men and of angels.

If we don't have that love, It's like you're going around your field with only 1 hand on the plow.

There's a balance that God is wanting us to bring to the presentation of the gospel.

In Matthew chapter 13, Christ goes down on the shore of the of Galilee there and people are pressed around him and he's fed thousands of people with just a little bit of food and he's raised the dead he's done all these amazing miracles and they're like this guy's gonna lead us out from under the Roman oppression, right?

And he steps into a boat, and he has him push away a little bit.

And the first things that come out of his mouth are a sower went to sow seed.

You see, God wanted to come and he wanted to implant his character into the hearts of humanity.

And he, the sower of the good seed, is the son of man.

And we're all called to sow that seed, no matter what our age is, no matter what our occupation is.

Whitmar McConnell

The Basics of Soil Science

Back in 1980, well in the mid-1980s somewhere, Time Magazine published an article by Carl Sagan.

Is anybody familiar with who Carl Sagan was?

He asserted that there were 2 essential parameters for life to exist.

That we had to have the right size star, and that the planet had to be the right distance from that star.

Today, there are more than 200 parameters that are recognized and acknowledged as essential for life to exist, not just exist, but to function.

And that number keeps climbing, and it's gotten to such an extent that even the atheist scientists who have argued against creation are beginning to have second thoughts about their position.

We're going to look at 1 of those parameters today.

It's that thin layer of soil between the atmosphere and the mantle, or the crust of the earth, that is essential for life to exist, but not just to exist, to function and to fully function.

And so I think it would be important for us to know something about that, don't you?

When I teach soil fertility, it usually takes me anywhere from 10 to 12 hours to 3 days to teach this subject.

So we are going to just look at it in a basic way.

What I'm hoping to do is to give you a platform or a frame of reference to use to evaluate the choices that you make in pursuit of working with your soil and improving it.

You'll see that there's a lot of ideas out there, and we're gonna get into that in just a minute.

There are a lot of visual cues that we go by that we assume indicate that a soil is good or a soil is not good.

If it's dark and it's kind of crumbly and a lot of different factors like that, we assume that that means that this is a really good soil.

And it could be that there are things about that soil that are really good.

And I can tell you that I've seen soils like this that are awful.

And I've seen soils that looked awful that were fantastic.

Having said that, I'll tell you that there are none righteous.

I have never seen a soil test that was good, and it was perfect, it was ideal or optimal.

They all have their flaws, they all have their weaknesses, and they have their strengths.

And the key is to be able to know, okay, What should they be?

Is it the fertilizer dealer that's going to tell you what they should be?

How about the compost maker or the chemical salesman?

Is it going to be the conventional farmer?

Is it going to be the biodynamic farmer, the biological farmer, the permaculturist?

We're going to look at some, like I said, we're going to give you some framework.

I can't give you all the detail that I would like to give you, But I want to give you some framework and some foundation because if you have no point of reference, if you have no standard or means of measuring something, how do you know whether you've got it or you don't?

And unfortunately, a lot of people go through life just doing what somebody else does or guessing at it.

I spend more time with growers helping them straighten messes out that they spent money to make.

And so, you know, I don't know about you, but I don't have a whole lot of money just floating around that I don't know what to do with, and I could just throw whatever.

And so we need to use the means that we have to get the greatest benefit out of it.

That's considered the model soil and there's universal acceptance of that assertion.

It's universal, it doesn't matter what school of thought you come from.

And that ideal soil is what is represented there.

The volume is made up of about 45% mineral, about 5% organic matter, and then the other half is pore space, it's air space.

And of that half, about half of that space is filled with water and half of it's filled with air.

When you look at that, does it invoke any questions?

Let's go back to the second chapter of Genesis And what did God say when he created man?

He formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed in his mouth into his nostrils the breath of life.

Now I look at that and I try to imagine in my mind God just saying okay, just Just grab a little bit of this and grab a little bit of that and throw it together and breathe on it.

You can read through the Bible and there's never an instance when God just randomly does anything.

There is a pattern, a very specific pattern to everything.

And so there's a very definite makeup that that soil should have.

And if we had the time to go in and look at each 1 of these nutrients, I could illustrate and point out to you why it's important you have the certain amounts that you do.

And we're going to look at a couple of them because they affect the science of this.

We're going to look at a lot of chemistry, physics, and science today, but it might not sound like chemistry, physics, or science necessarily to you, because that's what that is.

So there are very specific amounts of these nutrient elements that should be in the soil.

Okay, if that's the ideal soil, if I don't have that, how do I get it?

There are a handful of people throughout the world who have brought the condition of their soil pretty tight onto that condition.

How do you know the soil test will get you there?

Just to note, there was a mainstream, it's actually the modeling that I use, the mainstream model, it used to be a mainstream model, It's been marginalized now because of higher priorities.

And labs, just to illustrate that having a soil analysis done doesn't necessarily mean you're going to hit that target because different labs run different analytical processes.

They can take the same soil and they can come up with different numbers.

Well, it has to do with the type of extractants they're using the amount of extractant to soil and the amount of shaking time and a few other parameters, they will determine what those numbers are.

The real key is do they have a model that they can measure?

Do they have a demonstrated model or demonstrated model numbers that they can measure those analytics by to determine whether or not it's achieving this objective?

Series

Seminar 1

The Basics of Soil Science

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Session 4

Soil Tests: Learning the Language

57m

Soil Health

7- Choosing the Right Resources, The End Matters

53m

Soil Fertility Fundamentals

Soil Fertility Fundamentals: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

1h 16m

Breakout Session 2

The Ideal Soil: Water

1h

Soil Health

2- The Three Legged Stool Part 1, Chemistry

54m

Soil Fertility Fundamentals

Soil Fertility Fundamentals: Chemistry is Foundational

50m

Soil Fertility

Getting the Model Right- Part 2

56m

Soil Fertility Advanced

Soil: Getting the Model Right- Part 2

1h

Soil Health

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

1h

Soil Health

5- Environmental Influences, the Other Part of the Growing System

1h

Short Course: Soil Health

Soil Health- Part 1

57m

Sound Doctrine