Episode 147: Cutting Costs with Technology and Biology with Justin Wylie

Hi, friends. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast. Today I'm here with someone who I count as a close friend and someone that I've had lots of really good conversations with over years. A grower in California. And he's much more than a grower, but I'm going to let him share his story. Justin Wiley. Justin, thank you for being here.

Yeah, so I am a fifth generation farmer in Madera in Fresno, California. Work with my dad, brother and uncle. We're a ranch management company, but we're also farmers ourselves, mainly pistachios and citrus. Used to farm some almonds, fallowed some of those for water. Anyone in California knows about Sigma? So we're playing games there and trying to move things around and, and farm economically. I am, I would consider myself an organic regenerative farmer. Guess regenerative first and then organic by default. That started around 2017, but my journey probably started about five years before that. I started to become pretty disenfranchised with the system. Actually, it started with my political views and being disenfranchised with both parties and having a lot of issues on that front. But it kind of led me to being very skeptical of a lot of the systems in the United States. And my son was born in 2013, was very, very sick as a baby. It started out as a respiratory issue. He caught a respiratory illness when he was just a few months old. My wife was still nursing. We thought it'd be fine. After about a week of not getting better, our pediatrician recommended antibiotics just to be on the safe side. And he was really young. We did that. Did not get any better. So she prescribed another round of antibiotics. We went along with it did not help. The respiratory issues continued to get worse and he ended up being hospitalized because he required oxygen. He was admitted for about a week, sent home, and then later on there was a. There's a long story there. But it came down to a very young pediatrician that was still doing his rounds. Learning actually pulled us out as we were walking out of the main pediatrician's door. We'd been dismissed and said, you need to go to the hospital immediately. So, I mean, by the grace of God, he. So we were sent back to the hospital another week or two. We spent the super bowl that year. So he was born in September. It was super bowl that year that he had been. The next year that he had been in the hospital twice. So after he was sent home, it took a few weeks to recover. I mean, at full intervention. He was intubated, oxygen you know, for multiple weeks. And it was really scary. He didn't get better. He caught every single bug that came his way. He developed eczema. He was constantly short of breath. They were looking at every medical intervention, steroids and, and inhalers, things like that, just to. Just to help him thrive or survive during the day. And he definitely wasn't thriving. He wasn't sleeping well at night. He would wake. After a few months, he started to get worse. He would wake up with night terror several times a night.

He.

Over the next couple years, this is a pretty long process, but over the next couple years, it just continued to be that bad. We didn't sleep for basically two years. He was waking up four or five times a night with screaming, not developing, not looking us in the eye. At some point, pretty early on, we had a pretty good idea that he had some developmental issues. His language and speech were way behind. So he was very quickly diagnosed with autism. And so once you're under that umbrella of diagnosis, there's a whole world out there. There's support and there's groups. We. When you start looking into it, the mainstream view is acceptance therapy, behavioral therapy, but mainly acceptance. It is what you have, is what you're going to see for the rest of his life different, not worse or better. And that was really a tough pill to swallow when he was, you know, you give him the wrong size spoon and he was throwing his cereal bowl across the room, things like that, and just headbanging, all of the things. If you look up autism, you know, anyone know, any child that has autism? He had a lot of those symptoms and he didn't seem to be getting better. So we went down a different path. That's actually right about the time that I discovered regenerative ag. And you, John, in your podcast, there's another guy, Ron Helland, who started so back, and I went to listen to him in person several times through some local boutique fertilizer companies that I was connected to. And just everything he said, connecting, he actually made the connection for me between the gut and the brain and. And then the soils that we're farming in. And so all of a sudden, I've discovered this whole other world. There's people talking about healing autism through food. And we went down that path. And, you know, there's a lot of talk online about how maybe it's just timing and they grow out of it. Absolutely not. We spent two years in the trenches with zero development, and within a couple of months of getting rid of all any toxins that we could find in his diet whole raw milk, grass fed, everything from butter, eggs, beef, just removing any possible toxin we could find. I mean he woke up, asthma started to clear. He know within six months, did not need his inhaler, he started talking, his language blew up, the fit stopped. He immediately, within three months he started sleeping through the night which we hadn't seen in multiple years. So I mean this is not, this is not a two or three or five year development where he just grew out of it naturally. This is, this is snap your fingers and he turned a corner. So we, we dove in. I think still to this day I make that connection. I still am very interested in human health as it relates to US farming but I was already starting to look at regenerative, regenerative ag and Tiff and I debate that now. My wife, whether or not, you know, chicken or the egg argument because I was always already starting to look at that. But this I dove into and whether or not we would have picked up on that or not. But I do think this cemented it for me.

Yeah, it's when you start asking questions, you're. And perhaps your open mindedness, your mind becomes more open to alternate possibilities, you start doing more exploration and these other possibilities come forward and it's when you learn new information, you can never go back again. And the reality is there's this alignment of worldviews between taking a different approach to being personally responsible for our health or being personally responsible for our agriculture. The two are, they're so closely aligned you can't really separate them.

Agree. It's really hard to unsee and there's a lot of excitement in the regenerative world. But you know, that connection to human health and the fact that we have so many problems as a United States compared to even Western Europe or any other, any other westernized country and the amount we spend on health care and education and we're just not seeing results and there's just so many issues continuing to blow up. And so it's exciting to take a look at it on our end, do what we can to help.

So how did, how did your experiences with your son. I mean there's actually I want, let's, let's dig into this a little bit further because right now with the Maha movement and Kennedy's having conversations right now about reducing the toxins in our food supply, that was one of the things that you talked about is you, you just tried to remove toxins as much as possible. This is, it's kind of the obvious entry Point in, in my opinion, there's other steps that need to be taken after that initial step. But what were some of the. What were the. I guess specifically with an agricultural context, what were some of the major toxins that you identified that were a surprise for you that were unexpected?

There's studies out of Europe and wheat. I mean, it's a. It's a common conversation. If you have friends that travel to Europe, if you've ever been to Europe, people. There's a. Actually a friend of mine, David Dahl, who I think, you know, John, doing some really exciting work out there. But he, you know, he talked to me about that, about him coming to that realization when moving out there that he had some health issues. And I don't want to speak for him, but, you know, people go to. Go to Europe and they discover all of a sudden they can eat normally, they can eat giant plates of pasta. And people can't do that here without feeling badly, especially if they're paying very close attention to their health. And when you start diving into it and you really start looking at what do the studies say? What are the parts per million, Parts per billion that we can handle. And I know you've covered this at length, John, but there's a lot of information out there, and the world is changing rapidly, the technology is changing rapidly. I'll just summarize what you've already covered and what we're seeing is that the parts per million argument doesn't work anymore. And I think as growers, I speak a lot about this in front of my own cohorts in the pistachio industry, that we want to develop a roadmap for that reason, because when you start diving into it, the health problems are there from, from things like wheat and rice. We know that for a fact. That's not disputable. It's just a matter of how it was farmed. And just like in pistachio industry or anything else, our crops are being mixed with a ton of different growers. And we may come to a point where if you start talking to industry insiders and any food, they sort of know what's in it. They're looking at it to a certain degree, but they're not necessarily keeping up with technological changes. And in many cases, our biggest export markets are Europe, and they are other than California. They're. They're about. They're leading the charge as far as these MRLs, these maximum residue levels. So when you start looking at that, it's a scary premise that I've been on the Other side, where all of a sudden you lose a tool and it's really scary. There's only a couple examples for me, but one was chlorpyrifos. And we use it. We used to use it granular around baby citrus trees. And when we lost that in California, we. I thought to myself, we'll never plant another citrus orchard again. That'll be. That's the last one. Because earwigs are going to come and eat us up. There's no. That's the thinking. So I remember very clearly how scary it is to lose a tool. So when I'm up there talking to growers, I'm saying, guys, let's get ahead of this. Let's figure out a roadmap to get where we want to be before it's forced on us. We know it's coming. We've been saying for 10 years in the pistachio industry, there are no new conventional chemistries coming down the pipeline to defeat navel orange worm, our biggest pest. And pistachios, we know that there are a ton of biologicals, but they have not been developing. It's because the market in California is not big enough that it's too difficult to get something passed here. How long will it last? Why develop something in California when they may ban it five years later? And we have resistance all over the place in our plant bugs and in our navel orange worms. So they're talking about not spraying too often, withholding. And of course, growers don't listen to that. They're going to spray if they feel like it. So we're seeing resistance all over the place. And so, you know, being a conventional grower and looking at the future, it's no wonder that a lot of growers are getting out. And so that's what's so exciting about regenerative Ag. I have seen personally in the pistachio industry a half a dozen different sons and daughters coming back into the fold, getting excited about regenerative Ag, pulling their. Their mom and dad in that direction to say, hey, give me a 40, give me 100 to try at, you know, a small block. And the difference is, is noticeable their attitude and coming back and wanting to be here. And I think that's the difference is when you're on that side. That's why it's so much fun to talk about and, you know, and even share inside information and that. That's a funny thing in the pistachio industry. I said, nobody cares about your 10-10-10 fertilizer because guys will. Guys will pretend they have the secret sauce and it's really funny. But in regenerative, it's a completely different feel.

Yeah. Because there's so much in red. I think in regenerative, there's the recognition. There is that so much that remains unknown, so much that remains unexplored, and yet what we already know is enough to be revolutionary.

That's right. And there's, I mean, just unlimited amounts. There's more research coming out. I want to talk about a little bit of research that I've, I've been a part of you. That's specifically about pistachios, but let's go for it.

Now is as good a time as any.

Okay. I was consulting on about a 3,000 acre pistachio ranch and I think I am not as comfortable in citrus yet. We can dive into this a little bit more. But I think I do have a roadmap and that's why I'm really excited. Let me back up for a second. APG started a sustainability committee and we call it Sustainability because, you know, what is apg? Sorry, American Pistachio Growers. So I sit on the board and a colleague of mine, Karun Samrin, just piped up a younger guy and he'd been hearing about regenerative sustainability, all these kind of buzzwords. He was looking into it himself. He'd heard you speak at the conference, John. We'll talk more about that later. And so he pipes up in the middle of one of our board meetings, why don't we just start a committee? Can we just get a committee? Can we look at this? Can we get some funding for it? And you have all these kind of, you know, older board members that have been around forever. Processors, big growers, they just sort of rubber stamped it and said, fine, you guys want to look at it, go for it. It's on everyone's mind, you know, and so we're hearing about it. We don't, you know, a lot of these guys don't know a lot about it. So we got the funding. So all of a sudden now we have this committee. We've got about a dozen people super about it. And we started out, we're not there yet, but. But we're starting a roadmap and we're going to build a roadmap for our entire industry to say these are, this is what works, this is what doesn't. And then on top of that, we're going to create a marketplace of, of tech and products that we've proofed ourselves and that we're offering to our growers to say, hey, we've been through this ourselves. This is how we've used it in pistachio. This, this is what we like. So these growers, and as a grower myself, I get a daily or two daily phone calls and emails, texts from different vendors and it's difficult out there. You might have 10 different products for the same and unless you trust and you know, and you've worked with them before, it's, you know, so we're doing some of that work already as a, as a sustainability committee. So from an ABG perspective, there's, there's just a lot of concern out there.

So you had, you had started, we started talking about this, but you were excited to talk about some of the research that you're doing. Have you observed any results yet? What, where are you at? What are you studying?

So one of the board members started a plant bug. Plant bug is one of the biggest concerns of a pistachio. It gets in the way of our cover crops. Because what happens is in that April May window, just as the nuts are susceptible, the shell hasn't hardened yet, we'll start to see stings in the orchard and those nuts on those clusters will go down. And so it look to a, to a, any outside farmer and to the research that we've done so far, it looks like you're, you know, for every sting, you're losing a viable nut. So that's the standard is you're either going to be willing, like in an organic program to use a softer material and try to knock them down. There's some, there's some potential options there that I use that are really good if you have major problems. But most growers are spraying a pyrethroid during that time. It's cheap, it's easy, it's a pass. So, but it's key, critical timing around your cover crop because right as that cover crop starts to dry and especially in these low soil organic matter soils, it can happen very quickly. So you can be in your field on a Monday, don't get there till the next Monday, and all of a sudden you start to see drying in the field and those plant bugs are now in your tree, which they weren't in before. And so that's, that's a big, you know, that's a big concern. It's Phytochorus calchoris stink bug. The, the major enemy is the leaf footed bug, which is, you know, we, we tell horror stories to our children at night to scare them. I've Never seen this, but this. Every pistachio grower will tell you that there was a, there was one year that the leaf footed bug in the 80s was stinging raises and entire clusters were going down. And it's just this awful, awful potential problem. I have seen lots of leaf footed bug infestations. I have not necessarily seen entire clusters go down. So I think there's, there's still a little bit of that, you know, storytelling going on even, even now. So they, this group over on the west side near Riverdale, 3,000 acres of pistachios, did a study with an entomologist. They treated one area of the field. They left one area alone. They mapped it out very carefully. They did it over multiple seasons. So they, because pistachios are alternate bearing and so you want to be very careful in a study. If you're not doing a two or four year, you've got to do it on an even number so that you get both, both crop cycles in order to prove it. But in this case they did multiple year and what they found is that the plant bugs themselves were actually pre selecting and they were stinging what's most likely non viable nuts or nuts that were going to be aborted anyways. Pistachios abort a major percentage of pollinated nut nutlets in June, just a June drop. And it's, you know, it's something you and I have talked about trying to, trying to keep more of those nuts on the tree. But this is happening in that May window prior to shell hardening. And so what they found was that you actually had bigger nuts overall in these blocks, more weight, same varieties, same planting year. The plant bug itself is either stimulating or a combination of actually pre selecting and, and so here we are disrupting that cycle, allowing these nuts to grow partially and then being aborted anyways. And all we're ending up with is a higher percentage of blanks in our. So they. Lower percentage of blanks. Yeah, higher weight. So you're not shipping as many nuts. Shipping costs are, you know, out of the field are a major cost for us. So if you're shipp shipping blanks and wood and anything else, you're losing money there. And so, you know, it was really, really exciting research for me.

Justin, you're getting right to the edge of calling these pests beneficial.

That's right, that's right. Except for. Yeah, yeah. So it's pretty exciting. I mean there's those kind of things that even, even what I'm doing on the regenerative side, I've Been doing it now for, you know, probably about eight or nine years to different degrees.

So what. What have you been doing? What. What does your. What does your management system look like now compared to nine years ago?

So in a pistachio, let's talk budgets for a second, and that'll give you, give you an overall view here. So in a, in a California pistachio in the Central Valley, your budgets can vary anywhere from about 32 to $3,600 an acre as of this year. Traditionally, they've been a little bit cheaper. Labor has gone up. Fuel that is dependent on your water cost, largely your, your plant density, you know, how much your pruning cost. That's a big lever. And then, you know, are you double shaking or single shaking? Because if you're double shaking, that's another $300 an acre. So it can go up a little bit. If you're double shaking, you have higher, higher water cost, but generally around that $3,500 range. Our regenerative organic budgets are about $2,800 an acre consistently. So we're, you know, we're knocking anywhere from six to seven, $800 off an acre.

And what is contributing to that? You have reduced labor costs. You know, what are the drivers of that?

So the big one for us in the pistachios, that about 10 years ago, we lost the battle to be able to harvest off the ground because the pistachio is open. You have a walnut and an almond that they're still obviously able to harvest off the ground. It's a closed nut. USDA looked at that and said, you know, there's too many food safety risks. We, we fought it, but at the time, APG American Pistachio garden wasn't in a chance to. Wasn't in an opera in a position to really dispute that. And so we lost that battle. So what that meant is that we're losing a certain amount of nuts during harvest, maybe 2 to 300 pounds an acre as we shake. And they, you know, we used to go through with crews and rake that up, dump it back into the loads, and it was, it was worth it. We probably, you know, for the cost of labor, double your money there. So it was well worth it. So we just stopped doing that. It wasn't worth the risk. You can have loads rejected. You know, big trouble with USDA. So we stopped doing that. So we lost those two to 300 pounds an acre. So we don't have clean floors. So we don't need clean floors. So what I'm doing is full ground cover. That's the first thing I remember sending a picture, posting it on Facebook of Johnson grass and marestail fleabane malva. I mean, up ground cover. Yeah, that's ground cover. Successional plants. Right. And there are, there are, There are.

Listeners listening to this podcast all across the country right now with their ears on fire and their heads steaming because for two reasons, the budget numbers you just mentioned and for listing those plants as ground covers, that is, that is heresy.

Yeah. So, okay, there's a, there's a background here, but if you get into the regenerative world, there's a lot of really amazing principles. And, you know, in a pistachio, some are easy. They're easier to practice without risk because pistachio trees are very hardy. The plant bug issue I just spoke about, that I'm not worried about. So let me, let me go through the numbers with you. We eliminated fungicides. Alternaria is our big issue. We'll spray multiple times. So we have, we have bot. Botrysphere, botrytis early on. As you know, those are relatively easy to deal with if you're focused on nutrition. So if you're putting more dollars into the miners, you're putting on good foliars over a few year, period, you can really, really reduce any sort of bot strikes and issues during bloom. So if you're allowing ground cover to just grow whatever is out there. And so I've, I've really subscribed to that sort of soil succession fungal bacteria ratio that soils have a tendency to try to heal themselves and move forward naturally if we're not disrupting too much. And so what I've seen is that very, very quickly, all of those weeds, the fleabane, and I really. And I've been through this, so I, I hate marestail and, and I, I've grown to love it now. It's a silica plant and it's, it's scavenging. But I really hated it. And I hated that my neighbors would see just forest. I mean, forests of marestail in, in Madera. And I brought in sheep very early on. I think this was 2015, 2016. I brought in, you know, 100 sheep on this 40 acre block that I was just really embarrassed about had blown up. And I was like, I can't. I gotta reset this. So I thought, I'll cycle it. I bring these, these sheep in to graze and they will not eat the marestail. And I left them in there, you know, with the owner's permission. I left them and left them and left them and they just stayed, they ate everything but the marestail. I mean, until the very last second they were starving. And they finally stripped those plants. And by the time they were done stripping those plants, they had reset my soil. They had, they had uncovered every last blade of grass that was in that 40 acre block. And what I saw is bare soil all summer, which wasn't fun to see, knowing that I was trying to push this system forward. And that fall it blew up again. It was like I'd never been doing anything regenerative ever. And it just, it completely reset. And so it was a good reminder for me that, you know, you can manage a system wrong and it can really have major consequences. But what I've seen, and I've even brought entire processors with their growing team. So our pistachio processors are the biggest growers and they are very open minded about this whole thing. Obviously they have a fiduciary duty. They're farming large acreage. They have a lot of growers that aren't even interested in regenerative. But they are looking, they are looking at this very closely and they're at the table with us. So it's really exciting for us because they're our biggest growers. But a couple of them brought teams to a few of our early fields and it was the best thing to show them was a malva or a fleabane dying with grass and, and white clover right next to it, just flourishing, you know, and the birds and the fact that we could walk across the row into a conventional pistachio orchard that we farm by the way, for clients and then walk back into this regenerative field. And it had to have been on 105 degree day, a 10 degree difference. Just standing under that, I mean, at least. And you know, we see that consistently. I have a funny story about my dad. He, you know, he was sort of tentative for several years and digging through my bins as we'd harvest, you know, very concerned about my blocks that I was trying this on. And after about a year or two he would do these reports where he'd call clients in the afternoon, just checking in with people. And so he'd go make these calls around the hottest part of the day. He'd just go park his truck in the field and, and make calls. I started to catch him in my field every single day. I don't know that he even knew, but I think he was just naturally drawn to not only the coolest place because he had his Sometimes he had his window open and air conditioned on it was that hot. But he just, he just was drawn to those fields. He liked to be in there after farming the other way for 30 years. That's where he wanted to park his truck. And it was, yeah, it was a lot of fun for me to see. So.

Yeah.

But anyways, these processors and their teams, you've got agronomists, PCAs, you know, Foreman's, you know, all sorts of employees standing in my field and they are completely blown away that they're seeing the fruit buds, are seeing the crop load. And so I really believe we have, we have a roadmap. So fungicides I covered sanitation is a big one. John. We call that our silver bullet. Navel orange rooms. Our biggest pest. Much, much more of a problem for than plant bugs. No one likes to find what they, what they call a maggot in their nut. And that's, that's the issue of pistachio is that because the nut in an almond, you can sort it out, you can see it and you can sort it. If someone has really high navel orange worm damage, it reduces the total volume, does not reduce the quality in a pistachio. They have to run it several times. It's a huge problem. It's going to end up in a bag. You know, one or two are going to slip through and you get. That is by far our biggest complaint. It's a really sad thing because it's not a maggot, it's a natural pest, but that's not the way the consumer sees it. And so we're doing everything we can to fight that sanitizing orchard. Getting rid of old mummies is about 150 to $200 an acre practice for pistachio farmers. We first go in with and reshake. That's a really expensive. Somewhere around $100 an acre. We'll, we'll blow all those nuts off the berms, make several passes, then we'll come through with a flail mower and try to shred those nuts in the orchard to destroy it so that way bugs can get in it. You know, break down the, break down the old nuts, the mummies we call them. And then, and then by spring when the, when the early stage nave orange worm happens, the flights, you don't have any food in your orchard for them to, for them to overwinter in. We don't have to do that at all. We don't need to sanitize what, what we're finding is that why not? And that the reason for that is the ground cover we have in our conventional orchards. Five year old mummies that just have not had an egg laid on them yet. They are sitting there hardy year after year just waiting to be infected in a, in a regenerative orchard with full ground cover on the berms and even a 5 to 8 inch year rainfall year. You know, in the drought it's a different story. If you get one inch and everything's dry and nothing's growing, that's a different story. But if you have a decent amount of ground cover for that four to six months during our used to be October to March, April, now it's more like December to April, May, there's nothing left. There's enough life in the orchard. There's enough beetles and earwigs and everything else. That and bacteria and fungi. Every single nut you open it up is white broken down. There is nothing left. For the native orange room, that is a $200 an acre savings. The fungicides themselves are a two to $300 an acre savings. The herbicides themselves are another two. The only reason it's not $1,000 an acre is because I'm taking some of the money that I would be spending on crop protection or sanitation and I'm putting it back into my fertility budget. And that leads me to my next point is that young regenerative farmers or early regenerative farmers do not let go of your fertility program too soon. And I, I had the chance to listen to Keith Burns at the Burroughs Field Day in January. And he's a really great speaker and he gave this amazing talk. But I felt the need to get up afterwards and clarify something because he was very subtle when he talked about reducing nitrogen. He was, you know, he knows what he's talking about. He's seen it firsthand. He gave the warning, don't overdo it. But what my early regenerative farmer ears would have heard is I don't need nitrogen. And so I got up to make that point was I can understand how. And he said it right. He did not give, you know, he, the information was phenomenal, but I felt the need to just make that point that everyone was really excited about his talk. And you know, I'm sure he's done that several times, but I didn't want anybody to misinterpret, listen to what he actually said. In the right circumstances he qualified what he said. You know, if you don't have soil aggregation past an inch and a half and you don't have, you don't have a rhizosphere around those roots and you pull up these bare white roots, you cannot reduce your fertilizer. And I think as growers, even in the regenerative space, myself included, I. That pendulum swung a little bit too far the other way for me some years, you know, and I saw deficiencies and I'm thinking to myself like, this shouldn't be here. And you know, you're able to reduce. But we have to remember we're trying to overcome 30, 40, 60, 80 years of abuse in these soils. And it can happen very, very quickly. But in California, we don't have the rainfall. You know, even this will be our third relatively normal rainfall year in a lot of these fields. You go, in our conventional fields, we don't have moisture past 6, 7 inches. So we're not getting that water penetration. We're not getting leaching of salts. In a lot of cases, in many cases, growers that have the water, even in a year like this, they're applying water with gypsum on their berms during the winter if they have it in order to leach salts in the middle of winter when we've already had, you know, that 8, 10, 12 inches of rainfall. So it's, it's a system we're trying to overcome. It takes a long time and, and we need to, we need to be able to commit to that and start, start switching over from salt fertilizer to high quality fertilizers to try and do no damage. And I, so I think that's an important point.

And since you mentioned Keith Burns, I'll let everyone know that Keith Burns just launched their own Green Cover seed podcast. And I'm sure it's going to be awesome. So if you listen to this one, you're, you're, I'm sure you're going to want to listen to that one as well. Yeah. So, Justin, I want to come back to your weed succession. You mentioned some of the species that you had at the beginning. How has there been any succession in weed pressure now that you've gotten the chance to see this over a multi.

Year period, it's really interesting because we've, interesting because we've started several different fields now and we can, we can look at the different successions happening. When you have the type of soils we do in Madera, there are some ranches, we're dealing with a few hundred acres that have major hard pan, you know, 12 to 14 inches down. So, you know, I'd say you can make the argument that none of us have an O layer in our soils. But I would make the argument we don't have an A layer in Madera in some case. So, and that's another reason for the fertility side is like, you know, we're not farming in a, in a natural system. You know, we've got trees that are very condensed in some cases. In pistachio orchards were 20 by 12. So you have, you know, 145 to 155 trees per acre. And citrus, it's north of 300. That's not what you're going to find in an old growth forest. And so people talk about these natural systems, you don't need to fertilize. Our first goal should be never to allow, and you say this all the time, but, but we don't want a reduction in our production. We don't want any sort of issues with quality. We can't afford it. So you know, we're not purists. If you need to spray, if you need to treat the crop comes first, then you want to be thinking long term. But you need to feed the crop, you need to protect the crop now. And there are some tools to do that. You don't always necessarily need to go in with the hardest material immediately but, but protect the crop. And I've had that conversation with growers dozens of times. Do, do not compromise on your crop this year for the long term because you know that's, that's your first goal is we talk about that with abc.

That can put you out of business.

Yeah. And, and you talked about this too. Sustainability is being here in 10 years, right?

Yeah. So actually I, I, I kind of diverged a little bit. You started having the conversation on nitrogen management around Keith Burns and, and you mentioned your use of foliar applications, but specifically around nutrition and fertility. How has your, how has your nutrition management protocol adapted?

A lot more focused on, on miners. Pistachios do not need the nitrogen. Some of the other crops that we work with, they're not as, as nitrogen intensive and that's why it's a really interesting advantage in regenerative ag. I am still working through that roadmap in citrus and Mercotts and Tango specifically in the mandarins. Very, very heavy nitrogen users. They can be anywhere from 300 to 400, 250 to 400 units per acre a year. And those guys that are pushing 400 units, they're getting the crop sets to justify it. I don't think they're getting the size, the quality Their packouts might suffer. But there's an argument to be made that they're getting a return on that kind of application even if it's broken up during the season. In pistachios. I am still spending a normal pistachio budget would be 350 to $400 an acre in fertilizer. That's a conventional standard budget with everything else, soil amendments, compost would be on top of that if you're doing that. But your in season fertility would be around $350 an acre. I'm spending about $600 an acre on that because of the types of materials I'm using. But I'm using a lot of humic seaweed foliars. I'm spending money on silica, cobalt, molybdenum, boron. You know, I just went through a tote of micro pack the last couple weeks so and I, you know, multiple sprays because it's only a quart an acre. So I'm actually doing multiple pre bloom sprays with micro pack. I'm chasing cobalt and things like that and boron. Pistachios are big users in boron. But I'm only applying 15 units of nitrogen a year, the equivalent of. And I would not recommend doing that in the beginning. I would. But I would also recommend there are big growers in the pistachio industry that no longer apply nitrogen. They apply 5 to 7 tons of compost a year.

Yep.

And that's it. And then they will do their miners. They ch. We all. We're always chasing boron and zinc in pistachios. It's just very common. They, they look at calcium, they look at, you know, of course there's the, the potassium argument, whether or not you need that based on your soils and how to apply it. But I don't think nitrogen in a pistachio is as scary as some of the other crops even earlier.

So it's interesting that you're mentioning the, the very high zinc and boron requirement because. Yeah, I think you and I are going to have more conversations about this. I have, I have more than just speculation. I have a pretty good idea that we get those levels high enough your navel orange worm is going to disappear.

So that's, that's interesting. We, we've been doing SAP samples and I've never thought about in relation to Neil Orange worm. We've been doing SAP samples for five years now. And what we found, we pulled some late saps which we were never doing before. Pulled them in around mid August right before harvest because those are really our last chance to fertilize. And a lot of times around that time we'll do, you know, some very minimal applications, but we were done. We're usually done with boron by, you know, June. It's in our last blend of the year. And what we found after going through Nutville, which is 50 gallons of water per tree per. Per day for almost 60 days, is what do you think happens to your boron when you're farming in rocks? It's gone.

Right.

And so, and that's something that I.

When is your period. When is your period of peak navel orange worm susceptibility?

Around that time.

Exactly.

Yeah. And another thing, John, with the other function of boron is the. Is, you know, the translocation of sugars.

Right.

And we inevitably, we have a very good percentage of crop that's left on the tree every single year. And what we found for $5 a boron an acre, we're getting another 3 to 5% crop removal. So you could be talking about 200 pounds that would been left in the orchard for, you know, next year's naval orange worm flights. That is now in the bin or in, you know, in the processor. You know, at two bucks a pound, you're talking about $400 an acre. $400 an acre for a $5 investment.

And so when are you going to start experimenting with a $10 and a $20 per acre investment to see what happens then?

That's a good idea. Yeah. I need to try it. Well, we've, we've definitely gone too far where, you know, we're getting margin. We're getting margin burn on the leaf, which, which the old pistachio farmers, my dad, I shouldn't use the word old, but the previous generation pistachio farmers, they love to see margin burn. They want us walking that line of, you know, you push so much boron that you can see in the leaves is now, now they're. Now they're happy. But.

Well, that's. Oh boy, we're going to have fun conversations around this because I now I want to understand what's happening and what's going on with calcium. We've been experimenting with this fun thing with putting on soil. This is for soil applications of putting on calcium and BON at the exact same time. And I'm, I'm coming to the conclusion from what we're on many crops, we can, we can elevate the levels a lot higher than people think with only positive crop responses.

Yeah, we're, we're definitely not paying enough attention to some of these calcium, especially in season. What are your thoughts on selenium? I want to have a conversation with you about that at some point.

I think. I don't remember if I've talked about selenium here on this podcast or on others, but I've been doing a lot of research on selenium over the last couple of months. You know, our gardens and the tree fruit and the berries and the stuff that I grow for our family here at home is all treated with selenium because selenium produces some interesting yield responses, particularly for any plant that has a high oil content, which pistachios would, lots of nuts would. If you, you have a high oil content plant selenium can produce a quite an interesting crop response and yield response. But I think for, from a, from a stewardship perspective, from, from the perspective of being wanting to having a desire to produce the highest quality food possible, I think we should be addressing selenium. You know, one of my colleagues, I, I've talked about this before. I need to go do the homework myself. But one of my colleagues reported that if you go to Google Scholar and you do a search for selenium treatments for cancer and I'm sure you have to use the exact proper terminology for specific forms and types of cancer, but he reported that There are over 400 peer reviewed published papers reporting positive results for selenium on cancer as cancer treatment. And you look at that and you look at the epidemic right now. CDC says that half the people in the country alive right now are expected to have cancer in their lifetimes. Why would we accept that as being normal? And it's, I don't, to be clear, I don't believe that a selenium deficiency is alone the root cause of all that cancer. So we have all kinds of environmental toxins and toxins in our food and everything. So there's lots of contributing factors to that. But we are in the unique position that if we from a perspective we have this, the MAHA campaign right now, Kennedy in office, and we should the next step from removing toxins is to produce biofortified food. And from my perspective, there should be a campaign to make sure that everyone is getting adequate selenium in their diet based on how we are growing our food. And selenium is one obvious example, but we should be doing the same thing with zinc and manganese and copper and boron.

You know, recently.

Well, this is me broaching up on the edge of speculation a little bit here. But I discovered that dairy is. There is this expectation for dairy to be a significant contributor to dietary requirements for vitamin B12. And I haven't seen a large enough data set to be very well informed. But the data that I have observed suggests that the vitamin B12 contribution of a lot of modern produced milk is only a fraction of what the expectation is coming from the usda. We're not looking, we're not paying attention. And so in the case of vitamin B12, if you want to have adequate levels of B12, you have to pay attention to cobalt. Well, who manages cobalt levels on their soils and in their forages and the feedstocks that they're feeding to livestock. It's normally accepted as a given, but we have to recognize that our decades of use of high conductivity, high salt content fertilizers has facilitated the depletion of a lot of these elements from our soil profile.

100 agree. I would add to that magnesium. I think for me and actually for anyone listening, if there's one thing I could talk about on the health side, I mean, I, there's a lot that I've dove into with my son, but I would, I would recommend especially for your kids to find a really clean. If you're going to do it in smoothies, do whatever. Zinc, of course, you know, there's some clean forms of selenium out there and seaweed and whatever. But magnesium, I think in particular, especially for kids, as they age, if they're magnesium deficient, it can create anxiety. And, and I know for myself, I grew up, I think that's one is one of my major issues. I was pretty shy as a young kid and, you know, grew out of that as I got it, became a teenager. But I saw some of that in my kids and I actually started adding it to their smoothies. And it was almost, I mean, it was night and day.

Yeah.

And so I, I think there's some things for any adult or anyone that has a child with anxiety or issues like that, try magnesium before you start medicating.

That's so awesome. Something that we used to use a lot. And when I was first starting out, I did quite a bit of livestock nutrition. If we had skittish cattle, cattle that were scared of being around people that reacted to tractors or equipment, if they were out on pasture, start supplementing with. Supplementing with magnesium, they just become as calm as can be. You can drive right up to them, you can walk up to them. They're. They're so calm and content.

And when, when was this, this has been.

That was 20 years ago.

Yeah, yeah.

So you mentioned magnesium. You know, there are, there's been some interesting research. There are four elements that are considered to be almost universally deficient. There might be local pockets and local dietary changes, but magnesium, selenium, iodine and boron are almost universally deficient in practically the entire North American population. I don't know how far, I'm guessing some of that extends outside of North America, but that's the data that I know for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. And we have, we have our work cut out for us. I think the next step is, what you've covered too, is, is, you know, looking at the nutrition, food and, and paying accordingly, you know, valuing the food accordingly and rewarding farmers. I think we get into that kind of system, we can get farmers to change pretty quickly. No, they'll react well.

The reality is, from a policy perspective, farmers have done exactly what we've asked of them. We asked them to produce large amounts of cheap food.

That's right.

And that's what we've done.

Incredibly well. Yeah, incredibly well. You, you asked earlier about some of my practices, so I, I, and I covered some of that. I, I do think ag tech and, you know, there's a lot of biostimulants. I know you work with some, your company, but I, I think there's a, there's a space out there that's going to help farmers transition. The big question is not can we get there? It's can we get there being financially responsible and not, you know, not going under and not making too many mistakes as we go. And I would argue that there are plenty of problems on the conventional side. I spent six years working from an investment firm as a farm manager. Left the family farm, you know, stayed in touch, was still farming myself on the side, kind of balancing that act. But having this bird's eye view across. At some point, I was managing 22,000 acres and seeing the amount of problems on those ranches, the performance issues, and even knowing what I know, working with the farm managers directly, having unlimited budgets, you know, in the best water areas, some of the better ground, you know, the conventional system has, as you know, has major problems. And I think sometimes as farmers, we don't have that viewpoint because we only see our own farms and we think, you know, I've got this system worked out. Any sort of issues, we blame on bad luck, weather, the variety. I know you've talked about varieties, but, you know, we don't give credit to some of the things that regenerative Farming, biological farming, can alleviate. I, I have seen pistachio trees underwater for months, coming up with a cupped leaves, half the trees dead over a period of time with our normal compost tea sprays that we do instead of fungicides for Alternaria. Those trees, because of the biology in the soil and their connection to the soil, are gradually recovering. That's not supposed to happen. I mean, in conventional mindset you see Phytophthora in a tree or any crop. It's a death sentence. And so there are things outside of our normal scope of thinking that are happening that we've never even imagined. And that's such a great point, Justin.

I think just some of the things you've been talking about, the idea of insects actually perceived pests having a beneficial impact and the idea of not cleaning up and leaving mummies on the ground for five years. I've recently come to, I've talked a bit about the fact that most of us have never seen what healthy plants actually look like. Most of us have never seen. I'm coming to realize what healthy soils and healthy soil plant communities actually look and behave like. And so there is this, what you're describing is that what, that the possibility exists that there is a completely different reality, you could almost call it a completely different reality where the ways of managing these ecosystems has less overlap rather than more overlap from what we might think 100%.

Well, and let me qualify it again because thinking of my younger self, I'm not telling anyone not to spray for plant bug as a, as a first year or second year, third year regenerative farmer and pistachios, because that is in an orchard that was probably five years in heavy amounts of compost. They had eliminated nitrates from their program completely. And we're relying on compost. So there are other things that need to happen first before you can see that reduction in pest pressure.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, but so another thing that I'm very interested in is some of the, like I said, the transition. How do we get from, you know, a conventional orchard to a point where we hit that 5% organic matter? We've, we've retained our production, our quality along the road. And that's what I'm really interested in is, is developing that roadmap. And I do think technology can play a role there. And I use lots of technologies. I think there are lots of good biological companies. You've talked a lot about water. That's something that stuck with me. I think in the Central Valley we are, if you don't Know the amount of bicarbonates in your water. The difference between, say 200 pounds or 400 pounds per acre foot can be devastating. So you might think, oh, I'm about the same as my neighbor. Each well, you can have three wells on 150 acre ranch. And you know, all three of them have much, completely different salt content. So you need to be managing the salt load we're applying, and that's been a big challenge for me. But I think there are some tools out there. So I think we need to be treating our water, looking at soil amendments, trying to overcome that with, with consistent and as heavy amounts of biological applications as we possibly can. Because in California, we're growing in a different system than you would see in the Midwest. We cannot rely on mother nature and protecting the ground to do enough because we have to, we have to irrigate, John. We have to put on, like I said, 50 gallons per tree per day during that fell. And I can reduce that. I've gotten it down to say 45. But you're talking a small percentage. The amount of salt that I'm putting on is, is between 50 and 45. I'm not really saving my soul that much. So if I'm putting on salty water, I'm doing damage. And we need to, we need to recognize that and we need to treat it. So there's, there's some systems out there. I love microalgae. I love applying, I love applying just a mix of microbiology through my compost teas. And actually every time I irrigate, there's a company doing that carbonic acid. I use a lot of wood vinegar. So instead of citric acid, which is, you know, derived from a mold and not actually citric acid, I'm using wood vinegar. A cup per tank in a 600 gallon tank actually drops the ph to about a four. So, you know, of course, like you've talked about the reverse osmosis type clean water for foliars. But doing what we can to mitigate those salts I think is really important, especially if you're listening from California, that that's something you need to know. You need to know what kind of salt load you're, your water has and mitigate it. Yeah.

And I think if you're doing foliar applications in any environment, you need to know what's in your water. You're talking about irrigation. But for foliars, you absolutely need to know what it is that you're putting, what you're, what you're putting your nutrients into.

And we would see that. We'll go. We use a high fungal compost out of Yuba City and it's supposed to be a biologically complete. They're reintroducing protozoa and beneficial nematodes, which I knew for a fact were completely absent in our Madera soils. So we're using these very expensive, high fungal. They go a long way. So it's about $2,000 a yard. And we will utilize those by making compost teas and just reintroducing species. And what we get after we spray, especially middle season, is just an explosion of mushrooms in the field.

Wow.

And it's really fun to see. Yeah. But if I were not to apply that again and say a second or third year or four year transitioning ranch, they would not come back the next year. And so you know what that tells you? Obviously they're still there. They're sporading like they should be coming back. The conditions are the same, except the fact that I've applied, you know, two or three acre feet of salty water. I say salty. Our what? Our water is not even that bad in Madera compared to other areas. But it's, it's actually salty enough just with the bicarbonate and carbon. It's just.

Yeah.

To do damage, you know, to suppress microbiology.

And it's, it's interesting. I had a conversation recently with, with another grower in California who was planting a multi species cover crop mix. I want, if I'm just going by memory here, I want to say he reported using, I think either 12 or 14 species in the mix. And I, I didn't get the details of, but over a couple years of that cover crop mix, he saw their soil's electrical conduct, even the salt content, drop dramatically just by using a multi species cover crop. Makes sense. These are these types of, I've started using the term the last year or so of non linear agronomy. You know, linear agronomy is take a soil test or you take a lab test of some type and you say, hey, we're low in calcium, we add more. It's just replacement. It's a one versus one that equals two. And nonlinear agronomy is realizing that these biological systems, these plant systems, sometimes you, you do one thing that doesn't seem to be directly related, but you have all of these secondary tertiary effects that are much greater than you might have anticipated in regards to nutrient availability, nutrient release and so forth.

Yeah, 100 agree. Yeah. I mean, I, I think we're, we call it, you know, we're saying two or three steps forward, one step back. When we're irrigating, we know we're going to do damage, but we're trying to mitigate that and you know, apply enough using technology, using our, our high quality fertilizers to push that soil forward. And we're seeing that, we're seeing consistent soil organic matter. So a company called Agrology and you've heard of them, but I love the idea across the board of real time data. You know, we use it in our soil moisture. So when you have a tensiometer instead of checking that spot check 10 CMR like they used to, you're actually in the field looking at readings, watching your soils dry out, watching that tension increase in the soil is a totally different world than just spot checking and seeing where it is now because you can see, you can anticipate makes you a better farmer. And I've kind of gone to that model in a lot of things. I love to see real time restoration, the soils. What do my practices actually do and watching those soils move forward. And I think real time data and watching what our practice, the effect our practices have, the irrigation, the foliars is pretty powerful.

What are some other, some other technologies that you're really excited about or interested in?

So I mentioned carbonic acid. There's a company in Madera that's doing carbonic acid Eco2 mix. And then I use on a lot of my wrenches, I use my land which is the microalgae. And so we actually figured out with some of the, one of the people that works there, what is the difference between, you know, some of what we're applying in the microbes and say the, the active microbes are dormant microbes in a jug versus what they're applying. And it was something like a thousand x on a per acre basis. And so I think flooding that zone, that's one of the things that I would use to argue that I'm overcoming the salt load with is, is applying exorbitant amounts of biology. And you know, microalgae as you know, is the base of the food chain. Feet get everything, feeds on it. And so if we're, if we're inoculating our soils in and out in year in, year out with different products that I. And there's a lot of really good products. You have some. It needs, it needs a foundation to feed on. Otherwise we all admit that it lasts for say a week or two or three, three and then dies off. What we really want is that microbiology to proliferate. Once we apply it, once we continually inoculate it, even with us irrigating. And I think the micrology does that.

So yeah, once you really look at microalgae and you look at soil microbial systems, all of a sudden, you know, you no longer think about photosynthesis happening just above the soil surface. You realize it can happen at a depth of a couple feet.

That's the exciting thing, all the way down the hard pan for us. So yeah.

At the very beginning of our conversation, you, you made a comment about that you are you, your mindset and the way you're thinking about going down this pathway is that you are regenerative first, then you end up being organic by default. Can you elaborate on that just a little bit? What did you mean by that?

Yeah, I think it relates to the fertilizers. I think ideally in a regenerative scenario, you can, you can use humic acid, seaweeds, other chelators with say a urea un 32 can 17. You can, you can apply fertilizer a little bit more responsibly. And I'd make the argument a lot of farmers on the conventional side are doing that. A lot of the PCAs have actually adopted in some cases though, the humics that these guys are selling. And some of the major chemical fertilizer companies are just, it's water, it's. It's chocolate water. There's not enough humic to actually do anything. So you really need to look at what's your percentage, what kind of pounds, what's the ash content of my humic, that kind of thing to really know what kind of quality humic you're getting. But I, that's where I would start. I wouldn't start, I wouldn't necessarily dive into the organic side. We, I'd like to talk a little bit about the market and some of that, but I wouldn't dive into the organic side with it without seeing a change in my soils first. Because I think, you know, you're on this salt chemical system. You know, you have your trees basically on life support. They're relying on you, much like we see in a golf course. And you know, that comes, that's come up in a few of your articles where you see the grass needs to be spoon fed. Well, that's our trees. They're on life support. That's what they've been. They're planted close together. The soils aren't nourishing them. They're relying on that fertilizer. If you cut that Cold turkey, you're going to see a reduction, you're going to see a problem. So, so start changing the way you apply. Reduce the number of units, but, and, and chelate it, do it in a way that doesn't harm the plant, doesn't, it doesn't harm the soil, and then gradually wean off as you build up compost and some of the longer term investments, you know, you're balancing the season soil. So the organic system itself can have repercussions. And I think there's a, there's a reason behind why anyone that says, oh, you're going organic, you're going to see a 30, 40% reduction in your crop, I mean there's a reason for that because a lot of growers, a lot of really good growers have gone down that path, chasing the premiums and had problems. If you start as a regenerative farmer and you focus on the soil instead of the crop, you know, and I know you, you like to increase photosynthesis, foliars, I think you can be doing that all at the same time. But the argument is in California, where we have, we have salt buildup in almost every soil and almost every ranch, you cannot overcome that. And I've actually made that argument with the Mylan folks that they're more of a soil amendment than a bio biology company because the cost per acre is actually cheaper than applying gypsum. And that's a band aid. We need to do it with biology. But we have to overcome those salts before we can start to see an increase in soil organic matter. And that takes a while to do. And before you see that, before you overcome those salts, you cannot reduce your fertilizer or you can at least, you need to switch to better, better uptake, higher quality, more foliars. You can do other things, but you have to feed that crop up. And, and that's why you start regenerative, you transition organic. It took me several years to come to that conclusion. And then I said, well, I'm already kind of there, I think I can do this in a pistachio. But that was after several years of 10 tons per acre of compost and doing other things that I, I really saw a difference on my berms and I really, actually, a couple years, I was over applying nitrogen. I saw this excessive growth with only 50 to 75 units of nitrogen. So I was, I was applying on top of the compost and I actually saw, for the first time just, I saw it in the tree. You know, I'm, I spent my Normal pruning budget. One of the orchards that I first started on has 180 trees to the acre. So it's a much more dense pistachio orchard. And our budgets are still around 350 to $400 for pruning. And one year after over applying, then 70 units is about, for anyone that doesn't know, is about, is about 50% of a normal pistachio budget for nitrogen or less. And I spent $800 pruning that year. Oh, so it was another lesson, you know, and better, I guess, better to air on that side. 70 units is still not a lot, you know, but 100% a waste of money. I could have reduced. I just cut it off at the end of the year. So.

So you were applying half the typical engine application rate, getting excessive growth, lots of things working well.

And we actually had to train our pruners to prune a different way in our pistachio orchards. So you're used to tipping off the whips because it's, it's about harvest. You want your trees to shake. You need any long whips that have grown and that happens pretty naturally, even in a low nitrogen system. You're going to get some that just take off. So you're going to cut down, leave a vegetative bud, you know, one or two vegetative buds above the fruit buds. And our pruners can see that even when they're 8, 10ft away. Well, we put them in the orchard. And these are, these are printers that have been with me for 20 years, guys that are my irrigators, tractor drivers, pruning in the winter. And they start tipping every single branch because that's just what they're used to doing very, very quickly. And John, these are 6, 8 inch growth with 6 or 8 fruit buds on them.

Wow. No tipping needed.

No tipping needed. Don't touch them. And not to mention the minute you cut into a fruiting bud like that and you remove the vegetated bud, they go dormant, they're inactive. You just killed the branch. So I'm like running down the, running down the row, you know, my uncle and whoever was with me at the time, you know, it was like we had to, we had to retrain them to, to prune in this system because they're so used to tipping. And so now even with 180 trees to the acre, we're still making quite a few cuts because there's so many trees to the acre. We're still in that 300 to 350. But it's a much quicker job. And I think that's about what we did last couple months ago.

Yeah. Wow.

You.

In, in passing, you mentioned the markets. Where do you see the markets going?

I, I think you could say this about every crop in the United States. But, but the specialty crop in California is, has had a really down cycle. Some of those nuts are coming, some of those crops are coming back. Most people know about almonds and follow almonds. They're the, they're the number one. But, you know, walnuts have struggled for years. And these are, you know, the sad thing about walnuts is you have a lot of family farmers. You have some big, big investment groups that own ground, but you have a lot of, say, 80 to 100 acre farmers, family farms that have been in the family for generations. You know, and it's been five, six years of, in some cases below break even prices for walnuts. And I, and I think there's a lot of things behind that. There's the, the tariff issues. There's, there's new production in other parts of the world where they came up with a blonde walnut that was competitive with the Chandler we had here. But that's what we're seeing. And that's another argument I actually made at the APG conference last month. I stood up in front of the growers and said, you know, we have seen this in almost every other crop. The cherry growers in, in California really hurt because of the, you know, the limited size marketing. There was an issue with harvest and I heard a lot of growers complaining about that. I mean, this is all secondhand, but, you know, the way they're marketing, the way they're harvesting, the, the system itself is razor thin. And we've seen that in table grapes, for instance, they were seven to eight thousand dollars an acre. Some of the newer varieties were trying to reduce some of those labor costs, but they ended up at $11,000 an acre and are probably more. This is last year. And so what Happened is a 1200 box crop per acre was the break even. And that started jumping to 1400 to 1600. So you have varieties that at best can produce 1800 to 2200 boxes an acre. And that is a phenomenal crop. It's difficult to get quality. You also had a situation, table grapes, where labor costs and a little bit of rain, there's no market for number twos anymore. So unless you're harvesting number ones, that secondary market used to make money on five years ago is gone. So it seems like we're only moving in one Direction, and that's my argument to pistachios is, you know, Even with a 1.5 billion pound crop, record crop in 23 dropped to about 950 million pounds. In 2024, the price shot up. We were able to move the 1.5, but we're headed really quickly towards 2 billion. And we will hit a, we will hit a saturation point. And that price, we expect to settle out around $1.70, $0.80 if we can open up those new markets. And so we need to look at that price. And right now there's no, there's no premium for organic or regenerative and there are some smaller companies doing it, but for most organic growers it's really not a premium. So what we have is what we have. And so we need to be able to figure this out. That's my speech. My soapbox to other conventional growers is how can we figure this out? How can we do this cheaper so that we're farming and we're not, we're not putting the exact same inputs we are today in 10 years? Because that's where we've been. That's where I've been for the longest time before regenerative ag is what I'm doing this year. I'm going to come back and do the same thing this year. Oh yeah. I'm going to do a little more SOP and whatever else, which is a future investment. But I've really never seen a farmer pull back on the sop. It's like it becomes a part of their program. They just continue to do it to the point of toxicity, you know, so that budget just becomes repeated every single year and nothing goes down. We saw for instance, anyone that's not farming and doesn't have 150 horsepower wells they're dealing with. We saw these demand charges from PG&E in the Central Valley for our electricity where if you run for five minutes between 5 and 8pm you get a demand charge added to every kilowatt hour that you use during that 30 day billing cycle.

Whoa.

And that is significant. Significant. And in some of the ranches that we manage for other clients, we might have just enough water during nut fill that we need to run 24, 7 for those 60 days. And so you are incurring major demand. So what we saw was a 20% increase, a 30% increase, a 20 compound increases of the last two, three years since the PG fires. And that's all in the backs of the, the end user. And it's, it's, we saw bills that were 900 an acre a year in PG go to 700 in one month. Those numbers sustainable? Yeah, it's not sustainable. And so when I go back to technology I'm looking into, on a few different ranches, we're looking into automation and automation because we cannot send our guys out in California at 5pm to turn around Wells off when it's 115 degrees and then turn them back on at 8pm it's not sustainable. And the amount of labor, the overtime where our guys are going home during those days at 1pm and we cannot risk a heat illness just to turn a pump off at 5pm no matter how much savings. So but when we did it as an experiment for one month, ran the same number of hours, we saw a 30% reduction in the Fugini cost in one month. That's the amount of charges that are being leveled at us from that 5 to 8pm runtime. So automation is almost a one year ROI. I mentioned the, the charting, you know, real time data. Our wells completely change. I don't know if you ever looked at this, but if you look at a well and you, and you track it, the pumping water level, the efficiency over time, it's a completely different well from month to month. That's a really interesting thing for me is that you could have a very high performing well and say March or April, that looks like a well that's about to go down in July or August. And what that means is that you have a sustainable yield of that well that changes from month to month. And if you're not watching that real time, you could be, you could be below the bulls, which is death, death to a well very, very quickly with the exact same amount of runtime you've already had and say March, April, May, July and August, it's a different well because everybody, everyone's pumping. We have to, from a technology standpoint we have to adapt. And so I, I don't see automation as even optional at this point. You have to have real time data. So we have it now on all of our wells. If we get within 40ft of our bowls, they automatically shut off. And so what I would be telling any client or you know, in my, my own case, either you're buying more surface water if you have it or you're drilling another well because that's your sustainable yield. What's not sustainable is, is putting in a new of set bowls every season. And that's what we've been doing. You know, you're, you're Irrigating according to ets, hoping you're well can keep up and then just dealing with the consequences. We can't afford to do that anymore.

Yeah, Justin, I'd like to switch gears for just a minute. We, we started this conversation. You shared the story, the experience that you had with your son. And going through something like that really shifts your perspective in significant ways. And I think for all of us, as it's important for all of us to find meaning in our work. And I think many, many growers in the mainstream model have in some ways they're still connected to the meaning of why they're doing what they're doing, but it's also, it's become, they've become more detached from it. It's become somewhat impersonal. And so I'm not even quite sure the question that I want to ask you, but what, what have, what have you found? That is what has renewed that touch point with meaning for you? What have you found really meaningful in your work?

When I went on this journey, human health to remove toxins and, and just completely heal my son from starting with his gut. I, I think being in the field and being sure, you know, and it depends on the grower. You hear stories about other countries where there's not a lot of regulations, not necessarily Europe, but other countries being able to trust and know what I'm putting on and that I can walk through my field any given day. Like I live on about 10 acres of citrus and we run Kunikuni on that field.

Sounds fun.

Yeah. It's becoming a problem because the kids have named every single one. So I'm in way over my head here, John. I need help. But you know, a lot of the beef that we eat is beef that we produced. You know, we're grazing in our pistachios. I'm trying. I think Kuni cooneys and citrus for the record, is a perfect model if anyone wants to look at it.

They guessing they clean up all the drops, don't they?

The amazingly. So we can bring them in right after harvest. We have to get them out. It's still a 90 day because it's a fresh fruit. So they're out 90 days prior, but we bring them in right after harvest to clean everything up. But what's amazing is the only, the only so called ground cover that I have a problem with, and you and I have talked about this before, is Bermuda. I cannot stand Bermuda. And in this particular orchard that I live on, it just seems to circle right around the tree. It's very happy. It takes over everything. It's right where the, where the irrigation is happening during the, the heat of the summer. And you know it, it is, it's a very aggressive crop. But the kunikuni is actually graze right around the tree. They actually disturb that Bermuda and give other things a chance to grow. It's pretty amazing. Forbes come back. Other grasses come back. So they're actually working in synergy in this ecosystem. It's really exciting. I just wish I could process a few, actually benefit from my, from my work. But I think that's it. I think that that connection to the land you've talked about that of kind. My connection to the land is there walk, being able to walk through and you know, I've been into a pistachio before and you know, I could taste it. I was like, oh, what is that? What are we saying? Having to wonder, you know, and knowing that that post harvest general, we're still ranch managers, we still farm. We farm about 4,500 acres total. And you know, I just recently started actually a lease with a, with a company called slm. You know, I'm working with Biome Capital as well. But there's another company I think you're connected with, with SLM Partners. And you know that's their, that's their charge, that's their philosophy is that regenerative organic thing. And so I was able to grow on that side, which is really exciting. And being in the field after six months, knowing just seeing the changes that happen very quickly and we have these wild carrots growing in citrus fields and you know, being able to walk through and give away. You have NRCS folks out there working on a recharge plan, doing all these things, trying to, trying to become sort of sustainable and water neutral and power neutral out there with agrivoltaics and automation and send these guys home with a bag of fruit knowing that, you know, I had put a foliar on the week before, but it was seaweed and hydrolysis, you know, and I think that's John. It's just the connection it is, it's really powerful and I'm not sure what it is that's bringing kids back, bringing the next generation back to the farm. But I mean it's got to be that, it's got to be that, that when you grow something in your own garden and you're eating it as opposed to not knowing it and we've got to get that trust back. I mean there's still parts of Europe that have that where the consumer, the, the buyer, they trust wholeheartedly that what they're eating is nutrient dense and clean. And I think they're starting to be questions. I mean, what kind of an effect on the psyche does the Dirty Dozen have every year when people release the dirty dose? I mean, that, that permeates our culture. Every, almost every mom has seen the Dirty Dozen and they're doing, there's all these gadgets out there to wash the food before you eat it. And, you know, are you going to use a little bit of hydrogen peroxide? I mean, man, is that where we're going? You know, and, and I think as technology want to go, that's not where we want to go. And as technology changes, that's, that's the speech that I give to other conventional growers within the pistachio industry, is as that technology changes, we may hit a wall. We may get to a point where there's a, there's a limit and we can't get it out of our crop in a year or even two years. If it's systemic and it's in the soil and it's there at a level that all of a sudden is no longer acceptable by some of our export market, that's a concern. We don't have that issue now. But technology changes studies. Someone comes out with a new study, we end up on a Dirty Dozen list. One of these crops, I mean, imagine that would devastate any crop. Any individual crop that ended up on a Dirty Dozen list would be difficult for them to overcome. I mean, it's, you know, so.

And I, I think your, your point about things showing up in the future is one that we should be mindful of because I'm reminded of this story that James Johnson shared. I don't recall if it was ever recorded or just in personal communication, but he, he experimented with growing CBD hemp. This is three or four years ago. And of course, that plant is very, a very effective bioaccumulator. It's known to have that characteristic. And at harvest, his oil was tested and found to have levels of this particular insecticide. And he was like, we have never used. There was no, he had no record of ever having used that insecticide, only to discover after a lot of digging that it had been used as a seed treatment on a seed. A crop that they had planted nine years prior. So you imagine how much product is applied as a seed treatment. You're talking a few grams per acre. And it was showing up in unacceptable levels in CBD oil nine years later.

Wow. Yeah, well, and, yeah, and I think as we start to lose soil organic matter in these soils or it's down to that half percent level that we have in most of our Madera soils that have been farmed for any significant period of, of time, we lose the buffering capacity, we lose the biology is the thing that's buffering. When we're applying these fungicides and whatever else. And you know, we have a lot of sick trees. I'll make another argument on the side a little bit unrelated, but I think it's a valid point. In the last five to 10 years, we've come up with several new chemistries in the herbicide side. From a management standpoint, when you're managing big acreage, you used to spray one, two, three different chemicals. You're targeting A4 grasses. You know, you're doing a burn down versus A, versus A pre emergent. What some of these management companies are doing now are putting 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 materials in one tank. And what that allows them to do is to make one pass a year. And I, I don't necessarily think that all these materials are, are a problem individually, but I think they've, they've crossed the threshold of creating a problem for their trees. And when I would go to these orchards when I was working for the investment group and do some digging, get a shovel out there and look at the feeder roots. Burned all burned completely. And we know that in certain stone fruits you have to time it right. If you're doing it during root flush, you can actually drop your crop. So we know that they can have an effect on the tree in the right type soils and whatever else. But nobody's ever studied when you combine them like that and you torture soils. And I've come in behind some of these programs change to an organic regenerative program. And it's taken me multiple years to get anything to grow on the berm. I mean, I think about that two years of, of, you know, just trying to cover it, teas and hydrolysates and whatever else to get anything to grow.

Wow.

And so I think that's a problem. And so we're seeing some management tools. I think people are managing wrong.

Yeah, we have this, this doesn't help you in the short term quite yet, but for the benefit of all our listeners, I'll mention it. I, I spent some time working on developing a microbial inoculant that called Santera, that we've experimented with that and for exactly those types of situations. It has some remarkable effects on Bioremediation and turning the system around. But California being the very interesting regulatory environment that it is, it is not yet registered in the state of California. California that we've tried.

Interesting.

Yeah. You know what the hold up is? You know what the holdup is? There are several groups of microbes that are not commonly used in, in agriculture. Not commonly used in agriculture. Inoculants. And so we're being asked to defend their use and to provide the data about why they are beneficial and why they should be added. But oh, by the way, the most common, the place that they're most commonly found in nature is in common, or they're abundant in common or naturally found in Commodore, but we have to provide a justification for their use.

Amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a. Still a split system there, but we, we need, I mean, we need all the tools we can get. Are you gonna let me tell my story now?

Yes, please.

Okay, I want to tell. So I invited you, John, to the eight to the American Pistachios conference. We got you there two years in a row. We did it in a kind of a sly way where we put it in the afternoon session, which is when we bring in a lot of mainly growers, only a lot of the bankers and sort of industry people leave. Some stick around depending on the speaker and. But usually it goes from say five to 700 people in the audience, 800 people in the audience to 50 and. And that's kind of what we usually see in the afternoon sessions because it's just a few growers that want, want hours and whatever else. So we invited you, John, to this, this conference and I was really excited about it. And you and I hadn't talked about what you were speaking about and whatever else, but there was, there was a buzz about it and I'm not even sure why because I don't think a lot of these growers know you or know of you. I mean, I maybe I think it was just because it was new, but we had standing room only. It was really.

Remember that first year? Yeah.

And I, and we don't even know. We, we got really excited about it because it was like, well, when we bring in these dynamic new speakers, people are going to stick around to see instead of it being 25 people and sort of embarrassing that we're bringing these speakers in for an empty auditorium. And so anyways, I got up to introduce you and then just gave about a one or two minute spiel and what you're there for and kind of what we're doing with sustainability. And, you know, and then I ran around to the back and I had, I had talked to you ahead of time about aflatoxin and aflatoxin. And ochratoxin was a new aflatoxin. We're big that year because we were starting to see this new aflatoxin show up in our crops and what we're going to do about it. So we apply that AF36. It's a grain that's infected with a, you know, another type of, of aflatoxin, doesn't affect humans, and so it competes. And we've actually been pretty successful at reducing those levels in pistachio crops. You know, they're. So it's below safe levels as long as we apply. So I run around the back of the room and because I wanted to ask you about that question and you hadn't given me your answer, you just say, yeah, yeah, go ahead. And so I run, I run around the outside, get to the back of this auditorium, and you see me come in the back door and you say, oh, yeah, you have a question, Justin. I mean, I was just on stage like five minutes before. And so they run over and hand me a microphone and I asked the question, John, what do you. What should we do about aflatoxin? And is there something we can do from a management standpoint? Do you remember your answer?

I said something to the effect that, oh, aflatoxins are easy.

Yes, that's what you said. You said, it's easy, it's not a problem. Stop using nitrate, nitrogen. And I mean, it was like you could have heard a pin drop, a hush went across the crowd. It was really funny because, I mean, that's a shocking thing to say to give it sugar. And I laughed because, I mean, I agree completely. I'm pretty sure my cousin actually got up and walked out, but, but that I, I always tell that story in front of regenerative folks because it's, it's typical you to be like, and, you know, next question. Not even, not even an expansion on that. It was really funny myself. I'm in trouble. I'm in big trouble. Well, you know, it's.

I'm curious about the, the rest of that story. I do have some thoughts about what you just said, but I'm curious about the rest of the story. What happened then in the, in the following years since this, that's been a couple years ago, has aflatoxin continued to be a problem? What about those growers that are not applying nitrates anymore?

Well, and so I've Actually been talking to some growers about that, about running. You know, it's a delicate situation because how far do you dive in and then, and then you need to. Once, you know, you have a problem, you have to go and force that with your growers. And so which direction do you grow when you. We're doing a lot of testing. A lot of the buyers around the world are doing a lot of testing for aflatoxin and ochratoxin. Every once in a while there's a load rejected. It's. But for the most part, it's not an issue industry wide. It's very, very clean. And they're, you know, they're taking steps and they're testing each batch as it comes off the tree. But yeah, I do think as we continue to lose soil organic matter, as we're continuing to use different chemistries in combination, if we're having more drought, we had one of the hottest summers we've ever had on record last year. And so, you know, speaking of that regenerative versus conventional, we're seeing all sorts of crop issues. The almond bloom was very weak even before the hail hit. We expect the citrus bloom to follow. It usually does. So as we see all these issues from a weather standpoint, from a managerial standpoint, you know, tree stress, what kind of issues do we start to have when the trees are weaker and struggling with, with weather issues? And, and it's a good question. And, you know, we want to be really consistent. And so I think from a board standpoint or from a, from a sustainability standpoint, we need to be looking at that for sure, long term.

Yeah, there's this concept, I forget where it's. Where it originates, but there's this concept called the curse of knowledge. And the curse of knowledge is essentially the idea that if you become so deeply immersed in a subject, you forget that not everyone else knows and understands the things that you know. And so it occurred to me recently that I don't recall. I'm certainly here on the podcast and public presentations. I've certainly talked about the concepts of nutrient density and the value of growing food as medicine. But it occurred to me that I'm not really putting a great deal of emphasis on it because to me it seems so obvious. Like, yeah, everybody knows that. Everybody knows that this should be the priority. This should be what we were focusing on. But in fact, everybody doesn't know that. And there's just, there's so many examples of that, of things that appear to be really obvious. Like, these are obvious solutions when in Fact, many people around the world are still, still searching for that exact solution and don't know that it exists.

Yeah, I have some really strong feelings about that. I mean, you see kids eating, you know, drinking sodas for breakfast, eating things with food dye in them, not getting, you know, the difference between a grass fed, you know, I listened to that, the understanding ag folks and Gabe get up and talk about that. There are studies around the difference between a grass fed beef and conventional, which conventional is still a really good product, you know, corn fed or whatever, it's still a really good thing to eat. But on the grass fed side, the difference in the omega 3 to 6 ratios, the point that the same food, the same butter, the same eggs, the same, the same beef, in certain cases where you have a very unhealthy cow versus a very healthy grass fed cow could actually create an inflammatory response instead of a healing response. The same food. You know, that's a very powerful argument that I don't think most people know that there's a reason to invest in your food. And if that, you know, that's one of the biggest line items in my family budget is, you know, we're really investing in good quality food, growing some of our own beef, you know, buying locally when we can. We know the farmers, having that conversation with them, we raise a lot of eggs on our, on our own house. You know, they're, they're grazing and eating table scraps. So they're eating a wide variety of diet. And I think a lot of people do take that for granted that you can't. If you're in a situation where you're, you're forced to medicate for something like ADHD for kid, and you haven't tried eliminating red dye, 40s specifically from their diet, you're doing them a disservice in my mind.

Right.

And, and I, that's a pretty strong opinion. I, I don't want to sound judgmental, but I hope that a parent would try that. And I, I've met a lot of parents that are going down that path and we don't know until we know and we've done the research, we don't know and, and it's just amazing the difference you'll see in the behavior and their development.

You know, there is a, there is a revision and I don't know who it gets credited to, but there's, we're all familiar with the quote of let your food be your medicine, but there's a modern revision of that and I'm not sure I Don't know who to. Who to give the credit to. That I think we should be mindful of and should all be thinking about. And that is let your food be your medicine or your medicine will become your food. That's where we are today. How many people are taking a handful of drugs?

Almost everyone as they get older. Almost everyone. That's the way it seems like. Yeah, yeah. It's the standard instead of the exception.

Yeah. Someone recently told me that the. I forget the exact numbers here, but I want to say 80% of people over the age of 50 are taking seven or more drugs every day.

Yeah. I think my dad is one of the holdouts. He still goes into his doctor and shocks him. Every time they ask him how much, how many medications he's on, he says so. He's very proud of that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Justin, I want to say thank you. We've had such an enjoyable conversation here. Are there any important topics that we've missed touching on?

You know, I would say yes, a couple of. Just. If you're a young regenerative farmer, there are some really great consultants out there, and there are starting to be more and more and more. You can do remote consulting, you can send samples over. If you're trying to do this by yourself, you have the power of the purse. As a farmer, you have a captive audience. Make sure that when you're spending your dollars, you're getting value for that. And I tell, I tell fertilizer salesmen that all the time that, you know, I need you to add value to my program, to what I'm doing. I need more sets of eyes. I need you in my field. If I'm going to spend money on your. There's five different types of fertilizer, you know, 20 different. For a humic, a seaweed, you want people that you're spending your money on to provide value to your organization. Obviously, the quality of the product is extremely important, but you can, you can spread that around a little bit and bring in the right people. It's worth even paying. I mean, think about 5, 10, 15, 20 per acre versus crop damage or, you know, underfeeding or, you know, know your fertilizer program being out of balance and being able to move. And I, I just think that's well worth it. And I have a number of people that I work with that I, you know, I, I enjoy their perspective. They're. They're sort of watching my back here. They're out in the field every week or every other week. And so I think that's an important thing is, is have people you trust have them looking at your samples. Pull SAP samples, pull soils, pull saps multiple times a season. If you're not doing that, it's amazing what you can learn. That that boron thing came from, from a SAP sample late in the season, and it's, you know, it's improved our entire operation across all, you know, we form a few thousand acres of pistachios, and it's amazing what you can learn.

You know, if you would have been following my advice of doing at least a couple fields every two weeks through the season, you would have figured that out a couple years earlier.

That's when I did. That's how it happened. That's okay. Definitely. Definitely. From one of your podcasts. Yeah. You know, yeah.

Thank you for sharing that thought, Justin. And it's actually, we're, we're in the process of, of shifting and developing our business model at AEA again, a bit as a result of exactly what you talked about. There's. There's multiple drivers, but Advancing Eco Agriculture started originally as a consulting company and 15 years ago, paying for independent consulting while simultaneously selling product was not a model that people appreciated or understood. Everyone was used to getting free advice along with product.

Right.

Which very frequently turns out to not be free. And so we've been able to survive in that space where we shifted our model to being essentially where the product was, was subsidizing the consulting, but we're actually choosing. It's not a sudden shift. We're gradually transitioning into this, but we're, we're shifting and transitioning our model where products are not subsidizing the consulting, but we're flipping that around on its head. And perhaps the consulting is subsidizing the products because we, There is so much value in the information that we share with growers, and we want there to be the. The recognition of that value, both not just from the, from the customers and the growers perspective, but more importantly from the team's perspective as, as our team continues to expand and grow, we want it to be very clear when someone sits down to make recommendations, to recognize, wow, I'm getting paid really well for this. I had better do an awesome job. We have to preserve that integrity.

I love that. And it is, it's a, it's a walk in a fine line. A lot of the consultants have found that selling a product, you know, the person I rely on for selling them and say it's a second opinion really, but because I have a PCA too that I use, but, you know, he's really only selling cake sulfur. Very talented. Solar Ground has been around for 50 years, but in a lot of cases, he comes back and says, here's your recommendation. There's no cake sulfur in it. So I'm not buying from him. You know, that's the kind of trust a relationship. They're not trying to sell you, they're trying to. They're trying to tell you exactly what their opinion is of the situation. And that should be your, your, your consultant, your agronomist too. In a lot of cases, the products they carry aren't needed, hopefully.

Exactly. Justin, thank you for all the work you're doing. Thank you for being. You're sharing your experience and I'll see you again soon.

Appreciate it. Thanks.

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.