Episode 137: Reducing Inputs Through Timed Nutrient Management with Dan Brown

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to regenerating our ecosystems. That includes regenerating soil health and plant health and livestock health and ultimately, of course, human health, which is what the ultimate purpose of agriculture really is and should be all about. There are many conversations around growing a variety of different crops that we've had here on the podcast, but there's one conversation that we haven't had very often and that is related to nut production. I've had lots of lot of conversations around fruit production, vegetable production, and the foundational principles are all the same. But I'm here today with Dan Brown who can give us some perspective on growing some different types of tree crops that we haven't talked about before. So, Dan, thank you for being here. Thank you for being willing to share your experiences and some of the things you're working on. Tell us a little bit about your context. What are the crops you're growing, what type of environment? What does your operation look like?

So, yes, we farm hazelnuts primarily in the Pacific Northwest, the Willamette Valley of Oregon, of varying ages, and I'm fifth generation on the family farm. We have lots of different varieties of hazelnuts. And this is the primary hazelnut growing region in the country. 99% of hazelnuts are grown within about 60 miles of me, about 10 miles north, about 50 miles south, and 10 miles east and west. It's very, very small microclimate from a food security perspective.

What's going to happen when you get a deep freeze one winter and then a hot summer that summer?

We hope that doesn't happen. It has back, I believe in 89 there was a crop almost crop failure. But hazelnuts are not hugely consumed domestically either. So there's.

That's true, that's true.

They're relatively unknown.

Which parts of the world are hazelnuts consumed very well? Does that mean that the majority of your crop goes to an export market?

It does, although a lot of it is exported and then re imported into Nutella. That's the primary consumption of Americans of hazelnuts. But as far as direct consumption, Europe, Germany is a huge consumer and other parts of Europe, China was a big market as well for a while and they've kind of pulled back.

Given the recent change in administration with the election, do you foresee any possibilities of some of that re importation or that that exported processing and manufacturing being brought domestically into the country or not particularly.

I don't know if that will necessarily benefit Us directly. It's hard to. Hard to say. I mean it's very fluid at this point.

Let's see how it's premature to speculate at this point. Tell us a little bit about your operation. You said that you're the fifth generation, still farming with your family. What is the scale of production and what other crops are you growing in addition to the hazelnuts?

So yes, I farm with my family. Dad's still heavily involved and my brother as well. We farm hazelnuts, a few walnuts. Used to farm quite a few walnuts, but that market has collapsed. And then we also farm some corn, wheat, clover for seed. We experimented with peas this year. That was a bit of a failure, but we'll try again. Some oats for grain. In the Willamette Valley there are about 200 different crops grown. So you can grow anything you can imagine.

Pretty awesome microclimate, isn't it?

It is, yeah.

So for those, for those of our listeners who aren't familiar with the Willamette Valley microclimate, can you give us some perspective on your rainfall environment and what your growing conditions look like?

Yes. So it's Mediterranean type climate. So we get most of our moisture and precipitation in the fall, winter and early spring. And then the summer is really almost desert. Like some years the rain turns off early May and we don't see a drop of rain until September. But we can also get upwards of 30 to 50 inches of rain in the off season.

And does that mean that you're then generally irrigating during the summer months? Most of the crop production is irrigated.

So we have both. Hazelnuts are traditionally have been dry land but have irrigation has been adopted much more so in recent years on a lot of the newer plantings because the industry had a influx boom 10 years ago when the price tripled basically overnight and the acreage also tripled in about five years subsequently and then pricing has fallen and then since recovered somewhat to a much better level. So that's that part of it. But a lot of crops in our area are cool season grasses which grow primarily in the fall, winter, spring and so irrigation is not required. Yeah, winter wheat in our area is. Can be 150 bushel dry land.

Intriguing said. It's able to tap into the moisture. Yeah. Well you have the cool season growing season as well. Yeah. So how has your farming operation evolved over the last, over the last five to 10 years? What are the things that you're working on improving? I know that several people recommend that I have a Conversation with you based on some of the innovative things that you're doing. Tell us a little bit about those.

So we're. We were having some significant struggles and challenges in our orchards and related to compaction, soil loss via erosion and things. So we were just went down the rabbit hole of how can we address this and try to fix and mitigate and tried some really crazy things to see what happens. You think of a tree is supposed to have roots out to a strip line. So I took a subsoiler down a row, very small test just because I didn't want to totally kill everything and found very minimal rooting. And so that was more confirmation that the roots really aren't there because of extreme compaction. I. I can have take a soil penetrometer and I can peg to a thousand at the surface.

At the surface.

At surface.

Wow. And so. So when did you try this experiment with the deep ripping?

That was about three years ago. Three or four years ago.

And what have you done since then?

We've done some cover cropping. We've tried to stay out of the orchards when it's too wet as much as possible. We've implement kind of changed from a traditional bare orchard floor to even if it's just the native weed cover, letting a lot of that grow at least in the dry rows to both mitigate compaction and help alleviate some and break some of it up as well as it helps hugely with erosion.

And to offer some context for people who aren't familiar with hazelnut production. How thorough is the shade cover on the orchard floor? Of course it varies with maturity as well how mature the trees are. But for a mature orchard, what proportion of the orchard floor is covered in shade during the, during the day?

In the summertime, a mature orchard can be basically fully shaded.

And what does that translate to in terms of COVID crop growth underneath the orchard canopy?

That was actually a little surprising. I planted a mix of oats and peas one year and was able to. We had some four foot tall oats in the orchard even through full canopy, no sunlight, no direct sunlight.

That's intriguing.

Yeah, it was. A lot of people were really surprised how much I was too. Really.

And I understand that in almonds, the reason for the bare orchard floor of course is to facilitate harvest. Is that the same purpose, the same intention in hazelnut production as well?

That is correct.

So how have you been managing that cover crop residue for harvest?

We flail mow quite a few times through the year and that generally if we don't get behind on it, takes care of it and does a good job if we do get behind. We've had some challenges of grass residue this year. We actually bailed a little bit just to get rid of it, but it's all learning.

So in addition to the COVID crops, have you also been doing any subsoiling.

For compaction after that first experiment? We haven't yet. I'd like to try inline ripper just to minimize the surface blowout to try to not cause so many problems because it was a full reset and so harvest that year was virtually impossible.

When you say a full reset, are you saying that you did things in addition to the ripping as well?

So, yeah, I ripped it in August, which is about a month and a half prior to harvest. And in doing so I brought up basketball sized boulders of soil that I then had to break back down into some semblance of soft. And then it got a little bit wet and just was a muddy mess of not good.

So what are the, what are the things have you been trying and working on?

We've got some subsurface drip irrigation that we're big fans of that it's much more easy to manage than surface drip. And then with that we do some fertigation. We like foliar feeding. It's, it's direct, it's quick, it's efficient with volumes of product and doesn't necessarily have the microbial degradation associated with some of the salty fertilizer type products that you would so apply.

Have you been, I'm assuming with the hazelnut production and the production of some of the higher value crops, you've been foliar feeding kind of steadily over the years? It's not particularly a new innovation for you.

Correct.

But how has your nutrition management evolved over the last couple of years?

We have brought in SAP analysis through crop health, which is through aea.

And.

Dad was actually an early adopter of foliar feeding probably close to 20 years ago in the tree nuts. And we've since continued and refined over the years and then with SAP analysis that's really targeted even more and brought nutrients into the picture that were never thought of in the past.

You know, I find it intriguing that still I still to this day sometimes people reach out and say, oh, foliar applications are invalid and they are not scientific and they have no scientific basis. Foliar applications don't work. Plants only absorb nutrients through the leaves. And where have you been for what, last 40 years? And where are you getting your information? We have the international. We have the international Plant Nutrient Institute publishing articles and some outstanding reference materials and resources on how to design effective foliar applications like this is not a new idea or an idea that is just getting started. Yeah. So coming back to your SAP analysis, what did the SAP analysis results reveal and how did that change your nutrition management?

We've seen lots of different things. We found low molybdenum and cobalt in those and have since added those into our programs. Potassium, we've been able to pull back on some different times a year. Calcium, we always, always struggled with trying to get levels up. Still, still trying to dial that one in. Nitrogen levels we've pulled back and that's also timing based. Another kind of progression of ours over the years was we would traditionally pull soil tests in August and I'd get the results back and there's 150 units of nitrogen in the soil left at the end of the year like this seems until we put it on tree never takes it up. Then it gets flushed in the wintertime and it's gone. So we've since really pulled back on soil applied nitrogen. Traditional application rates are as high as 160 units is kind of the recommendation from the college and we've pulled that way down to sub 50.

So you've cut it down to about 30, 35% of where you were, Correct?

Yes.

And how. Actually there's an important question that I missed asking when we're talking about your use of COVID crops and, and how that has changed. How did the soil compaction change as a result of that? Do you have less compaction now than what you did have?

We've found some, but we're still, still fighting that and trying to alleviate that. Still looking for, I don't want to say the magic bullet, but I mean there we're open to trying anything and everything to try to help with that. Cover cropping certainly has helped, but it's, it's challenging still.

Yeah. My reason for asking about the soil compaction was you mentioned previously that you had still as much as 150 units of nitrogen left in the soil at the end of the season. You were only applying 150 to 160 units. So are you thinking that you had very limited absorption because of soil compaction?

That's possible. And I think also they've, they've done uptake tests on hazelnuts and found that they only actually need about half of that total season growing long anyways as well as traditional organic matter levels in a lot of Hazelnut orchards are 3 to 5% and if you get 20 to 25 units per percent there. So it's just through microbial processing over the year, I think it was just basically wasted.

So with where you are right now with 50 units of nitrogen application, how are the trees responding to that reduced nitrogen application?

We've had some very, very good yields. We've had our challenges as well, but not necessarily related to that. Some possible and we're still dialing it in. We will foliar feed with urea and some amino nitrogen products through the year. And next year we'll probably step that up some to really try to dial in the right levels throughout the whole growing season. We were labor challenged last couple years due to very low crop pricing. And that's one downside to foliar feeding is the acres per day is much lower than dry bulk spread.

Yeah. So in addition to nitrogen management, what other nutrients did you other nutrient changes did you see taking place?

We're always trying to address boron, hazelnuts, like boron and we've always been. We have low soil boron levels even in the parent rock material. So will put on as much as three actual pounds of boron in a band. So like if you took it as a broadcast rate, it's almost six pounds in the tree row, which most people think you're crazy for. But the trees, we yet to see any boron toxicity symptoms. And again, you pull a soil test at the end of the season and it's back down to a half ppm level. So the tree had.

That's intriguing. Absorb some of it and who knows, some of it may have gotten sequestered in. Some of the organic matter may not be showing up on the test out there anymore. With the changes in boron management, nitrogen management, the various things that you've done, how has crop performance shifted? Are you getting yields equivalent to what you've got in the past? What do yields and quality look like?

We've had yields equal to some higher than in our really local. We have shallower soils. So 20 miles south of us, they just kind of automatically get a higher yield than we do because they have 30ft of topsoil versus 6 to 12 inches. So we're our soil. We farm in some hilly area, areas where there just isn't as deep of native topsoil. And you hit clay and silt is the kind of what you run into below there. Very red. It's shorey type soil, grows wine grapes very well. It's a very common crop in the very localized area. But yeah, back to Yields, we've been pleased and happy. We've had yield increases and through changing management last year we had some very good yields. This year we're still waiting on some final numbers, but we've been very pleased.

What have been some of the highlights or the memorable moments? What are some of the things that really stand out to you that were perhaps surprised or unexpected?

We pulled a total nutrient digestion out of some fields last spring and it was very eye opening to see just the amount of potassium and organic nitrogens and all these minerals that were always taught, oh, you got to keep adding, you got to keep adding, you got to keep adding. And well, no, we need to unlock what's there and use what's there, not just pour on hundreds and hundreds of dollars an acre every year because somebody said it's a good idea. Even though we've shown and seen that there's really no economic benefit to us, there is to the retailer.

Well, ultimately it's interesting to bring economic benefit to the retailer, but you need to bring it here yourself as well. How do we do that?

That's the magic. Magic right there is try to find high ROI inputs and unlock the native cycling of nutrients via soil biology and those types of things.

What are the experiences that you've had that you believe other farmers would benefit from knowing about? What have you learned that you wish you knew several years ago?

Don't be afraid to try something new that would be a big one. Just even if it's on a small, small amount of your acreage. Try some crazy ideas and see what happens. That's how we learn. Do I mess up and fail? Absolutely. I look at that as that's learning. We learn more from our failures than our successes.

You know, there's this interesting pattern that occurs when you, when you look at the trajectory of people's lives. Early on in life, we encourage failure like we encourage toddlers to figure out how to walk. And when they fall down, we celebrate it. Hey, it was awesome. You did great. And same with learning how to ride a bike and all kinds of athletic endeavors through your childhood years and formative years. And then the older you get, and particularly once you go to school with our educational system, failure becomes criminalized. And rather than celebrating failures and we get to the point where by the time we're adults, we want to avoid making mistakes. And when the reality is we should consider mistakes as a part of training and we want to make as many of them as rapidly as possible. Unintentionally, of course. What were some of the mistakes that you've made or you encourage people to take risks. What have been some of the risks that you have taken that you would encourage other people to experiment with and to play with?

COVID cropping. And we've had successes with that and some struggles. One definite struggle was we planted radish that was very aggressive, both top growth and tuber. And so come harvest season we had three foot tall radishes, radish top plant. And that was an epic problem of trying to harvest. And it would. The harvest equipment would pull the whole tuber out of the ground. So it's trying to run a three pound radish through the nut harvester. That's not meant for this.

Yeah. Nut harvester is meant for something about the size of a dime or a quarter, not a. Huh.

Yeah. But other successes through cover cropping have been just mass significant reduction in soil erosion. We've had traditional. We used to manage our orchard floors with bare soil just pretty much. We would spray in the spring pre emergent herbicide clear across mow drag to just basically a tabletop bare dirt surface and have since really gone away from that. We still keep the tree rows pretty clean because it's hard to get the nuts out of the tree row if there's too much vegetation there. But we manage a mowed center via either just native weed cover or planted cover crops. You want to hopefully next spring put in some creeping red fescue as a. Just a grass and a nice grass cover that'll we'll just mow four, five, six times a year. And we found flail mowing. We can mow as fast as 8 miles an hour and cover a lot of acres in a hurry. So it's really not a huge cost that used to be thought of as being very expensive to mow versus chemical mowing.

You mentioned the various cover crops that you've tried the radishes and the oats earlier. What time of year are those going?