Episode 145: Proving Regenerative Ag Grows Nutrient-Dense Fruit with Herb Young

Hi, friends. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. You know, all the types of conversations we have here related to soil health and human health and plant health and how they, how those things all interconnect and intertwine. And my guest for today is a conversation I've been wanting to have for quite some time. Herb Young, a citrus grower from Florida who has a fascinating story and some interesting work he's been doing. He's been talking about it quite a bit online. Herb, thank you for being here. Thank you for all the work you're doing. I'm trying to remember where or when was it that you and I met for the first time? Was it at an ACRES conference?

It was acres. Two years ago. Yeah, sure was.

Only two years ago. A lot has happened in the last two years.

Sure has, yeah.

Yeah. So you have quite a fascinating story about the scope of the work that you've done historically and then some of this journey that you've been on more recently. Tell us a little bit about your life story and what got you here.

So I probably have a completely different background. Well, maybe not. You came from traditional ag also.

Yeah, all of us came from somewhere and we didn't start, most of us didn't start in regenerative or organic ag.

We did. But actually I had an interesting start. I was a biology major in college and I got fascinated with agriculture and ecology at the same time. And I actually transferred to universities and went to the University of Georgia because they had just opened an Institute of Ecology that was actually located right adjacent to the ag school. And I was a little naive and I thought, well, I can go and, and study both and integrate them. Well, the Institute of Ecology was pretty esoteric and not practical. And the, the agronomy department, from the very first paper I wrote, the professor called me in and he said her, this ecology stuff, you need to realize we've been doing that for a hundred years. And so basically I followed suit and dove heavily into agronomy, you know, trusting the, the sages and the wisdom of the time. After undergraduate, I worked for a year on a research farm for one of the chemical companies. And I absolutely loved the, the research component. We were just doing field testing of all kinds of new, new pesticides that they were evaluating. So they actually lined me up an assistantship to go get a master's degree in plant pathology. And then I started a long and by the industry standards, real prosperous career in the ag chem industry out. I was a field rep several places in the US For Six years. Then I became a development manager, handled research across the US for some fungicides I was working in for a French company at the time. Rome Blanch doesn't exist anymore, but moved to France and managed fungicides development in, in Europe. Coming back to the States, the global economy collapsed and we all returned at the same time. So I took the chance to go back out to the field and do what I loved. So I landed in Georgia and was the tech rep for 15 years doing a lot of field trials. Call it on university professors contracting research. I was really good at launching products. So I had a chance to go into the home office and then spent the next seven years as a product manager and actually managed the entire launch of some fungicides and a pneumaticide. And then as I was approaching retirement, I saw a unique opportunity to come back to Georgia. Both of my sons happened to live in the small town where I am and somebody was retiring. And so I jumped at a chance to take his job and I worked on a research farm for the last five years of my career. Really, really enjoyed it. A lot of fun. The technology had exploded. We took half of our data with a drone. Is incredible accuracy and the complexity of the data that we're able to take. So then I had this interesting experience getting ready for retirement. I thought, I have a citrus at my home, I'm about 30 miles from, from the Florida border and we can grow citrus here. And I planted a bunch of trees in the backyard and thought, wow, that's, that's really enjoyable. So prior to retirement I started researching some different methods of growing and I really innocently thought that organic might be a economic opportunity for me. And when I started researching it, I was absolutely blown away to realize the entire body of, of data that had evolved in the last, real rapidly in the last 10 years and was just, just fascinated.

And when you're referring to the data that had evolved, you're referring to agronomic information, you're referring to information on citrus production?

No, agronomic on regenerative agriculture. So base, basically I discovered for myself regenerative agriculture and you know, was actually frustrated that after 38 years in the ag industry there was no discussion of life in the soil and the ecosystem and microbiome and the interaction that it might have with plants. And I've, I've called it ag's best kept secret, which is, you know, it's just, just a shame that we're, we are up against this huge wall of, and I don't know that the information is being suppressed. It's just not widely known yet. I'd actually taken soil microbiology in college and there was, there was no discussion of beneficial microbes. It was, it was just about pests. You know, here's your nematodes, here's your fungi, here's the.

Talking about a time period that's 40 or 50 years ago. There was a lot less information then than there is today, but there was still a decent amount of information available then.

There still was. And there should have been leftover information from, you know, prior to the World War II transformation of agriculture. Let's see, I was going through college in the early 80s, so yeah, it's. So I actually, I spent a full year researching regenerative practices. I had a three hour commute total in the truck every day getting to the research farm. So for one year I listened to every podcast I could get my hands on. John, John Kemp, Elaine Ingham, Christine Jones, Graham Sa, Matt Powers, you know, Nicole Masters. I listened to everybody and kept a notebook open, drive all the time, filled up notebooks with information. So I was ready to, after a year of that, I was ready to plant a grove completely regeneratively. So I actually started going to the nursery before my trees came and I inoculated them. Bacteria, mycorrhizae.

Wow.

Before they ever left the, left the nursery. And so when they came to my farm, when they went in the hole, it was full of kelp, seaweed, fish, hydrolysate, molasses, yeast. My survival rate. The nursery had never heard of such good survival rate. I, I only think I lost a couple of trees out of 1350 trees that, that I planted. So, and then pretty quickly there wasn't a huge amount of information, particularly in citrus, about how to grow either organically or regeneratively. And so with every single challenge, I just put out a replicated research trial. Basically, the ag chem industry had taught me how to prove things beyond a doubt. You know, you design a good trial, you replicate it, you apply statistics. And so every question I had, that's, that's what I did. So my, my little citrus grove became pretty much a research farm. And, and so that's what I spend a huge amount of my time taking data and doing trials and doing real specific different applications, trying new products. So that's kind of brought me today.

What are some of the, what are some of the problems that you attempted to, to solve and to research their practical application to conditions for?

So one of the most practical was I absolutely wanted Cover crops. I plant 10 species in the spring and then a different 10 species in the fall. You know, it seemed to me like if they were good, they should go trunk to trunk. And so it's hard to know in a perennial crop when to terminate, if to terminate. So I did a replicated trial. I, I mowed all the COVID crops and through the residue to the tree row, creating a nice mulch layer. I, I mowed and threw the, through the residue away from the tree and then I left completely unmoad. And, and then you, I take a lot of measurements. You can actually, when a tree is young, you can do a trunk diameter measurement very accurately and throwing to the tree, increase tree growth almost 10% followed by throwing it away from the tree and then followed after that by, by doing nothing. So that was just one of my. Well, I even started a bigger trial than that. Before I ever started, I contacted the soil DNA company and applied for a grant and was given one basically to evaluate different treatments and see what the impact was on soil microbes. And so I set up a large trial. 135 trees replicated strips of regenerative and then purely conventional. Conventional was bare ground glyphosate, synthetic citrus, blend of fertilizer, all the pesticides that they might need. And then I had a kind of an in between treatment with all the organic practices like the regenerative, but it didn't have. And he added microbes. So I was able to follow that for four years and monitor the soil microbial changes over that four year time.