Episode 152: Family Farming and Modern Economic Realities with Mike Omeg

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. If you've not heard my introduction before, well, if you've heard my introduction before, you already know what we talk about. If you don't, here's where we talk about topics that are generally related to revitalizing soil health and plant health and human health. Because after all, the ultimate purpose of agriculture is to cultivate the well being of human beings in the landscape that we're responsible for stewarding. Today I'm here with a return guest who is a very close friend of mine, someone who I've really come to appreciate, Mike Omeg. Mike, thanks for being here.

Hey, thanks for having me on again, John.

Mike, I think you were probably one of the, one of the first couple dozen people that I interviewed and your episode has been really popular where you talked about all of the successes that you've had and the impact that you had early on with, with the changes in cherry production and producing more disease resistant trees. But a lot has changed for you since we had that conversation and your operation has changed. The scope of the work that you're doing has changed. What's been going on? Tell us a bit about what the last seven or eight years have looked like.

Hey, that's a great question and I'm going to give you the Cliff Notes for your, for your audience today. I, I'm a fifth generation farmer. When I was a young kid we, we farmed, we had cherries but most of those cherries went to processing cherries, either cannery or maraschino cherries, cocktail cherries. And we cut hay and we had, we ran cattle and we had apricots and we had apples and we did wheat as well. But as, as the world changed around us, we changed with it and specialized in grow cherries. And in 2017 I looked around me and I was a grower of about 350 acres of fresh cherries. And I was focused not on what am I going to do tomorrow or in five years, but what, what am I going to do as the steward of our family lands into the long run. And what I saw was that it was becoming more and more of a struggle just on the economic side of the business to not have any vertical integration. So we would grow our cherries and then send them to a packer and they would be packed and sold. And I saw, I saw a dilemma with that in that I didn't see a future and I wasn't super excited about getting really small and marketing just to, you know, only Farming a few acres and shrinking our farm size down. And I looked at what I needed to do for. For that in the future. And that. And the key to me was vertical integration, becoming part of a company or buying a company or developing on our own our ability to pack and sell our own fruit. And what I quickly learned is that's really expensive. And at that time, there was quite a bit of ag investment dollars around just. But in the end, I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to be working for somebody else. So the next best path was to buddy up with somebody, to partner with somebody and affiliate with them. And so I decided that that would be the path. I went and I did that. I affiliated with my longtime friends and neighbors, the Bailey family, who grew up literally next door to each other, had farmed by each other for generations, and they already had through Orchard View Farms, which I work for now, had a vertical integration. And so we affiliated and my much smaller organ farm became a part of a much larger organization. And so today, other families have. Have done the same thing. Today Orchard View, where I. Director of orchard operations. So I'm in charge of all the farming side of the business. We. We farm about 3,600 acres. A little over that, almost all of cherries. We have a little tiny bit of wine grapes, a little tiny bit of prunes and plums, but we're focused on cherry. And that has been a huge change for me, but it's a change that I. I needed to do to ensure that I could keep our farm and the family. And I didn't care what the name the shingle on the door said. I was more interested in having the farming opportunity be available for future generations, even if it's just owners of my family just being landowners. But also if people wanted to participate. I didn't want to say to my kids and we hear so often in agriculture, hey, this is a huge challenge to farm. So you're crazy to. You're crazy to do it or k. You know, our young people aren't interested. There's a lot of opportunity by being a part of a big organization where we're in it together, but it's still all family farm. And we're farmers at heart. And we really. I'm very fortunate in that Orchard View is focused upon the farming and family aspects of. Of the business. So we're very large, but we aren't. We aren't what you made. That horrible title gets bounced around. And I don't mean to insult anybody. We aren't a large corporate farm. You know, of course I think all farmers need to be welcome to the table and we need to, we need to be, embrace each other for what we have to offer. But we're very focused on the growing of fruit and packing it, selling it, but with the family aspects in mind. And I think that does make us different than most large organizations.

You know, it was here on the podcast in an interview with Canon Michael a couple of years ago, he, he took that, that label of a corporate farm because they're also a very large farm. And he said, you know, how many we, we idolize or idealize smaller scale regional production, but how many of these smaller scale operations are paying their owner operators for high quality health insurance and giving them a good quality of life? Like the, by working with the larger organization, having a larger team, you're actually providing much better quality of life for the team members that are participating in that organization. And thinking about most of the people that I know, he's not wrong. So I think as in many things in life, if we pay attention to the things like what are the ideal outcomes, what are the things that we really care about from a people perspective, from an organizational, from a landscape ecosystem perspective, from a food production perspective, good and bad is not equal to large and small.

No, I, I think it, it's one of those traps that there are, there are many in our community, say the regenerative ag community. If I, if I may be so arrogant as to, as to use that phrase and to put myself as a, as a member of that. There are many who are, are puritan and say if you're big, you're bad. And I don't think that that is fair at all. And I think that I look at it from what the opportunities are not what may be lost when you grain in size. Because there are many, you know, the, the world is complex and when you're part of, when you're running a large organization, there is things that, there is things that you say, oh gosh, I wish we were small again, that'd be awesome. On the other hand, there's tremendous opportunities. You mentioned one of them with health insurance and being able to care for your people really well, that of course can be done at a different, at, at many different scales. But the opportunity that I have, if my goal is to grow really awesome fruit that people want to eat and consume and that brings them health, we grow food for people. I can grow 14,000 plus tons of that good food and have a big impact on, on the World, I have many more acres where, when we improve that landscape on this, you know, little blue ball that the creator gave us to steward, I have a bigger impact on that.

Right.

Hundreds of employees that, you know, grow our fruit during the growing season and thousands that harvest it. When we have a win, that win is amplified at a much larger scale. And I think that's the opportunity. And if it, if it comes down to scaling the difference you can make, I think that's something that gives me a lot of hope, actually, as being part of a much larger production organization.

Let's, let's talk a little bit about scaling. You know, there is this critique, this criticism that regenerative agriculture doesn't scale. You can't scale it up. And one of the things that Will Harris has said in some of his popular podcast interviews as well, yes, it may not scale, but it does replicate. And you can replicate it. But I don't agree with the premise that it can't scale because many of us are working. Like when I work at aea, we were working on very large scale operations that have succeeded on scaling it. But that certainly does come with its own set of challenges. There, there is, there are things that have to be overcome, but it is very scalable. But I'd love to ask you, you've, you've had the perspective, I mean, you've essentially, over the last seven or eight years, you've essentially 10x the size of the operation that you're responsible for from 370 to 3,600 acres. What has that process been like? What has it been like to try to scale the approach, the regenerative agriculture approach that you originally had with Omega Orchards?

You know, it's interesting. I think I agree with you, John, because I'm a pragmatist and I'm definitely not a puritan. So when I think, when I think about where I started, you know, meeting you and your team at Acres USA and the excitement that I had for that, my perspective now looking back at that, is when, and I think this is common for many folks because I've talked to quite a few that get started in regenerative agriculture is we say we want to check all the boxes and we're excited about all of them. And we try to do 100% of everything that we consider to be regenerative. I think it's very difficult to scale if you don't focus upon the things that the practices that move the needle the most. And you try to do everything at all times everywhere. And I actually think for smaller scale producers, that's also a trap that diffuses the focus. And so what I mean by that is when we're talking about regenerative agriculture, doesn't focus. I can see where that would be a perspective where we say the human limitation of being able to manage and focus time and concentration and thought upon everything that's encompassed in regenerative ag. There's a limit on that. My argument is that let's concentrate our effort and our thought and our resources, whether that be time, labor, dollars, on the things that bring the most benefit to the regenerative process. And that we don't say we aren't regenerative if we don't do everything that say we read in a, read in a paper or listened to in a lecture or read in a book. But rather we focus upon the things that accomplish our goal of truly changing the way that we produce our crops to be beneficial for those that are, that are consuming them, beneficial to those people that are working on our operations. And I would also say beneficial to everybody who's involved in the economic processes, the logistics and the retail sales. And as well, because regenerative practices bring great benefit to them. If you have better quality fruit, everybody wins. That's involved in getting fruit grown, packed, distributed and sold. Everybody can win in that model. And so I, for example, am much less focused upon saying that I need to find a companion cover crop I can plant, plant under my trees because I cannot use herbicides on my operation, because if I do, I'm not regenerative. I'm much more of the school of I am willing to take three steps forward and one step back if it gets me towards accomplishing my goal. And with time I truly believe that it there will be an opportunity to check all the boxes. But I want to start and concentrate my efforts on those things that are advancing us the furthest the soonest. And for us here, that's our nutrition program.

I what you're describing in essence is, is one way of thinking about or is applying the Pareto principle, the 8020 principle to regenerative agriculture. What are the 20% of the things that you can do that will produce 80% of the results? And I still remember when you were smaller scale as you were renovating fields, preparing to plant new orchards, preparing to plant new trees, you were doing cover cropping and incorporating livestock and, and doing many of those things. What are some of the things that you used to do at a smaller scale that you find don't fit so well at a larger scale?

There are two that come to mind quickly. I'm sure if we had longer, we could list them all. And this is gonna, this is, you know, I, I can't promise everybody's going to be happy with us, John, with how this podcast goes, but we're, we.

Care about results, Mike. It's the results of the matter.

Ab. Absolutely. So it's, it's not fun unless somebody wants to argue with you. That's what I've always lived by. It just seems to be that's what I always fall into. But there are two things that come to mind and they're all around compost for scale. When you scale compost, what the process of compost turns into is, and this is my point of view, is a, it becomes a logistics activity and not a farming activity. What I mean by that is if, if you are a smaller, smaller operation and you want to, you were say you're planting a new field. As you're referring to earlier, John, you can get compost applied down your tree rows without having to move a lot of compost from one place to your farm, or you may actually be able to make it on, on your farm. But it very quickly becomes an industrial process. When you want to put on, let's say I said I want to put a quarter inch of compost on all 3,500 acres that I have. You are talking about a massive composting facility with giant wheel loaders and big dump trucks hauling burning Diesel, you know, 24, 7 to make that material. You're talking about a tremendous process to move that material to the location it served and then to apply that material. And when I looked at, when I looked at composting, Even on our 350 acre scale, you know, what I saw was that if I remember right, almost two thirds of the costs that were associated with the composting, with compost process was involved in moving the compost around and staging it, getting it here, staging it and getting it applied. So that's something I think that falls apart really quickly. You know, that's why we don't have ants the size of elephants. Even though. Right. It just, it doesn't work. The physics involved fall apart. Now there are probably some very creative people who are smarter than me and brilliant and, and, and have a way to do it. But again, focusing on what really moves the needle. I decided not to do that because I didn't think compost contributed to a big moving and it didn't scale very well. It got ugly fast. And I didn't, I Didn't I dropped it. The other thing is compost tea. Compost tea. I saw great results with compost tea, but it really quickly changes because you're dealing with a perishable product. And again, there's probably brilliant people or compost tea passionate and experts that are going to say, boo, Mike, you're, you know, you're, you're way off. But that was something that if you were applying small batch amounts to small acres, worked great and was doable. But it also fell apart when we tried to scale it. And those are the two things. And there's a lot more that I think we can't say scale. Well, from my point of view.

Well, your, your compost tea point is interesting and I'd like to just dig into that a little bit more because one of the, one of the arguments that come up frequently in favor of compost teas or various biological home brews, whether it's indigenous microorganisms or, I mean there's all kind of, of approaches to developing your own microbe teas at home or on a, on a farm scale. And one of the recurring themes is that, well, it's so much less expensive. It's less expensive for you to, you can produce your own inputs for a fraction of the cost of buying inputs. And the question that immediately comes to my mind at what labor cost? That's the assumption of, in many cases the assumption of free labor or on farm labor and for the labor costs that operations at your scale are paying for, need to pay for. That argument in the favor of compost tea vanishes into smoke.

I would add to that, John, because I agree with you and I would add to that that the challenge with compost tea, amongst many besides perishability and the application process, which I think is a very big challenge, require a large infrastructure to do, is that it's also a very highly skilled technical job and you need to have some of that magic mojo to know how the tea is doing and that can't be replicated. So I used to go out and smell the tea. When the tea was brewing, I could walk into the room and be like, this is going to be a fabulous batch. When we were putting the inputs in, there's just something about that connectivity and that process of, you know, grandma breaking, baking the bread that as soon as you say grandma's not, didn't bake this bread, it doesn't taste as good. And it, and that that's something that at scale, time is a, the most precious resource that we have. And the most limited resource that we have especially skilled time. And if I'm having to dedicate to, to a compost tea process, I can be taking away impacts that are 20 fold greater my management focus. And, and again, this isn't to say that we wouldn't have a win with compost tea, but we have to prioritize the, not just the, the labor and the layers of the onion down for me, but my creativity and my connection to the land. If I'm focusing just on one process, then I'm only giving myself the option to have benefit from one process. And I want many processes out there in, in process, in action in our fields. And so that's why we, that's why we don't do the composting.

So what are the things that you do do? What have you found to be able to scale?

Well, something that you said often, John is and, and you need to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to paraphrase it, I'm going to put it into my terms where it sunk in and I wrote it on my scroll instead of parroting it from what you've said is, is the notion that if you want to improve your soils the quickest, grow healthy plants. That is something that I think gets in one of those things that if you put your focus on that you're gonna really make big headway and big advances towards the goal. So our, you can say compost tea is important to healthy plants. Compost is important to healthy plants. Biodynamic applications are important to plants. Doing your own compost on, on site or growing your own herbal extracts on site. There's lots of things that we can say all those contribute to healthy plants. But I, for me the single most important focus has been on our plant plant nutrition and in particular our foliar nutrition and using products that we can inject in our irrigation. So we're, we're in a very dry environment. So all of our fields are irrigated. That gives us the opportunity to distribute nutrition or biology, whatever we want to say. I, I throw biologicals in there through irrigation or foliar application. And that is really, that's very much so where, where I've been focused and it's a, you have a wide playbook when you focus on those two areas. But to me it's the single most effective way for us to further further our journey towards a truly regenerative state in our fields is to focus on those aspects of nutrition.

I'd like to dig, I'd like To better understand your thinking on that. Mike, you. You just said an important sentence. That's the single most effective way as compared to what. What is. What is the. The rationalization or what's. What's your thought process in comparing that as to soil amendments, for example, or other things. Other things that you might do?

So, first of all, I think it's. If we. If we say our objective is to improve the soil as one of the core tenants on judging our success. If we look at the impact that. Let's say I want to bring a. I want to bring a mineral amendment that's mined in upstate New York, and I say that's going to be what I do to improve my soils out here in Oregon. Think of everything that's involved in that and then ask yourself, would it be better to work with what you have and look at another way to do it? Are we really so absolute and as is creation really so limited in its ability to provide for itself that we say the only way to do it is to get it from a mine up in upstate New York because there's a layer of some prehistoric something there that we're going to get? Or it could be somewhere else. I don't want to pick on New York. Let's pick on Vermont. I don't know, because I think that's. I think that is equally as bad to say that, you know, I want to buy bat guano from Chile and bring it up here, Bird guano or whatever. I think we. I. I just can't bring myself to think that the. That this wonderful place that we inhabit on this planet only puts the one thing that something needs where I'm at, way over there, somewhere else. I just can't think that. So I think we need to work with what we have, because that's much better. And so we have soils that are there, and we could, again, spend a lot of time amending those soils and. And guessing what the. So, you know, making educated guesses or studying deeply what the soils need. But then who defines that? And. And what does that. What does that focus on? I am. I'm definitely of the thought that if we can provide the plants what they need and not do bulk amendments and great, you know, great big movements of minerals, using diesel and steel to get it there, that we're going to be better off. And so, again, I'll go back to. If we want to keep it simple and we want to keep it to basics, it does make just much better sense to focus on our plants Instead of trying to grow that $60 tomato because we bought, you know, something from somewhere else that we were told does something special.

So given that context and the framing, the question that I'd like to ask you is, what has changed? What changes have you been able to make in your newer and larger organization and role? Because it's one thing. You can make changes very rapidly. If you have an acre of cherries, it's like taking a kayak down a river. You can pivot on a dime when you're running. When you had 300 acres of cherries, your boat was a lot larger and you necessarily had to move slower. But now you're the captain of a boat that's even 10 times larger. And so when you think about introducing changes and making changes in an organization like that, what changes have you been able to make? And one of the questions that I want to get to is, with this modified approach, what crop performance changes have you seen and observed relative to your previous experience?

So it's. It's been a learning process and it's been a fun journey. And I. I love challenges and I think that. I think that it's been a great opportunity for me to figure it out. And it's really, really honed and forced me to focus upon those things again that move the needle the most. I'm going to keep harping on that because if, If I were to go back in time, I wish I would have really focused from the very beginning on the. Those things that have the biggest impact instead of just doing the shotgun pitch and sync approach and trying everything. And, you know, being. Let's.

Let's dig into that a little bit more.

Yeah, Being master of none.

Yeah, let's dig into that a little bit more. You spoke about the things that are the most effective that produce the greatest results. The way that you've framed that conversation up to this point is in terms of application types, your foliar applications, your fortigation applications. Are there things within those application types that you've found to be the most effective? As you've been, as you've been narrowing down on prioritizing, what are the things that you've really focused on?

So, one, I think the most important thing when you're operating at scale is you need to measure. You really need to do a lot of measuring. And what I mean by that is you need to. We'll get to the. I think the most important thing, but I think you need to look every, every season, but also within the season at your crop performance. Are your trees putting on the amount of, in my case, their trees. So I'm just going to speak in a tree centered way. Are your trees growing like you need them to grow? Is the fruit sizing like it needs to size and are the leaves there on the tree? Are they growing in the way that you need to and you, that requires you to go out and actually look at, at your crop? And that's a way of, that's a form of measuring. When I'm at a given where I'm at, and one of the fortunate things at a large organization is I can, I can put the time into doing that. I don't have to put the time into paperwork. I don't have to put the time into compliance and regulation. I don't have to put the time into focusing upon all the, all the aspects of farming. I, of course I have responsibility for that, but I have a team that can cover that for me and I can take the time to make sure that they're doing what they need to do and that they have the training and that they have the vision and we're all on board and on the same page. And then I can go out and take the time to go look at our crops and see how they're doing. So that, that's really, that's really important. That's a form of measuring. Then being a part of a larger organization. I can see, I can see the packing information that we get from our fruit. What size are the cherries? What firmness were the cherries? How did the customers receive those cherries? On the retail side, all that's in front of me. Whereas if I'm a grower just supplying to a packing house, my fruit gets blended into the other fruit. And so I don't actually know the impact that my fruit had after it left my farm. If you're, if you're a larger scale farm, but at this scale where we pack and sell mostly our own fruit, that becomes evident. So I have the feedback of the marketplace where I can't say, oh gosh, I was today I was part of a pool of, you know, a few dozen growers that had cherries. And so did I carry the day or did I drag everybody down? But the other thing that we do that's, that's really important is SAP analysis. That's been a central activity to, central to our ability to make decisions with what we put into those applications that we've been referring to. That's really, really important. We don't sit down in January and draw out our playbook. And then stick to it through the entire season. We start with a framework and an approach and then we're very dynamic within the season by observations that I make of our crops, the observations that other people on my team here at Orchard View make about the crops. Because there's, you know, hundreds of years of experience when you combine us all together. What the observation of our agronomists from AEA make and then what does SAP do? Taking those, taking those inputs and forming it into a plan is central to success. When you look at nutrition and then the ability to then handle actually getting the applications on accurately and timely, that is a big, that's a big part of success here is being having a team that can get, get her done. It's pretty easy and it, and it's actually more fun to put the plan together. But rubber hits the road when you get the plan done. And those are the, those are the folks on my team that are in the field operating the equipment, whether that be tractors and sprayers, mixing or injecting.

Yeah. So we started this conversation. I asked the question what are, what are the, what are the pieces? You. Earlier I'd asked the question what are the things that you found to be most effective? And you answered that question in the context of putting on fertigation applications and foliar applications. And so now I'm, I'm asking to dig into that a little bit deeper and refine it. Are there specific components of those that you found to be the most effective that deliver the most results?

I think so. And you know, it's always, it's always dicey to talk about specific products, but I think that, I think I will because, because when you ask about what are the, what are the, what's the foundation, what's the core base of things, tools that we use all time here and regularly to provide the benefit and the outcome that we're getting in our crops? I think it's very hard to say. Well, I just use something in general because there's just such variation out there. And so our, our nutrition program will start with the, what we inject. The basis, the basis for that is, is fish with seaguard because we don't have to be certified organic. Then with Rejuvenate then we apply a sea mineral, sea or seawater derived mineral nutrition. I think it's called C crop with aea. And then we apply a biological from tiny O called OP8 though that's the baseline that we found when you put that team together in the form of injection. Wow. The results are really, really substantial. Now we're always doing, we're always making modifications. Usually it's in the form of additions to our nutrition and fertigation through the season. So for example, we, you know, we, we may put calcium through from time to time in the form of soluble gypsum or calcium acetate or other calcium products. We try to make sure that we vary that up a lot. If we see an orchard that's heat stressed or having some other kind of stresses, we'll add a kelp product. In our case, we use seastem to go through injection. And then there's always those extraordinary cases where we need to do something for some reason. And, and, and it could be the repertoire thing. We could put humates through. We could do some, you know, even put potassium in, in the injection to do. We may jack the fish up quite a bit with the seaguard in our case. So that, that's the, that repertoire really provides a huge, a huge impact. And so when I started injecting when I was farming independently and at 300 acre scale, my mix sheet used to be like 11 products long for, for fertigation. Now it's much shorter than that.

It needs to be absolutely if we're.

Gonna get, if we're gonna get her done.

Yeah.

And then for, for our foliar applications, C stem is, is a foundational product. A calcium product is foundational. I'll, I'll vary what, where our source of calcium, where we get that from. We use a calcium acetate product primarily. That's, that's been central. But then we also want to, we always have. Maybe, maybe I should say a little bit more about how we're going on our foliar nutrition. If I may. Sorry, we're bouncing around here a little bit, but our foliar nutrition. I used to have a mix sheet. Sometimes it would be 15 products long. And I am not exaggerating, it would not fit on one page. You can't do that when you're at scale. There's too many people involved in the process of getting the work done and too many chances for error. So a couple years ago I started working with the, with the agronomy team that, that I have here with Jim and Kevin from aea. And I said we, we got together on something that actually you and I had talked about, John. And we bantered it back and forth, but I locked down on it and that is doing custom blending where instead of us in the field on my side blending all those products we need together, we started custom blending at the, at an AA facility and receiving bulk totes of pre blended material that had what I needed. Based upon SAP results and based upon our foundational elements to, to our nutrition program. That's been a really big change for us and I see that growing in importance. And I can't say enough. If you're, if you're going down this route, it makes it to where you can apply it at scale.

That's something we're beginning to do for a lot of customers.

Yeah, yeah, I, I'm really excited about it. And there's something about that process and I don't have numbers. I just have a feeling, I just have my observation and that feeling of that connection to the, to the trees and the crop that it's, that sum is having one plus one is equaling three. In this case there's some kind of beneficial bend back impact of doing it that way that I couldn't achieve when I'm mixing it here that we're getting from having it arrive pre blended. You know, I probably am getting too much into crystals and moon phases and.

No, not at all. I, I would really feel that there, there are, there are many powerful biological synergies that can occur when you can create blends. But there are many things that you cannot blend and expect to sit on the shelf for two years because they come alive and they do stuff that you really don't want to see happening inside a container. And so when you're pre blending things and then applying them in a matter of weeks or months, you have a much different time window and you can do things that you couldn't otherwise do.

Yeah. So I'll talk about the process more and then we'll talk about the, the products that are, that are the baseline there. So when, when our process is, the AEA team pulls a SAP sample for us here we have indicator blocks that, that we use and then we also do we have some more dynamic approach to our sampling where I don't have 100 samples to look at because you can just be over swamped with data. So we do some aggregations of blocks where we'll sample several different blocks in an area. Instead of taking three different samples from a, you know, three different locations, we'll blend those together in the sample and that's so far yielded pretty good results. I would say that's still being evaluated for us in the efficacy, but we'll take those results, I will look at them and then our AEA agronomists will look at them and then we will change the next blend arriving, that's the real power in the, in the process is the ability to change what's arriving. Aea. AEA is able to blend and react during the season to what the crops need for us here. So then that material is blended at the AEA facility and it rides, arrives in my case in toads. And then we get that product applied within 10 days. And so we have the ability to, we have the ability to do like you were saying, John, to put products together that, you know, if you were taking spray mixing one to one at a big ag university, they'd say don't do that. So it works really well for us. So what's in that mix? What's been fundamental? What's the baseline where these are always present, maybe in different amounts, but they're always present. Sea stem is always present. Copper is always present for us. Magnesium is always present for us, and calcium is always present for us. I would love to put fish in to that mix as well. But one of the things you'll learn when you farm at scale is you have a 10x increase in the number of neighbors that you have. And they also are 10x more grumpy it seems at times. And so I don't know what it is about smells, but if you really want to kick the beehive of your neighbors at the edge of town, spray fish out there. Boy, they really get, they really get amped up about that. And so we don't use fish foliar. We do it through fertigation only. And, and that's, that's the great compromise you have. Yeah, at our scale. But those, those, those products are baseline. And then we'll change things like iron through the season. We'll, we'll add potassium if we need to during the season, and then we'll vary our nitrogen during the season. Usually I, I apply nitrogen in the form of urea. Again, I'm not an organic producer and that's, that's the form that we, that we use with fish being applied through fertigation as a form of nitrogen in.

In the nutrients that you addressed as the baseline. I guess we're talking specifically about foliars, but I'm surprised you didn't mention boron.

So you're gonna, you're gonna think that this is crazy, but boron is, boron is in there in a small amount. I may have to, I may have to send you my mix, the baseline mix, so that you can look at it. There is a small amount of boron and I don't have my notes in front of me. I think there's a small amount of manganese in there as well. Yeah, but I was talking about the, the big ones, the big features. Yeah, yeah. The ones that we're applying, you know, their, their ratio in the mix is much, much larger for that.

So I do want to come back to the original question that I'd asked a little bit ago. But before we go there, you spoke a bit about using urea and varying nitrogen. How has your nitrogen, when you were at a smaller scale and when you were using a lot more compost and cover crops and incorporating livestock to some degree on the fields that were not in trees, how has your nitrogen management changed today from what it was five to seven years ago?

So nitrogen is, nitrogen is the, is the politics at a Thanksgiving dinner of the return more so than glyphosate? I think now we could put glyphosate in there also. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just say, let's not talk about nitrogen today, everybody. Let's just enjoy each other as family here in the regenerative ag community. But hey, let's rock and roll. I used to buy Triple 20 foliar fertilizer, which is essentially miracle grow. It even came blue by the semi load. And we've talked about that a lot, a great deal. I also used to apply calcium nitrate and ammonium nitrate, you know, when, when you could do, when you could use those products. And what I've really changed to is I, I avoid the use of nit nitrate fertilizers. And, and through a lot of trial and error in the school of hard knocks, I, I really have arrived on my preferred form of nitrogen. If I, if I'm going to be using it is, is urea. But whereas I used to prophylactically throw nitrogen out in the mix, saying we need to put out nitrogen, I've really come to understand that nitrogen is one of the things that's fairly easy if you need it to get on in, if you're willing to use urea or other foliar forms of nitrogen in our crops. And so I'm, I'm, I'm generally as a general approach, applying less nitrogen by ground in this earlier in the season by quite a bit less. And I'm applying more nitrogen in season if it's needed, either through fertigation or through foliar. And overall I'm applying less pounds of nitrogen per acre than I did in the past. And I know I'm speaking in generalities that's because the amount of nitrogen that's going on some of our locations is so dependent upon the age of the trees and the, in my case, how, how large is the crop? Sometimes the amount of nitrogen needed by a cherry orchard at 1 ton of crop for acre, which is very low, that, you know, something went wrong there versus 15 tons is really, really different. But I've also come to, you know, I agree with the general notion that nitrogen is a cheat that we can use to cover up other needs of the crop. You can really see that when you do SAP analysis and have several years of SAP for, for your operation and under your belt, you can really see that. And I'm much more comfortable with pushing the limit on having low levels of nitrogen, you know, because we have other, we have other nutrition, hopefully in abundance. But if we have other nutrition and abundance, say calcium, magnesium, now we could go down the list that still keep the leaves growing and the shoots growing and those cherry sizing in the field.

You know, Mike, it's. And I find it interesting the way you started this conversation about. Conversation about nitrogen being similar to politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But the. I've, I've shifted and changed my perspective on nitrogen over the years. If you would have asked me the question half a dozen years ago, just my, my general sentiment around nitrogen is that it is unnecessary evil and that we should try to limit its use as much as possible. Because my perception around nitrogen fertilization is that it has really suppressed. It can shut down your soil microbial population's ability to fix nitrogen. It creates all kinds of disease and insect susceptibility problems. And I could point out a long list of things that excess of nitrogen has detrimental effects on. However, I don't think I would any longer consider it a necessary evil. I think it is actually a positive that we need to use with caution. And that's where I think we've gone wrong in the past, is that we haven't fully understood all the negative consequences. So we used it abundantly and freely and created a lot of negatives. But the reality is at its most foundational level, you know, one of the things that I talk a lot about is if you want to increase the overall system's health, increase photosynthesis, that's, that's foundational level. The plant health pyramid. Increase photosynthesis. Well, guess what? One of the easiest ways to increase photosynthesis is making sure you have lots of large leaves. And you can do that really easily without nitrogen or, or with nitrogen or saying it differently. You cannot achieve that if you don't have enough nitrogen. So having enough nitrogen is foundational, I think, to plants and biological systems working well. And another aspect of this is in, in a biological context, when we're talking about the rhizophagy cycle, the soil microbiome, so often we, we describe the negative effects of nitrogen fertilization in that system, that nitrogen suppresses nitrogen application, suppresses nitrogen fixation, which is true. But small amounts of nitrogen actually enhance microbial populations. Something I think is not discussed often enough or talked about enough. So I'm no longer of the perspective that nitrogen is black and white. As with many things, it's grayscale, it's form dependent, it's dose dependent. The right form at the right time can enhance biological activity, can enhance disease, suppressiveness, can enhance plant disease and insect resistance.

I, I agree with you and I think that, I think you did tell me one time, John, to go back in time, you'll, you'll eventually never need to apply nitrogen. And maybe we'll get there. May, you know, maybe we'll get there. But this is a process, not an event. And I think that that is a trap that, that sometimes people will fall into. They're just getting started. Or in regenerative is, they'll say, I'm not going to apply nitrogen. Yeah, that's not regenerative. Then, then you're going to have a much harder journey getting there. I think you need to look at. How can one argue that nitrogen is a, is a net harm? If we're measuring and, and right. The plants say they need nitrogen. How is it different than if the cal. Would we ever say that about say calcium? Well, my, my plants need calcium, but I'm not going to apply it because it's again against my, it's a, it's against my ethics. Now I think that, I think that I'm willing to apply lots of different products. You know, we have, we have seen great success putting Redmond rock salts, as you know, John, in our injection, just 50 pound bags of salt going into a tank would give a lot of people a heart attack. But the plants needed it and we saw a tremendous response with that. If we give the plants what they need. Plants are the best growers of soil biology that there is.

Absolutely.

And let's keep them, let's keep them happy. Let's have the, let's have what they are saying they need available in abundance for them, not enacting excess. And that again, that's just rephrasing something that I'VE really come to learn from you, John.

So let's go back to the question I asked in our conversation a little bit ago. You now you've really streamlined your applications. You've reduced your applications in, on a smaller scale operation. At one point you were doing mulch in the row, you were using cover crops, you were using lots of compost, you were using compost teas. In addition to doing the foliar applications, the fertigation applications today you've streamlined, you're doing none of those things or much fewer of those things, focusing really on the fertigation of foliar applications. How have the results changed? How are the results different in terms of how rapidly you're achieving them and the outcomes? How are things different from what they were on a much smaller operation?

So I think that, I think one of the important things is it's not just been the size of our organization that's changed. Our environment in which we operate has also changed, especially in the regulatory environment. So in the state of Oregon, we have a ag overtime bill that was passed a few years ago that limits the number of hours that we can work per week. And it makes anybody who works in agriculture subject to overtime. Right now it's 48 hours and in a couple years it's going to be at 40 hours. So when you're talking about making passes, operation passes through, through an acre of cherries, you're talking about using hours. So we have to be very, very tight on where we're using our hours. The other thing that's changed is we have a much higher minimum wage than most states. I think our minimum wage is going to be 15, 30 or somewhere in that, that range. So it's much higher than federal minimum wage certainty. And then for our operation we utilize the H2A guest worker program. And so we have about 70 people that come from Mexico and they stay for seven months, six, seven months here. And they help us with the actually growing process of the crop. And when, when we participate in that program, our default minimum wage as a company is actually at a $19 and I think it's 82 or 85 cents an hour. So you have to be very, very diligent with your use of labor. And, and it used to be that we would apply foliar sprays once a week. I know some folks that are smaller scale that apply it, apply foliar sprays twice a week. We can't do that in the current environment, in my opinion, because of those, of those limits. So now what are the Results because that's really. Let's talk about where rubber, rubber hits the. Really. I would say that. And this is going to sound, this is gonna, this is gonna sound pretty, pretty bad. John and I, and I don't mean it to. So let's focus on. The glass is half full, not half.

Michael, why are you making all these judgment calls and observations about things? You have no idea what my opinion is going to be.

Oh, that's good. I'm filling the air. Yeah, you're right, Jim, but I'm trying to prep your audience so you, you won't get as much hate. So with the current program, with the, it's, it's my belief and I truly believe this, that with what we're currently focused on, with our management activities that are focused on the regenerative parts that we're talking about here with those foliar and injections, I, I truly believe that when I, when I walk through an orchard now versus that same orchard when we were mowing, blowing our mulch, when we were applying compost being the primary differences here and putting on compost tea on an average year, I don't see a, a difference in the fruit. In fact, I believe our trees now in these blocks that have been that, that my family brought in is actually better now than it was when I was farming them independently. I believe that the cumulative impact of these actions. But now just for the last seven years being focused upon these foliar nutrition central and fertigation central things, I think that the trees are doing better now than they were back then. Could they be further ahead? Possibly. But again, I'm happy with three steps, steps forward, one, one step back. And I would not be able to mow and blow. I would not be able to put on compost. They're just for compost tea, for example. And, and so I truly believe that I, that if we can't see a difference when we walk a field, then we probably shouldn't be doing those things now. Are there some times where we had 118 degrees Fahrenheit and it was really extreme? Boy, I wish I would have had compost on that soil or mulch on that soil to cover that soil. I do wish that there. But that is an exception and not the rule. And I need to be doing things that over time are leading to success and not focusing upon those exceptions. I need to focus upon on a general. On an average year with our average market, what are, what are we gaining the most from? And so that's, that's What I'm really focused on, I would also, I would also say that we've become better at measuring and better at reading what the crop needs. Just we have better intuitive sense of what the crop needs because we've been far enough away from a pure, say, chemistry approach to measuring what a, what a crop needs. And I've got a good relationship now with the soil and with the orchard to be able to make observations that now have more of a critical impact upon outcomes than in the past where I was just trying to look at everything. My focus has become much more home.

So you are, you're seeing improve, you're seeing, it's interesting, Mike, I didn't expect you to say that your trees are the same or better as what they were years ago. So that's an interesting observation. But you also, you now have the benefit of, as you described earlier, now have the benefit of having more fruit quality data than what you did previously. So how have you seen fruit quality and harvest quality improve over the last however many years it's been since you're on a larger operation?

So one of the things is it's very dynamic. So I'll have our company orchard view. We'll have blocks where growers will, will start to have us manage their nutrition program. We may start with harvesting, just harvesting their cherries for them and then they grow the cherries themselves. But what I've, what I have seen, and to add to this question, and it's good to surprise you, John, is when we come into, when we come into a new orchard, we see immediate improvements in fruit quality, say an orchard that's been delivering to us in the past. So we can look at those data and we can have seen those cherries under one form of management, and we see it under our form of management. And again, it's not just nutrition, it's pruning, it's how we irrigate. All those things are involved. But I've seen improvements in those in those orchards quickly and I see them continue to improve the longer that, that they're under our management in, in my opinion. And so I actually think that that's a really important gauge that if I was farming on my own, it becomes a lot harder to evaluate yourself, to look at yourself and in the air. But when you have operations where you can apply, apply your trade and your craft and your art that your team brings to the management of an orchard brand new, you know, here we are. But you've seen those, you've seen those cherries growing under another form of management. That's where I think we can really see what is that 8020 break?

Yeah.

So we've done those improvements, market improvements, without the use of these other things that. That we currently aren't using on our. On our own acres. Could it have been different? That possibly. But I know that I can do this time and time again, and we can. We can make it scale and work.

Yeah. So I want to shift gears just a little bit. You have. You have the benefit of having.

A.

Clear perspective into what is happening in the retail marketplace with consumer demand. And what does the future look like for you as a cherry producer? What are the things that you are prioritizing about and thinking about developing in the future? And part of this question is related. There's this recurring conversation around how much does consumer demand actually drive change, particularly in the fresh fruit and vegetable production space? And so you can take that set of questions in any direction that you'd like. I just love to get your perspective on what you see happening in the space.

It's a great question. We need to add that topic to the Thanksgiving dinner conversation. My take is this. Again, I want to focus on just being pragmatic because I need to be. I've got responsibility for a lot of different families, you know, that have hitched their wagon to the decisions that are made in the orchard here at Orchard View. And then I in turn, am hitched to the packing process and the selling process, too. So I am not the expert on. On marketing and how retail works. So I'm going to give you my. My take on it, But I'm much more involved than I was. I truly believe that regenerative practices don't need to have consumer demand to make it the best way of doing things. And what I mean by that is I believe that regenerative practices grow better crops. I believe that those better crops, meaning they're more nutritious. The. The. In my case, the cherries are more beautiful. They taste better. They last better in the. In the distribution channel. You know, our fruit gets picked, it gets packed, it then goes into a distribution channel. It then gets put in retail, and it has to last in retail. And then our fruit has to last in the consumer, in the customer, which. That's the most important thing, has to last in the refrigerator so that several weeks after this cherry is picked, somebody can open up their refrigerator, put a bowl of cherries out there, and they get hammered. They're just gone. And they say, hey, I'm gonna buy those Orchard View cherries again. There's a win for everybody that's involved in that process. There's a win for the grow it for the growing team, my team that grows those cherries. There's a win for the people that are selling those cherries because better cherries that last longer are easier to sell. There's a win for national scale retailers because there's less things that go wrong that have a big p impact on them. The fruit going bad, the fruit being inconsistent. You know, those kind of things are what, what drive retailers to buy your cherries or not. They, they want to have those cherries then sell in their stores and for customers to want to buy more of them. Believe me, those metrics are tracked to a science when you're talking about national retailers versus say, other forms like selling it out of the back of a, of a, of a truck on the side of the road. I truly believe that customers will want to buy regeneratively produced fruit, in my case, without having any idea about how it was grown, if it has the impact that we're shooting for here. So I want to be anonymous. I don't know our customer, I don't know the customers that are buying our cherries and they don't know me. Perhaps they know Orchard View, but they certainly don't know me personally. And I think that, I think that the, that we can't say only way for regenerative to succeed is if it gets sold as some kind of premium product or differentiated product. If we want to have it be involved on a nationwide and worldwide basis. I think that's not a winning model in my opinion. I think we just need to let the fruit or whatever we're producing speak for itself and be better for everybody that's involved in large scale distribution of our, of our food.

All right, that raises a few other questions. I'll, I'll put out two questions at once. Are you actually on your end as the grower packer, are you actually seeing demand coming from national retail level for these specific characteristics? And if there isn't additional compensation, if there are no premiums, then how, how are you making up the, where's the incentive for the, for other growers to adopt?

That's a great question and you're asking at the end of the podcast, John, so maybe, hopefully this won't be a cliffhanger. Retailers, many, many retailers, and not to speak for all, but many, many national level retailers, they have a, they have a set of criteria about how they want fruit grown. It's generally around kind of social Environmental and governance. This ESG type of criteria or global gap is another inspection regime where, where they. There are boxes that you have to check that you do things certain ways. Okay. Very few of those focus upon regenerative agricultural practices. Some do, but very few of it, very few of that does what retailers are looking for. And they, and this, they do have a demand for cherries that last longer in the retail distribution and sell better in the stores. So my answer is yes, there's a greater demand, but they aren't demanding it because they want to know that we're doing SAP analysis in the field and that we're using seaguard injections and C stem or other regenerative. You know, that we're. I still use cover crops and plant cover crops on new field. It's less about that. It's, in fact, it's not about that. It's about, hey, you have good cherries. They're doing well. For us as a retailer, we want to buy more. We're going to give you more opportunity. And sometimes, John, sometimes one of the folks that, that's on the board of directors here at Orchard View, she's been involved in sales a long time. She said that, she said a few months ago, she said sometimes the premium is the purchase order. That means sometimes the difference that you get is you sell your cherries. That is important to think about. So I think that the, I think that the ability to sell our cherries is enhanced because the fruits back. And I think that the demand for our cherries is greater. If the fruit is better, does that mean that we have a win every year? Does that mean that our fruit is better than everyone else's? No, but under the measurements that are done by large retailers, we can, in my opinion, be more successful by using regenerative practices to just make better fruit.

Let me ask, let me go back to my question about incentives. Are there incentives? So you're describing the incentives and the premium is that you might get the purchase order when your competitor does not. And that's, that's a pretty significant incentive.

And it is one of many.

Yeah. Are there also incentives on the production and the growing side? What are the costs of production today versus the cost of production under a different nutrition management regime? And of course, understanding that labor is, is you have a very different labor environment than you did not so long ago.

So the, the, the biggest drive that, the biggest driver for us, from my perspective is so we grow, let's say we're growing. We're growing cherries. Right. A lot of our costs for labor are fixed. If we have a person that's on a mower mowing an acre of cherries, that person can mow an acre of cherries. In the same time, if there's 1 ton an acre there, or 15 tons an acre of fruit that are there, that cost is fixed. The cost of doing irrigation is fixed. There's a lot of cost. The cost of pruning is fixed. In my opinion, the, the approach that we're taking by focusing upon using regenerative principles and guiding our nutrition decisions, in this case, we're putting more fruit per acre out there. The fruit again is larger and better in my opinion. And so that's doing a success in the retail scene. But we're growing higher tonnage of those cherries and we're also making those cherries bigger. You don't want to make 15 tons of small cherries because the price difference between small and large is a, can be substantial. So if we can grow more cherries and have more of those cherries be larger, then our, again we're in the, we're in this business to put food on the table and, and you know, provide for our families. All of us, myself, everybody who works at Orchard View is, is here for that. If we're able to generate more revenue per acre, that needs to be our focus. And, and it's about, it's about return on your cost investing. And in my opinion, definitely these practices that we're doing are adding to our tons per acre. You know, we see more flowers per bud, we see more buds per linear foot of branch in our orchards than we did under conventional practices, if you will. We also see the fruit are larger. We see that the fruit endure weather events that would normally cause higher college where know fruit that can't be sold. If we have a, a large number of tons of larger size fruit and a higher pack out, in other words, less college that we pay for all those expenses and then it goes to low value fruit, we can have a win. And I really believe that. Definitely, definitely believe that. And we haven't gone into the fruit being more, you know, resilient against if it, if it lasts longer through the retail chain. It's also going to be more resilient to heat, wind, rain events. The growing environment.

Of course, all of, all of which we're seeing. We're at the stage now where we can reasonably expect to see to see some type of extreme weather event in almost every growing season.

Absolutely. It's definitely become the regular instead of the norm. And what's it going to be? Is it going to be a big freeze? Is it going to be a big. In our case, it's actually heat events that I would love to have rain again, being the problem with weather, because I think there's a lot we're doing. You know, we see about a 15% reduction or more in rain cracking than we do under conventional. And that's a big difference. That's a huge difference. But heat rain can impact one region and not another. So we're a pretty expansive operation. And one of the advantages of that is if it rains one place, you can not have rain another place. But a heat event just can encompass all of our growing area all at once, real fast.

Yeah, Mike, this has been a very enjoyable conversation. I'd love to keep going and keep digging, but thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing your experience, because I know there are as. As there is more momentum. There are many other growers who want to scale, and I think your experience and. And being willing to freely talk about that experience is going to be very valuable for many people. So thank you very much for being here. Thanks for all your work.

Thanks, John. I enjoyed the conversation.

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