Horticultural expert Jeff Day describes the differences between petrol-chemical and natural fertilizers.

1. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Jeff Day on Horticulture in
Healthcare
[THEME MUSIC]
Dustin Baly—For as long as there has been human evolution—and
I’m talking over five million year old human evolution—the root
ingredient in our food system has come through plants.
Whether you eat plants direct, which you probably should, or if you
eat animals who have eaten plants (which you should probably do
less), you can see that plant material is our fuel foundation.
For most of the last five million years, we have not used the chemical
fertilizers. These poisonous ingredients are the remaining remnants
of World War One trench warfare. You could say for the many plants,
the poisonous gas attacks, the kind that ended for humans at the end
of World War One, have not ended. Most chemical fertilizers are still
using these poisonous world war one ingredients.
Now, allow me to a place were the chemical poisons have been
extinguished.
It’s in golden gate park on top of the California Academy of Sciences
museum and their website describes it as a wonder.
An exclusive native California habitat has been resorted, on the roof.
In a minute we’re going to talk with the landscape supervisor who
helped build the living roof museum exhibit. He’s the soil shaman dirt
doctor who recreated a new native habitat.

2. As an expert horticulturalist, he’s can effectively illustrate the
difference between plant health in toxic chemical fertilizers and what
natural fertilizers are like.
It’s an important soil biome difference, because our health effectively
comes from plants.
You might not know that squirrels and rats are closely related. Except
that the lifespan of a rat is short at about 2 years and the squirrel
lifespan is longer at over 15 years. What might be causal for this
650% longer average lifespan between closely related species? Rats
are surrounded by poisonous excrement. Squirrel excrement falls
away from trees. I point this out because the chemicals you surround
yourself with can have an impact on your lifespan. Imagine adding
that 650% lifespan increment as a human, you’d live till you were 487
years old!
Now allow me to bring on our guest horticulturist with perspectives in
healthcare, Jeff Day. He’s a dirt doctor who can make a difference.
Destroyed soils need a shaman to save them.
Jeff Day—Hi Dustin, good morning. Thank you.
Dustin—What are the typical ingredients in chemical fertilizers and
where do they come from?
Jeff—Well, let’s start with nitrogen. It’s a process of nitrogen that
comes from crude oil. It’s pumped out of the ground and then it’s
processed. And some of it comes in the form of gasoline. One of the
byproducts of that is nitrogen. That’s the nitrogen that’s blended into
fertilizers such as with ammonia nitrate, ammonia sulfate, and urea.
That finds it way many of the crops that we find in the central valley of
California.
The second would be potassium, comes in the form of K2O, also
another result of the processing of chemical crude oil which is made
into gasoline, it’s made into kerosene for jet fuel, and all sorts of
things. These byproducts are used in chemical fertilizer. And then
finally phosphorus, P2O5 is the form that the plant takes it up in, and
again another result of petrochemical form. In N2O you end up with

3. P205 and K2O which are all specific to plants and are readily
uptakeable. Which is beneficial for the plant, in some ways, but in
other ways very disadvantageous to the soil structure.
Dustin—From the perspective of the plant, what’s it like to get
chemical fertilizer?
Jeff—The plant would get a rush of the three chemicals, the three
main chemicals, there’s about sixteen different elements that plants
need to survive, but the main three, the nitrogen, phosphorous and
the potassium would be in the form readily uptakeable by the plant so
they get a rush of all of these substances, these elements.
And so in the beginning, you would be a very happy plant. Having
one of the essential ingredients that you need to live. However after
that, the plant becomes dependent, and without it would quickly
wither. It would die. It would quickly kind of falter a little bit, and then
without continued use of those types of elements in fertilizer, you will
find that the plant will quickly start to wilt, and will quickly die. So
multiple applications of these fertilizers are necessary, and hence the
multi-billion dollar petro chemical fertilizer business that you see out
in the Central Valley of California.
As far as the plants experience, the plant would be quite happy and
health to begin, however if you stopped applying these fertilizers,
shortly after stopping they would start to die. So the plant becomes
dependent, it becomes almost like a drug addict in that way and
without those substances, those elements, you’d find the plant quickly
declining, quickly dying.
On of the major factors in that is what happens to the soil structure.
So when you apply ammonia nitrate as the name implies, there’s
ammonia in that.
So that acidifies the soil. So that acid really starts to kill all of the
beneficial bacteria, all the beneficial fungi, all of the little, and what we
would call creepy crawlies that are in the soil and actually help plants.
It slowly starts to kill that off. And so over time you end up with a soil
that is basically sterile.

4. So that you are dependent on that type of fertilizer, if you want to
continue to grow corn or rice or whatever your crop may be, you are
almost obligated to use a petro-chemical fertilizer because the soil
structure in those areas have been depleted to the point where it
won’t sustain life, plant life.
Dustin—There’s a strawberry plant that I have in a container from
Home Depot, in my yard, and it had this burned characteristic on the
leaves. Like it’s experience, of having that burned limb is not the
same as having a thriving limb. Now do you think that that is related
to it’s soil experience?
Jeff—Definitely. Sometimes when you see a little bit of burned leaf
fringe like that, sometimes it’s the fertilizer that may be doing that, so
if you used something like Miracle Grow, which is a petro chemical
type fertilizer, it has chlorides and chlorine in it. If you mix it a little too
heavily, then that excess chloride or chlorine, can get into the plant
and it burns the fringes of the plant. Sometimes the tap water that you
use, since it’s chlorinated, or many municipalities use chloramine, if
there is too much of that in the basic tap water that you use to water
it, that can also burn the plant.
Dustin—So let’s talk about the nutrition that we can expect from
plants that use natural fertilizer, vs. chemical fertilizer? What kind of
topline impact are we talking about?
Jeff—Ok, so just like plants need phosphorus, need nitrogen, and
need potassium, so do humans.
And so what you find with plants that have been fertilized by petro
chemicals, using fertilizers like Miracle Grow, you’ll find that it only
has the nitrates and nitrates that are in the fertilizer, potassium in the
form of K2O, and phosphorus in the form of P205, you don’t find any
variance on that.
A human body needs all sorts of different types of potassium, all
different types of phosphorus, and different types of nitrogen, as well
as what they call the micro elements, you’re looking a molybdenum
and magnesium. So petro chemical fertilizer only have very trace
amounts of those elements. And so you’ll find that the produce that

5. you eat with something that’s been fertilized with that petro-chemical
fertilizer, does not have the quantity of magnesium, molybdenum, and
calcium. There are about sixteen elements in plants that are needed
in very trace amounts, that would be in very low quantity wise in the
plant.
Whereas the plant that has been fertilized with a natural fertilizer, it
would be abundant in these elements.
Dustin—The nutrients that I hear you are describing, the potassium,
the calcium, the magnesium, these are all common supplements that
humans are craving. That could be attributed to getting them through
the soil into the plants, that have been cut off since chemical fertilizer.
Jeff—That’s exactly right. Pre World War I, when things like manure
were used for fertilizer, when we used more natural types of
fertilizers, the human body was getting plenty of those elements from
the plants, from the produce that people ate, the foods that people
consumed where naturally high in these elements.
Today they may be high in a certain type of potassium, a certain type
of phosphorus, and a couple of types of nitrogen, but the rest of the
plant is very depleted in those other elements, hence the need for
people these days to take multi-vitamins, and different types of
vitamins to supplement the vitamins that they use to get in just eating
healthy produce.
Dustin—Tell me about the soil environment for the living roof at the
Academy of Sciences where you were a landscape construction
superintendent?
Jeff—Ok, at the Academy of Sciences we planted multiple types of
California native plants, we worked with Rana Creek, down near
Santa Cruz and they brought us a bunch of samples. We started off
with just four types of plants. We started with the beat strawberry, we
started with California poppy, we used a miniature type of lupen, a
plantain, and a type of jaro.

6. We had a big challenge to begin with, because the local birds, they
found that and they were getting in there. We had nice little bugs in
the soil, so we had a little bit of a bird problem to begin with.
So we planted that rooftop and then we supplemented, we sprayed
on endo and exto microrise, so that we would get great root growth.
We fertilized everything with a natural type of fertilizer.
We found that over time, and we did have challenges with birds, and
the wind, and the slope on the rooftops. Some of the rooftops have
about a sixty percent slope, so when watering that, getting all the
irrigation dialed in, it was definitely a challenge.
But that was a major success in the long run of using native plants for
a living roof. It helps cool the building. It’s a great rooftop.
Dustin—Before that, some of your experiences were with redwood
trees at stern grove.
Jeff—Yeah, I was involved in the Stern Grove concert area where we
did a bunch of stone work. In doing that with a bunch of contractors,
and getting the stage built and everything, we had definitely a
challenge with soil compaction from all the trucks, machines, and
everything we used in construction. So after we were finished, we
went ahead, and in a large 100 gallon tank mixed up some endo and
exto microrise with natural fertilizers and with a spraygun went out, I
personally did it, went out and sprayed the area around the redwood
trees, spayed the new turf that we had planted out there, and spayed
everything. It was amazing how quickly everything returned.
The redwood trees in that area were very stressed out, they were
starting to turn a little bit yellow. And these are redwood trees that are
between fifty to seventy five years old. Just the compaction from all of
the traffic, construction, and tractors used in the construction stressed
out the trees.
With some applications of endo and exto microrise and some natural
fertilizer, within about two months, everything not only came back to
the standard that it was before—it was thriving and we noticed that
things were really looking great.

7. That’s when we knew, my partner and I Jake, that we were really on
to something with spraying microrise.
Dustin—Sounds like vegetative healthcare for redwood trees.
Jeff—Yes, it was amazing to see just fifteen minutes after spraying. It
was amazing to look up into the canopy of trees and see this bright
green growth and see how happy the trees appeared after we
sprayed it.
Dustin—Jeff has also been the chief landscape engineer for another
iconic Bay Area location, he managed horticulture at the Cavallo
Point Lodge in Sausalito, California, under the northern end of the
Golden Gate Bridge. A place on the national register of historic
places. How would you describe the soil dynamics at the Golden
Gate National Recreation Area?
Jeff—So this was quite a challenge, this was a former army base in
Sausalito that had been turned into a hotel. And so when I first
started there, we had a fairly new landscape. They had landscaped
most of the area. Not only the old army base, the old army officers
quarters that were turned into hotel rooms, but a new contemporary
area that was eco-friendly and built with an environmentally
conscious process with the solar panels, with actual torn-up Levi’s as
the insulation. But the soil structure there having been an army base
was really terrible, because they had used petro chemical fertilizers
for probably something like 50 years prior to that. So that if you took a
shovel and tried to dig, you’d really hit some hard pan soil and so we
wanted to loosen that up. We wanted everything to be healthy, and
so I started using a fertilizer called Down to Earth, and then blending
that with my own endo and exto microrise and started making
compost tea. I would start applying that every two months, to the soil
for the whole area. It was about 33 acres. I noticed over time that not
only did we see a much improved plant health, but much improved
soil structure as well. So that when you went in to make an irrigation
repair for example, and you had to do some digging, that you did not
need a pick anymore. You could pretty easily get through it with just a
shovel. It was amazing how quickly the soil structure changed. How
all the biome, the microrise had developed a mycelial web with
beneficial bacteria. It really loosened the soil up to the point it wasn’t

8. hardpan everywhere. You could really get in there with a trowl or a
shovel, and very easily dig.
Dustin—It sounds like this dynamic rich, alive soil system allows for
deeper inner connectivity with the plant system, ultimately delivering
more valuable nutrients through the plants to the humans. Nutrients
that we appear to be cut off from, since World War I.
Jeff—Yeah, that’s exactly right. At the hotel, at Cavallo point, we
didn’t grow crops that were edible, but at the same time I used that as
my laboratory, I had 33 acres of plants and many of those plants
were California native plants, that were used to having more of a
more natural fertilizer. Not a Miracle Grow type fertilizer being applied
into them. They didn’t need the amount of nutrients, a native plant is
use to dealing with less, with California having a rainy season from
November through March or April, and being dry for the rest of the
year. A native plant here is used to some stresses. Using a petro
fertilizer on a native plant gave it a little too much nutrient, and so not
only burning the soil, but the plant would be over-nutrified.
So as soon as we started using the natural fertilizer and the
microrise, we used a little less than was needed on some of the
regular landscape plants, and we noticed they immediately they
responded to that. They really started to take off.
Very quickly we were able to go from some of these 4-inch pots that
we had planted, to big beautiful plants within a year.
Dustin—Jeff’s grandparents lived a vintage apple orchard near
Pescadero, California. Jeff, how would you describe the place? How
did it impact your career in horticulture?
Jeff—I would visit them for a couple of weeks every summer, every
Thanksgiving, and every Christmas. My grandmother was an avid
gardener and was an expert in all things related to plants. And so her
love of plants definitely filtered down to me. Every time I would visit I
would find myself in the apple orchard, eating apples from trees that
were over 100 years old. It was originally an orchard with the apples
used for cider, hard cider. Not that I was drinking hard cider as a
youngster, but being in that environment. She had a small nursery at

9. the other end of their property that was called Old Jackson Orchard
Nursery. My father later turned it into a very successful operation.
Just being exposed to that as a kid really fostered my love of plants
and all things horticulture.
Dustin—Jeff’s soil engineering has led him to start 5 Brother’s
natural fertilizer. What does this product contribute to plants, and
where can people find it?
Jeff—What does it contribute to plants? It contributes to a plant that
you are going to be eating, if you are an avid tomato gardener, or if
you are into kale or anything of the other things that people plant in
their garden. In using this product you’ll find that the nutrients in the
fertilizer and transferred directly into the nutrition value of the plants
themselves. So whatever you eat that you have grown with this
fertilizer, you’ll find that it’s much healthier for you than something
that’s non-organic and bought in a store.
As far as the endo and exto microrise, you’ll find in your garden that
the root structure of your plants will definitely be much more vigorous,
and you’ll find that your entire garden, over time will become a
thriving beautiful place that you will love spending time in and
gardening.
This product is one where with the first few applications, you’ll notice
a difference in the plant health. As you continue to apply it you’ll find
that your garden is a much healthier place as far as the plants that
you eat, not only that, but in the health of the plants themselves, you
will find a beautiful green thriving garden.
Dustin—Let’s take a gemba walk with 5 Brother’s natural fertilizer on
my goji berries. A gemba walk is a lean methodology term to describe
a first hand experience. My goji berry plant is a descendant of the goji
berries that came to California with the Chinese laborers who built the
first transcendental railroad. It was easy to add the mix to the
watering can my first year of goji berry production lasted from May
through October. How would you describe the plant experience with
your natural fertilizer?

10. Jeff—In Novato, California I started my garden in earnest with a
couple of redwood boxes. One was about 4x8 the other 4x16 and
started with kale, started with tomatoes, pepper plants, planted
around it were some roses. I noticed after I started using this type of
fertilizer, I had a control and a test.
I put some Miracle grow on one part of the garden, and I used my
blended fertilizer on the other. I found from the outset, the plants that
were watered with Miracle grow appeared much more green and
thriving, beautiful and I noticed it took a while longer for my formula’s
plants to come along. It took them a little bit longer to come to size. It
took a little bit longer to look like they were thriving. It took a little
longer to get up to speed.
But I found that it was like the tortoise and the hair, whereas with the
tortoise, I had to be a little more patient. But in the end, those tomato
plants and those pepper plants were still producing tomatoes and
peppers into late November I was still harvesting. Whereas the plants
that I had fertilized with water and Miracle grow, those had come and
gone.
The tomatoes came on first with the Miracle grow, the tomatoes
looked big and luscious, but they were full of water. They didn’t have
any flavor.
The plants that I watered with my fertilizer, the 5 Brothers type, I
noticed had much more flavor. They were much more nutritious. And
in the end were much more health thriving plants.
Over time as that mycelia web developed, all of my landscape plants
were more resilient as far as water and draught. If I turned my drip
system off for a couple of weeks, while I was on vacation, I noticed
that when I came back, everything was much more resilient as far as
draught tolerance. It did not require as much water.
Plants that used petro-chemicals, if I failed to water them for two or
three days, would start to wilt and die.
Whereas the plants that I had used the 5 Brothers, where much more
resilient.

11. Dustin—That’s an incredible impact on the water table of a natural
fertilized landscape.
Dustin—Allright, let’s roll this up to the top line of chemical vs. natural
fertilizer. Though chemical fertilizers increase crop production; their
overuse has hardened the soil, decreased fertility, strengthened
pesticides, polluted air and water, and released greenhouse gases,
thereby bringing hazards to human health and environment as well.
Jeff—Absolutely.
Dustin—On the other hand, we have natural fertilizers that give us
the nutrients that we are craving and seeking in the supplement
industry.
Jeff—Absolutely. Well said Dustin.
Dustin—Jeff thanks for being on Voices in Healthcare. Tell us again
where people can find your natural fertilizer?
Jeff—First off, thanks Dustin for this interview. I really appreciate the
time with you. If folks are looking for a great natural fertilizer, you can
go to shop.5brothersfertilizer.com.