Episode 162: Increasing Pecan Yields up to 6x While Eliminating Herbicides with Troy Swift

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to soil health and plant health and public health and how we can collectively create the better future that we all know is possible. I'm here today with Troy Swift. It's a conversation I've been looking forward to for some time. You know, there is a lot of benefit. There are many. One of Charlie Walters sayings from Acres USA fame many years ago. Charlie's now passed away probably close to 20 years. But he used to have this phrase that was frequently repeated. He said, there's only, there's. There's a select group of farmers who get to have 40 years of experience. Entirely too many growers have one year of experience 40 times. And I've been looking forward to having this conversation with Troy because I think he embodies the growers who truly have had a long run of experience, a cumulative experience, and who've remembered past experiences in informing future decisions. So, Troy, thank you for being here. Give us a little bit of context of your operation and the scope of your work, your history, your pathway. What's brought you here?

Okay. Well, John, first of all, thank you for inviting me on the podcast. I've. I've been listening to you a long time and I consider it an honor to be here. I, I'm a first generation farmer. I didn't plant a pecan tree until I was 42 years old. And so now I have 27 different years of experiences that all mold, that all mold into what I hope is making me a smarter farmer. But I didn't start out farming. I, I was in the canoe and kayak and whitewater industry as a young man. And I ended up because we built boats out of carbon fiber and fiberglass and composites. I ended up in the composite jet engine business and worked at the only factory in the world that builds stage one fan blades for GE90 engines, which go on Boeing 777s. And I started on the floor as a, as a person that built parts and ended up as the manufacturing manager. In that experience, I was taught to solve problems with data and use data to solve problems to drive emotion out of the problems. That way people couldn't point fingers at each other. Bottom line was use data to get to the root cause, which is a good agricultural saying as well.

You know, it's interesting because there is this, this concept that I've spent a lot of time thinking about is that ultimately humans make almost all decisions based on emotions. We like to define ourselves as logical creatures, but we're really not. We're mostly emotional, mostly.

And once, once somebody feels threatened or gets defensive, the, the logical thinking often goes out the window. So, so when I change the regenerative agriculture. Let me finish this thought and then we'll go to that. But when I change the regenerative agriculture and when I do presentations in front of people, I don't stand up in front of them and say, I'm going to show you, show you how to farm or teach you how to farm. I'm, I'm going to tell them here, I tell them, here's what I'm doing and if it works, I'm going to tell you. And if it doesn't work, I'm going to tell you. And I back it all up with data and testing. I, one thing I've got to get across in this transition to regenerative agriculture, this is important to everybody, I think, is that we can't do it. We're not going to convince people if we just think we're doing it because it feels good or we're tree huggers, in my case, or some reason like that. We need to have empirical data best as we can and show it to the farmers. And that's how we're going to convince them.

Well, particularly in, in the current macroeconomic environment and context. To go back to the comment you made earlier about decisions, logical decisions going out the window the moment we become fearful or we become concerned about risk. And that's, that's the thing that almost all growers are, we're almost all in that zone right now because of the macroeconomic factors.

That's right. And, and you know, so market conditions is a reason to, is a reason to change to regenerative agriculture, in my opinion. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you my logic. The reason I changed from, by the way, I started my regen journey about 2019 and I had pecan trees that, that were 12 years old had gone into production and they began to, they began to die actually. And it was, it was slow. But when we had extreme situations like extreme heat or extreme cold or dry, I started losing them. And I asked some scientists, I was associate with scientists all the time. I asked them to come over and look at my trees and tell me what's wrong with them. And of course they said, well, we don't know. It's either, it's either the rootstock or the soil. And I said, well, I don't believe it's the rootstock because they're not all doing it and, and it couldn't all be root stock anyway because rootstocks are born of different seeds and even though they know the mama seed, they don't know the daddy seed because pecans are wind pollinated. So I said if that's the case, then the only thing I can do is learn about the soil and see if I can find, find a way to have the soil work for me. And so I started studying the soil and asking other scientists questions. And I finally ended up a man named Bob Whitney, very famous agricultural person in Texas, referred me to a man named Dennis Perz. P E R Z. He said, you need to go see Dennis. So I called Dennis and, and I went to see his orchard and I had never met the man. And he said, just drive up to the orchard, I'll be in the barn. Never met, met him, he's older than me. I drove up, got out of my truck, walked into his orchard and before I ever met the man, just looking at his trees and the, the orchard floor, I said, man, there is something good going on here. And I proceeded into the barn and he had an old style flip chart in the barn waiting for me. And he began to tell me about soil biology and mineral balancing among other things. And, and he introduced me to a lady named Betsy Ross who, who Steve Divor used to work with as a matter of fact. And she was an organic oriented person. She had a company called Sustainable Growth Texas. So she came to visit me and loved my orchard because of the biodiversity I have. But, but she was organic and I'm not organic, still not certified organic. I'm not, not really planning to do that. But anyway, that changed everything. And then I really began studying the soil, worrying about carbon more in the soil. I changed, I changed, started changing my fertilizer system drastically. Reductions, reduction of nitrogen and increase in humates and carbon based fertilizers from multiple, multiple vendors. And then we got in a, got in a program. The Noble Research Institute, found out about me and invited me into a program. And I don't know if, if you know them, but they changed their charter to soil health about five or six years ago. So now we're in a study that's six years long where they come in and do soil testing and that's Haney and PLFA testing, leaf analysis, not SAP analysis, conventional leaf analysis. And then here's a biggie that I hear on your program a lot and that is nut nutrition. So we're going to see if we're building a better nut from a nutrition perspective. And then they also do food safety analysis on, on, on pecans that are on the ground to see, see what kind of effect animals have on the food safety. So the point is that I'll get into a lot of these experiments if we have time. But the point is I'm backing it up with data. And I think an important aspect of that is those scientists are coming here and they are taking the samples and they are doing the work and that drives the farmer bias right at it. I can't, I can't want a soil test to be better than it is. I can't go select a place I know it's better. They, they have all this GPS out they take, they have trees marked and areas marked and they do the same places over and over. And then what I do, my part of the deal is I supply them with all the data, all the, all the inputs I have done to that particular piece of property. When I did it, what I did and how much it cost and, and how much labor and electricity and diesel and the whole works. And then they, they, they go, you know, for one thing that caused me to focus in on my costs a lot better. But the other thing is as they analyze it and their job is to tell is, is to decide whether this type of a management system is financially superior to some of the other systems. Some of them are conventional. So it's a long term study and it should drive a lot of the fallacies and guessworks out of the, out of this regenerative ag effort.

Yeah. So Troy, we have, we have lots of fun conversations to get into about the data, what it is that you've been discovering. But before we go there, give us a bit of context of your operations. You're growing pecans, what's what region, what soil type, what kind of scale.

I'm in Central Texas. If you draw a line from Austin to San Antonio, about halfway between them and 12 miles east. I'm in the Blackland Prairies of Texas on the San Marcos River. I'm a small pecan grower. I have two farms. One is 60 acres, one at 66 acres and the other one is 200. But I only have about 60 acres in, in man planted hybrid pecans and the rest is in native pecans because this part of Texas is the homeland of the native pecans. So if you want to see giant pecan trees that, that quite probably the Comanches ate pecans off of, this is, this is where it is. Big, big trees and you know, Texas history is not all that old. So 200 years ago the Comanches were here and those trees were too. So I like, when I give tours of my property, I like to point that out and put, kind of put it in perspective. But, but I concentrate. So I don't do anything to the natives. I see natives as if you want to correlate it to animals. I see native pecan trees. You say they're like the buffalo and the man. The man, the man. Hybridized trees are like modern milk cows. You don't treat them the same. So the natives I leave alone, they were doing their thing before, before we knew anything about pecan farming. But the, but the hybrids, you know, they make bigger pecans that take more energy. And so we do farm them and we do do crop load management on those as well. So what I have, one of the things I have changed. Let me begin to, to give you an idea of what it looks like. Let's, let's talk about a 35 acre field has 600 trees in it. Most, most of those trees are Pawnee variety and cattle. Now you might notice in pecans you hear a lot of Indian names. That's because in 1955 the USDA started naming all their releases after the American Indians to honor them. Because the Indians used to live in the river bottoms like where I was talking about where the natives are. And so the first variety was released in 1955 and it was Comanche. That's the first one they, they named as an after the Indians. But this sick, this 35 acre orchard, these trees are on 50 by 50 spacing and they're 18. The big orchard is 18 years old. Full production and Texas concretries about 10 years to come into economic production. They will bear fruit earlier than that. But as these trees came into production and their energy needs went up and they grew, I had, I had to change the management style. One of the biggest changes is I quit mowing. And that is a major paradigm change for, for old pecan farmers.

And what, what's happened to you and it no longer looks nice and neat. You're no longer managing well.

That's right. And so one, one of my, one of my friends that's going down this journey with me when he's doing presentations, he has a little picture of me there that says we quit mowing. Troy says we don't have to play golf in this orchard, so we don't have to play golf there. So it doesn't need to look like a golf course. What it needs to be doing is collecting the sun's energy and transforming that energy via photosynthesis into what the plants and the soil microbes need. So now our grass is really tall. In fact, it's as tall as I am in some places. But we quit using herbicides completely. Now if in traditional pecan farming it's not unusual for the entire orchard floor to be killed with herbicide, and the old thinking, and there's still that thinking now just by some, is that that those plants are stealing nutrients and water. And of course I don't believe that. I never did believe that all the way. I never did have a bear orchard floor. But, but I did used to mow. So mowing is a major savings. If you eliminate mowing, that's, that's labor, it's diesel, it's machine maintenance. And plus, plus you're doing the, the volunteer ground cover a big favor. It can, it can grow and be biodiverse.

Well, give us some context for you said you're in the black prairie soils there in that region of Texas, and I know there is this common conception by people who are not familiar with tree growing to say, well, you have a tree that has this deep root system. It's not as dependent on the surface layer roots, but in fact, many trees are very dependent on getting a lot of nutrients from that surface surface layer, from that top 6 to 10 inches to a foot deep of soil, of shallow feeder roots. But you have these, these deep black soils. I think if I'm not mistaken, you've got pecan trees that are on 50 foot spacing and they've got these massive root systems. So how much are they competing with the grasses for nutrients and so forth on the soil surface? Really?

I don't, I don't, I don't think they're really competing at all. I think they're working symbiotically. The, it is true that a pecan, you know, a pecan does have a very deep root. It has a deep tap root. Even when you plant a bare root young tree, you still got to dig a hole 30 inches deep to get it in the ground. But, but really most of the root mass is in the top 18 inches, fanning out, fanning out under the canopy and in fact about one and a half times the diameter of the canopy. And so that top foot is very important to, to those trees for gathering water. The tap root's really kind of a, kind of a survival route and a, and a mechanism to help the tree stand up and wind, you know, so are, so are the lateral roots. Though if you plant a pecan tree wrong, it's more, more, more prone to blowing over in a hurricane than it is if it's planted at the right depth. But there may be some. There's still some scientific evidence that says when you have really young trees, there's some competition going on. But I'm doing an experiment now with, with newly planted trees, with, with Dr. Amet Dingra. And there's no herbicide being used, and these trees are growing as fast as any trees I've ever grown. Just because of the biochar.

Yeah. So now that you're no longer mowing, what does your, what does your soil cover look like? What's the species composition look like?

Johnson grass, Bermuda grass, silverleaf nightshade, which is hated by the cattle people. Mustards, Lots of forbs. Lots of forbs and grasses.

Well, all the things that you named given names, I think are all universally hated by someone somewhere.

Yeah. But they're not hated by me when, when you have those. And we only, we only mow one time, and that's right before harvest just for. So the harvester can pick the pecans up off the ground easier. But again, it still doesn't need to be a golf course if you have ground cover like that. First of all, you know, it's just like any agriculture. You can get, you can get in and out of the orchard a lot faster in rainy periods or wet periods. And also, the dust is, is held down. If you want to see a dust storm, go watch a pecan harvester harvest on dry soil. It's terrible. And so that ground cover performs all those photosynthetic resource functions as well as, of course, erosion and dust and keeping the soil cool and, and those type of things. So in my opinion, and I've heard it on your, your podcast before, too, I think you know, what's the definition of a weed? Well, I don't have any weeds. I don't have any weeds. I have, I have ground cover that's, that's performing a function.

You have, you have volunteer ground cover. You don't even have to plant it.

That's right. And I tried planting some and it did very well. I tried some True, Kaylee. And for forage college last year, it all grew very well, but it did not come back. Yeah. And I let it go to seed, but it didn't happen. And so I'm just going to let what Mother Nature wants to grow there. I'm going to let it grow.

Yeah. Yeah. So you started this transition, you started giving us some context and some explanation of the transition. Then you started, began talking a bit more about your farm. What, in addition to changing how you mowed or not no longer mowing, what else started changing in 2019? What, what are some of the other things that really started that you began doing differently?

Well, the, the main one was my fertilizer planning. So, so after mowing I said, you know, I've been hearing about nitrogen maybe, maybe being over applied. And so I started thinking about that and I started changing my, my, my ground applications of, of fertilizers to reduce nitrogen and I started increasing biology applications and, and adding a lot more humate based fertilizers over those years. I, you know, back then I would have been doing probably between 80 to 100 pounds of actual in. And, and then I cut it in half and I went down to about 40 to 42 pounds of in. Didn't see any detriment at all. And so then I, once I, once I started applying the biology, I cut, I just cut the nitrogen out. We're not using it anymore. And, and that's a real paradigm change because in pecan trees the old way of thinking is you needed water, zinc and nitrogen. And so the nitrogen I've taken out and, and I've done another, another thing that most people don't do, but it's becoming a little more common now and that is spread wood chips orchard wide. So in the, in pecan farms we have to cut a lot of limbs because the trees get too big. You know, it's called hedging. And traditionally those limbs were pushed to the end of the orchard and burned. But now people are grinding them up and putting them in manure spreaders and spreading them thin over the top of the orchard grass. And that's what I'm doing. And we're studying the data for the farms that are doing that and we're having pretty remarkable increases in plant available nitrogen. And we're also seeing our PH drop, which is a big deal because when you're at 8.2 or 8.3 ph to begin with, if you, if you can start dropping those top decimals off of there, get down to 8 or 7.9, you're starting to really improve the availability of some of the micronutrients like zinc and manganese that become very difficult for a plant to access at high ph. Another thing we did, and I think this is very important and it's also very cost effective and easy. And that is Johnson Sioux Bioreactors I built six Johnson sue bioreactors and put different inputs in them to see which. Which recipe worked the best. Now I'm growing trees, so I want a high fungal to bacterial ratio. At least that's. That's what the information I've read says. Now there's a little bit of argument about that because some of those plants in that ground cover might want a higher bacterial to fungal ratio. Okay? But high fungal to bacterial ratio, and that's completely achievable with Johnson sue bioreactors. And unlike most of life, the easiest recipe turned out to be the best. And that was. And that was just wood chips like you would get from a crew chipping for the power company. If I see them. If I see them chipping, I go give them my card and I tell them where to go. And I'll take as. I'll take as much as I can get. So now you say, well, how do you know that? Well, like I said before, I had tested. So I took these six recipes and sent them to a micro. Micro could be lab. Sorry about that. And, and had it analyzed for fungal bacterial ratio and harmful pathogens and all that sort of thing. Amoebas and nematodes, things of that nature. And it's very high quality, Very high quality, very alive. And the good thing about Johnson suit bioreactors is they're totally passive, except you have to water one to three minutes a day and you wait a year. And the remarkable thing is you can take this material, this mature compost, which looks like compost, smells like compost. It has arthropods and all sorts of living creatures in it, and it dissolves. So you put it, you put it in water and it dissolves, and then you can spray it on your orchard floor. So I have a ground rig and even came along and built a device with a bunch of shank blades where I injected in the soil. So I spray it and inject it. I'll sometimes throw some algae, liquid algae in there and some humates. And, And I've even, I've even. I've even applied your soil primer that way, as a matter of fact.

Yeah.

And so that's the big. That's the big changes. And no nitrogen. In fact, I, I decided to look up. I do apply some foliar nitrogen. But to put it in perspective, I used to do, you know, 45 to 90 pounds or 100 pounds of actual N per acre. Now I'm doing 2.4.

Wow.

Via foliar.

I wanted to get into this earlier when you were talking about it. And I also, I want to come back to the, to the Johnson sue and the compost extracts work that you're doing as well. But when you were speaking about nitrogen and you've now, you're now down to 2.4 pounds. How, how did the trees respond from a vegetative growth perspective? Did you see reductions in vegetative growth? Did you see reductions in nut size? How do the trees respond to that?

No, I saw better growth.

Wait, what?

Yes, that's right. I, I saw. I saw better growth. Now, it is, it is true that the shoot growth this year might have been a little shorter than, than it had been, but the nut size and the nut quality and the nut quantity and the leaf size. I've done leaf size analysis too, and, and it all stayed the same or, or got better. But the real deliverable, the pecans. We're. We're seeing higher yields than ever, and we're also having very high quality. And we prove that by sending those pecans to the Texas Pecan show. And we compete against every other pecan farmer that participates. And we do very well in that competition. In fact, we've won the best pecans in Texas two times, and that's a pretty big deal. Don't win it all the time, but I usually do place by variety in, in our East Texas show and our state show this year for the variety Makono, I, I won first place for that variety. But not the best pecan in Texas. They do it by variety, and then they pick one, and that's the best pecan, you know, that's the grand champion. So I have won that twice. So when people will say, well, you can't grow pecans like that, I say, well, just go find my sample at the shop at the pecan show and we'll see. See how you stack up.

So, Troy, I've been. I've kind of been gunning for this narrative that there should be the expectation of a yield loss early on during a transition period, because that has not been my experience. That has not been my observation of the growers who do go through a transition, who are managing agronomy well. And I've. I don't know anything. I'm. I'm hearing your story for the first time, but I'd love to hear what, what happened with yield trends as you started this transition.

So as I went through the transition, I, I did not have a dip as I started. It all just kind of stayed the same. And pecans are known to be Alternate bearing anyway. And in, in man planted orchards we can manipulate that a little bit by making sure they get what they need. And natives, they just do what they do. But, but it kind of stayed the same until about, really, until about the third year of really intensively doing this. And, and after I expect the biological amendments and the carbon and all the things I did had a chance to kick in because these are perennials, right? I mean, they don't respond the next day. They're perennials and they're pretty big, so it takes a little while. But to answer your question, last year one of those varieties, Caddo, did four times what they've ever done. So four times what they've ever done. And I had other areas desirable and Nakono and some other varieties that did between two and six times what they had ever done. And I had a couple of spots that did the same this last year. Now last year on those Caddo they were so heavy I had to do crop load management. In other words, I had to hook a shaker up in July and shake them off, shake a lot of them off before the tree expended the energy to fill the current. And you have to wait till they get big so that, so they're affected by the shaker. But you do it at what's called the water stage when they're full of water but before the dough, the dough is being formed, shook them off. I had PhDs. I had a PhD who was not, not, not too fond of this regenerative egg standing in knee deep, knee deep grass. And I said, you tell my guy when to quit shaking because he was experienced at that, just so he could see it. And that's a different story, but I do want to talk about it a little bit. But anyway, I shook those trees last year and then we had four, we still had four times what they'd ever done. And those trees are again very heavily loaded. And, and so the Pawnees are also very heavily loaded. We're going to set a record there this year.

So if I'm following your narrative here, it sounds like you've at least in a couple years, instance, you no longer have the biennial bearing challenge. How has biennial bearing been for you over the last half a dozen years.

Since 2019 in the orchards? I'm talking about, I have not it. We, what we've done is taken, taken extremes and flattened it out. You still get some variation. And I would expect, I would have, expect this year on those Caddo to have, have a, what we call an off year. Although it's not, it's not off at all. And so I think we're smoothing it out. I think we're increasing production and we're smoothing out ultimate bearing. That's what I think we're doing and we'll see in the next two or three years, you know, but yeah, that's what it looks like.

So as you've, as you've been on this, this journey and exploring, doing things differently, what have been some of the memorable moments? What are some of those stories and the highlights that really stand out in your memory?

Well, I'll tell you this, this is something that stands out and it's also very important and it's the impact on other farmers and academia. So I have, first of all, I, despite the fact that I turned to regenerative agriculture and I'm a small pecan farmer, I'm the president of the Texas Pecan Growers association, so I'm a visible person in the industry. And last year I did a presentation about all of these projects I'm doing in front of the whole convention. And in earlier years, I'd have probably been run out of the hotel, you know.

But you never would have become president.

Yeah, that's right. And they, and they still elected me president. So now what I do is I offer my place for, as, for research. And I can't believe how many PhDs and institutional people want to come do research on my, in my workshops. And I can go through that. If you want to hear, if you want to hear the list. It's pretty, it's pretty long. But, but the point is, is that people that used to think bad of this are now joining up. And, and this is true even for major institutions like Texas A and M. They are the big, they're the big ag school down here. And, and so they put it this way, my last field day, I had 11 PhDs sitting in the orchard on a lawn chair listening to what we were talking about. And if you, if you can look at those trees and tell me I have to have nitrogen at, at the old prescription, I say look at that tree right there. And, and so I had, I had the head of my of pathology from Texas A and M and the head of horticulture there, too, and some of their people and other universities and noble research. The point is, I don't mean that to be bragging. What I mean is that people are interested and it's important and noticeable, which was what your question is about how we're impacting academia and other farmers and of Course, other farmers are now asking me questions all the time, and there's several of us in this study.

This is a very valuable and important conversation, Troy, because it's. I mean, there are all kinds of different scenarios and settings where there's different types of relationships between academia and growers, depending on the context and the crop and what you're talking about. There's. There's a wide variation in cultures all across the country and internationally. But in. In many cases, there is. There is a disconnect between academia and the growers themselves, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller. But what. What you're doing, I think, is. Is quite inspiring in that by. By providing a. Providing a place, providing a landscape and an opportunity for research, you're actually, you're. You're fostering and building these relationships and aligning that community more closely together than perhaps it's ever been before. And this, it seems to me, this is a remarkable opportunity that we. We see some growers take advantage of. And sometimes there's enough of a cultural disconnect there that it just doesn't happen very well.

Well, I've kind of made it my mission because of place in life and my age and the size of my farm. I'm never going to be that pecan farmer that says I grew a million pounds or I was the biggest grower in Texas or anything like that. That's never going to be me. What I am trying to do is discover these new ways of farming that are better for the environment, better for the bottom line, safer for the employees and the visitors and the families and the food, nutrition. I want that to be what I have provided people a place to study. And. And they're taking me up on it. I'll tell you a joke, and I don't mean this bad, but it sounds bad, but it's not. We were standing under one of my trees the other day with a whole bunch of scientists and PhDs, and one of the scientists looks up at my tree and there's nothing. He doesn't find anything wrong with it. He says, well, I don't see anything wrong here. What's your biggest pest? And I said, usually PhDs and university people. And then I said, no, not really. I really want you here. I really want you here. And so we just had a girl here studying. She's been here twice. Her name's Mackenzie Stock out of New Mexico State. She was here studying mycorrhizal fungi associations with pecan tree roots, which in my orchard I find very interesting because we haven't even talked about something about fungicides yet. But one of my big goals is to, is to reduce and eliminate fungicides and I'm being very successful at it. I think the Johnson sue biology, I think the enhanced biology in the area, in the soil and you know, in the, in the rhizosphere is quite possibly helping that. Of course, I don't have a way to prove that, but I'm also spraying bacteria on the leaves to induce systemic acquired resistance. And I'm doing that early and multiple times. And I've taken my fungus pony by the way, is a very scab fungus prone variety. I've taken my scabs, my, my true fungicide sprays from 5 or 6 a year down to about 1 or 0.5. And I intend to get rid of that last one this next year if my experiments keep showing the results that I'm getting now.

I was about to ask the context of what, what common fungicide applications are. What about insecticide applications? What, what is the common cultural practice there and how has that shifted for you?

Well, that didn't have to shift too much for me. A lot of people spray broad spectrum for lots of different insects or arthropods. I learned not to say insects a long time ago. If you're talking about small creatures in general, you say arthropods because there's others besides insects. But, but I never did spray broad spectrum. We have a pest here called pecan case bearer. It comes in the, when it comes at the time when the pecan is really small, usually around the 1st of May here. But that's different as you change latitude. So you can spray a lot of different insecticides. It's a moth larvae that destroys the whole nut cluster. One egg can destroy or five pecans. This is why we started experimenting with bats, by the way, because they eat moss. And so I've only ever sprayed one for that test. And I spray a specific insecticide that, it's not broad spectrum. It only, it only affects larvae. But this year in one of my orchards I didn't spray at all. So this is the first year I have eliminated a insecticide completely and I have a very good crop there. And I went up and monitored it. I got in a man list and I went up and evaluated the damage of the nut clusters and presented that data to scientists down here that care. But you know, you can use an insect as a, what's considered a bad insect as a beneficial. Remember when I was telling you we had to do crop load management?

Right?

That means I'm shaking pecans off the tree before they're mature. But that tree has still put all that energy and effort into making that fruit. You can use pecan, that case bear. If you have too big of a crop, you just. You just let the pecan case bear take them off when they're young, and then the tree doesn't even have to feel that fruit. So that's what I did at this orchard. I said, I'm just going to let them take what they want because I got too much. I got more than the tree can bear anyway. And if you let. If you let them overbear, then you start an alternate bearing cycle, and you also will have crop quality problems at that year because the tree doesn't have enough energy to fill all the nuts.

So, Troy, I'm going to ask you a question. Earlier, you were describing the story of a friend of yours standing underneath the trees, and you were asking for their perspective on when to stop shaking. You know, one of the things that we've observed on apples and on a number of other crops who are also prone to biennial bearing is that as the nutrition improves and as the tree health improves, the. The ability to handle fruit load changes and the biennial bearing threshold changes that the. The number of nuts that a tree is. Can be considered to bring to harvest will. Can sometimes change dramatically. On a couple of apple varieties, it changed by a factor of 100% where they. They essentially doubled the fruit load that the tree was capable of handling without inducing biennial bearing. So it's still early days for you. Do you have any thoughts about. It's interesting to me that these trees are demonstrating they have the genetic capacity, the genetic potential to handle and to set these very large fruit loads. But then do they have the ability to bring them all the way to harvest? What do you think you'll expect? What do you expect to see happen in the future?

I think I'll have increased production with high quality. So we just got to monitor that. We want to make sure we don't make too many pecans that aren't good, because, by the way, I retail almost all my pecans. I don't go into commodity market for price reasons, but.

Oh, I know a lot of listeners are not going to be happy if I don't ask this question, but where do you retail them? Under what brand?

Swift River Pecans.

Swift River Pecans. All right.

It's easy to remember that because my last name is Swift. Swift. I live on a river and I grow pecans. So it's Swift River.

Yeah, we'll include a link in the show notes.

Yeah. And we have a website. But I think, I think the alternate bearing is going to, I think the, the variation is going to reduce. I think, I think the yields are going to go up. And I don't know if I've said this in this podcast, but you kind of did a while ago. Here's the deal. No matter what I study, and I study a lot, or who I listen to, whatever the bottom line is, if you can have a healthy soil and all the things it takes to make a healthy soil, your trees or plants or whatever you're growing, that, that's really the bottom line. Remember when I said root cause a while ago? Well, that's really where, where this happens. If you have a healthy soil, you have a very high biodiversity both above and below the soil, and that includes large animals all the way down to bacteria. Your trees are going to be in a healthier environment and, and, and they're going to have more water naturally because of the organic matter. And by the way, I have a saying that I also, if I'm doing presentations to people, especially skeptics, I would say if you don't believe in any of this biology and you don't believe in this, the photosynthesis, bring it bringing energy and carbon into the soil. If you don't believe all that, that's okay. But just believe this. Every 1% of organic matter in your soil has 15 to 25,000 gallons of water holding capacity per acre. And nobody can argue against the fact that the south and the Southwest, particularly Texas west, has a serious water problem. And so I use the term countermeasure to drought. And I like to use that term countermeasure, because people that are my age understand that word counter. Measure the drought. It doesn't mean it's going to prevent drought damage, but it gives you a big tool to fend off drought right off the bat. And so if you get ready now when your drought comes, or it cannot be just a drought, it can be politics, it can be restrictions, it can be a number of things that cause water not to be able to get to your crop. So I use organic matter as, as a way to get ready for drought by demonstrating its water holding capacity.

You know, a friend of mine described how he went to. I forget if it was a county commissioner meeting or if it was a regional Water Planning commission meeting, but they were having this conversation about the need to conserve and store water. And so there was a proposal on the, on, on the TABLE for significant investment in the hundreds of millions of dollars to build water storage, to build water storage capacity. And he stood up in the meeting and gave them a 20 minute overview of the capacity of organic matter to store and hold water. So he said what you should be doing with the hundreds of millions of dollars is instead of investing it in water storage infrastructure, you should be investing it in incentivizing farmers to hold water in the landscape. And because it is equally as effective there for your purposes, for what you're looking for, every drop of water that is conserved and that is held in soil means that there's less irrigation requirement. And you will, your money will have a much bigger impact there and go a lot farther there than it will in storage infrastructure by like an order of magnitude or more. Actually, I think by almost 20x there was a bigger water storage per dollar spent in soil rather than in, in storage lagoons and lakes and so forth. And so it's, it's just that it's such an obvious concept for those of us who are familiar with this idea, but having it crystallized and juxtaposed to say here's option A and here's option B to people who are actually in charge of having those conversations and making those decisions, I think was a very powerful moment.

Yeah, that's a, that's a very good point. And, and, and it's really not just farmers. You know, if you can teach soil health and water holding capacity to residential areas, to people, to parks, to cities, that all counts too. And, and so that, that is one of the main, to me, that's one of the main subjects that needs to be talked about in regenerative agriculture and soil health. It, that's in fact, it's probably the most important. You can't do anything without water. And, and in fact, there's a joke, you know, you've probably heard it when you start a field day or something and somebody smart will stand up in front of the crowd and say, what's your, what's your most limiting nutrient? And people, people will often say, well, it's nitrogen or, or my manganese is real low or something like that. The answer is what, the answer in this part of the world in west is that the nutrient is water. And, and so we, I think that's very important.

Well, the answer in your part of the world is water. And when you go further east to high rainfall environments, I mean, there's seasonal variation some seasons and we have, we have drought periods here in the east, but once you cross a threshold of about 40 inches of annual rainfall. I think the most common and most significant limiting factor is carbon dioxide, which is equally ignored and invisible for most people. Well, it's even more ignored and more invisible than water.

Yeah. Well, so that, you know, that brings us then to the, to, you know, I was not, I didn't ever pay attention to CO2 before this. Right. And now, now in the Haney soil soil test and part of the soil health score is the CO2 burst. And so, you know, it's a measure of how, it's an indicator of how alive the soil is. And so now, now that I study the Haney soil test and I've met, I met Rick Haney one time, by the way. But I look, I look at that, I look, I look at the organic matter, obviously, and the soil health score and the nitrogen savings. Look at all that stuff in the Haney soil test. But CO. But CO2, and there's a PhD that works down here that, that often brings up. It's no wonder that, that the stomata are on the bottom of the leaf. It's not accidental. Yeah, it's not accidental, is it? Yeah, yeah.

My goodness. There. Troy. There's still a number of conversations that I want to get to, but let's, let's dig into nut quality. You've mentioned that you've placed very highly in a number of these competitions. You've been a champion of some of the competitions have been the ultimate winner. What are those quality parameters that you're really striving for? What do the competitions get judged on? Is it flavor? Is it texture? How are your nuts performing from a nutritional profile perspective?

The nutritional data is not done yet and we're looking very much forward to that. That's. But it will be coming soon. But that's not what the contest is based on the con. So there's, there's about a thousand different varieties of pecans that have been hybridized over the years. But understand, they all started. The genetic homeland is the native pecan and the giant native pecan forest, if you will, groves that are along river bottoms in this part of the world. Pecan trees are riparian tree. Native pecans are generally smaller and have a thicker shell, which means they have a lower nut meat content by percent. So the way you grade pecans, let's just make a simple example. If you take one pound of in shell pecans, weigh it accurately and then you hand crack it. So let's say it weighs one pound and let's say there's 60 pecans to one pound. So one, one of your answers is count how many does it take to make a pound. Then, then you hand crack them and you keep what's edible and what, and what that means is what, what is sellable edible. Not what, not what I would eat just because I don't want to throw it away. Okay, what could you sell? Which means if you have stink bug damage or, or dark areas or wafers or dust or something in them that you have to throw those out anyway, if you, if you get a half a pound of edible, then it's a 50. Okay. And if you're buying pecans bulk, if I'm selling you an 18 wheeler loaded pecans, you're going to ask me how many, how many per pound and what's the yield? That's what you want to know. You're not going to care about the variety unless you have a customer that does. But, but, but by variety, then they take the pecans, you turn in 45 pecans of each variety. You cannot. They only let me turn in six varieties and I grow more than that. But it's how they don't want you.

They don't want you winning all the competitions.

So they, so, so, so you do that and they, and they. So it's nuts per pound and how consistent the nut looks. Does it look, you know, how literally it's, it's subjective. Literally, how pretty is, is the pecan? Is it well shaped? Does it have undulations that it shouldn't have? Does it have insect trackings on it? You know, you don't want any of those in that context.

Are you referring to the nutshell or the nut meat?

The nutshell. Right. Now see, when you turn it in, you only turn them in in shell. So even I don't know what they look like on the inside.

Got it.

Now I have a good idea because I will have sampled, you know, I will have done statistical sampling to know that I got a pretty good chance this is going to be a good sample. But you never know. I mean a stink bug leaves a black spot. If you ever see a pecan with it looks like a black freckle, that's a stink bug damage even through the hardened shell. But so it's that and it's nutmeet yield and then it's what the kernel looks like. How, how pretty is it? What color is it? They like golden, golden colored kernels, no blemishes and well filled out like even, even all the way to the tip. So this is kind of Pecan scientist, pecan nerd stuff. But those are the things they're looking for. And really, it's how well filled it out it is and what it looks like. Ironically, taste is not part of the contest. What? That's right. It's not.

Isn't that. Oh, my goodness. That's American consumerism and food consumption in a nutshell. We don't care much about flavor, but we only care what it looks like. It's like buying red apples on a grocery store shelf that are nothing more than a packed skin of carbohydrates.

Yeah. But there is kind of a reason for it. Like, if you come in my store in November, I'm going to have six or seven different varieties laid out on my counter for you. And you're going to come in and say, troy, what's the best pecan? And I'm going to say, that's not for me to figure out. That's for you to figure out. And then I will hand crack the different varieties and start handing them to you. And you're going to pick one. Most people pick one immediately. Sometimes a person will say, I can't tell the difference, but usually somebody will pick one immediately, but their wife or their friend or whoever they're with will pick a different one. So. So the, the. And so what people are trying to taste. When they're tasting a pecan, they don't know this, but I think subconsciously they're trying to find what is the sweetest one and that. And that's what they don't even know they're looking for that. But that's the one they pick. And the one that's sweetest to me might not be sweetest to eat. So I don't know if that's why it's not in the contest, but that's what I see.

Well, you know, years ago, I read this fascinating little book that was titled Biochemical Individuality. And it was essentially a description of the science as it was understood at the time, of why and how things taste differently to different people. Because they have different receptors, different receptor sensitivity based on very slight chemical differences and biochemical differences in their body. And it's like we understand that people don't like all flavors equally. Some people prefer one flavor, one flavor, and others have a passionate dislike for it. And we assume, or at least I used to assume, that it was just based on historical patterning and conditioning from when they were children. But in fact, the realization is that everything tastes slightly differently to different people. They're actually not Tasting the same thing. They may be consuming the same food with the same makeup and the same composition, but the flavor profile that they perceive can actually be very different. And this is, in fact, something I think we should celebrate. That's why one of the contributing factors, why we have hundreds of apple varieties and tomato varieties and so forth is because there are all these flavored and aroma variations. And that if we actually optimize for flavor and aroma, often there's also a correlation with nutritional value. So come on, Troy, you're the president of the organization. You have the ability to, to lobby to get taste included in the, in the, in the parameters. And it absolutely, absolutely should be there.

Yeah, well, I can, I can lobby for it. I don't know if I'll get there or not. So. But, but taste certainly does matter in retail. So when you have people tasting the product, they will definitely select one.

Well, and it matters for you with your retail brand. I mean, you, you have a direct to market brand. So people absolutely will care about flavor and quality.

Yeah. And here's another thing. This doesn't have anything to do. It has to do with pecan quality, but not the contest. But what people don't understand, and this is an industry problem, and it's very important. Pecans are supposed to be light colored, golden type. The kernels that you eat when you buy pecans, and this is particularly true out of the pecan belt, in other words, not in the South. When you buy pecans at the grocery store and they're dark, they're dark like root beer, those are no good. They have not been stored properly and they're rancid. And the retail, the retailers will still sell them. And unfortunately for people that have never had a good pecan, they buy that, they think pecans are no good, they won't ever buy another one in their life. And that's really bad for the industry. So people come in here all the time and I give them one of those taste tests and they go, wow, I didn't have any idea pecans tasted like that. And that's how that's. But you. We have to get that education out. And the, and the right way to store them is frozen and they're good for two years and they'll, they'll maintain the color and the taste.

Yeah. So, yeah, this is a great point, Troy. The proper storage. There's something similar that happens with walnuts. And, you know, let's talk a little bit about astringency. So we know walnuts. I have. I forget the name of this compound right now. But for so many people, when, when they, when you taste a walnut, there is this slight aftertaste, this slight astringency aftertaste. And one of the things that I've had the absolute joy of experiencing is getting walnuts that are really high quality, grown in a regenerative system with lots of plant species diversity and with very good nutrition. And that astringency is gone. They have no aftertaste at all. And it's, there's this, it's this remarkable flavor profile that is, it doesn't have any of the negatives that are sometimes associated with walnuts. And it's my understanding that pecans can also have, from the tannins and so forth that are associated with it. They can also have this slight level of astringency. How, how is that influenced with, with tree health management and nutrition management and so forth? Have you observed anything at this point?

Well, let's, for one thing, we can let the native pecan speak for itself. Native pecans taste great. They're not as marketable because they're not as big and, and they're harder to harvest because the trees are giant. But a lot of people really like natives, and natives is. Native pecans is the true definition of sustainable agriculture. I mean, they've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years with no help. So they're, they're often very high quality. The improved varieties, if they're well filled out and, and lived in healthy soil, they're going to, they're going to taste really good. Now, empirically, to answer your question again, we are doing the nut nutrition analysis, which includes flavonoids, and we're going to find out whether or not we are actually building a better pecan by, by, by using the soil health principles and reduction of all the pesticides of all natures.

Right. We started this conversation by you describing your background, your professional background and using data to make decisions and all the data that you're collecting on your operation. We've, we've had a great conversation so far, but we've not talked about any of your data. So what, what has, what has your data been revealing that you've found intriguing?

The biggest one.

Well, actually, let's back up just a step. You spoke about your soil analysis data that you're collecting, the Haney analysis and so forth. Give us a bit of an overview. What are all the various types of data that you are collecting?

Well, everything on the Haney soil test, which does have some traditional elemental and mineral type stuff on it. But the important thing there is the organic matter and the, and the nitrogen savings. And so also with the noble data, I was just looking at it a while ago. Here's something important. Since we've changed our nitrogen management, essentially taking it away, our plant available nitrogen has, has gone in the soil samples, has gone from about 20 to 30 pounds per acre to 60 to 90 pounds per acre. So it's doubled. The available nitrogen has doubled by taking the nitrogen away. This is amazing. And so you know, this is not my discovery. This is, this is what got Haney onto the soil, to the Haney soil test. Anyway, as I understand it, he saw crops growing with no nitrogen applied and said, how can this be? And he studied it and found this to be right. So it's just this biology is working for us big time. And with the limited years, I mean, if I keep seeing this, I, this, this is very substantial data. The other one which I mentioned a while ago is ph going down. Ph. Ph is a huge problem. You know that. Now. I know, I know. I've listened to you. You talk about ph and redox and that's all of that stuff. But ph is important when you're real high on the scale like we are. So knocking it down a few points is important to us. The other, the, the other data that, that is interesting is the, the pure economics of reduction of mowing and the reduction of the fertilizers and all that sort of thing. Now, we haven't talked about, we, let's see, we haven't talked about the bats yet. So this is data. We, I won't spend a lot of time on this, but we, we got funded by The Brown Foundation $50,000 to study what bats are eating. And so we send the guano to a lab called Species from Feces. And we've learned what they eat and they. If you don't want to be a bug around the back. The bats are incredibly important to agriculture that if you look at a Pareto chart, I have Pareto charts of what they eat, okay? Beetles of all sorts. In fact, if you look at bat guano on a sunny day, it crumbles, it's shiny because it's beetle. All right? But on the Pareto chart, you have beetles, you have moths. Now, moths is one of our main pests, but it's also a major agricultural pest. The point is, is that these things are important for all agriculture, not just pecans. Next. Next is mosquitoes and flies. Now mosquitoes and flies is important to everybody. Nobody likes that and, and think of it from a cattleman's perspective, which is a big deal in Texas and everywhere flies as well. Okay. They also eat cockroaches and, and ants and, and termites. And then here's a biggie for all of agriculture. They eat stink bugs and, and so, so that's one of the, one of the data things that's important. But I could go into this, I could go into the soil analysis. Too long for this podcast.

Well, let's, let's talk a bit about the bats and bat populations. I was inspired years ago about, I don't know, half a dozen years ago. We moved to the home where I now live and I'm surrounded by a fairly wet area, let's say that way, very heavy clay soil, very high clay content, a fairly wet area. There's two rivers that are. One is a half a mile to the east and one is a half a mile to the west of where our house is. So as you might imagine from that explanation, this is a very mosquito rich area. To state it very diplomatically and mildly. And I was inspired by this story of. I think this dates to the mid-1900s, 1940s or 50s. There was a doctor in Texas who was out to solve malaria, to solve the malaria issue. And he was able to get funding to build these giant bat houses. And there's photos floating around on the Internet of this guy. They built these bat houses timber framed. I think the structures were something like, I want to say there are 30ft by 30ft or something like that, maybe even bigger than that. I don't remember for sure. There's a picture of him standing on the timbers of this timber frame structure that makes you realize how big that had to be, bigger than 30 by 30. But whatever it was, they located these things, they built very large bat houses and they located them 50 miles apart along the Texas coast and solved malaria as a significant issue. So it's a 50 mile spacing. And that story inspired me to build some bat houses. I looked at the University of Alberta research and the design research that they've done. I've have a build a bat house here in our property and in a matter of a year or so we've got around 60 bats that are occupying that at certain times of the year they move around to different locations and let's just say that our mosquito population and insect population in general has notably diminished.

That's, that's why you want them around. We have, I have 17 bat houses in my orchard and they do move around we film them, we study them. In fact, that man that you're talking about, I don't know for sure, but quite, quite likely that is Dr. Merlin Tuttle. And Dr. Merlin Tuttle has a bat conservation organization called Merlin Tuttle's Bat Conservation. He was the original founder of Bat conservation international. He's 80, 83 or 84 years old now. I'm on his board of directors. As a matter of fact, he's, he's the one that got me started. He came into my orchard, he said, Troy, look at the biodiversity around here. You got all this biodiversity and you have pests that are moths and stink bugs and you have water close by at the river. River, you ought to put up a bat house. And I said, well, you give me a design and I'll put one up. And then he, then he came up to my sawmill. We're in, I'm in the sawmill business too. We take, if big trees fall, we, we collect them and saw them and kiln drum and plane them and sell them for furniture wood. So we had some cypress that's very rot resistant. He saw that, he said, that's the best bathouse material I've ever seen. And I, so I, so I started building. So we build and sell those as well. But, so one of them is called a rocket box. It's about 4ft tall and about 9 inches square. And to your point, this year we had 397 bats living in that box. And the interesting thing you mentioned, yours move around. They do, they move from house to house. We don't know why. Ours are called evening bats, which are forest bats. And, and the other ones are Mexican free tails, which are really Brazilian free tails. Now those, the interesting thing about those, and that's what comes out of the rack and cave down here, which is the highest concentration of mammals on the earth. They can come out and fly 100 or 150 miles, come back the same night, and they get up in the jet stream and they can fly, know, 100 miles an hour. Wow. And it's a fascinating story, but the fact of the matter is most people have bats all around them and they don't know it. And most people are scared of bats, which is unfortunate because they're very beneficial animals. For instance, I've been in these river bottoms, canoeing, kayaking, camping, fishing, whatever I've been doing. And I've been living amongst the red bat, the yellow bat, the whole time and I didn't even know it for 50 years. And, and then when we start doing our Studies. And we have an event here called Join the Nightlife that's coming up next month. As a matter of fact, we have scientists come in with instruments and computers and microphones and nets and all kinds of things. And we have seven species that live here. Seven species that live here. And some of them you'll see and hear, and some of them you won't because they're very elusive. So I've learned a lot about bats and really came to appreciate something I never thought about. You know, and the difference is with bats, you don't ever see them unless you happen to catch a silhouette of one. And, you know, usually most people are not looking for them. The difference is you never see them. They're mysterious, they're hard to study because they're in the night, versus birds, which you see and hear all the time during the day. So we, in our, in our orchard, I have videos of both. And I call the birds the day shift and I call the bats the night shift.

Well, all right, this is Troy. You're getting exactly to the question that I was about to ask. When you were describing the various insects that the bats are consuming. Cockroaches, ants, termites and so forth. The thought that was going through my mind is that a number of the species that you're describing are, I don't think of as spending a lot of time in the air sometime, yes, mating flights and migrations and so forth, but I don't think of them as spending a whole lot of airtime. And so for those types of insects, what effect does a healthy bat population have on pest pressure? What have you been observing from an insect pressure perspective?

Well, just like, or as, or as.

You'Re telling me arthropods.

That's right. And you know, you particular, particularly in batch study, you say arthropods because they eat a lot more than insects, for instance. And to your point about non flying species, how about spiders? They eat lots of spiders. So that's kind of a bad thing because that spiders are generally beneficial. So if a spider doesn't fly, but they do float around in Webster, and so if they float around in the web in the wind, they're gone. But the whole biodiverse predator, prey relationship is really what we're driving at here. Bats are an important part of it, just like parasitic wasp. Okay, so you, so you don't, so you answering your question in a roundabout way, you don't want to go in and do a broad spectrum insecticide because now you've wiped out all the, all the Prey, all the food for birds and bats and any other animal that's in there eating arthropods.

And you've given the bats a stomach ache.

Yeah, and they will leave if they don't have anything to eat. Just like the parasitic WASP that, that Dr. Lewis, I believe, was talking about. Just, just like, just like if they don't have any food to eat because there's no flowers in the orchard floor, a bat, if it doesn't have any insects, it's gone. It's got to go live somewhere else and so do the birds. But the problem is then, then your aphids and, and your other species like that flare up because they don't have any predators and, and the whole thing goes out of whack. So bats are just a part of that. And, and so I don't ever get bothered by mosquitoes and I don't even ever think about mosquitoes.

Wait, where do you live again? Oh, that's right, Texas.

And, and you know, now I'm one of those people that mosquitoes don't bite as much as other people get bit, but still they're, they're incredible. The problem is they fly in the night and people don't appreciate. And for what they do for agriculture, they, corn ear worms, stink bugs, everything. And so all agriculture is benefiting from them and all agriculture can benefit from, from good biodiversity too. And you know that, that's a big feature of this regenerative agriculture.

Yeah, right. We got sidetracked. You started talking about your data around economics and then we shifted the conversation to bats. But I don't want to lose sight of that.

Yeah, so, so I study the, the leaf analysis and the, and the, and the soil analysis quite a bit and nitrogen levels are coming up in the leaves. Now. We don't use SAP analysis and, and I'll tell you why. I did, I did try it and, and I did get some data and the reports are very impressive. But it's very hard to get SAP out of pecan leaves in the summer. And so unfortunately, when I tried it, I got the answer of insufficient material, even though, even though I did what I thought was right, you know, so I think there's some development that needs to go on there for, for these kind of trees, for SAP analysis. You can get it out of the young leaves, but the old leaves, very difficult. And, and even if you're going to study your, if you want to study leaf bricks, it's just, you just can't get it. You just can't get a drop so we, we're going to build, probably going to start using pressure bombs or something like that to extract SAP SAP out of the pit Yodels in order to be able to have something to measure even with a refractometer. Okay, back to the data growth analysis Dr. Dingra From a and M and I are doing. We decided to do a 110 tree planning with different treatments of bare root trees and then monitor them for, for growth over the next few years. So we planted 110 cans of variety and we applied wheat based biochar at 10 and 15% of whole volume. And we applied Johnson suit bioreactor non dissolved compost at the same rates. Six different types of of applications randomized in location. And now we're doing, we're testing the growth rate at 3ft off the ground by measuring caliper of the trees and we did two different kind of biochar. So what. So that data is ongoing. It's going to be very interesting. But right now, right now the mineral enhanced biochar tree diameters are the biggest and growing the fastest. I expect that to change as the Johnson Sue. I would expect the Johnson suit and biochar to do better. But that's an experiment. I might be wrong. Leaf analysis.

I'm going to take the opposite side of that bet. For the bio, for the biochar.

All right. You think the biochar is going to win by itself?

No, actually I think I've not seen biochar perform very well from a, from a plant response perspective. When you're measuring microbial communities sometimes we get a response although it's inconsistent. But I've, I, I've not seen plants give a thumbs up saying that they really like to have biochar around.

Yeah, well that's what this is all about. That's what this is all about. We're gonna, we're gonna find out if it affects pecan tree growth or not. And again like I said, I'm not biased one way or the other. There's something I want to happen but we're going to get the real data and we're going to know it either works or not. Leaf analysis in in is N is going up into the acceptable range. I actually had had low, low leaf in like below 2% and now we're, now we're in the 2.5%. P and K are going up. P P is a real problem with, in the, in the high ph soil here. Typically I have even been below 0.1 and, and the minimum really Is, you know, we want to be around 0.12 or 14 if I'm, if I'm remembering these numbers right. And, and we're there now, so we're doing much better on that. Zinc is doing much better also in the, in the 50 range. And so what I'm telling you is these, these leaf analysis figures are getting better. There is, though, a challenge to academia because the, the. And I would even say this may be for the SAP analysis. You may have heard this before, but, but the values that are published for leaf analysis I'm not sure are really right.

Well, I'm sure that they're not.

Well, and, and here's why I say that. Let's say manganese. Manganese is hard, hard to get into plants down here. And, and the minimum, you know, published is usually 50 to 100 minimum and 300 parts per million. At the high. My trees have 14. 14 parts per million. And my buddy down the road that lives by a mine has 1400 parts per million. Whoa. Okay. And guess what? His trees are functioning very well. They're alive, they're healthy, they make a good crop, and so are mine. And so the thing that bothers me is if I, if I'm a farmer and I listen to the published data and I say I got 14 parts per million manganese, I better go buy some manganese and spray it, and I do it, and it doesn't have any impact. And I'm, I'm. And so I'm challenging whether they need it or not, because the data says I'm doing fine. I mean, the plants are telling me they're doing fine at 14 parts per million when I should have more to have a healthy plant so that you, maybe you can help me out with that. But to me, what's happening in the rhizosphere is somehow that plant is. Is getting what it needs.

Yeah. Well, I have two thoughts. One is that the way the desired values have been established historically was based on what thresholds deficiency or toxicity symptoms showed up and not based on which trees were actually healthy. Healthy as in resistant to diseases and insects. So that's one thought. And the other thought is based on our SAP analysis data. I'm actually, I'm quite surprised by the number of species diversity, or not species diversity, but varietal cultivar diversity that you have in pecans. And you told me there's a thousand different varieties. That's a lot more than I expected. And I know from work with other plants that other plant species can have significant variation in the nutrient optimal ranges on a variety by variety basis. Tomatoes, for example, are quite variable, as are apples. It's inadequate to just have a target value for apples and treat Honeycrisp and Braeburns and Fuji the same. And I don't have the context or know if this would be true for pecans as well, but I would be surprised if it were not the case to some degree.

Well, I think it could be. We see. We see. I, I discovered something the other day. Remember when I told you I went up in a man lift to look at, look at pecan case bear damage in the nut clusters? So I'm, I'm up, I'm up about 15ft, driving around on a man list. And in my Pawnee variety, I had 11.6% nut cluster damage. This is where I didn't spray, remember? But that was okay because I had too many pecans in the same orchard. I have a different variety in a Kono, and I went into it in the same orchard, literally randomly spaced in there, 2% damage. So, so the susceptibility that season for that test appears to have been different. I called the scientists, I said, have you ever heard of this? And the answer is, well, we know that there are some varieties that are more susceptible to some pests than others, and we know that. We also know that in atheists.

So what are the mechanisms?

Yeah, what are the mechanisms? And, and, and so now that we're on the mechanisms for deterring insects, that brings us to bricks. And so I've challenged these scientists to find a good way to measure brix and mature pecan leaves. Remember, it's hard to get SAP out of, and I want them to do studies to tell us what that brix number really needs to be. And I know this is a stretch, especially for people that might not want to hear it, but I want to. I want them to establish macomb specific numbers, if that's possible, to tell us what bricks we need to get at and if they can tell us how to get to the bricks, even though it's soil health, in my opinion. But we need to understand that because it'll deter stink bugs, it'll deter aphids, mites, moths. And there's another one called a hickory shuckworm that's a, that's also a moth in a larvae. Now, I did, I did a brick study on infested pecan pecan shucks that had hickory shuckworm larvae in it. And it was very disappointing because the answer came back backwards. And of Course it would, because an infested nut is dehydrated. So when you squeeze it out, it's got a lot more suspended solids in it. So that was my lesson there. You got to do it before it's infested to figure out which ones get it and which ones don't. And I have not done that or.

Either that or do the math to compensate in some way, if that's possible. Yeah, yeah. So I want to speak about your soil ph and ph reduction a little bit because that's so important for you with the high ph that you're running. And part of what you described has been is interesting because I think it might be different from my what I've observed. And if that's true, I want to understand it. So you are adding or you're spreading pecan chips primarily, as I understood it, which contain tannins. And so those tannins, similar being in the oak and the hickory family, they would have an acidifying effect and reduce soil ph. My observation has been there's been a lot of fear in many parts of the country about adding chips because of acidifying the soil too much and having a negative effect on soil. And I've only observed that negative effect when the chips were actually incorporated into the ground. So when they were spread on the surface, there wasn't nearly the same degree of impact, negative impact on acidifying soil too much. So my questions are, have you been incorporating the chips that are being spread? Are they just on the soil surface? And out of curiosity, I'm curious what impact if you have a centuries old pecan tree, I don't know how much wind you have and how stable the leaves are. But does centuries of leaf deposition dropping on the soil surface, might that also acidify ph over a period of time?

Well, I guess I don't know for real. But I can tell you that in our soil analysis studies, we're using the native pecan bottoms as the baseline, as the control. And those soil features are very similar to what I have in my orchards. Now granted, all of this soil is in the same floodplain of the river, but the man planted orchard is higher in elevation and doesn't flood as often. Sometimes the flooding is very scouring, so a lot of the organic material washes away. But I guess theoretically more washes in too. But there's really not that big of a difference between a native pecan, which in my area, between that and my and my improved. Now we're not incorporating the chips, we're leaving them on the surface and we're not even putting enough to kill the grass. We're not using it like a mulch to kill grass. Grass where, where it looks like it had a light snow came through and you can see the wood chips in on the ground, but the grass is still protruding through it and still able to do photosynthesis. So here's my. Here, here. Here's the reasoning for doing that. I'm growing my Johnson sue compost on wood chips anyway. So I think the ideal thing is to spread Johnson Sioux out on the ground and inject it in the ground and then cover it with more food that it was already consuming and just continue the biomass buildup and give the. Give that those organisms what they have been eating. Again, a lot of people are concerned about incorporating chips because. Because especially high surface area like sawdust because it is reported to essentially make nitrogen not available to the plants because the. The microbes are used are eating the wood instead of providing nitrogen. Right. There is an orchard in West Texas, happens to be the biggest orchard in Texas, that does grind up their chips and does incorporate them. And they've been doing that for years and they've been very successful in that. And I haven't seen their soil test data, but I hear that their earthworm population is very good. And I can tell you I've been to the orchard. It is a. It's amazing. So. So adding high carbon materials to the orchard floor in my opinion is a good thing. And it does mimic mother nature because mother Nature has been dropping limbs and leaves forever. Yeah, so. So I think it's a good thing and people are starting to catch on to it.

Troy, this has been a fascinating conversation. I want to be respectful of your time commitment and our listeners time as well. I have still half a dozen notes of things. I wanted to dig further into what it is that you're doing with the Johnson sue extract. You had wanted to talk a bit more about the tree shaking and determining the optimal nut load. There's other things I wanted to ask about as well. But what are the important pieces yet? What are the important parts of your story that we haven't talked about yet?

Well, my, my intention as I said, is to. Is to be a demonstration plot for researchers to come to and, and to help the industry in general by really talking about this regenerative agriculture. And it doesn't have to just be the countries. It can be anything. But here's the deal. If it it. Here's what I want to say to academia and here's what I want to say to, to the, to the regenerative ag world, if we are going to get this regenerative way of thinking to scale in the big picture, I think what we're going to have to do as people in our position is to get the ability to go crop specific and go in and tell a pecan farmer, you know, here, for instance, the example of the bricks. Here's the bricks we need to keep this from happening. Here's the, here's the, here's the soil organic matter. Here's the microbial active carbon that we need to make a pecan tree grow the best. Here's, you know, things like that, these things that we study. And, and then of course you can say, well, you don't want to drive it back to a reductionist. You know, that reductionist testing where it's just one thing causes this. As you know, that's not true. It's the whole system. Right. But we do have to get some attributes back, rock or some subjects by crop that proves to farmers that it works. And that's how we are going to get this thing to go to scale. And I challenge the academia. Like I didn't tell you this, but I started my last field day. In fact, you're, I think your man was there, Kip was there. I, I changed the way I do field days. Now. If you come to my field days and you got all these PhDs and people sitting out there that are there, some of them are there to present, right? And they want to present, they want to do their presentation and they want to leave, I don't let them do that. I scroll and I say, here's my list of things that I think you, you guys should be studying. And I handed out to them and it was all these kind of things. We're talking about a lot more. And I didn't let them leave until they heard the whole thing. And, and I didn't let them talk until they heard the whole thing. And, and they have to hear. And, and, and, and so I'm making some good progress because I have the same list. We just had a regenerative research topic at the American Con Promotion Board, which is a. We have two federal marketing agencies. We have the American Pecan Council and the American Pecan Promotion Board that have federal marketing orders. They had a region session and I did a video because I couldn't be there. I was on vacation. But I did the same thing there. Bring all those researchers in. Here are the things I think we ought to be working, working on and I think the people in our and that are interested in regen need to challenge their act, their, their colleges and their government researchers, whoever that is, to, to really go look at these things. After all, we are their customers. We are their customers. And sure about that, huh? Well, I see it, I see it on my tax, on my tax statement one way or the other.

Don't, I don't know, I thought it was the agribusiness companies that were their customers.

Well, oh, well, that, that too. But, but there is a paradigm change at these universities down here where they are saying we need to be doing what the farmer wants and the farmer needs to be going to those field days and to those, to those conventions and saying, look, it is time for you guys to be studying this stuff because we're not going to do it the old way anymore. You can't do it the old way anymore. We'll all go broke.

Yeah. And you know, when we were talking about, I asked you twice about your economics, your economic data, and you gave me a very long winded answer, but you didn't give me the actual answer, the bottom line answer. What are the economics like for you with this different approach?

The economics with me in the old days for the type of farming I was doing was around $2,000 an acre. Okay. Gross or net gross expenditure, not counting land prices and all of that. And by the way, I don't know land, but inputs, okay. That includes labor, $2,000 an acre per season. And, and I'm on track. I'm on track. Well, last year I had one farm at 1100 and one at 15. So I'm going down this year. I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna be in the, in the, probably the 900 to thousand dollar an acre range on inputs and I've got to get my, my price per pound down into the $2 to 25 or per pound range in order to be able to make a decent return on retail. And I don't, I won't go into the commodities market until the prices come back up. And we don't know when that's going to be.

Well, Troy, this has been a very enjoyable conversation. Thank you for all of your leadership, for your innovation, for your drive. Thanks for your inspiration, encouragement and I look forward to having more conversations with you sometime soon.

Well, I'm planning to go to Acres, so I'll see you there.

All right. Well that's, yeah, that's the nexus of where a lot of brainiacs come to have a good conversation.

That's right. So again, thank you for inviting me. I'm really honored and I hope, I hope the audience gets get some good ideas out of this.

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