Episode 112: Transforming Arid Landscapes with Taimur Malik

Hi, friends. Welcome back. This is John, and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. I so much enjoy having these conversations, and I hope that you get to enjoy listening to them as well. And one of the pieces that I've really enjoyed about our work, I don't pay any attention really to our podcast statistics because I do this for the fun of it and because this is something that I'm passionate about and that I care about and that I believe is very important to the world. But it is interesting sometimes, occasionally our team lets me know what is happening and what's going on. And a few weeks ago they let me know, or maybe a month or two ago, they let me know that we hit the number one spot in the natural sciences category on Apple podcasts in North America or in the US specifically, I guess, which was interesting to know. And I know that for the last several years we've had podcast listeners in 190 countries, which is quite interesting when you think about it. There's only 192 countries in the world, so that's practically the entire globe. That's been the case for several years. But perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects of the podcast and the reason I've put it out there, is because every week I hear from farmers from around the globe who have taken what they've learned on this podcast and implemented it. And this is particularly true in areas of the world that are more challenged economically in Southeast Asia and areas where people are taking these principles and implementing them very, very successfully. It's so rewarding to know that there is enough information coming together, because in our work at advancing eco agriculture, we can't be all things to all people, and nor is that something that we aspire to. And so in this conversation, I'm particularly delighted to speak with someone who has had that distant connection, but that we haven't worked with as closely as we work with our people in North America. Taimur Malik. So I've really been looking forward to having this discussion because I have been hearing about his work from other people in several directions. And so I've been looking forward to this conversation. So, Tamar, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. And I'd love to if you could just tell us some of your context and background, both of your farming operation, but also of your personal life and story. It's my understanding you didn't come, you started initially in a very different trajectory than an agricultural in the agricultural space. So I love to hear where you've come from and how you've arrived here.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, John. Firstly, it's a great privilege to be here. You know, I'm one of the contributors to that statistic of you hitting number one, a very small component. So firstly, congratulations on that. I almost, very religiously listen to pretty much every or almost every episode as it comes out. And if I don't have time then I sort of put a calendar entry to listen to it at some point later. And I do go back to it. And your webinars, I sort of really, I take very copious amounts of notes. So I've been doing that religiously for the past many years. So firstly, thank you for that and it's a real treat to be here. And let me, you know, as you so kindly ask, let me begin with my own life journey, which began as far away from the fields of agriculture as can be thought possible. I was a city slicker extraordinaire. I went to university in, you know, at the heart of the biggest, or what some would call the greatest megapolis in history, which is New York City. I had the privilege of attending Columbia University for undergrad and then I worked at Citibank also in the city. So I was Wall street guy, if you will, for a few years working in trade finance, which was very interesting work. You know, I learned a ton and I'm very grateful for the, for the opportunity because I really understood how the global economy works. I mean, you know, to a much greater extent than I had ever before or had done so at university. But then, you know, deep down in my heart, I felt like this wasn't really my calling and this wasn't what I saw myself doing 10 years down the road or 20 years down road, at least not at the time. It felt very soulless. Now finance has changed and we can talk a little bit about that later as well. We now have a lot more discussions about changing finance in ways that can improve things like natural capital, biodiversity, carbon and so on and so forth. So I think it's definitely improved. It's not where it needs to be if we want to build a truly regenerative economy. It's nowhere near there, but it's definitely improve leaps and bounds compared to where I was when I was on Wall street, circa 20, 11, 12, 13, etc. And given sort of that, that wasn't where I felt most, you know, myself or most at peace. I started looking for other opportunities and other avenues of expressing my passions, my interest in entrepreneurship, but also something that was more soulful for Me. So I left Citibank and then headed back to pa, where I actually was born and, you know, raised. So my youth had been spent there. And I ended up joining a small textile spinning mill in Lahore, which is one of the big cities in Pakistan and is also the cultural capital of the country. So again, was very urban in its setting. And here again, I did not come from a textile background either. But the idea was that I'll bring a fresh perspective and I was sort of going to be a little bit of a placeholder while the company found a more permanent chief executive. But as luck would have it, when I joined in, I brought in such bout of good luck that the mill shut down soon after. And as good an omen as that seemed to be at the time, I have this sort of bad or good habit, depending on how you view it, of really trying to go deep and peeling the layers of the onion as much as possible. And the reason why the mill had shut down was because the economics didn't work out, because cotton prices in Pakistan that year had really shot through the roof. This is 2015, and most people had accepted that, okay, we have a cotton crisis in the country because one third of the cotton crop got destroyed because of the pink ball worm, which is a pernicious pest of cotton. And given that that's the case, just accept it and try to figure out how do you go from there. Some companies that had better balance sheets, they started importing cotton from Tanzania, Uzbekistan, even the US Et cetera. But those companies that didn't necessarily have that bandwidth on their balance sheets, they had to shut down temporarily, including this mill that I had the good fortune of being at. So of course I began a review process of how do we improve the economics of the mill? And energy and cotton were the two main costs. And there was also labor. So we sort of looked at sort of equipments that could maybe reduce some of our labor, though not eliminate it at all, which is good. Obviously from a macroeconomic perspective, you want people to have jobs, but also we worked on more efficient energy co generation equipment. So we worked on that. We worked on some solar equipments at the time at least did some preliminary study work. But the main thing that really got me on a very deep level was the agriculture component. How could a country that relies so heavily on agriculture is an agrarian economy where about 40% of the people work in agriculture and where cotton is a very vital crop for the overall economy, because the vast majority of the exports of Pakistan are dependent on cotton value addition, which is Textile exports, right? So how could that country or that economy allow this to happen? And as I probe deeper, some people were talking about, oh, the Bolgard one has failed now, which is a BT cotton variant, and now we need to move towards Bolgard 3 and newer iterations of GMO cotton. And that was one paradigm. But that disturbed me on a deeper level because I thought that basically the system of genetically modified cotton is essentially designed to fail. And I was also reading other ways of in the news, etcetera, about super weeds, where things like glyphosate and other chemicals had stopped working for many weeds and you needed like, you know, even stronger, even harsher, even more toxic chemicals like dicamba, et cetera. And I realized, or at least a part of me thought, that this paradigm always fails because nature always overcomes whatever reductive approach you take. Right. And of course, this was a very genesis of my sort of thinking along these lines. I, you know, I'm a much more, I'd like to think I'm a much more sophisticated thinker now about this stuff, but at the time, you know, a lot of this stuff really troubled me and I started looking at alternative models. I was like, is there a better way to do cotton? And one thing I was exposed to, living in New York, you know, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to was seeing a lot more organic produce hitting the market shelves of not just really what you would say, bougie grocery stores, but even increasingly like your corner bodegas. And because of that exposure, I had this idea that there is something called organic agriculture, which obviously intuitively I knew meant that there are no chemical pesticides and maybe synthetic fertilizers, et cetera. So I started reading up about that and trying to go deep. How does organic happen? How do you make it work? And I discovered many, many interesting facts that in many ways were game changing and really blew my mind. And I'll just go over a couple of them to share with your audience and yourself because I think they're very important in how I really got into what I am doing today. One of them was a study that came out of Madhya Pradesh, which is a state in India. And there a local agricultural university had done a study of a farm and that had, or actually not just a farm, but a few farms that had transitioned to organic certified organic agriculture, USDA certified, about 10 years ago. So at the 10 year mark, those farms were compared to their neighboring farms who were still growing BT cotton. So GMO cotton. And what the study revealed was that the farmers growing organic were getting either similar yields or in some cases even higher yields, and their profits were much higher because they did not spend money on expensive pesticides and other chemicals. And this to me was a really remarkable fact that just changed the paradigm of my thinking. Because having lived in New York and had the privilege of patronizing organic produce, I'd realized that it tended to be more expensive. 20% more, 30% more, 50% more, depending on what you were buying and what season it was, but certainly more. And so the mindset that I sort of got from that or that I deduced was that organic is always going to be more expensive. It's for the few and not the many. Because when you're not using these synthetic inputs, you're going to get a lower yield, therefore the price is probably higher. Of course, later on I realized that's not always the case. Not just is it not the case in the Global south, in fact in many parts of the world where soils are naturally poor because of weather dynamics, geology, etc. And geography. And then, you know, this is also very interesting. I discovered a lot of the work of people like, you know, there's a professor in the UK who's done a lot of this work whose name is escaping me right now, but will come to me in a sec. And there was a Umich University of Michigan study as well that showed that in a lot of countries a transition towards organic or agroecological systems can actually lead to higher yields. Not just the same, but higher yields.

Compared to almost immediately.

Yes, exactly. Because those soils are so poor that when you start adding biology to the system and what we now call more regenerative systemic approaches, it has a tremendous impact. And also regenerative amendment approaches, especially for on farm made stuff, things like compost and maybe in some cases fermented biologicals and things like that. And we'll get into the weeds of that as well as this conversation progresses. But that was a really big sort of eye opening moment for me as well. And so as I came across these data points, these studies, I was enamored by this. I really was. Then I also discovered that famous Rodale Institute white paper which talked about how at the time, version 1.0 talked about how organic agriculture can sequester all the excess carbon that's in the atmosphere and save us from climate change. But now of course, they call it regenerative organic agriculture again. That was amazing for me at the time, I'll be honest. I was also very worried. So in 2015, I was also blessed with the gift of fatherhood. I got married in 2014. You know, soon after, in 2015, our first kid was born and I have two sons. And, you know, I was very worried. In 2015, I came across one article about climate change and then it led down to a rabbit hole where I started reading. You know, one book that really impacted me was Bill McKibben's Earth. That's E A R T H, where he talked about the planet that he was born in is not the planet that we are living in now because we now have so much more carbon in the atmosphere. And therefore he named this new planet as Earth because the age of the Holocene was over. And you know, the data points that he mentioned, the work of, you know, one of the most famous climate scientists in the world, Jim Hansen or James Hansen, you know, that was really remarkable. Just the science and getting into that, the data points and the thesis that Jim Hansen had espoused that was, you know, becoming or seemingly becoming remarkably true. And then I read a bunch of other things about climate change. The 2010 floods that had happened in Pakistan, where 20 million people lost their homes. The Syrian civil war, which unfortunately really destroyed that country, also had its roots in the largest drought in Syrian history from 2006 to 2008. And that left 80% livestock dead, 60% crops got destroyed. Two million destitute farmers moved to the cities and started protesting. So all of that stuff was quite disturbing. I realized that a lot of these semi arid parts of the world, which include Pakistan, they're very susceptible to climatic changes. And of course, we now know that that's the case for not just semi arid places, but also other places that generally have abundant rainfall. Any tweaks in the weather patterns have huge impacts on farmer livelihoods. And whether that's a 2 acre farmer or a 20,000 acre farmer, they get dramatically impacted. All that stuff, you know, was very disturbing, of course. Now I also know that a big component of climatic changes is land use change. How we've destroyed ground covers and the systems that allow for, you know, things like cloud formation and water cycles, the small water cycle, et cetera, et cetera. So of course, again, my understanding here is relatively more sophisticated, I would like to think, thankfully. But again, in these teething stages of this journey, I learned all of these things which really were very shocking at one level and then also very hopeful as I was reading more and more about the enormous power of regenerative agriculture. So one thing I knew is that I think this is what I really want to do with my life. I think I came to that conclusion deep down, even if I didn't sort of say it out loud. But there was only one 10C problem, which was that I did not have any agriculture holdings or lands to implement any of these ideas on. So you know, that began a journey of trying to find people in, in my orbit or circle who did, who were lucky enough to have ag lands. And one such fine person was my father in law, who is a thorough gentleman and you know, is a captain of industry. But his, he has a passion for agriculture because his roots going back many generations have been in agriculture. And so what he had started doing as he sort of, you know, became a successful captain of industry was to buy agriculture lands in South Punjab, in the southern part of the Punjab province where he belongs, but in, specifically in the Thal Desert biome. And he bought lands on the cheap starting in the 1990s. And these were basically lands that we would call, you know, not just were they not grade A land, you would maybe call it a grade E land. It was very, very poor. It's, it's basically just, you know, desert sand or beach sand. And he started, you know, slowly and gradually and with lots of like huge like sort of dunes or hillocks, call them what you will. And so he began a process of slowly sort of, you know, flattening the land out. And so really started doing like row crop farming and some orchards, like mango orchards. That general southern Punjab climate is very hospitable for mango farming. And the best mangoes in the country, and dare I say perhaps some of the best in the world are grown there. And there's a smorgasbord of varieties, like more than 120 varieties of mangoes are grown in that general region. And so he started working in earnest with that, but in a very conventional type of a system with synthetic inputs galore, which you need in such poor soils. There's no other way to do it unless you take a very, very deep regenerative approach, which is some of the stuff that we'll talk about that we started doing later on. So coming back to my father in law and his land holding. So he has a few sort of farm holdings that are all in the broad area, they're very close to each other. And I started pitching to him these newfangled ideas that I had come across and he was very skeptical to say the least, always with a smile because he's a thorough gentleman. And he, you know, he once said, you know, if this Stuff is so cutting edge and you know, leads to such amazing outcomes as the studies that you're quoting say, then how is it that, you know, the developed, advanced, you know, and many of them Western countries, how are they not doing this en masse? Because they're so clever, they think ahead, they're so advanced. And that was, you know, that was a pretty profound question of his to which I then, you know, of course, some of the stuff that I'd read that, you know, there are some, you know, one is the status quo is always hard to change. So that's one aspect. Another aspect is the embedded nature of these big chemical act companies and you know, so on and so forth. So, you know, finally he very generously and kindly relented and after a few presentations and conversations and said, you know, all right, on one of the farms, which is a 600 acre farm, which by Pakistani standards is a very large farm, he said, why don't you start practicing or at least on some part of that farm, why don't you start some of these practices and let's see how they go. So that's basically how this journey from a banker on Wall street to someone farming in the Thal Desert began.

That's a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that. And I think you and I both have, we both are granted a gift, a blessing that at least in the world that I get to see and experience, many people don't receive. And that is the privilege of feeling fulfilled by our work, feeling fulfilled that we are doing the right thing and that we are in the right place at the right moment in time. And it's such a rewarding place and it's one that I've come to realize that many people don't get to experience, or they may only get to experience it for a part of their life. So this is a fascinating story. You know, one of the things that I really appreciate about the journey that you shared is that there is tremendous power in fresh perspectives and fresh insights. When you come at a conversation from an unconventional background, it is much easier in some cases to challenge the status quo and to challenge assumptions and to go back to first principles thinking, which can be very challenging if you are embedded in something on a day to day basis and you're so busy doing the thing that you forget to work on the thing that you're doing. So you pause for a bit in telling the story. But now we get to the piece that all of us are really wanting to get into, which is the actual farming enterprise. What were some of the transitions that you started making and how did that operation evolve?

Right on. Yes. Now for the fun and spicy stuff. So basically, you know, just to give you a bit of the lay of the land. So again, as I briefly mentioned, this is, you know, the Thal Desert, it's a desert. It's, it's actually part of what's considered the Greater Indian desert. Part of it is on the Pakistani side, part of it is across the border on the Indian side. It's a massive desert. And you know, the soil cannot really be called soil at all. It's just, you know, sand. It's pure sand. And of course there's some native shrubbery that grows when the rains come. Sometimes you get a couple, you, one or two winterish rains. Sometimes you get some rains in the monsoon season. So there is some rainfall that comes and that allows for some of these very hardy desert shrubs and forbs, et cetera, to grow. And then there's some trees that dot the land as well, especially acacia species that are hardy and some other tree varieties, some tamarisk varieties that were actually planted by the government in the 60s. But broadly speaking, it's a very harsh environment to do agriculture. Summer temperatures can reach about 50 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit, that's about more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So really blistering heat. In the winter we can reach almost zero degrees Celsius. So we do hit frost a few nights every winter. So that's about 32 degrees Fahrenheit, so the freezing point. So given that variance, it's a harsh environment to do agriculture. And the biggest impediment, of course, to agriculture is water and water availability. A lot of the groundwater aquifers are very salty and so not fit for, you know, agriculture and certainly not quality agriculture as we would, you know, to use the title of one of your books. And it's, you know, we are fortunate in that. And as a country, Pakistan is fortunate. I mean, it's a very semi arid landscape. Mostly it does have some forests in the north, but on the whole, and especially the agricultural belts of the country, it's very, very semi arid. But the great fortune of Mother Nature is that we get these big rivers that come in from the Himalayas. They start in Tibet and flow through all the way from India and into Pakistan and heading into parts of India, parts of China, etc. And one of them, of course, is the very famous Indus river, which is one of the most famous rivers in the world. And you know, India a Fun fact. India is named, gets its name from the Indus and the what is thought to be either the oldest or the second oldest, depending on different viewpoints of different scientists. But the Indus Valley civilization is one of the oldest civilizations in the world. So it's either Babylon or the Indus Valley. And you know that great fortune on those rivers that, you know, the Indus being the primary one, but there are also others that allows for agriculture to really take place and for productive agriculture to happen and for this country to be able to sustain 250 million people. And that is growing at a fairly rapid clip as it is. And Pakistan also has the largest canal network in the world, which over hundreds and hundreds of years has been built and grown upon by different empires. The Mughal Empire, then during the British colonial rule, then after independence, Pakistan itself, including with World bank funding in the 1950s and 60s, further developed that network. So our farm itself is right next to a canal that takes water from the Indus river and it's water that comes from the Tansa Barrage, which is a barrage, a very big barrage, a water holding body, and that takes water from the Indus river and takes it to the Chenab River. And so we are on that canal and we have a government allotment for water. And also courtesy of being close to the canal, underground aquifer water, at least a fair amount of it, is fairly good quality and can be used for agriculture. And that's obviously a really great fortune that we're very grateful for. But of course, I think again in Pakistan what's happening is that as you move down the canal networks the farmers at the bottom, because a lot of farmers end up using much more water because we don't have a system of these smart meters for allotments, which is really unfortunate and unfair. And so people overdraw their water and big farmers, powerful farmers, politically connected farmers, they end up sucking a lot more water than is their due. And of course we need to change that system with having smart meters, etc. But we also need to invest in two things. One of them is regenerative agriculture, because as you build soil, you build up water holding capacity significantly. And then of course with high efficiency irrigation systems, and now coming to our farm itself, and what we've tried to do on both those scores, the regen component and of course also the water use efficiency through high efficiency irrigation systems. And so this farm was managed conventionally, it used high amounts of synthetic inputs because otherwise you cannot grow anything in this dead substrate, that is sand, that has very low water holding or no Water holding capacity, no nutrient holding capacity, really poor cation exchange capacity. And so it was using up a lot of water. All of the irrigation was being done by flood irrigation when I joined, which is also an extremely wasteful way to do irrigation. And in Pakistan generally that is the norm. I would say maybe 99% of agriculture happens with flood irrigation. And of course there are economic barriers to adopting high efficiency irrigation, such as center pivots, impact sprinklers, drip irrigation hose reels. But the government, in conjunction with the World bank, has a fairly generous, a very generous actually subsidy program for solar powered drip and impact sprinkler irrigation systems. But even then there's a big significant barrier for farmers. But what farmers can do is regen ag and we will talk about why. I strongly advocate that because they can dramatically reduce the amount of water they need in a flooded system, especially if they are using crop residues as mulch. They can bring it down by 40%, 50% even, which is huge savings. But coming back again to our farm, and I apologize for digressing here and there, but I just really want to give a nice little overview.

Well, when you remember, when you remember that the podcast gets listened to in 190 countries around the world, then what you're describing is very relevant for people globally. And so that context is very important. Yeah, I do want to get into, obviously you've been shifting your irrigation, your water management practices, and also the regen ag piece. I'm very curious about water use efficiency and also depending on how, I don't know how your scale has been growing and expanding, but in the desert environment that you are in, it's not unreasonable to expect to reach a threshold at some point where you begin influencing the local water cycle as well. That will make for an interesting discussion also. So how has your water use efficiency evolved from since when you began and what were the contributing factors that you believe are making the most significant impact for you?

So that's a great question. What we started doing was, it was like a double whammy kind of an approach. There was a regen piece which we started on a much smaller scale because we wanted to prove the thesis and we knew we're going to make mistakes. I mean, I didn't know how many mistakes we were going to make and we ended up making more than I would have bargained for. But isn't that what life is like? Indeed, that's a great metaphor for life itself. So that component, I'm glad we started small because otherwise there would have been quite a Few disasters. And on the other side, of course, the thesis was already proven globally for high efficiency irrigation systems. And because we had subsidy systems in play as well, that made it a much more compelling economic thesis. And we were really passionate about doing the right thing and saving as much water as possible. So we started a transition process where we literally, the four high efficiency irrigation systems we mentioned in different parts of our farm, we incorporated all of them. So center pivot irrigation systems. We now have three center pivot irrigation systems. We did drip systems for our orchards. We have mango and citrus orchards. We did impact sprinklers in different parts again for like certain specialty crops, but also row crops. And we did, for our most far flung areas, we did hose reel irrigation systems. And of course there with hose reel you can never get enough water, especially in soils with such low, such bad CEC and water holding capacity. So there we do crops that are generally just have very low water requirements. So something like a millet or a winter chickpea, et cetera. So the idea was they were uncultivated parts of the farm as well. So we brought them under cultivation as well by using things like hose drill irrigation. So try to improve the economic performance and thesis for the farm overall. So that was the component of irrigation. And again with irrigation, because we don't have electricity on most of the farm except for the very sort of the entrance area. So we can't run our center vivid systems on electricity, which is much more efficient and economically efficient as well. So we had to run them on diesel generators. As everybody's aware, we're in the midst of a commodity super cycle. The past two years have been extremely unkind for anyone who uses fossil fuels of any kind along with other, I guess, commodities. But the diesel really crushed us from an economic point of view. So now we've started the transition towards solarizing our center pivots. And we've just, I'm happy to report, just a couple of weeks ago, commissioned our first pivot that's been solarized. And it's the first center pivot in Pakistan to be solarized. So I'm very hopeful that that can be a huge economic boon. It's also obviously really good environmentally. And what we're trying to do is, you know, have a little pollinator and insectary zone under the solar panels. So inspired by some of the stuff that some people have done in the US and some European countries. So that will be a pretty fun experiment that we have yet to embark on. But coming now to the regen act piece so there we began with a very. So I began with a very naive understanding of compost as this magical elixir that will resolve all problems. And lo and behold, with just one compost application, you will not need to add any synthetic inputs into the system. But that turned out to be not at all accurate, especially in these very, very poor soils. And also the act of making compost, like what I now realize the initial compost we were making were very bacterially dominant. And of course, our compost paradigm has changed tremendously since then, initially when we did this experiment on sugarcane. So one of the main things we grow is sugarcane under our center pivots where we are able to save 50% to 60% water easily compared to a flood irrigation paradigm. So just by dint of the irrigation, it's a big saving. And one of the big reasons we do that is because, as I mentioned, my dear father in law is a captain of industry and his main line of work is sugar milling. And so there is a sugar mill. One of his sugar milling institutions is relatively quite close, also located in southern Punjab, to where we are. And so we sell our cane to them. So we have a mandate from the board to grow cane. So then the question becomes, how do you grow cane regeneratively and what is the thesis behind it? So just to give you a little bit of background on cane, in Pakistan, cane is a big crop, it's a vital crop. You know, sugar is considered a staple crop in Pakistani cuisine. You know, Pakistani people, tea is the caffeine, you know, the caffeinated elixir of choice. In this country, black tea, where people have, you know, two to three cups of tea, some people have even more. And you know, sugar goes in that. So in a country of 250 million people who are having three cups of tea every day, that's a lot of sugar that's used. And then of course, desserts and other things obviously. So sugar is very vital. And the government, you know, wants to ensure that there's enough sugar supply in the country. And that's also the case across the border in India. India is also a big producer of sugar in the world. So obviously we think of sugar, we think of Australia, Brazil, obviously the biggest producer, Mauritius, countries like that. But those countries are much more gifted ecologically. Their soils are far superior, the climatic conditions are better, and so their cane yields are superior, whether it's Mauritius, South Africa, Brazil, Australia. And they are able to get. So cane, as you obviously know, is a semi perennial, it's a grass, it can last for 8, 10 years easily. In Pakistan, believe it or not, cane is usually treated as an annual. You just get one crop, or at most you'll get one rattoon. Whereas in Australia or Mauritius or Brazil, they're getting 8 to 10 ratoons easily. Right? And in fact, in the ratoon cr they're getting higher yields. But studies show that in India and Pakistan, ratoon crops usually give you an inferior yield, which is why the farmer at best will keep one ratoon, because he'll take that hit for a little bit lower yield or even significant lower yield because he doesn't have to go through the labor costs of planting the cane again or doing the prep for the land, which is very expensive, like multiple rounds of different types of tillage and land prep. And then of course, the labor costs of planting the seeds. So one of my thesis for regenerative cane is that we can improve the ratoons of the crop significantly. And the other one is a yield thesis, because we know that the genetic potential of some of the varieties we're using is something like 1700 or 1800 monds per acre. And a mond is a term used in India and Pakistan. It's calculated at 40 kgs makes a mond. So for some of our listeners in kgs, something like 1700 mons per acre would be like 68,000 kgs or 68 tons. Whereas what we are getting today is at best 1,000 mons per acre. Right. Which is significantly lower. And in tons, that's about 40 tons compared to like 68 tons. So there's a lot of value that's being left off the table. And my goal was a value creation mindset. How can we add value, economic value, ecologic value, climatic value, natural capital value, and of course indirectly like social value as well. But that doesn't directly have to do with the agronomic practices. That's a separate category unto itself. So that was a big component. And cane is the largest acreage on our farm, is devoted to sugarcane. So the early experiments, we really learned a lot. There were a lot of failures, especially for row crops like cane. Just adding compost meant we were having really weak growth, really poor quality yield results. So we then had to resort to synthetics. The thesis early on was that I wanted to jump to regenerative organic from the get go. And my views have shifted dramatically on this front. I now disagree with the approach. As much as I love the organization called the roc and I've listened to your webinar with the, you know, with the regenerative Organic alliance, who are the creators of the regenerative organic certification. And of course, I really like that you started bringing in the mindset change or you started goading them to think about nutrition as well. And this is, of course, why I consider you one of my, you know, most important gurus. I started listening to your webinars and that really had a big impact on my thinking as well. And we'll get to some of that, what that thinking was as it evolved. But I disagree with the ROA thesis, which is that you need to be organic first and then you transition to regenerative organic. I believe that if we want to move the world towards regenerative organic, we first have to move conventional farmers towards a more regenerative paradigm and then slowly wean them off synthetics and move them towards regenerative organization.

Organic. Right.

That, I think makes much more sense. And that's the mindset. That was a big mindset change for me because we were getting these earlier failures by being really radical and going cold turkey, because cold turkey does not work. It just economically doesn't work. And if you don't have economic sustainability, how can you expect to have ecological sustainability or regeneration? And so that was a big paradigm shift for me personally. And of course, as I just alluded to and mentioned, you know, listening to your webinars really opened my horizons to the role of nutrition. And of course, later on, you know, you know, there were so many other people I discovered, you know, to try to understand biology better. Dr. Elaine Ingham was vital, myself and my entire team. So I hired a bunch of agronomists, horticulturalists. All of them had come from a very, very, very conventional paradigm, largely stuck in the 1960s Green Revolution thinking, which was a big deal for countries like Pakistan and India and Bangladesh because it did dramatically improve yields and was able to feed a vastly growing population. I mean, imagine when Pakistan was created, the country had about 30 to 31 million people, and it today has 240 something million people. Right? It's been a massive increase. And that's been possible because of this green revolution thinking. But what's happened is there's been a massive ecological cost. The soils have been destroyed. The PH is now incredibly high. Pakistan has overall, in soils, really high ph, we're dealing with about, on average 8.2 pH. PH is logarithmic. It's increased exponentially over the past few decades. And it's also highly calcareous soils. So that's one component I forgot to mention, and that's important in some of the changes that we would later on make as we understood the science behind these things as well. So I hired these agronomists, young guys, either they had completed their BSc, the Bachelor of Science, or their MScs or MPhils. And these guys were, A had very little to no practical experience on the field, and B, their thinking was firmly rooted in just conventional npk, predominantly with some micronutrients that kind of a, thinking and then heavily reliant on pesky pesticides and herbicides and so on and so forth. So, you know, and you mentioned, you know, very kindly early on that a fresh perspective is so vital because you don't have to unlearn things for these guys. They had to unlearn things and then, you know, learn a completely new way of thinking, which is sort of what I worked on, you know, sort of becoming a sort of trainer as well in the process, or a mediator, whatever I was learning and connecting different dots, I was then teaching to them and then also translating it to our local code context. And so I got them trained and myself got trained in the Dr. Elaine Ingram soil food web system to really understand biology better, the value of, you know, fungally dominant composts better. And then, you know, learned a lot from Dr. Christine Jones and you know, liquid carbon and her thesis of nitrogen etc. And quorum sensing, you know, very vital pieces of information. And then from you, predominantly, of course, the nutrition angle. So vital, and the forms of nutrition. And on a recent podcast that I had the privilege of being on with our mutual friend Kohn, I also specifically mentioned how you have really brilliantly explained the ideas of what I call regenerative amendments. Because hitherto my entire focus, because a lot of the regenerative movement focuses entirely on what I call regenerative systems changes, right? So the systemic changes such as no or minimum tillage, intercropping, cover crops, those sorts of changes are vital, there's no doubt about that. But they are much harder. The barrier to entry for them is much higher and it takes a lot of energy, effort, time, many cases economic investments for a farmer to move in that direction. Whereas what I call regenerative amendments are really the low hanging fruit. In fact, it's not low hanging. It's like literally on the ground begging to be picked up. And so that's the stuff that we need to focus on, right? And so, you know, you make it abundantly clear that we want to have nutrients that are ideally organically derived, that are organically chelated and then delivered in the best Way possible. Right. And that could include foliars and how we construct a synergistically stacked foliar. That's vital. At the same time as I was discovering all of these amazing things, I was also discovering a lot about human health. And here I'd love to give what is one of my favorite analogies, which is the Kara Fitzgerald diet, the Dr. Kara Fitzgerald diet. So there was a study done by Yale by Dr. Kara Fitzgerald led that study. And in that study she made a group, there's a control group that's just having a regular diet and then the group making the changes. And those changes were a series of about, I think, 12 or 16 things that each person in that group had to do every single day. And of course, that included exercise, but it was specific items to add to your diet that included beets, turmeric, rosemary or rosemary extract, some other herbs, having adequate amounts of protein, having cruciferous vegetables every day. And over a period of, I think it's six weeks or eight weeks, she showed that eight weeks down the line, these people compared to control had reduced their biological age by a significant amount. So telomere lengths change like, you know, the ways that biological aging is calculated showed a marked improvement in just 68 weeks. But it was, you know, the brilliant thing was it was stacking a bunch of things that were working in harmony with each other that were leading to profound and really quick changes. And that's the core message, and I believe in what I call the general Diet for Agriculture. You have to stack as many things as is possible for your context to get the quickest ROI and the quickest sort of change. And that's what we sort of. Well, I realized this much later, by the way. This did not happen in the beginning. I was not nearly this wise. And, you know, it's been this very long process of really learning these things, connecting various dots, and then coming up with this sort of thesis. But, you know, I think that this thesis makes so much sense and we can delve into deeper sort of, you know, what it means in agriculture. And I see that you might have a question or two or a comment.

This is such a beautiful analogy. Did you get any training on how to be an ambassador for aea? Because this is such a beautiful analogy. And I think your comment and your perspective is so spot on in that it is easy for most growers to shift away from inputs that antagonize biology to inputs that support biology. Like that is such the easy entry. It's such an easy entry. And the responses are immediate, the ROI is immediate. And then you can start the systemic changes in the soil already begin taking place. And then as the system progresses and as the grower's thinking progresses, you can start making the transitions in thinking that occur over time. As with you and as with all of us. We're all on a journey and they don't. That doesn't happen at the snap of a finger. And this is, I think, one of the areas where I have a fundamentally different perspective than some in the regen ag space. And I'm so delighted to hear your perspective on this and that it is true that we should have an ideal in some contexts, not necessarily at all, but in some contexts it is true that we should hold the ideal before our minds and before our eyes of achieving an agricultural ecosystem that is self sustaining and that does not require outside inputs. That is not going to happen in some contexts, perhaps, such as yours, with very sandy soils. But that doesn't mean that we need to begin there. We don't have to start there and go to zero inputs from the beginning. In fact, it is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect to do so, in my opinion.

Absolutely, completely agreed. And you know, the role of nutrition is so important. And again, you've elucidated this so well in your various, you know, webinars and podcasts, et cetera, and you know what form of nutrition, right? And these nutrients or enzyme cofactors, just like nutrients are for the human body, whether it's magnesium or zinc, et cetera, et cetera, and the absence of any of them, is both yield limiting from the classical Justus van Liebig, his entire system, the law of the minimum. But also it leads to the plants being suboptimal in their health, which in turn leads to insect and disease pressures. So the role of nutrition is so important. And just like you've mentioned, the nutrition ideally needs to be biologically derived, it needs to be biologically chelated or reduced and then delivered in a manner that is ideally biologically ensconced as well. Right? So having biology is so important. So it's not a chemistry first perspective, it's chemistry in the service of biology. And it is what I often say, what AEA does is basically precision regenerative agriculture and the role of things like SAP analysis, which we so far have not sort of been able to conduct. But we are working in earnest. Hopefully this year is the year that we start incorporating that practice as well, because we have to send the samples to the Netherlands. But this is the year that I really want us to do that component as well because, you know, there's so many moving parts. We make four different types of composts now. We make vermicompost, we make an Elaine Ingham style bio complete compost. We make a Johnson sue compost. We might have the world's largest agglomeration of these bioreactors, as they're called. We have the large bioreactors, we have about 250 or so. Heading towards 500 is the goal. And we have recently started making a spic compost, which is a fermented inoculated compost with amazing results. We just made our first batch and we used a microbiometer test, which is a fungal to bacterial ratio test. Our bio complete compost had really amazing results as well. It was a 2.7 to 1 ratio. So fungal to bacterial, which is great. Much more fungally dominant than bacterial. But the spic compost, the fermented compost was 3.4 to 1, fungal to bacteria, and the color was much more chocolate brown.

I'm not familiar with spic compost. Would that be like an anaerobic fermentation, like a bokashi or something like that?

Something like that, exactly. And I've seen you in some interviews you've done with others, so not necessarily on your podcast, but when you've interviewed on other podcasts and you've mentioned that you're really interested in fermented and bokashi style composts, you've recently started saying that, I think last year. And so I was very intrigued by this as well. And so I'm starting to wonder how closely you keep track of everything I say. That's a conversation for perhaps another day. But you have to keep your mentors and gurus close. I often tell people and pick on whatever nuggets of wisdom you can, and the results really surprised us. So this is a system that was developed by a close associate and friend of Dr. Christine Jones, and we learned it from them. He has a sort of webinar about this online as well. But it's worked really well for us because this process, it holds a lot more water, it's much more water efficient compared to when we make these windrows that we have to water regularly. We have a compost turner and of course we're ensuring there's a lot of carbonaceous material in there to get a fungally dominant compost in the bio complete system. But it's still, you know, it's losing carbon because it's out there in the Open when you are covering it with a silage top, you're holding the water. There's much more carbon in there, there's much more nitrogen in there. So it's a much superior compost product at the end of the day. So that's really good. And of course, our limiting factor is the amount of carbonaceous materials we have. So we have an animal operation on our farm. We have, you know, big ruminants, we have goats, we have sheep. And so we have manure, which is great from the sugar mills. We sell the sugar, we get some press mud or mill mud, which is one of the byproducts of the sugar milling process, which again is a high nitrogen greens sort of product. So our big problem is the browns, the carbonaceous materials. So for that we've been planting a lot of trees in earnest and we intend on planting thousands more. You mentioned the water cycle. I'm very passionate about having trees and hedgerows everywhere. The potential for creating life, biodiversity, having beneficial insects and birds, for sequestering carbon, for having materials to make compost. So our bio complete compost predominantly relies on dried leaves. So we need deciduous trees for that. So we've tried to plant as many as we can, and we have an ambition to plant tens of thousands more. One hack for doing this is Miyawaki forests as well, which is like a tiny forest that you can create in very small amounts of spaces. And so we are trying to plant these tiny forests. These have these little patches, repositories of biodiversity at different parts of our farm. And then we've also taken out 12 acre patch where we want to create hopefully what will be the largest Miyawaki forest on a farm in the world. So we've planted a tiny sliver of that. But the idea is to over time make the entire patch into a Miyawaki forest so that hopefully these types of things, hopefully will ultimately maybe bring more cloud cover. You know, we've seen what Ernst Ghosh has done with his farm in Brazil. And you know, I love, you know, what his saying is. One of my favorite sort of quotes, which is water is planted. And you know, it's so pithy and it just captures the enormous role of ground cover for water.

Let's go back to the sugarcane example with. In the context of the compost that you're now doing, you described how you started initially producing some compost that had very high bacterial content. Now you're producing these four different types of composts. And you were describing this in the Context of the sugar cane. So there's kind of two parallel questions. I'm not sure exactly how they overlap, but how has your sugarcane management evolved? And then also, how are you using these composts differently? What is the purpose? Why, why four different composts and what are the specific things you're using them for?

Sure, absolutely. So let's answer the cane question first and then we'll come to the compost. So when I was designing a regenerative cane system for our farm, with the idea that we will work with our mills and ultimately with the agronomy teams of the mills, and ultimately try to help the farmers, the tens of thousands of farmers that sell to the mill, transition towards more regenerative systems as well, and trying to create the lowest hanging fruits for them to first adopt. One of the things that we did was when we finish our ratoon, rather than doing like heavy tillage, you know, rototilling, etc. Just do something like disking because you have to destroy the stools. And then when the cane is harvested in November, get in a very diverse cover crop in there, which again, you know, as Dr. Christine Jones shows so elegantly, and she even quotes some studies like Jhana trials or Yana trials in Germany, where when you have many different varieties of plants and from many different families, right? So you can have from the legume family, from the sunflower family, from the amaranth family, and so on and so forth, the more families you have in the system and within each family have different types of crops, right? So in the mint family, you can have mint itself and cilantro and basil and so on, so forth. So we create that kind of really diverse cover crop of all of, you know, natively available seeds, you know, no hybrids or anything like that. And then we get them grazed from our animals. And the first five acre trial we did of this, voila, we saw enormous, huge yield difference on that 100 acre. There was this 500 acre patch. We had a heat wave, this is 2022, we had a huge heat wave in all of South Asia. So India, Pakistan, led to huge crop losses for the wheat crop, et cetera. But thankfully that five acre patch, the cane was just looking so lush, so fecund, so verdant and everybody really noticed it and they were like, this has really made a huge difference. Everyone was also really impressed on the farm, like the farm management, including the farm foreman, so the non technical people as well, they were like, this is so much easier because the soil is so much more pliable. So friable. It's so much more beautiful. When we're planting the cane, we just graze the COVID crop and then we, you know, maybe just do one gentle disking and then you can have the labor come in to plant the cane. Right. So that really was a, you know, a huge sort of change that I saw in people's mindsets because they could see it with their own eyes. Right. That was one thing we saw that went really well. Another thing I did was, you know, the role of silica is essential and it's so vastly underestimated. And I know you know that your new product. So again you're going to say, how closely are you watching what I'm saying? But your latest product, launch webinar, I think your seed treatment product has silica in there as well, right? The macro pack does, yes, the macro pack does, exactly. And you mentioned the role of silica and it's absolutely vital. I think it's just Joel Williams talks about this as well and all of these. So many other people who now talk about nutrition. And so we got a plant available silica product from, you know, it's like marine sort of creatures based from Australia. It's also certified for use in organic. And you know, we did some, I got some RCBD trials done and we got on average about a 20% yield increase from a farmer who's already getting really high yields by Pakistani standards. And so some of these results in terms of nutrients we also started getting which were really, really beneficial. And then in terms of compost, what we do is we add, we mix some of these composts. We usually use our bio complete, sorry, our Johnson Sioux compost for seed treatment purposes and for some of our specialty high value crops. So last year was the first time we planted chilies. We have a seven acre drip irrigation zone which we now devote to like more specific higher value crops. So in the February of 2023, we transplanted our chili crop. These are red dried chilies, not fresh green chilies. And you know, we added a boatload of compost there as well. And it had a really amazing impact. The chilies were very abundant in terms of their fruiting. The color was really bright, beautiful, deep red. And the amazing thing was that we did not get any insect pressures at all. And that's unheard of in Chile farming in Pakistan because prophylactically farmers every 7, 10 days do a pesticide application. You know, knock on wood, we had to do zero applications, partially because we have beneficial insects and partially the plants themselves. I'm guessing were very, you know, strong in terms of their immunity. So we have, obviously we have a farm that in many parts is steaming with things like ladybugs, which is amazing. We also use some beneficial insects strategically, which we get from the sugar mills. They have an insectary lab, which was the first lab in Pakistan of its kind. We get things like Trichogramma wasps or Chrysoperla, which is commonly called the green lacewing. We deploy those strategically in some cases as well. But mostly we've started relying on native beneficial insects because we now have the habitats and we're increasingly making more and more hedgerows because there are some parts that don't have enough habitat spaces around the cropping zones. So that's one of our goals for 2024 and then again 2025, whatever's left over to have a lot more green vegetation in areas where we don't in and around the farm boundaries and creating really diverse hedgerows. So not just trees, like leguminous trees, or things like mulberry or moringa, but also increasingly having shrubs, flowering shrubs, etc. So the insects have, have pollen to eat when they don't have the bad bugs to eat. But coming back to the cane specifically, one of the things. So again, we did nutrition differently as well. So because Pakistan has highly calcareous high ph soils and the predominant phosphorus fertilizer used in Pakistan is dap, which I think is frankly quite silly, if not outrightly absurd because that is a high ph fertilizer and it doesn't make sense.

Like a ph of 11 or something like that.

Yeah, something like that. And it doesn't make sense to apply that in a high ph context. And you know what? Farmers are now increasingly applying more and more to get the same result. There are banana farmers in Pakistan that used to apply one bag. Today they are applying six bags of dap. Right? And yeah, because bananas are really high value crop in Pakistan. So those farmers, you know, they're getting the return. But it's just so silly because transitioning to MAP and doing things like strategic fertigations, mixing it with a carbon source, mixing it with a biological such as a PSP or a broad spectrum like compost extract, again, that's something you advocate as well. All of that stuff will make so much more of a difference. And that's our approach now. We are now entirely MAP on our farm. We ensconce it with biology, with carbon like humic acid. And you know, that's one of the things we're working On. And again, we can do fertigations in many of much of our cropping zones because we have thankfully center pivots, we have, you know, drip irrigation and impact sprinklers. So that allows us to do fertigations in most of our zones. We can't do it in the hose drill zones because there's just too much waste. Because that water really goes high in the sky. Much of it gets evaporated before it comes down on the ground. But, you know, we can do it with some of our other, you know, irrigation equipment. And so that's something we've done and we've started seeing like a better result with that. We have started deploying strategically biostimulants. And I'm really passionate about good quality biostimulants mixed with the right kind of nutrients. And for that, what we're working on is biofermentation processes for nutrients. So you will take like a magnesium sulfate or a copper sulfate and you will ferment it in, you know, with a fermentation lock in these barrels. And that's something we have not tested yet because we just started it. We had to create like a room, a space for this stuff. You know, everything requires like an investment of time, of, you know, obviously financial investment, et cetera, et cetera, creating, you know, the right, you know, sort of team flows, labor flows, things like that. But two of the things that we've added on is this biofermentary and also compost tea room. So large scale sort of chambers where we're brewing, we've got these big pumps that are brewing compost. And the goal is as much as possible, for every single watering that we do, every single irrigation should have a compost extract. And each of those composts we make into a compost tea as well. So whether that's vermicompost, we usually mix them together. A bio complete, a Johnson Su, etc. So that's one of the other ways that we're deploying. And as I mentioned, in an ideal word, I would like to add at least 10 tons, if not 20 tons of compost per acre per crop. But we don't have enough carbonaceous biomass to be able to do that. So we have to pick and choose. The vermicompost thesis is that the vermicompost is not a fungally dominant compost. We use our manure. A lot of our manure, of course, a lot of it goes into the other composting systems, but we still have a lot left over. So the vermicomposting thesis is rather than deploying that manure directly, that cow manure, if you make it go through vermicompost, and there are a lot of studies out there on this, it gives you much better results. And then we add some other materials. We'll add like, you know, banana leaves, we'll add moringa leaves because moringa is a really good bio stimulant. We'll add maybe a rock phosphate or we'll add gypsum. Right. And that will just enhance the quality of that manure because the end product, the vermicompost, the worm castings, which is basically worm manure, is a much better product. The gestation period is very fast, three months. The worms increase at such a rapid clip, you basically double every three months. We started with basically a couple of kgs of worms and we're now down to many tens of thousands of kgs. And we're expanding because the goal is to deploy about at least 30 bags of 50 kgs per acre. So at least about 1500 kgs per acre per cropping cycle. And that's something we can achieve with the amount of manure we have. Right. And on top of that we can add the more fungal stuff.

Right.

So that's the thesis for, for the four composts. Wow.

I'm. I'm a little bit envious and I think we should have some follow up conversations offline because I have some thoughts on how to amplify some of the things that you're doing even further. Coming back to the sugar cane for the moment, I also want to explore some of your other crops to understand what you're doing with some of the mangoes and what other crops you might be working on. But you've been describing some of your journey and the pathway of how you've been evolving your cane production. But what does a current cane management system look like? And also what are your yields like compared to where they were historically? Are you doing repeated foliar applications? What does the overall ecosystem of managing a cane crop look like at this moment?

So the way cane is managed generally in Pakistan is you do this heavy tillage to prep the land, then you add the cane. Usually the cane lasts for either one or maximum of two years and then flood irrigation is the paradigm. And then you deploy predominantly nnp, urea and DAP with some better farmers adding potassium in the form of SOP or mop, which is cheaper but not good because again, from your webinars you make it very abundantly clear. The chloride and salts, they're really not good from a water usage efficiency point of view as well and from other agronomic points of views. And then some of them, very few of them will deploy like maybe a micronutrient stack. Now micronutrient stacks in Pakistan are really poor quality. They are EDTA or EDTH chelated, which, which as we know is a big no, no. And again learned this from you. Those really strong synthetic chelating agents can go in and you know, chelate or bind to other nutrients and maybe cause like a calcium shortage in the plant or something like that. Right. So that's the paradigm of cane generally. What we are doing is some of the things that I just mentioned. We also did another really cool study where on one center pivot we divvied it up into three parts. We were growing silage maize at the time. And on one third as a source of phosphorus, everything else was the same. Once for one third, the source of the phosphorus was dap. This is before we'd made the transition to map. One third was DAP plus something called bop, Bio organic phosphate. And I'll just explain what that is. And 1/3 was just bop only. Now bio organic phosphate is basically you take a low grade rock phosphate that cannot be used. So this is indigenous mined in Pakistan, so it doesn't come from Morocco like the DAP products do or MAP products do. And then you mix it with a high nitrogen source, you add some PSBs and some other microbial inoculants and then you sort of, you know, compost it for like a month or so. And in the process, the end product that you get is a much more bioavailable form of phosphorus that actually lasts much longer than dap because DAP gets affixed into the soil, the vast majority of it. Right from you I learned the statistic that 8 to 11% gets absorbed and the rest is just get gets fixed in the soils. Which is when you think of it, really, really shocking at how waste.

Very inefficient.

Yeah, exactly. And so what we actually, the results we got were amazing because we got about a 22 to 25% higher yield. When we applied a lesser dose of DAP with BOP, we were 25% more cost efficient. We got about a 25% higher yield with that approach. And the next in line, surprisingly well, unsurprisingly, surprisingly, I guess was the DAP result. But very close to that. Very close, Very close. Number three was the BOP only. So that's been, that was an amazing revelation. And now what we did was work with the mills who have this excess amount of mill mud, or press mud, as it's called in Pakistan. And sort of I became an advisor for biofertilizers to the mill and they are now making, because their season just closed the sugar cane milling season, and now they are making BOP both for us and for some of their other farmers to sell as a fertilizer product and using this process, specific process, using the inoculants that I told them to do. So that has been an amazing revelation. We're adding an organic phosphorus source to mix in with the relatively more synthetic MAP source. But even with the map, we're taking a much more judicious approach. It's microdosing, which again you advocate and again ensconcing it with biology and carbon and again with urea. Our approach is, this is something I learned from an Australian farmer, Grant Sims. So shout out to him, which is what he calls liquid urea. So we first create a liquid form of urea, melt the urea, we add carbon, we add a biological inoculant, we add humic acid, molasses, and so we make this very nice concoction and then we micro dose the urea, ideally timing it with critical points of influence. When the cane or other crops need it the most, we fertigate it. Now, to your question about foliar applications, and if you were to ask me what is the one thing, there are obviously many things that one wants to accomplish that you never do when your ambition is sky high and you're doing something as complex as regeneration and you want to do a carafe Fitzgerald diet and stack everything. So there's always things that you have not achieved at any given point. But I would say the number one thing on that list that's a big source of consternation and heartburn for me is our foliar game is not where it needs to be. And foliar is such a incredible tool. It is in some ways the highest ROI tool. I think when deployed correctly, when you create a synergistically stacked foliar. And the greatest application tool for foliars, in my humble opinion and from the research I've done, is these new cutting edge drones that have been designed to get, get the optimal, you know, droplet size and also they have an airflow where, you know, you, you get the underside of the leaf coated as well, which is where 90% of the stomata is for non grass, you know, crops, non monocot crops. Right. So it's just incredible, you know, what These companies that have, you know, mastered the science of drone have done with it. And of course DGI is a big name in this, XAG is another one. So one of the things that we've been trying desperately to do, but so far I've failed, is to get big drone. And this is one of our goals, so please, you know, send us your prayers and good vibes is for 2024, if we can get a drone, we're ideally trying to get either the biggest DGI drone that's out there or the biggest XAG drone so that we can get more acreage out of it. And I'm just obsessed with drones. Just every critical point of influence, we get these nutrients in some of the bio fermented nutrients we're making, we ensconce it with biology, with carbon, with bio stimulants. So we've been working with a few companies in the world, doing some tests to get some really cutting edge biologicals in Pakistan. So biologicals here means biostimulants, biological inoculants and bioferts and doing trials to find out the most bang for buck wise products for the Pakistani context and market. And one of the ambitions is to create a biofertilizer company in Pakistan that can lead the charge for regenerative agriculture. Because as I just laid out in my thesis, the regenerative amendments component is the gateway drug towards regenerative agriculture. And then of course you ideally want to push for systemic changes as well. That's very important and very close to my heart as well. And of course AEA products, we'd love to get them into that mix as well and we can have a conversation offline. Especially the seed starter kit I think would be a massive game changer. Maybe the macro pack, maybe the calcium product, we can have a discussion and then ultimately maybe biocode Gold, which we personally by the way have used on our farm and continue to use. Every time I come to the US I get a massive bag of biocode Gold. So my luggage is mostly AEA products and maybe a toothbrush in there if it can find space. So that is the overarching strategy on the whole, but I'm sure you have many follow up questions so please go ahead.

What does your performance look like today versus the mainstream?

So let's go crop by crop. So for our mangoes and our orchard crops like last year, sweet lime, which is a citrus crop that's harvested in.

The summer, actually if we could, let's focus on sugarcane because then I also want to get into some of Your agronomic practices for some of the other crops as well.

Sure, sure, absolutely. So for cane, what we've seen is that whenever we've deployed regenerative practices, we have seen, and by the way, cane is the last crop that we started moving towards regeneration because it's the most economically vital crop. Our board is very particular about cane, not messing up cane, to put it sort of bluntly. And as I mentioned, that six year ago, first attempt on five acres to Duquesne, where we're just adding compost at 20 tons per acre, which was a bacteria dominant, probably a hydrophobic compost, because at the time we really had not at all, not just mastered the art of compost. We hadn't even begun to understand it. And so that botched attempt really meant that we needed to have legs to stand on before we started transitioning cane towards more regenerative systems. As I mentioned, that 2022 trial with five acres where we added some biocomplete compost, we did not do heavy tillage. We just did the disking and then had the COVID crop and then grazed it with the animal. That cane performed so much better than the cane because we had the heat wave. And so that cane gave US maybe a 15% higher yield, which was really encouraging. We didn't do some of the other nutritional things. Right. So again, it's been this learning journey where we've been figuring out how do you incorporate nutrition? And that's something that is a major focus now with the cane. What we did see last year, and this was on another farm, but on the other farm, we deployed vast quantities of organic material and we did not have weed pressure. So weed is a big problem that we are dealing with with cane. And we can talk about how we're dealing with that. In my mind, the biggest impediment to regenerative agriculture in the world is really weeds. Because herbicides, getting rid of them is the hardest nut to crack. Insecticides, fungicides, you can do really easily with biology and nutrition, you know, if you have the right kind of system, you know, and the right products you're using. But I think the biggest nut to crack is really weeds. And arcane really suffers from weeds, because weeds in these really poor quality desert soils, there's some weeds that just grow exponentially. And especially when you're adding that dap all of that nitrogen and the urea and so on and so forth. And we don't have balanced nutrition, we don't have the carbon in the soil yet. So that's something we're working on last year on one of our farms where we had virgin land, we installed a brand new pivot and we planted cane for the first time. And we got 1750 mons per acre just by adding organic materials. We didn't have the wheat pressures and we just did microdosing with nutrients. And lo and behold, you achieved a much higher yield than what historically these farms are getting like 800, 900 at most. And what we get with just the beginnings of our regenerative practice is about 1000 Mons 1050. But the North Star is really 1700. And that's what I'm obsessed with. 1670, 100. And I am certain we will get there once we get the drones, once we have enough compost to add. And this year I think we're changing the nutrition game significantly and once we can add the foliar game, because there is no way to do foliars in cane once the cane grows. So we need the drones. They just bring quality. But also physically, in many cases, it's impossible to do foliars. Right. Not just a superior quality. So we desperately need to have that. And I think I have no doubt. And then we're adding the silica product. So after the trials were so successful and we've missed the boat this year, but we're getting more silica product to add to our next crop iteration because we just immediately got like a 20 to 25% yield bump just by adding that plant available silica. So these are some of the things in our preliminary sort of results with gain, that's what we're getting. We're also to enhance the economic efficiency, but also to ecologically improve. We did for the first time this year, we've planted sunflower in February with the cane, we've intercropped it, and the sunflower has been treated with biocord gold. By the way, you'll be happy to note. And sunflower is a really good host species for mycorrhizal fungi. So the hope is that some of those benefits will also transition over to the sugar cane as well. Then the compost tea room, as I just mentioned, was built this winter. This is the first time the cane is going to regularly start getting the composty applications, you know, ideally with every watering. So let's see what kind of results we get. But I'm fairly confident that we can get some really, really good and fun results.

You know, I'll look forward to checking back in in a couple of years as your protocol and your system continues to evolve to See what that looks like. So let's. We've, in passing, you've mentioned the other crops that you're growing. The. You have in the dryland, or, yeah, I shouldn't call it the dry land, but where you have the drag reels, you have millet, chickpea, you're doing some work with chili peppers, you have mangoes and citrus and the cotton as well. How has your agronomic management evolved on those crops and what have the results look like for those crops?

So, firstly, just a quick correction, we don't grow any cotton on the farm. Cotton is how I got into regenerat, but we've actually never grown the crop itself, which I would love to do at some point, but our board is not a big fan of cotton, so that will have to be somewhere else. But for the other crops, we have reasonable scale for mango orchards and citrus orchards, and we've seen really amazing results with regenerative practices. We've seen soil transformation in the basins. We've seen water holding capacity improve dramatically. We've seen earthworm castings galore from native earthworms. Right. We've seen, you know, yield and quality specs like the mangoes, the aroma, the flavor so much better because our sister farm is conventionally managed. Same with sweet lime again last year. Sweet lime crop was phenomenal in terms of taste, flavor, sweetness. It was the best. Like, people who tasted it were like, this is the best sweet lime we've ever had in our life. So the regenerative practices, again, doing foliars was much easier there because we have a, what's called a bowser, which is like this sort of big tank, water tank behind the tractor, where we're just, you know, spraying the crops. So again, much less efficient and, you know, than a drone, which is designed for ideal droplet sizes and things like that and ideal pressure and so on, so forth, but still, you know, better than nothing. And just adding those biostimulants and nutrients and biology has been amazing, both adding it into the basins and the trunks and adding it under the trunks and adding it as folia. The results with orchards are phenomenal. The results again with Chile were fantastic. The crop just kept flowering. It just wanted to produce more and more. We didn't have to add any pesticides, no fungicides. You know, again, one of the big problems in Chile farming in Pakistan is fungicides. So that was a really encouraging thing. And now we are in talks with some big companies in Pakistan that procure chilies from thousands of acres to Produce, you know, masalas and spices and condiments and things of that nature that some they export as well and make for the domestic market. And we're in talks of potentially doing contract farming with them for Chili's. And they're interested in Regen Ag now because that's the buzzword of our times. You know, thankfully, when 70 years ago I used to talk about this stuff, you know, people would just sort of roll their eyes, if not physically. I could see it in their brains. And now, you know, people, people think, oh, that's so cool, because, you know, that's just the, you know, like I said, it's the buzzword of our times. And that's wonderful. So, you know, we can think about this contract farming because we've been so encouraged by doing chilies regeneratively. Last year, I'll give you another really amazing story. We did banana farming in the Thal Desert for the first time. And what had happened was that our principals, our board was like, let's do bananas. And the thesis was the bananas are grown in the southernmost province in Pakistan, which is close to the coastal belt, the Arabian Sea. And that's the province of Sindh. And that province has higher, the highest humidity in the country. But all over the country, bananas are grown there and then, you know, sent over, packed and sent over to the entire country. And these are all sub cultivars of Cavendish, where again, we have issues starting to come up of the Panama disease. But, you know, our board said, let's do an experiment on a few acres, on a couple of our farms. Let's plant some bananas, some of these two, three local sub cultivar varieties of the Cavendish, and see how it goes. Because in season, if we can sell them in the local mandis, the local fruit and vegetable sort of marketplaces, where grocery stores and everybody else and small stores, they all come and procure their fruits and vegetables from them every day. So we'll sell them there and we don't have the transportation costs. And in season we can just really capture some value. And so let's do an experiment to see how it goes. So on our sister farm, which is run conventionally, the same varietals were planted, bought from the same nursery at the same time. And on our farm, the same varietals were planted from the same nursery and they were all grown on drip, conventional, and ours, which was regenerative, and we'd put in a lot of Johnson Sioux compost. And we were also fertigating compost extract and we put in A living mulch, which is what we're transitioning all our orchards to, having a living mulch there, whether that's alfalfa, whether that's sweet potatoes, things like that. But here we created a diverse seasonal living mulch. And the idea was three times a year we're going to change the living mulch, whatever the seasonal things are Inspired by the Dr. Christine Jones methodology of having different families in low growing stuff, stuff that's synergistic, doesn't compete with our main crop crop. And the results were amazing. We did zero synthetic fertilization. The bananas survived and thrived and they were so verdant and green and on the sister farm they died within three to four months or maybe maximum five months, they had completely wilted and died. They were given, you know, all the recommended doses for DAP, for urea, for SOP, potassium, etc. Etc. And here we had like this nutrient cycling and in the beginning we hadn't even added nutrients, although I feel like we should have biologically ensconced. Potassium would have been really good or something like that, which we're now starting to do to get even heavier fruiting. But we got really decent fruiting and the plants survived and not just survived, thrived. They look really healthy. Everybody who came in was in awe. You're growing bananas in the Thal Desert and they look so good, it's like, you know, candy for the eyes. And so, you know, that was really cool. And then for the other orchards, what we're doing now is which I'm really excited about, we got sheep for the first time and sheep compared to the other ruminants like cows and goats. So in the Pakistani culinary scene, goat meat and cow meat is eaten and enjoyed much more than sheep meat, aside from like the northwest westernmost province where sheep is the preferred red meat. But here in the Punjab, in Sindh etc, goats are really the most loved form of meat. It's called mutton, although technically mutton is both sheep and goat. But in Pakistan mutton means goat meat. And I sort of spoke to the board and convinced them that we need to have a sheep operation. And we use a native sheep breed, the Thali sheep, which is named after the Thal Desert. And my thesis was we're going to use this specifically for grazing in the allees so we can make our orchards into silver pastoral zones so where we will have like annual, we can have some annuals drilled in in a no till seed drill and some perennials like alfalfa and bersene, clover et Cetera. And then when they go dormant, we'll come in and add the annuals and then we'll have them continuously grazed by the sheep. And we're going to. It'll be really amazing for the soils. And for that we're making sheep tractors, our first sheep tractor we just built because we don't have electric fences here. So the idea is moving the sheep tractors and grazing our soils so that we can extract more value from our orchards, but also regenerate the orchards at the same time. Right. So adding stacking economic value, but also ecological value. And my favorite part on the farm, by the way, and I haven't spoken about this, is actually a 10 acre experiment that we did under an impact sprinkler system. And this area was a barren, desolate desert patch where nothing had ever been grown before. And we installed a solar powered impact sprinkler system. And then I said, I want to do a holistic land grazing trial or a managed grazing trial. What we did was we planted Rhodes and mombasa grass. And then we also added about 20% annuals of different types, some legumes and some others. And we started getting them grazed in a more managed kind of a way again, as Dr. Christine Jones would tell us, 50%. Leave 50% of the grasses as they are and then they grow back much better. And you can actually increase your output per year per acre by at least 50%. That's what we did. And I kid you not, one year later, that sand had converted and we would dig deep with our hori hori knives, which is like now a standard practice. Everyone on my team has a hori hori knife because I want them to dig the soil. And, you know, one year later, in just one year. So from one spring to the next, we had, at least from visually I could tell, 2% organic matter in that soil. So it's chocolate down in color in just one year. That is the power of regeneration and of grazing especially. It's really powerful stuff. And we didn't add anything to those soils aside from compost extracts being fertigated through impact sprinkler systems. Right. And so that was really encouraging. Now we're converting that system into a intensive silvopastoral zone. So we're adding Lucina shrubs, which is a leguminous shrub, also a high in condensed tannin shrub, which is really good for plants, sorry for ruminant health and digestion. And we're adding mulberry trees where we can feed the leaves and the mulberries both to our ruminant animals. So that was really amazing. And the plantation has actually just got completed, the mulberries and the lucina. And that really encouraged me about the power of grazing and how quickly you can actually transform soils. The other thing, one other amendment of the many that we make is something called beneficial indigenous microbes, also called IMOs. And from that we make a liquid extract that we apply to soils. Anywhere you put those rice in a wooden box with a mesh boxes to capture the native, the beneficial fungi. Anywhere we put them on our farm, especially our row crop areas, et cetera, we get mostly bad fungi that are really bad colors like the greens and blues and things like that. But in our grazed zones, we get really white, fluffy, amazing beneficial fungi, which we then use to create this inoculum called bim. Beneficial Indigenous Microbes. That just shows how amazing the soil has become. It's fungally dominant, it's carbon rich. You know, the nutrient cycling is phenomenal, and it's allowing us to create nutrient or an inoculum or biological that we can deploy to other areas of our farm.

So many beautiful stories. When you described the bitter flavor and the aroma of the mangoes and the citrus and the lime, I'm thinking back to the story that you shared of the heat stress that you had in 22. How did those crops respond to the heat stress and how has the pest pressure shifted there, if at all?

Yeah, so what we've seen is that after we started deploying these practices, we haven't really had, you know, any pest pressures in our orchard zones. You know, again, knock on wood. No pest pressures, no fungal pressures, you know, no mildews or amphetinos or anything like that. That sometimes can happen in orchards in Pakistan, even in our bioregion. And that's been a really good sign as well, because the plants, they look healthy, the fruit looks healthy, and it's able to withstand some of these climatic shocks much better. So the sweet lime, I'll give an example. In the 20, you know, one of the heat waves a few years ago that we had, the sweet lime really suffered. And this is before we started doing some of these practices, but subsequent to that, it's been able to perform much better in stress conditions. It's been able to have really good flowering, really good fruiting. And so I'll give you an example. The first time, after we started doing more regenerative, these regenerative practices in earnest and the foliar applications and the compost applications, we got at least 50% yield bump in our sweetland crop.

Wow. There's this framing that you achieve what you incentivize. And we've been talking about the improved pest resistance, heat, stress, flavor, aroma, et cetera. But what has the. Just broadly with the various things you've tried, what have the economic benefits been?

The economic benefits I think it depends on from crop to crop. Right. Obviously, it's been fantastic for chilies where no pesticide usage. So you're doing this huge saving. You're getting a really good, very solid crop. It's led to other economic opportunities that otherwise wouldn't have happened because now this big company that I mentioned is thinking of working with us for us to expand our chili production and cater to their needs. So that's a great economic opportunity. Chilies, by the way, are. If you can do them well and get a good yield or a very good yield, then Chile is probably the most economically lucrative crop in Pakistan today. These dried red chilies specifically. So again, it's opened up this huge economic opportunity for us, which I hope we can capture now, again, with orchards, we are getting much better performance than under a conventional system we did before. So again, huge economic advantage, both from the point of view of not having to use synthetics, but also in terms of pesticides or fungicides or herbicides, but also in terms of the quality and yield specs and what it's leading us to now, now that we have confidence and we've created a regenerative product, we are now seeking to launch a direct to consumer brand for our mangoes and our citrus in which we can capture much higher value than taking it to the middlemen. So hitherto we've been selling it to middlemen, but now that we've established this premium product, which I'm almost certain is also much better for customers to be, because we know that this stuff generally has much higher nutrient density, which at some point I hope we can get tested. But just from taste, aroma, all of that stuff is an indicator that it is better for customers. But it's also better because we're not using pesticides, we're not using fungicides and herbicides. Right. So that opportunity has additionally emerged because we've created a superior product that's free of these chemicals and we hope the customer will then patronize because of these attributes. And in terms of the cane, we are seeing much better stress resistance, we are seeing slightly higher yields, but we are only at the beginning stages of our regenerative protocols. And I have zero doubt that a year from now and especially two years from now, our yield specs are going to be so much better than the conventional cane that we used to grow and the conventional cane that our sister farms are growing in the same bioregion just a few kilometers away.

This is an incredible story, incredible experiences. Taimur, thank you for sharing so richly of what you've been learning and what you've been experiencing. What advice would you have for growers who are in a similar setting in an arid environment? Or really for any growers, what advice would you have for growers who are on the beginning stages of the journey?

Yeah, I think it depends what part of the world you are. But for those lucky enough to be in more developed economies, you know, the us, Australia, Canada, Europe, you are very lucky because you have a slew of products available to you that can help you on your regenerative journey and get you a result from crop cycle one, which is amazing. Right, because you can better your land, you know, be really good stewards of the land, leave it better off for your next generations and get an economic return from crop number one. So that's amazing, right?

You've had to figure out a lot of that on your own.

Yes, exactly. Because we didn't have any guidance, at least in the country. There were no consultants or anyone that we could go to. But again, very grateful that we live in a world where we have these technological tools. And I think Dale Strickler mentioned this on your podcast as well, that we're so lucky. You can be on a tractor or a combine and just put on a pot of, you know, you don't have to waste those three hours or five hours or whatever of your life. You know, we can be constantly upgrading our information. And that's what I do. I mean, when many of the times when I'm driving, I'm listening to a podcast or webinar, whether it's Regen Ag related, which is my core passion. But I also have some other passion. Sometimes it's economics or, you know, regenerative finance, other things, you know, that I'm very passionate about as well. But it's always about upgrading our information. So that I think is something that every farmer in any part of the world can do. And of course, it is a privilege if you are well versed in the English language, which I'm very grateful for as well. Because in a globalized world, English is the predominant language. And most of the research and a lot of the great podcasts and webinars, etc. Are in English, and books and research papers so that of course is a privilege. But the other thing I would say for farmers who, let's say, are not in developed countries or maybe in some arid and semi arid environs, I think again here the good news is that the biological space is really dramatically increasing and there are some things they can start doing from the get go themselves. Like they can start planting a tree like moringa, which is now everywhere in Asia, has been indigenized in Asia, Africa, and you could start creating your own biostimulants, right, in a bucket. You can add moringa in a sock and just brush it in water and use that water for a foliar application and you will start seeing hopefully really good results from crop number one. Right? So there are many amendments and tools that are low cost. Certain bioferments that farmers can make from the get go, right, Using manure and some sugar source and a fat source and a carb source like a lentil powder that's locally available and add some molasses or sugar or jaggery, add some manure and just ferment it in water, right? And you'll get a bioferment that you can flood, irrigate into your lands. Let's say you're a 2 acre farmer or a 5 acre farmer in South Asia or Africa and you can start getting really good results again from the first crop. So start thinking along biological lines, but also for farmers who are maybe more medium scale or bigger scale, but in more developing economies. The biologicals revolution has meant that companies are now playing catch up with aea. And so you have Cortiva that has bought Stoller. And I know that, you know, Mr. Stoller, who's passed away now, was one of your mentors and created a fantastic company in its own right, you know, and Cortiva bought them for $1.2 billion. They bought Cymborg, a biological inoculant company that's from in Spain. You know, they Syngenta bought Villagro. So you, you're in a gold rush for purchasing biologicals. But what that means is that these companies, so Cortiva exists in Pakistan, Syngenta exists in Pakistan and many other developing economies and that makes access to these products real as opposed to some of the more smaller and niche companies that are amazing, such as yours, but that exist more in developing economies in North America. In your case, obviously there are some cutting edge companies in Australia and so on and so forth. Right.

Well, the good news is that in our work at aea, we are starting to do work in throughout Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle east and in Asia and in Australia and in South America. And so we're going to be in your neighborhood in a few months.

That's amazing. Looking forward to it. Hopefully in Pakistan itself. Let's, we can, let's talk about that.

I want to say thank you. Thank you for a delightful conversation. I've enjoyed this discussion so much. I'm sure that there is much more that we could still talk about, but we're going to save that for a follow up conversation where we check back in in a year or two to see what other things have been developing and how your how your farm has continued to develop. So thank you for sharing your wisdom and your experiences and I've so enjoyed this discussion. I'm sure many other people will as well and I look forward to chatting more.

Thank you so much for having me. John. It's been a treat.

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.