Accidental Regenerative Management - 3rd Generation Stone Fruit Grower John Warmerdam

Hi, friends. Welcome back. This is John, and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about fun stuff like agronomy and cultural management practices and all the different systems that we can put in place to regenerate soil health and plant health and ultimately human health. And you're in for a treat today. I've been looking forward to having this conversation. You know, shifting farming systems on farms to a more regenerative approach often presents lots of gnarly problems, like there's difficult pieces that we need to figure out, how to transition. And those are challenges that some people really enjoy and embrace. And I haven't met very many who enjoy thinking about challenges and how to overcome them, like my guest today, which is John Warmerdam, a stone fruit grower from California, the wild, undomesticated place called California. So, John, thank you for being here. I really look forward to this discussion and love for you to tell us a little bit of the context of your farming enterprise, your history and your story and how you got to be doing the work that you're doing today.

Thank you, John. It's a privilege to be here. I'm a third generation stone fruit farmer. We're in Hanford, which is kind of the central of the Central Valley south of Fresno. For context, we grow peaches, plums, nectarines, sweet cherries and almonds. We grew walnuts until about two months ago, the price being as bad as it is. And we're certainly a small, small side, around 400 acres. My grandpa came over from Holland back in the teens and started farming stone fruit eventually. And so I'm third generation for that. My dad started his own business back in 73 and I was born in 75. So here I am, just continuing the tradition, I guess, of Central Valley stone fruit. We do have our own packing shed for stone fruit, which is a rarity these days. A lot of folks have gotten way bigger or retired, so there's probably just a handful of grower packers that left, even though there might have been, I'm sure, a couple hundred back even 20 years ago. So times are changing and things are moving more corporate and consolidated, but we're still here doing what we do.

For people who might not be familiar with what stone fruit production looks like, tell us a little bit about year in the life of a stone fruit farmer. Like what are all the cultural management practices and what have your farming systems look like historically and how are they developing?

Well, almonds are a stone fruit just the same, same Prunus species, but almonds, the peach, palm and nectarine are similar and cherries are distinctly different or three different versions. So for peach, plum and nectarine, we're looking to do, you know, fall. Basically the season will start in the fall. We have pruning, dormant sprays, bloom and bloom sprays, trying to, you know, for fungicide we'll do thinning season maybe through, basically this time of year through April. And then the fruit will harvest at various times through the year. So for us it's basically from the 1st of June to the end of September. Some folks have stuff even in April and we're already doing cherries, which is our kind of April made stuff. And then we bring here for packing. The cherries are a little bit different. We do the pruning and the same kind of. We don't do dormant sprays. One of the things that's unique I think to our area is the rest breaking that we need to spray for cherries. So hydrogen cyanomide, a bunch of different trade names, but that's something that's probably our most important spray. It helps us to set the bloom a little bit earlier, but more importantly to give us a. Help us to set a crop. We're kind of at the far reaches of chill, if that makes sense for cherries. So there's some, you know, maybe 100 miles south of us is about, in California for sure, about as warm an area that they're growing cherries, probably the second area that harvests. But that rest breaking is very important and helps us to synchronize our crop, get the flowers to bloom at the same time and then, you know, just taking care of them very quick. Basically from bloom to harvest is about 60 days and we'll be, we've harvested as early as maybe April 25th and we have some later varieties, skinas and stuff that we've actually picked in June. So we might have one of the longer, you know, we run the gamut in terms of varieties for cherries. And then almonds is a new crop for us. We got a new block that we put in a few years ago, but that's going to be the same type of processes but without as much hand labor. You're not harvesting by hand. You're not, you know, your pruning is less. So it's certainly a better crop. As people know, our wages in here in California getting pretty crazy. So that cost of availability of labor does get pretty steep pretty quick.

You know, John, one of the conversations I want to have is to understand how your operation has evolved and how you are farming Differently today from what you were a decade or two ago, obviously. This is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast and I want to have conversations to help people learn how to transition and how to manage differently. And so often when we think about farming systems that are really challenged or really stressed, maybe with intense pesticide applications, a Roundup is a good example. When we talk about soils that have had a history of lots of Roundup application and how that may have compromised the microbiome and. And all the pieces that we need to account for to try to recover some of those soil properties and plant health properties. People's thoughts immediately go to broad acre crops. Corn, beans, Roundup Ready corn, beans, cotton, etc. And we don't tend to think about orchards and fruit and vegetable systems as much. But in reality, orchards get intense Roundup applications, or at least some orchards like citrus and so forth do. What did that pattern look like for you historically and how has that evolved?

It's interesting. I've told a few people, I think at one point we were accidentally regenerative. So I graduated college in 97, came back, and it was a really tough year and to the point we almost.

Went out of business.

I think that's a lot of your stories of regenerative come from that place. But at the time we were just trying to survive. So we reduced our inputs quite a bit. There was a time where my dad and I were the only guys on a tractor, probably for three years, the only guys on a tractor. And that leaves you with a lot of weeds growing, a lot of sprays that you don't do. A lot of, you know, the cultural practices that you would have, the guy would be out there spraying today and this, whatever else that those were things that we let go, if that makes sense, because we didn't have the time or the money in many cases to do that. And I remember coming back to the farm, I didn't have much interest in being on the farm and coming back to help because of the circumstance of being in kind of dire straits. So I was learning what an orchard looked like in that process of seeing the weeds grow and seeing not doing all those sprays. And there were times where we lost crops because we didn't get the bloom spray on in time. There were times where we didn't bloom spray and everything was fine. So you look pretty quickly and you say, hey, do we have to do these things that were being said? I spent a lot of time on a sprayer driving through and doing whatever spray we're doing and seeing the lace wings or seeing the bugs coming out, seeing nature kind of moving. As we got better at farming and made more money and got to kind of turn the ship around. Then we started saying, oh, well, we probably should use some Roundup to clean up the middles. Instead of mowing or disking or whatever we'd done previously. We hired guys and cab tractors and everything else. So we were out there spraying like everybody else. And it was interesting to see. Maybe in a lifetime people don't get to see a change. But I saw a change from good to bad. And now I'm trying to see a change from bad back to good because there are changes that you see. So spraying Roundup, it works great the first time you use it, especially if you haven't for seven years. And then it didn't work as much. It's interesting to see because it's. There's a resistance. And also the change in the. The weed pattern, that succession. We were actually kind of going backwards a little bit as we were moving to originally, probably with cultivation and then moving with. Trying to spray the middles. We never got to the point, which is a. And you've been out here, there's probably half the fields you'll see it's a moonscape. There's not a weed out there. And that is very good quote, unquote farmer who was diligent about doing their sprays every few weeks, perhaps for five years. And there's nothing out there. There's not a weed bank, there's not a worm, there's not anything. It's just dirt. We've always tried to keep green grass going. It was kind of just personal choice that it seemed like a good idea. But we'd go through at Harvard, you know, whatever the harvest re entry interval was, you know, a month ahead and spray round up and kind of push the weeds down sometimes, almost like a roller crimper sometimes and lay it down and it'd be great for picking. But I remember being in the field and seeing the worms. I remember in the field and seeing the bugs and the critters doing their thing and they went away. I didn't see as many lace wings. I didn't see as many ladybugs or whatever it was that were out there. And there was a point where it seemed like. I'm gonna say it's all nuanced. There's not a scientific way to say, hey, our farms getting more. Not artificial. But we were losing some of the aspects that I think that we had in terms of production. In terms of soil health, because soil health is something that you can see if you have an eye to look for it. But I think sometimes we. The aesthetics of a clean field and the practicality of it are evident. But the benefits of having soil life is something that you don't see necessarily. There was an instance of recently with the huge rainstorms that we've had, where the fields that we haven't been cultivating for probably three years now, the water, we had two and a half inches, you know, over a day, and the next day the water was clear. If we needed to spray or drive tractor through, we were good to go. And across the street it was probably 6 inches of water where it accumulated at the bottom, bottom end of the rows. Those are those things that are practical, but you have to again, have an.

Eye to see it.

When you described the transition of seeing things, implementing more pesticide applications and seeing things gradually progress from good to maybe not so good, in addition to the soil health and soil biology, what were the things that you observed happening with tree health and what were some of your other observations?

I think more distinctly for fertilizers, there's a lot of inputs that one can do. We had an instance for cherries where I was probably six or seven years ago, that it was suggested that we put some phosphorus down. And when you. When you get sold phosphorus, you don't know what kind it is, whatever, it just comes in the tank and you put it out there. And we put it down that year because it's a cold, wet winter, the roots aren't going kind of the. The salesman pitch of a perspective on physiology, but that's as far as it gets. So we put it down that for that first year and the crop was fine, it didn't notice anything. The second year we did the same thing. And the third year I said, you know, I don't know if we need to do that. And we sure enough had a very distinctive. I had to get out the old book to see phosphorus deficiency. And I don't know if anybody would have considered what the difference was. Our leaves were probably two thirds the size, a distinctive point at the end, kind of like a candle flame type shape. And we had a university tour out there and we had a really nice crop and had the researcher looking at the trees and I said, you know, what do you see? And he says, well, it looks like you got small fruit. And that was distinctive. And so I know we were probably, you know, a size or size and a half off from what I would have expected for that crop. It's hard to imagine looking back and saying, okay, was it that, hey, was it that spray we did 365 days ago? We're actually 400 days ago because it was at harvest. It's hard to think about what you did becoming something in the future. We also have a lot of inputs, you know, you know, foliar sprays and different things. There's been times that we've done a foliar spray and ended up having a nice crop the next year. And there's other times that maybe we missed it and the trees don't set. It's interesting to see how the activities that we do have a benefit. But you have to have a, you have to have a good memory and you have to have a, a sense of what you see. I'm not sure who said it, but see what you're looking at. You have to look at that crop and see, we're short this year. What happened? We have a good crop. What happened? Those inputs are important. And especially in a stone fruit crop, that's one thing that is difficult. If you have a soil that has a lot of nitrogen from, you know, a fall primer application type thing I've seen. And it works well in cherries where you have a nice flush of growth at the beginning of the season. On a stone fruit, you have a longer period of fruit set and then you need kind of, if you want to see the nitrogen to come in a few weeks later. That grand period of growth is usually, well, basically right about now, which is. I don't know if we'll be on the time for the podcast. It's, it's late April right now, so that's the time that you're growing through, maybe mid May, that's when you need your nitrogen. But if you put your nitrogen front loaded with your soil, that's a little bit of a different timing. So you have the luxury when you're putting inputs to get them done at the right time. You don't necessarily have that luxury when you're looking at it from a regenerative perspective, but when you look at the water's not going down, there's a lot of fields you drive by and you see the water's not going down, you're irrigating, you're figuring out how much water you should put, but it's not getting to your roots, it's not getting to the crop. So I think a stone fruit crop is more resilient to the, to not having a regenerative Space sort of buffers because it's been alive. It's got a root system, it's got all these different things. Unlike a corn seed that needs to get what's there right then. It's almost to my mind a no brainer that you need that for an annual crop or seed crop for perennial crop. You have the luxury of being able to not say take your chances. You got a bank account, things that you've done before, the roots can get what they need. Even if it's not a perfect generative system, it certainly does help. But you got to kind of balance the upsides and the downsides.

How have your pesticide and fertilizer application shifted in the last four to five years? You described briefly the transition that you went to and how you saw things move from great to not so great. What have you observed more recently?

There was a time, like I said, as we, I would say became more successful. You said, hey, I'm going to make sure that we keep this train rolling. And if there was a spray that was suggested, I would spray it. I just got to make sure, hey, we got to cover and protect this crop. We got to make sure that we don't have any issues. And I remembered back to those days where somebody told me, you have to spray this or this is going to happen. And we didn't spray in the past and we didn't see it happen and now we did spray and guess what, we didn't see it happen. So you have to kind of consider and puzzle over the fact that did that spray do what we wanted it to do or did it not matter? One thing that we did a few years ago was mite sprays are something that we spray mid season, but it's right at harvest time. So generally speaking it might be after we've begun harvest. But again we have, you know, maybe four months of harvest season. So you'll have crops that are already post harvest that you can spray and it's like not a big deal when you're doing the minus side. You have fruit that you are going to be picking this week. So you have to make decision, do I spray? Can I wait? Can I put a little bit of oil and give them, you know, just spray oil will be enough to knock them back for a couple weeks. So you're not spraying on the crop. Then you have the stuff that's three weeks out and you say, okay, well the reentry is seven days. So we're okay. We can, you know, pre harvest interval, we can spray it and we'll be good. And then you go and spray it, and then you pick it. But I know there's miticide on there. I don't want to do that. So a lot from your podcast, I've made an effort over the last two years particularly to not spray for mites. And we got a really good pca, and he's out there checking all the time, and he'll send me a picture, hey, you got some mites at the edge of this field. And before I would have said, okay, we got a spray. But now I go out there and I look and I say, hey, they're on the edge of the field. I know the field next to it's been, you know, a little bit stressed. Whatever else. I can see that. Let's wait, let's see what's going on. And if we have our nutrition right, and if we haven't already sprayed for mites. If you spray for mites. There was a few years ago that our former PCA had a spray early, and thinking we knock the mites out, we don't have to worry about it. So we'll spray in April and we won't have to worry about mites all season. Mites regenerate faster than any bug out there that I've seen. They come back quick and hard, especially when it gets a stressful situation, dry or hot. And so that year we sprayed early, you know, with ovicides, just, we're going.

To knock them out.

They're not going to be there. And they came back with a vengeance, you know, six weeks later. And I remember thinking, it's like, wait, with that, maybe that regenerative mind, even back then, that's not what's supposed to happen. We're supposed to knock them out, and then they're gone. They're never going to come back. But if you kill 99%, there's 1%, and they have a life cycle that's like a week they're going to come back, and they come back with a vengeance. And then you don't have any beneficials there. There's nothing protecting you from them coming back full force. You know, it's almost like the sequel movie. The bad guy at the end, you know, reaches out from the grave and you know that phase two is going to come back. He's going to get you. That's what the mites are. They're ready to attack, especially if they don't have a defense system in the tree or in the orchard. So we made a point of not spraying and it's been two years and we haven't done a mite spray. And there's times that we have the edge of the field, the weak trees, whatever, they have mites. But I made that choice to not have to spray and to wait patiently and to see, and it hasn't been an issue yet.

What was your motivation as over the last couple of years, as you've developed a more regenerative mindset, as you called it, what were the driving factors that were driving you to consider doing fewer mite sprays and doing fewer pesticide applications?

I think there's a lot of reasons. I think I've been doing this for 25 years, which is funny to think about. When you do something for a while, you start to think, well, what else can we do? Can we do a better job? Can we get more of a crop? And one of those things is, can we do more with less? Is there a different way to having the experience of seeing the mites, having them come back? Because we need to spray. What if we don't spray? And your podcasts have been instrumental in a lot of that to get an understanding. There's not a lot of research out there how to not spray stuff. You can get plenty of research how to spray stuff, but how to not spray stuff. And why, when you don't have food for the mites to eat, they're not going to live. They're not going to come and be in your face, you know, or in your. In your crops.

I've always said that it's very difficult to prove that you've prevented something just because nothing shows up and the disease isn't there. How do you prove that you actually prevented it? I mean, there are some cases where you have a field boundary separated by 30ft or 50ft, where one field is just infested with a certain disease and the next one beside it is not that. That's pretty clear evidence that something was remarkably different. But in many cases, you don't have that remarkable evidence.

And even if you do, you have to see it and understand it and digest it and then understand what's going on there. It's easy to, well, I don't know why that other one didn't, why that field set, why that one. Not any of those things can have. There's a huge multitude of factors that go into it. You know, one forgotten spray, there's the times where the guys will forget a row, and you say, okay, did they forget that row? There's something there.

Or the.

We do have brown Rot in this row, for example, when we're spraying for bloom sprays, you never know necessarily what actually happened. But you, if you're observant and said, you know, you got a good memory to know what you were doing in the first place, you can get a sense of what's going on. But I said, for me it was, hey, I think there's something we can do better. And then we had an employee who worked for us years ago, and I went to his funeral and he died young. And he asked the kids. His kids worked for us too. He died of cancer. I go, okay, this is our guy who was our spray guy back when he did all the tractor work before we had let him go because we were almost out of business. And so I took over his job basically after the fact. And you consider, well, what happened. It's easy to say, hey, that's sad, and then go to lunch. But it did stick with me because he was a really good dude and I'm friends with his family and everything else. And I say, is there anything that we're doing that could have contributed to that? That was a. Was a thought, but there wasn't anything that really backed it up or when he. Any information. And then, you know, with the glyphosate paraquat, there's a lot of chemicals that have now, I mean, you can get them in your junk email. It's like, hey, are you been exposed to this? It's become part of the kind of zeitgeist, I guess, that people are thinking that maybe these chemicals that we sprayed, without any consideration of them having a downside, do have health issues. A lot of people dismiss. It's like, well, I'm not a plant, so this is not going to affect me. But over time, I think there is growing evidence. At least there's a problem. And I don't know what the problem is, but I know if it is this spray, that's something I like to avoid. I remember being out on the tractor and doing dormant sprays. We didn't have cabs back then. We couldn't afford a cab tractor. And you have the saddest little tear coming down your forehead. It's copper oil and Diazon running down your forehead because you're spraying and that's just what. And you wipe it with the back of your chemical glove and keep on spraying. I don't know what causes the diseases that we're seeing in this world, but I do know that I have a responsibility. If it's a question, if I can Avoid spraying it. And it's very simple. I can put some molybdenum, magnesium, or check for magnesium, sulfur, molybdenum and a little bit of boron.

Right.

And keep my mites off of there. I'd much rather have a healthy tree that's avoiding mites, then go out there and just blast it with whatever chemical that's available and think that I'm doing a good job.

You know, there are, it's interesting the, as you said, the zeitgeist of the moment. There is all of this, at least in the non agricultural world. There's all of this growing awareness of the challenges of glyphosate. And you know, it's worth asking the question, why glyphosate and why now? Is this just a question of exposure or is it just a question of that? This has been around now for 30 or 40 years and we now have an accumulation of evidence. And what about all the other stuff that hasn't been scrutinized to nearly the same degree as glyphosate has? And what are the cumulative effects of some of the other compounds you're using? You know, I'm recalling a verbal conversation, I believe it was with Dr. Terry Wahls, but I need to double check now. I think it was with Dr. Wahls. She was describing how after glufosinate came out in a matter of a couple of years, Dr. Terry Wahls, for those of you not familiar with her name, has reversed degenerative Ms. For herself. She was diagnosed with ms, was in a wheelchair at one point, was completely immobilized and now has fully recovered as a result of dietary changes and essentially removing toxins out of her life. And I recall a conversation where she said that she had dozens of Ms. Patients reach out to her in a very short time period a couple years after glifosini came to be widely used, that were all spray operators that were exposed to liberty were exposed to that specific herbicide. And she was describing how it degraded the myelin sheath of the nerve. And so, you know, there's one anecdote, one doctor that's seeing a pattern. And it makes you wonder what about all the other patterns that are out there that we're missing? What, what else is out there that we're not seeing?

Certainly.

And I think when we're given the idea of toxicity, we're looking at LD 50s, we're looking at this killed so many rats or whatever else in this instance and this amount. So hey, there's not a study there's not a 20 year study on mice. Right? You might have. A year study would be equivalent if they got to that point, but who knows? And, and that's the thing. If you're fair, you'll say, I don't know, it's suspect. I think there might be a connection here. There might be people who have a very strong best interest in it not being a problem and just don't look behind the curtain type thing. And there's other people said, you know, causation and correlation and kind of dismiss it, but if you're living it, and I'm the one who is spraying, so I know what I went through. Right. I'm not saying I got sick from it. I am type 1 diabetic. That's one of those things where you say, okay, is there a correlation there? I don't know. But I know that I see groups of people that have issues. I see things that shouldn't happen. I can go to church and see a bunch of autistic kids. And it's something that I don't remember seeing. You know, people that I know that are autistic. You go, wow, there's six kids in church right now that are autistic and there might be 40 kids there. You start doing the math and you're. You, you say to yourself, what is the answer? And there are people who are supposed to give us those answers, but I haven't heard a good answer yet.

Well, and the people who seem to have good answers are vilified by the people who are supposed to have the answers.

Welcome to life. Yeah, yeah.

You know, John, when I visited your farm last summer, you said something that I made a note of. And I don't recall the full scope of the conversation that we were having, but we were talking about the use of nitrogen applications. And you mentioned this a little bit ago when you were talking about cherries versus the other stone fruit that you're growing. And you mentioned the phrase of nitrogen as a growth regulator. How are you thinking of using nitrogen as a growth regulator on your crops?

When you apply nitrogen, and especially as a straight UN32 application on a stone fruit crop, cherries, peaches, anything, probably within 10 days, you will see growth. And it's not the growth that you want. It'll be. The latent buds will start pushing. You'll see, you know, kind of almost dragon scales. You want to have that extension on the end of the shoot, which is a normal peach branch, but you'll just see weird spots start growing and you have to say to yourself, okay, what happened in those 10 days? Did the tree magically gain a bunch of nutrition and carbohydrates, which is what's going to drive that growth? Or did something tell it to grow? Did it say, hey, did you put money in the bank account? Or you just decide to spend it? And there's not, I don't know, any way that that amount of carbohydrate accumulation would happen that quickly. So by putting that nitrogen application, you're directing the tree to say, hey, you're in a good space, you found a fertile soil, right? Now's the time for you to grow. But in nature, you're never going to get 40 units of fully soluble urea, ammonium and nitrate all at once. So I'm of the opinion that you can direct the growth of the tree by applying a nitrogen web in whichever form and get it to grow absent of a increase in the metabolism or whatever of the tree. And I think that is something that you see like when you have a rhizo sheath type corn plant or whatever else. And I said, I've only been to Iowa once, so I don't know anything about what they do out there. But when you see a plant that is growing, a lot of times the people will say, hey, I have a plant that's growing its roots first. If they put a bunch of nitrogen out there, it's going to grow the top first. There's something telling that seed or that newly sprouted seed make growth on the top or make growth at the bottom. And it's amazing to think that there's a mechanism that strong that can tell it and that that mechanism is nitrogen based. So that idea of it being a plant growth regulator, I don't. That's a good physiological idea, but I can't see any practical way for nitrogen to be able to turn that corner, make that tree grow that quickly, other than stimulating it to grow, rather than stimulating increase in carbohydrates or whatever to make it grow.

Yeah, that's an interesting point. I hadn't thought of it quite in the context of the carbohydrate requirement, but you're absolutely right. There is a tremendous amount of carbohydrates and sugar energy needed to achieve the amount of growth that is common on tree fruit. I mean, this is perhaps less obvious with annual crops, although those crops certainly respond strongly, but they tend to respond strongly within the vegetative growth stage anyway. But it's an interesting point. I hadn't thought of it quite in that context. That for many of these tree crops, we don't actually want strong vegetative growth.

You want to have the two types of trees that have strong vegetative growth are strong trees or trees that have a bunch of nitrogen. Right. So you can have strong vegetative growth, but no flowers. You can have strong vegetative growth or weak fruit. You can have both. But if you're looking at that tree and you say, hey, I want a big, strong growing tree, you can either do the hard work of taking care of the tree and giving it what it needs and being able to naturally produce a strong growing tree, or you can do, I'm gonna say, the easy route, but if you apply nitrogen, you can make any tree grow and look big. But where's the internodal spacing? What's the flower density? It's gonna be substantially different. It may be the same size as the tree that you're farming well, but it's not necessarily going to be the good quality growth that you want.

One of the things that I've talked about, as we start managing nutrition differently and look for different nutritional balances and profiles to achieve plant health, one of the phrases that I've used is that plants begin behaving differently, they begin responding differently. So pruning might need to adapt or thinning, thinning fruit, thinning blossoms and so forth. How have you seen this evolve with your operation? And has there been any need to make changes in your cultural management practices, managing the tree canopy and so forth?

It's interesting because I would say traditionally, you know, back when, before, you know, in the early days, we left way too much fruit on the tree and we'd always have small fruit. And then as we got better with nutrition in those transitional years, in the, you know, the early, probably first 10 years that I was here, our nutrition got better, our water management got better, and we started sizing these big crops that nobody probably left on the tree. And it was interesting. I had my PCA back when, tell me he says, you have bigger fruit and more fruit than anybody I know, which is maybe a backhanded compliment, I guess. When you have your tree, you have the fruit density, you have the amount of fruit that sets. You need to be aware and make a lot of, a lot of estimations to say, let's prune it like this. Because we're going to set this kind of crop, especially on peach, plum nectarines, where we're doing hand thinning, there's not really a very effective chemical thinning agent that we can use. So we spend a lot of money on hand thinning. If you do a bad job with your pruning job, then you're going to have a big cost on your thinning job. So we're trying to estimate and find a happy medium whether we're going to have like this year, rain events and set less. So there are many trees and I've always been surprised when I go out to see other people's trees. There's places where you see three feet of peach hanger growth. And for example, like early season peach, you harvest the crop and it can keep growing. And then you have, when they come back to prune, they'll leave one really big hanger and put three pieces of fruit on it. That's their crop. We've always had less growth than most.

Other farmers have on their trees.

And we leave more wood. And then that wood you have more, how to say, maybe a better leaf density. Because it's not all one spot. If you have 113 foot hanger sitting there, you're going to have a big void of space around it where there isn't sunlight capture. So we have kind of more of a, almost more like a citrus tree, I think, than a peach tree or traditional peach tree with these little shoots going everywhere. And I think that does help us in terms of balancing out our crop. It makes it difficult sometimes to prune because it's really easy to tell the guy, find that hanger and leave the one really big one. I think that's what traditionally a lot of farmers will do for their peaches and things. Looking at flower density is another thing that when you have a lot of growth, there's a lot of times you'll see on a peach limb we had an orchard that had the back half. The field was a lot more vigorous for whatever reason. And we weren't applying nitrogen, it was just sort of naturally that way. And the guys would prune in the front of the field and they would leave these little branches and look like there wasn't much there. And they'd get to the back of the field and they'd prune and they'd have these big hangers. And you say, wow, it's going to be great. And that's what you think. You think all winter long there's going to be a bunch of fruit back here because these branches, this is the early days. I wasn't looking at the flower density. You can see it on a piece. You can see it's got a single leaf bud or it's got flower Bud, the buds are together. And so when it comes to bloom time, you see, there's not as many flowers as I thought. And then come to harvest and there was half the crop and these vigorous trees that look great didn't have a. The crop that we were looking for. Well, how do you slow that down? We're not applying nitrogen. It was just sort of naturally that way in that back half. And over the years, it's kind of mellowed out a little bit. But it's one of those things you need to be aware what your crop can be and what it maybe should be and prune and thin and fertilize accordingly.

One of the things that I've spoken with Steven Beerlink about and others about is the idea of early fruit pruning. And it just. And there's kind of a parallel idea as well that I see with summer pruning, where, for reasons that I don't understand, there seems to be a fairly high level of comfort in different fruit crops of delaying fruit pruning and even summer pruning until what I would consider to be relatively late. Have you played around with fruit pruning at all? And how have you seen that shift?

When you prune, you are, I must say, leveling out the crop or taking tasks off your table. If you got a project to do and you have 10 tasks to do, you can maybe get 10 tasks done. But if you take it down to where you have five, you can do a lot better job at it. So it makes sense to prune, especially when we're artificially sizing peaches. Peaches should not be 3 1/2 inches wide in nature. They wouldn't. Would never do that. So we're trying to artificially get a much bigger size fruit than we normally would. When you summer prune, it's a similar thing you have. It would be an epicormic shooter, a sucker. Those are pulling a huge amount of resources from the tree, and they're not giving you anything back. You'll have a tree. Generally, in terms of tree physiology, there's certain shoots that will grow in absence of their own carbohydrates, and those would be the suckers. If you cut a branch back, it regenerates a huge branch. Well, those would grow in the middle of the tree, but the resource demand of that branch is huge. You cut it out, you have, you know, a quarter pound of lignified materials. You got maybe 100 leaves on there. Sometimes that's all resources that could have gone to the fruit or the Fruiting areas, the leaves and everything around the fruit. But instead it went to this junk. And the sooner you prune it, it's almost the best. I think Stephen said that best plant growth regulator is a pruning shear because it's distinctive and you know exactly that. You're cutting it off. You're redirecting that nutrient to the parts of the tree that you want instead of the junk that you don't want. And even if it's not impeding you by. For shading or anything else, by pruning early, you get the benefit of stopping that growth and redirecting those nutrients that are naturally there to the places you want.

Yeah, and there are these cumulative benefits of pruning early. You know, you shared this book with me on concepts for understanding fruit trees and looking at tree carbohydrate sinks and how they move around. And it's been a fascinating read because conceptually, I'm already very familiar with many of the ideas. But it's a completely different point of view on managing trees. You know, in some ways, it's more akin almost to managing livestock. And the idea that if you have a stunting effect on a baby animal, that stunting effect is going to follow that animal for the rest of its life unless you do something pretty extraordinary. And we should be managing our trees and our crops in the same way, but often we're not.

No, certainly. I agree. I said the book you reference is Ted DeYoung was a researcher. I guess he still is a researcher, but emeritus now at UC Davis. And the Kearney Ag Station is here in our area. And even back when I said there used to be hundreds of grower packers, they used to have. The hall would be full and we'd all get a couple donuts, and there'd be 400 people there. And then there was 200 people, and then there was 100, and then the room got smaller, and toward the end, there was 30 people. But they had a huge wealth of knowledge of understanding how trees work. And I probably heard Ted give the same talk, kind of like the podcast. You hear him two, three times. But every time you hear them, there's a little bit of a nuance that you get. And one of the things that he always talked about was, and it would be in fruit thinning, particularly, is the early thinning. And similar to early pruning, has a compound interest rate effect. You would always make the point. If you thin early enough, you not only get kind of a linear, you get a parabolic curve in terms of the increase of your fruit size because it's a compound rate and it makes sense for that because the, the tree has a sink and it's a larger sink and it can pull more and it's not competing with that. I've always had the thought when you thin, oftentimes people will thin based off of the thinning cost. So if you go out on peach trees and the peaches or golf ball size, it's actually pretty easy to thin. You're not having to use your fingers.

You can use the, almost the back.

Of your hand and just kind of knock off what you want. But by then you look at the ground, you say, how much resources are we throwing away? How much are we putting on the side? In 2006, it was kind of the. Maybe it's the first year. I said, hey dad, this, we're doing stuff different, right? We had an orchard and we thinned it and that year was a low chill year. So the fruit was out, but the leaves weren't out yet. And we thinned it before there were even leaves on the tree. Fruit was probably pea sized to maybe a small almond size. And I remember harvesting the crop and I couldn't believe how much crop we got and the quality of the crop we got by thinning that early. And that was something that they had always suggested, but it was hard to do. It's. You don't want to spend the money to do that, but it's like, hey, let's go for it. And we certainly, we paid for it many times over by doing that and was just understanding the physiology. If you're looking at it on a spreadsheet, you'd say that's crazy. That's going to cost you 20% more to get that job done. But we got 40% more returned or whatever it was. I'm just picking a number by doing that. I think there's a lot of things that we don't understand fully or consider in terms of the. The book describes the idea that each, each entity, whether it's a flower, a leaf, a fruit, a shoot, is semi autonomous, which is kind of like a cow would be or whatever, you know, crop that you have. And if the collective is doing well, then that's a good thing. If you have wheat grass and they're not growing, you can't make that up. So if the fruit has what it needs and it's always having the resources that it needs, it can grow to its highest potential, but you don't know what the highest potential is. And so by by thinning fruit in that particular instance, you're able to redirect all those nutrients so it has that best efficiency. But we always, I think we too often think of trees kind of anthropomorphize them. We, we say they're tired or they're, they're stressed, but it's not a stress that they don't have a. The hormones. They do have hormones, but they're not saying, man, I'm having a bad day out here. They're saying, hey, I need these resources and they're not available. So I'm gonna build that, that fruit with the resources that you gave me. You gave me half as much calcium, I'll make you fruit. But it's not gonna, it's gonna fall apart, it's gonna have a deficiency, it's gonna have a cork spot or whatever else. And if you don't give me enough carbohydrates, yeah, I might grow to that 3 inch fruit, but I'm gonna be 9 brix instead of 15 or something that you might want it to be.

Yeah, I think. You know, it is intriguing how we have all of this historical knowledge, as with Ted's knowledge that has not, hasn't really made it. It sounds like it was mainstream in a local area there for you. But I'm sure there are many people who are not familiar with his work who would deserve to know about it, so I intend to. This is really good book, Concepts for Understanding Fruit Trees. I'm going to link it to the show notes if anyone wants to follow up on that.

I'll talk to Ted and see if he can join you on the podcast. That'd be. I'm not saying he's humble. He is humble, but it's one of those things. You can have a lot of knowledge, but there's not a lot of people that are cognizant of how important that knowledge is or how different it might be. He's talked about that idea of the economy of a tree for a long time, but if there's 30 people in a room to hear it, and about 15 people came just for the donuts, it's a little hard for that information to get out there and get the, the perspective that it really needs.

I think, well, it's so important. I've seen so much knowledge disappear over the years from elderly people that have taken it to the grave with them, and that's something that we want to avoid happening as much as we can. You know, John, you've had some very different experiences on your farm over the last 25 years, and you've taken a very different pathway from most. What is something that you believe to be true about mainstream agriculture or about agriculture in general that is different from the mainstream view?

Well, I'd mentioned that we have, I think, a moral responsibility to create the. To create safe fruit, to create a healthy product. I think that sometimes that kind of goes under the radar, if that makes sense. We have chemicals that are considered safe by regulatory agencies and they tell us, hey, they're good to go, there's no problem. You spray them. You don't think about it. We think of the upside as tangible, but the downside is, is not intangible. It's. It's something that you need to be aware of. I have a concern here, especially in the Central Valley, for water. I think we live in a fantasy world where we. Well, this year is different. With all the rain that we've had, probably unprecedented rain, Tulare Lake, which I see in the news all the time and nobody ever even knows existed, hardly. It's about 10 miles south of us. And it's interesting to see national news talking about, you know, your backyard. But we, we live in a world where even in stone fruit you have a commodity, because that's what we are that you don't necessarily always get a great return on. And we don't take the kind of true cost accounting of what it costs to pump that water out. In my lifetime, I've seen the water. I don't know what it was when I was a little kid, but I probably seen it down and go 100ft in our area from.

From 60 to 160.

We're kind of at 160ft of water. What will that be for my kids? They're going to get to 260, they're going to get to 320. How far down does that water need to be? We live in that world where it's easy to turn on the pump and the water comes out until it doesn't anymore. And I think that we take for granted that that water will be there forever. And especially when you're creating a crop that you might break even on. I don't know what, how. I don't want anybody to regulate what we do. But if you said, hey, let's just all grow 20% less of what we're doing and get a good return on it and get the value on it so we don't saturate the market with this product that we're doing at cost in many cases that's what commodity is. And think that we're not accounting for the water that we're using to get to that point. That's something that there's a lot of regulations that's coming down the pike. Sgma, which is a Sustainable Groundwater Management act, where each region is going to have to have a plan and restrictions on how much water they can pump. And that's not something anybody's looking forward to. But how that's implemented is going to be the biggest issue. And I don't think many of us even have a consideration for what that's going to be. But probably half the people haven't really thought about it. But I'm still young enough to say that I want to make sure there's still water here. So it's something that we don't see. It's kind of like roots. People don't give roots the credit they deserve. We certainly don't give the groundwater the credit we deserve to make sure that we're maintaining it, we're taking care of it, or protecting it from contamination or other things as well.

You know, when you think about where we are as a country, and this is true for many different countries around the world, there are strategic resources, strategic reserves. Let's take oil as an example. If we think of oil, we'd like to think of oil as being infinite. We behave as if though it's infinite, but we all know it isn't. And so knowing that you have finite resources, is it better strategically as a country to develop oil internally and get as much of it out of the ground as you can, or is it most strategic to somewhat develop it, cap it, and import as long as you can, as long as it remains relatively inexpensive? Strategically, you would think that you want to import as much as you can and maintain your own reserves so that you have those reserves for the future when supplies become tight? And if you take that approach to thinking about groundwater and water management, the reality is we could think of our almond exports and our, to some degree, other fruit and vegetable exports that are coming out of California. We're simply exporting water in a different form. It's in a different package. We don't think of it as water, but when we are exporting almonds, we're exporting water. And strategically, is that the wisest use of resources and our natural capital, our ecological capital that exists?

That's true.

We have. It's interesting that almond water has become an issue. It's kind of like said the zeitgeist, where people are talking about it. Oh, it's. Every almond is a gallon of water. People have no idea what an acre foot is, much less three and a half acre feet that you're gonna need to grow a crop of almonds. And when you, yeah, when you pencil it out, that's a lot of water. But we have that many times it is surface water. We maybe we have the luxury of having surface water when we have it, but we have the expectation to grow a crop because it's permanent crop. If you got an almond tree, your almond tree is a 20 year crop and you're gonna need water every year. And so I think people, once you plant that almond tree, you're betting on the expectation that you're gonna have 20 years of water. And for the export part, that's fine. The only thing I would say counter to that is that we, we can overproduce. We produce way more food than we need. Right. So you can say, hey, we're just gonna not grow it. That would be fine. But it's really difficult. That's that part. I don't want a regulation to say, okay, Everybody just produce 80% of what we have or whatever else. We create a surplus because we're so good at what we do. And we have a climate that that's just 85, I think percent of all almonds in the world come from California because we have the perfect climate. We have the technology, we have the, the Mediterranean climate, we have great soils and we have water most years from the Sierras to be able to do that. But to say that we shouldn't do that is difficult. To say that that's tough. And there's I think almonds probably now the almond and dairy, which is, that's another question too, whether dairy is sustainable in our area. Sorry, dairy guys. But it's, it's one of those things that is going to be hard choices once the water starts getting tight.

Yep.

John, where do you see opportunities? Where is the unrealized potential? What do you see that other people don't see?

That's probably the toughest question because for our industry, for example, 20 years ago we had two types of boxes. We had tray pack, you know, tray packing for the big fruit, volume fill for the small fruit. And then you started getting the consumer packages and bags and different things. And the guys who got in early were the ones who made the inroads. They got a little bit higher price and went from there. Our industry kind of had a revolution when we had white flesh peaches, white flesh nectarines pluots or plum cots, donut, peaches, all kinds of different specialty fruit. And the guys who got in there early, especially within a marketing advantage, made.

A lot of money.

There isn't a lot of opportunity. There hasn't been anything really new. And when it is something new, the. The breeders and other marketers have figured out that it's a proprietary. So either you're in or you're out. There's still opportunities in terms of, you know, maybe times of seasons and other things, but we've really maybe backed ourselves into a corner by being so successful. One of the examples is table grapes, which we don't grow, but there's been new varieties of table grapes with different flavors, different profiles, different cropping potential. And the market is saturated with these really, really good table grapes that can produce now with the different trellises, twice as much as they were before. And you tell yourself when you plant this variety, hey, we were getting 600 boxes or whatever. Now we're gonna get 1200 boxes. This is gonna be so great. But guess what happens? The market has to absorb another 600 boxes, including the ones you're originally producing, and do it at a price that you're able to produce it at. And the consumer is going to have to buy that. And if they don't now, you've. You've not only flooded the market, you've made yourself kind of in a negative direction. So I think in many ways, we're a victim of our own success. There's plenty of stone fruit, and every year there's. Oh, there's less stone fruit. Okay, well, that's good. The price will go up. The price stays about the same. And when it's a big supply, there's some fruit that doesn't make it. Make it have a home. There's still a decent price. You're still just kind of floating in this kind of middle, middle ground where it's always pretty good but not that bad. And that's.

That's hard.

I don't know, opportunity wise, really. And if I did, I might tell you. But there's any number of different. Different things. But I said, when we do the regenerative and we actually, I'd like to do less work because I work more than I want to. And we had a ranch for sale. And when the guys come out there, nobody ever asks, hey, have you sprayed glyphosate here for the last four years? Hey, have you? You know, there's not an upside to that. I wish there was, but it's hard to distinguish. And the marking side too. Hey, this fruit didn't get sprayed with miticide. Is it worth more? Some people might say yes. I would say yes. But I don't think there's a place in the market where in a world where you have organic and conventional, there's not a middle ground where you can say, hey, there's a third spot on the shelf that we're going to put. So I see it. With the proprietary apples there's a lot of new innovative things. But because there's so many, we, we back ourselves into that corner really quickly to where there's a abundance of riches that doesn't necessarily result in anything great for the farmer because the market, which is where all the dollars come from, the market, there's not a way to either quantify it or to fill that space or fill a void that isn't already filled by something else.

Yeah, John, this is an interesting conversation. I feel like we could go into market dynamics and have a pretty interesting conversation, but we may need to save that discussion for another day. I guess perhaps a simple follow up question is what do you see as the long term future for maintaining viable markets for you as a farmer? What's the resolution to the dilemma of being trapped by your own success from your perspective?

I think there's always opportunities, everything. You're kind of like living in the moment, if that makes sense. So for example, we've made a huge effort to have trees that are of a easier structure to pick. My intention was to have a short tree that the guys can pick. I think we still need a ladder because a six and a half foot tall tree is not going to be enough, in my opinion to set a good crop. But we have trees that are nine and a half feet tall. The guys can go through there. They're a four liter tree so it's easy to get. Guy goes down one side is almost kind of a fruiting wall type thing. We did all of our pruning this year without ladders. For example, in those orchards that are set up we have the guys prune as much as high as they can with the pretty sure they can get up to 8ft. That last foot and a half was done on a trailer. We have a tractor trailer with a kind of a fence around it. And the guys were able to prune the whole thing from the ground and from that trailer without having to climb a ladder. And then you have the benefit of, you know, nobody fell off a ladder. Obviously there's a lot of people that are Moving to platforms which dedicated platforms that are in that eighty thousand dollar range. I don't know how that pencils out, but God bless them if they can do it. You know, there's opportunities for newer varieties and newer things, but our market is saturated. There's not a early season niche, late season niche that really stands out. That if I could snap my fingers at, man, I wish I had a peach that came off, you know, the first week of July or whatever else, right. If I had this magic wand to make that we, we've filled that season, even, even 10 years ago, there were still some gaps that you could fill in. But right now, not so much. The one variety that you did see when you came out here was our green plum, which I'm kind of a little bit proud of. It's a specialty plum that goes to export to Asian countries quite often for the ghost festivals. Kind of, I guess, kind of equivalent to Christmas or something for them. And in their tradition, both kind of in a religious sense and in a, you know, you might go over to somebody's house and bring a bottle of wine. In many Asian countries, you bring over a piece of fruit and the best that you can find. And so the, the green plums that we have are, we harvest by hand and we pack them by hand. You got to see that there's not a machine that touches them. There's. There's two sets of fingerprints on every single one of them. They're sized by hand. They go in a little box and they go out on an airplane and go to Taiwan for their moon festival or whatever festival is going on at the time. And so I kind of pray for Taiwan right now. Everything's good with the Chinese issues, but that's one place where we've been successful because it's something that people don't want to do. Anybody who comes out there says, how much do you get for that fruit? And I tell them, they go, okay, but that seems like a lot of work. I don't want to do it. Rainier cherries is another example. It's something that there's not that many growers who want to take the effort because it's easier to grow red cherry and I have to worry about it. You're not worrying about getting color on the fruit, you're not worrying about bruising. It's just easier. So I think for us, because maybe we're more hands on or maybe we're not as smarter or maybe not as good marketers and we have to do those things, we tend towards Finding something that other people don't want to do and making the best effort to do that. Extra effort, the extra time, extra money. And that's helped us be successful up till now.

You know, John, one of the concepts that I'm intrigued by, Ray Archuleta talks about this concept of calibrating your soils. And he constantly asked growers in presentations, have you ever calibrated your soils? And what he means by that is, have you ever tried reducing your fertilizer applications and doing a half rate and a full rate and a double rate just to see what crop response you get? I find this to be an interesting concept that we often don't think about. This is the way we've always done it. This is what the historical recommendations and standards are. But is that really what we should be doing? How have your nutrition management practices evolved over time?

When we first started, I didn't know anything about anything. I came back without a college degree in ag or anything else. And I saw what other people were doing. I think that's how a lot of people start. They do what the neighbors are doing or see what the university said. And we tried things, and I had the luxury of being out in the field to see the differences. I could see at that time, the zinc deficiency symptoms in the book look just like our trees. So we were really focusing on zinc early on. I didn't mention, but we almost went out of business because we put too much nitrogen on. So I was scared of nitrogen. So that was probably a good thing in retrospect, but we were trying to find a rhythm and that.

Hang on, hang on a second. That sounds like a pretty interesting story. We see nitrogen excesses causing problems all the time, but how do you almost lose the farm because of nitrogen excess?

Well, I'll say, sorry, dad, but one year we made money, and my dad, like me, was always trying to find a way to do a better job. And I think he hooked up with two different nitrogen, I should say fertilizer guys. And both of them gave a recommendation for nitrogen. And I was just out of college, 22. I didn't know any better, but we had lots of issues, a lot of rejections. Just bad fruit the whole season. And looking back, I have one picture from inside the packing shed, and we have our one field that was right out past it, and I could see, like, four feet of hangar growth, which is not what you want on a peach or an actuary. So in retrospect, I think that's what happened, that we took recommendations from other people out of the context of our own experience and put on too much of something that ended up having a big issue. A lot of nitrogen and no calcium is a recipe for disaster, especially on peaches. So that was my introduction to the idea of fertility. And probably for 10 years I don't think we hardly put any nitrogen down. May have heard us sometimes for tree growth, but it was certainly a poison pill that we'd already seen and wanted to avoid.

For those of our listeners who aren't familiar with stone fruit production, what I'm hearing you saying is you had all this new growth and how does that then translate to a loss of yield or productivity?

Peaches set their fruit on the new wood, so perhaps the next year you'd have more flowers because you have a larger tree. But we're already pruning, we're already thinning, so we don't need to have a whole bunch of wood. We need just enough to set the crop load that the tree can manage coming into that season. And again, it was me coming back from college, I'm not sure, but we certainly had a lot of new growth. And your growth, like we talked about it, it's a semi autonomous unit. You have that fruiting area is growing, but there's only so much nutrition, there's only so many carbohydrates to go around. So if you're growing a four foot hanger instead of a 18 inch hanger, which might be preferable, all the nutrients that are going into that extra two and a half feet is going to be at the detriment of your fruit. You're trying to find a balance between next year's growth and the fruit crop then and what you can grow right now. So I think by putting on that extra nitrogen, we did that growth response where the trees grew like crazy. And anybody who didn't know better would say, oh, look at that beautiful big green tree. That, that's great. That wasn't our intention, but that was the end result.

Got it. So that results in a loss of quality, loss of yield and loss of tree strength for the future. So anyway, back to your story. I had interrupted you, so you stopped. From that point forward, you didn't apply nitrogen for 10 years and you started focusing on zinc.

Yeah, there was times we were putting.

More zinc on the nitrogen, which is funny to think, and it would be a little bit of low biure or whatever else. We were using neutral zinc, which is zinc sulfate that's neutralized to a neutral ph with zinc oxide. So that was kind of our standard Practice and everybody's standard practice, but we were focusing on it. There were a lot of times that people were putting it on. You know, Halloween, for example, was kind of a classic time because people were thinking, they're going to knock the leaves off. I'm going to put zinc and I'm going to get into the tree. But that didn't make sense physiologically. So we started moving it to post harvest or maybe the 1st of September, to where the zinc could actually be utilized by the tree, Become not just elemental zinc. It would become whatever product that was used or it was using the enzymatic form to, To. To get those processes going. If you're looking at a tree as a carbohydrate economy, you need to have those units in place to say they're doing a job. So, you know, for example, calcium is structural. If you don't have calcium, you're not going to be able to build structures. It does other things. Or potassium and boron, for example, helping to transport nutrients. So if you have the nutrients but they don't transport, or you're building something, you don't have the materials.

I'm not sure if, you know the.

I Love Lucy video where the candy's running down the line and she can't handle it, there's too much. It's a classic video. But once you are forced to do something you don't have the resource to do, then you do a bad job. You start putting the chocolate all over the floor and eating it and everything else. That's basically what the tree does. It's still going to make a peach. But is it made out of the right materials or is it just built with whatever's available? I think that's what happens. We had a lot of soft fruit, a lot of rejections because the fruit was falling apart. It didn't have enough calcium, it didn't have nutrients. The calcium was going into the wood instead of into the fruit.

Those processes are things that you have.

To be aware of and find a balance between the two.

So what happened next? How did your nutrition management continue to evolve? You avoided the nitrogen problems. You started putting on a lot more zinc. And then how did things evolve from there?

Zinc was a standard practice, and it's probably the number one nutrient. But even for corn, like you, you've said in your podcast, that's one that people realize is a micronutrient that trees need and it's effective to use as a fertilizer.

But then I started saying, hey, what about boron?

What about manganese? Trying to use those other products and then learning each of them and saying, how do we put sulfur on? How do we get calcium on? How do we do all these different processes? On the university level, I was always surprised they would say, hey, calcium foliars don't work. Maybe they don't. I don't know how you're testing it, though. That's the hard part. If you're looking at it from a standard leaf analysis perspective, a few quarts of calcium is not going to do anything. But if you're putting on early in the season when the fruit is building those cells and cell division stage, maybe it is getting to where it needs to go and you have to see the results, but they're less tangible. There's not a, a good test other than actually seeing the fruit to know if it has what it needs. Structurally, it can have the same crop load, it can have lots of different things, but it's made out of a fluff. It's not made out of something solid. So we were just trying the different steps down that road. Some successes, some failures. But I in particular, manganese was one that was really tough for us because I could see there was the symptoms, the kind of tiger striping, especially on our plums, I could see it all the time. So, like, okay, we'll have manganese sulfate. We'll go put that out there. And we probably put more manganese than anybody to the point that the, you know, the chemical companies like, what are you using all this stuff for? Because nobody else was buying it. And I thought, we're going to solve it and you can do it for one year or two years or four years, and eventually you go, hey, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. I still see the deficiency symptoms, I still see the classic tiger stripe, but I, I don't see a benefit. And we've put 20 pounds of foliar, which sounds crazy, of manganese sulfate in three sprays and it hasn't done the job. The first time I started working with AEA was for our SAP testing because I knew there had to be a better way and it made sense that it would be something that would be effective. If there was one thing that I think for at least stone fruit that you've brought to the table is SAP testing made it popularized for us because it is a huge benefit. You're getting a much better sense of what's out there instead of just the standard leaf analysis. That'll give you a number and you'll.

Feel good about it.

But it's not going to correspond to what you see on the tree.

What did SAP analysis reveal for you? What, what did you, when you started using that, what did you see from that that you had not been seeing with tissue analysis?

Well, first for the manganese. Again, the manganese samples on the leaf analysis said we were fine, and the tree said we weren't fine. So you throw away the book, as you say, sometimes if it doesn't match what nature is telling you. We were throwing away the SAP analysis. We did tons of SAP analysis or, sorry, leaf analysis. It didn't match what I was seeing. So already kind of pre knew that it wasn't correct. Now that I get a SAP sample, I can't guarantee you that it's 100% correct or that it's. It's fully correlated. I, I don't know, but it's certainly much more correlated than I ever saw in a leaf analysis. And when I go back now, it was by steps because I thought manganese sulfate was working by the leaf analysis. So I kept using it. Once I realized it didn't, then it was kind of the chicken rag. I said, I have to change this product to find out if I can find a product that does correct the deficiencies that I can visually see. If you can visually see it, you know, it's. It's pretty substantial. So we would switch over right around the same time to chelates for those other forms. And again from, you know, we've all learned so much from your podcast, but learning that zinc has its oxidation state, the other oxidation states for the other micronutrients, it made sense for us to focus the chelates for those. We still use the zinc in the regular form, and that's been a good fit for us. And as we've done these steps, it's only been three years probably since we've gone exclusively to the SAP analysis, but I can see that we're moving up the ladder. We can, I can see the trees even before the results come in, but I can also see the results matching what I see in the tree, which gives me confidence that it's actually doing what it's supposed to be doing.

Yeah, your story is such a common story of growers who start using SAP analysis and getting a bunch of revelations about what is the test, matching and correlating to field experience and also to product performance. And I think that's. That's the big one. It's, it's also, it's kind of unfortunate, but that's one of the reasons why SAP analysis hasn't become more popular by a lot of input providers. It was such an intriguing experience for us when we started using SAP analysis back in 2011 and 12 and 13, we had to completely revamp our entire trace mineral product lineup because what we had been using up to that point was a lot of the manganese sulfates and less expensive trace minerals that just did not, didn't deliver, didn't move the needle. And it was quite a learning experience for us. So good news today is our product lineup is completely different from what it was then and a whole lot more effective. But it would be, it would be good to see more companies using that.

You have to test what you're doing. And I've never had, broadly stated, a fertilizer salesman come back and ask, hey, how's the crop of this stuff we sold you? That that's one of those things. Only a farmer is going to see it and only a farmer who's looking can see that. The dollars they spent, the effort they put in matched to what they were looking for and not just on a production basis. That.

That's one of the things that's really.

Tough for scientific tests. You don't know, even in a control setting what the crop would have been this year, next year, whatever else. There's years that's, especially for cherries, that it's tough to set a crop if.

You say, hey, the control was this.

And the treatment was this. That's only dependent on this year, on.

What happened last year in the fall.

Or the spring or whatever the crop load was the year before. If you have alternate bearing or something having that information, you have to extract all that to be able to understand the effectiveness in real time of that spray that you did six months ago or a year ago to know what it's doing for you today.

You shared some photos with me recently. I don't know if you feel comfortable talking about this or not. If not, we'll just either not talk about it or cut it out. But you shared some photos with me recently where you were showing very different leaf expression based on different types of nutrient applications. What were you playing around with and what did you see?

Because I've gotten better at understanding the, you know, for example, where the, the leaf nodes meet at the base of the leaf. I don't need a SAP analysis to see and I'm gonna have to wait, you know, some time to get it figured out. I can go look at the leaves and say, hey, I think I'm short of zinc because I can See an expression here. I noted that especially on a cherry leaf, you can see when your trees look healthy, when they look like they have this. It's a large leaf. The dimensions and the ratios of width to length are correct. It's the right color. It's having the expression that you want to see. But I've seen the leaf serration, which is the edges, that kind of the saw shape at the edge of the leaves. So this year in spring, I could see that the leaves were not the dark color that I might have expected otherwise. And so it's a quick and dirty experiment. I got our amino acid chelates. I put them in a spray bottle and I sprayed two limbs, you know, both sides of the row with that, just undiluted directly on there and expecting to see maybe in a couple of days it'll get darker, whatever it is. So I put manganese, iron, magnesium and nitrogen. Those would be the four that would give it that darker color. Presumably, if it was short of something. And it didn't really change, I think it was just. It needed time to, you know, early season is trying to catch up and get all the nutrients where it needs to go. But I went back a month later, and the one, the manganese trial had very distinctive on the next leaves that came out, that serration. And so whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, if that's presumably an expression of good leaf structure that was caused by that excess amount of manganese that I had put just in that localized area. I didn't expect to see that, but it was clear as day. And that's why the picture I'd sent you, you can see the trial next to it. The leaf looks a certain way and the other one has. It's hard to quantify the serration, but twice the serration or distinctive from the whole orchard, that little bit of difference.

It'S much more deeply serrated.

Yeah.

Yeah. So coming back to our conversation on SAP analysis, you had, even before you started working with SAP analysis, or I should say after you started working with SAP analysis, you started using more of the trace mineral chelates. But how has your need of trace minerals evolved over the several years you've been using it? How has the crop begun to shift and change, if at all?

Again, it's hard to quantify it. I can tell. And again, this is three years in. I can tell this year that the leaves look better. And that's from, you know, 25 years of experience of seeing the trees. I remember that the very first time I saw A tree that looked healthy, like you talk about, people can tell their herd is a certain way. By being out there. You see the differences. You see, when a tree is hurting, you get that sense. And especially driving on the tractor, you're going by a few miles an hour, you're seeing repeated. Your brain is picking up the nuances of each of the possibilities of a tree. When you see an orchard that has good leaf structure and even growth, not excess growth, but everything's growing top to bottom. The leaves are all the same size. They have the right shape, they have the right form. They're not overgrown. They're not artificially kind of juiced up by nitrogen application. They're. They're happy, they're growing and they're doing the right thing. I can see that.

And that's one of those things that.

The SAP analysis is backing us up. There's always going to be a nutrient that we're missing. We're missing, you know, often is the minor nutrients. Even when we don't put potassium, we always seem to have plenty of potassium. We don't put much nitrogen. We have plenty of nitrogen. It's one of those things that you look down the list and you say, hey, we got to watch for cobalt and aluminum. I don't know if I can see the expression per se. I know we've put cobalt on to slow down ripening, you know, slow down the ethylene response. And it seems like it's working, but there's not a direct correlation. It takes a while to be able to see it and say, hey, we got the timing right, we got the quantity right. But I do have a sense there's. And this often happens to us. There's certain varieties that people don't grow anymore because they had a problem.

There was one variety of early white.

Nectarines that always got soft. I remember going to a neighbor's field and looking at it to compare. And the farm guy came out there and we were both commenting, yeah, this variety's really good, except it gets off pretty early. Now, over the last couple years, we've moved towards using more cobalt. And I can see that we can pack a box. We don't have to pick it early, we don't have to pick it green. We can pick it at the right time. But it's able to be packed. That's. Can I say it's cobalt? Can I say it's 10 other things? No, but that's something that we. We tried to do on purpose, and maybe that's the X factor. But it's hard to see, but I can't tell you exactly.

Yeah.

But I can say I'll take it.

Yeah. It's. There's so many of those anecdotal evidence pieces where it's all of a sudden you used to historic historically have problems with all kinds of disease, and all of a sudden diseases just aren't a concern anymore. And it's. There's this gradual transition where sometimes you kind of don't remember where you came from anymore because your observations have changed and your reality has changed so much.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah. Thank you, John. Anything else you want to add?

One thing I've always thought was strange, maybe it is. I won't say you're a fertilizer salesman, even though you do sell fertilizer, but it's that consideration. There's a salesmanship that goes into it, and I've always found it strange. I probably heard a dozen times calcium makes stronger fruit. And I remember being out in the field one day and seeing the trees and realizing the lack of calcium makes weaker fruit.

And we always think of it as.

A proactive step that we're going to put something in and make it better. There's a perfect peach. There's a perfect plum out there somewhere. But our. Our efforts are to give the tree what it needs. There's not something that you're going to put on that's going to make it feel better than it should. It's just going to make it express the way that it should be in the first place. That by a lack of something, instead of adding something, thinking that's going to magically do something. When we have a nitrogen response that will actually make the tree or the plant grow, that isn't necessarily a good thing.

You'll have a weaker tree. It's interesting the way you phrase that. You add more calcium, you'll produce a stronger fruit. Or. And the way that you redefined it is to say that you'll not have a less weak fruit. But why are we defining things purely in terms of fruit? Like it's. There's also the entire tree structure. You'll also have a weaker tree. You'll have. Or you'll have a stronger tree based on calcium integrity. And yeah, I think that holds true for not just the fruit, not just the tree, but the entire ecosystem. The whole ecosystem and the whole crop system is a lot more resilient. All right, John, what is something you wish more farmers knew or were thinking about?

I see this quite often. We have. There's a huge Generational shift in farming right now there's a lot of farmers and that's why I said all those guys were at that meeting back when they were all in their 50s and 60s and 70s and then 50s turns into 70s pretty quick, right as you're, as you're growing old and they may have a son who wants to stay and maybe not they, maybe they don't have any kids. I have four daughters. I'd love for them to keep farming but so far none of them have been that interested. So you have that generational shift I think and what we see in our industry, it's kind of in the news. But the, the two largest companies, I think it was probably three or four years ago now merged and in corporate takeover type thing. Now there's not a lot of guys around who are going to take over a three or four hundred million dollar company, much less two of them. But we live in a world that there's more and more investment. I know that Washington state has that with apples. There's a lot of companies that say it's kind of the short sleeves, the shirt sleeves. In three generations where you had grandpa started with the dirt and dad built it into something and now the kids are running it. But if it's successful, you have this multi hundred million dollar enterprise. There's not another grandkid or great grandkid that's going to take it over. So I think for us we need to be aware that our food production, we don't. We, we see a name on a box. Most the boxes of fruit will have the farmer's name on it. And you'll say oh, I know that name because it's, it's the name that, that's on the box. That's the guy who owns the place. And now the guy doesn't own the place anymore. And so I think as we move into a more corporate world, that's the only place that has enough money or enough resources or enough maybe even initiative to step into those difficult situations of running a huge company that we need to be aware that that's going to change the dynamics for regenerative agriculture. The New York stock guy is not going to be on board. Maybe the same way I am about not spraying Roundup. That's not, that's not even on their radar. And if they aren't aware of that, it's going to be an Excel spreadsheet, it's going to be a board meeting, it's going to be a zoom call. That's where those decisions are Going to be made instead of somebody who's living on the farm and dealing with the people that are working there and maybe thinking deeply about the food that you produce and having a pride or a responsibility to produce something that's good.

A point perhaps counter to that, John would be thinking about the growing need or expectations of ESG goals and is there a future possibility where there is enough mainstream demand for what is presently being called regenerative that there's actually a mandate, even organizations that historically would have been purely for monetary gain, that there is a mandate to reduce pesticide applications? Do you see that as a possibility?

I think that's a good idea. I generally. But theoretically, yes. I think there's. People use the term greenwashing. Right. And that's a negative pejorative term for making something seem to be better than what it is. When you have a food safety audit that doesn't guarantee the food safe. Sad to say, it's the management style that makes it a positive statement of we're doing a good job as opposed to here's our certificate that says that we did a good job. Does that make sense? There can be a lot of variance between what's stated and what's actually happening. If there was a regenerative push, I can imagine that, for example, for a nut crop, if there was a company that was making a product and wanted to have their label, be that these nuts or whatever they were producing is done in regenerative way, I could imagine that being available. To have a label stuck on a whole industry to say this is done in a regenerative way, it's going to be either a mandate by a marketer, then everybody's going to kind of fall in line as best as they can, or it's going to be. I don't ever see where it's really an upside in terms of dollars and cents. It's going to be a, you have to do this as opposed to, if you do this, there's going to be an upside for you because you're taking those extra efforts you've done. I think a pretty good job of saying, you know, it was 2040. You want to have regenerative be a thing where most products are that in that world or thinking in that world. It's a pretty ambitious goal, but it's something that I think people are starting to think about. But like anything in farming, the. The practical side is the hard part. The idea of it is. Is great, but making it happen and making it happen in a way that isn't Just pushing papers around, I think is going to be the really difficult part.

Yeah. Execution is always where the fun starts to happen.

Yeah, well, you call it fun, I call it a lot of. A lot more extra work sometimes.

Yeah, it's just a euphemism for fun.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Well, John, thanks for being here. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. There's so many experiences and stuff that people don't pay attention to, don't observe, and I've really appreciated the questions that you've asked and the things that you've shared. So thank you for being here and look forward to having another conversation with you again in the future.

All right, thank you, John. Appreciate it. And thank you for all the work you do for the podcast getting this information out there.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible, and since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test, we analyze, and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. Thank you for listening and we look.

Forward to working with you.