Episode 164: Navigating Economic Pressures in Tree Fruit with Sam Godwin

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of conversations related to regenerating soil health, regenerating the quality of food, and ultimately regenerating public health, which as it turns out, is kind of having its moment in the sun with what is happening politically here in North America. But it is really coming to greater global consciousness. More people are aware of the impact that the quality of the food they have that they are consuming is having on their own health and the impact that it is having on ecosystems. So lots of fun conversations to be had in this direction and in this discussion. I'm joined by Sam Goodwin in this episode and I've been looking forward to having the conversation with Sam because we live in a moment where we are, we are at the moment, we are the lowest farm income relative to relative price index. We're at the lowest farm income that we've been at in 100 years. Many farms are negative income. 23 and 24 were very challenging. 25 is even more challenging. And in that very challenging macroeconomic context, how do we think about moving forward with regenerative agriculture in that particular environment? So, Sam, I want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for being willing to share your story. I've been really been looking forward to this discussion. Tell us a bit about your operating context, the environment that you're operating in, the scope of your operation.

Yeah, thanks John, for inviting me. I've been looking forward to the conversation as well. We're a small tree fruit farming operation in North Central Washington. We farm apples, pears and cherries predominantly. We do have a little bit of stone fruit too, but nothing really to speak of. Our, our focus has been to really get good at growing organic fruit and that's, that's really been the journey we've been on. We were first certified organic in the early 2000s. I'm a second generation farmer, so started with my father, grew up on the farm in the 60s is when, when we originally started farming. And so I've been doing it a long time. I've been involved in the industry not only with my own personal farm, but I've worked in, in a packing shed and learned about packing as well as in a sales desk learning about selling our product. So I've kind of had the chance to work from tip to tail in the industry. Our farm is about 300 acres. It's small by tree fruit standards and it's in a world that's growing almost exponentially. It seems like the big farms are getting much larger and the small farms are going away. So we find ourselves in a world where the family farm and family farmer is under this constant economic pressure to try to stay one step ahead. So in that search for efficiency we started, we're in our second year of I guess really trying to understand and learn and engage with regenerative farming and take our organic farm to the next level is kind of the way I like to think about it in terms of switching to incorporate regenerative practices as well. I think that it's fascinating. We've learned a tremendous amount in a really short amount of time with the help of consultants from aea. And so it's really, really exciting to see SAP analysis, see some of the tools and see how, how we're starting to apply them and ultimately how it's transitioning into results on the farm. So we're just coming out of a cherry season where were year two of cherries and I saw results that quite frankly were, were a little bit surprising to me from my 20 plus years experience. We.

Okay, now, now you've caught me. I was about to ask you to go back and, and I wanted, I want to learn more about your history and how your farm has evolved over the last 20 or 30 years. But now, now that, now we're going to save that question. Tell us about the cherries.

So this season's, this season's cherries, you know, we, we just committed and kind of with blind faith jumped into, to working with Jim and getting our, you know, our SAP analysis and following the, the program and not really knowing what to expect. But we, we just wanted to, I really believe in measuring and data and so seeing the results at the, at the SAP level in the blocks. What we've experienced is the first year we saw results but it was a really short crop. So everyone expects to have big, high quality when you don't have any volume. This year was, that was not the case. This year we had a full crop. So we've averaged across our 60 acres of cherries, we've averaged a little over 10 tons to the acre of production volume. And we've been, it's big, it's good, it's a great target for us. And we're, we're averaging probably 75% of the fruit is nine and a half row and larger, which is most, most cherries you see in a grocery store are going to be ten, ten and a half row. So it's a full size larger with that crop load. The most impressive thing about it is as We've seen our bricks of sugar in the cherries stay in that 19, 20, 21 brick range, which is fabulous for a red cherry. And our pressures have been in the three hundreds for the most part.

I was just ready to ask about firmness. Yeah.

So the firmness has been, has been outstanding. So as a result of that, we've been able to let our fruit hang a day or two longer because it's so firm. So then you get bigger, sweeter, and ultimately you get that higher yield.

For, for those of our listeners who aren't familiar with the firm tech and the firmness index, can you give us a bit of, of context for what 300 means on a relative scale?

Yeah, so, so most organizations are saying you got to be, you know, 280 or above if you want to export your cherries offshore somewhere, which is where the, typically the premier markets are. But, but we, we saw. I'll talk specifically about our chelan cherries, which is always. It's an early cherry we harvest in June, mid June. And it's a cherry that we always struggle for size, sugar and firmness. And this year, when we finished harvest, our final picking, we were still at like 3:11 on the scale. And our pressure, our sugars were 21%. So it was an unbelievable eating experience. And, and ultimately it does nothing but thrill your, the consumer when they can get something that's big and crunchy and tastes that good. And so as a result, we saw really high packouts in the upper 80s. So I think that that's really was a, was a really nice or a pleasant surprise. And I really attribute the only thing that's different this year than in the past is trying to really honor the regenerative SAP analysis and trying to keep things in balance.

So I want to understand the context of the 10 tons per acre a little bit because that number of what an optimal target might be can vary widely based on tree spacing and tree size and so forth. So what, what would have been a historical expectation for these blocks?

Well, normally, normally with, normally with our historical average with chelan cherries as an example is probably 6 or 7 tons to the acre on a good year. Not uncommon to see five.

Wow.

So. So a significant improvement because of the volume and the size. And then having the quality meant that in a year when the market was. Our cherry market this season was under pressure. A lot of people had to stop picking. Markets were saturated. They couldn't move the fruit. But by having exceptional quality and size, we were fortunate enough to be able to Continue to harvest and deliver the, the full crop to the consumer, which is really what it's all about.

Yeah, that reminds me what you're saying. In essence, it's a comment that I've heard from several cherry growers and I think Mike Omeg stated it quite succinctly in one conversation where he said that the premium for regeneratively grown fruit, that is higher quality in the case of cherries, doesn't necessarily mean that you have a price premium. Sometimes it means you have a customer.

Exactly. And that was exactly the case in experience this year.

Yeah. Yeah. So you've been organic for quite some time. If you made the organic transition in the early 2000s, that's now almost a 25 year period. What has, how has your agronomic management and how has your operation grown and evolved over that last 25 year period?

Yeah, so. Because of our size and our location in north Central Washington, we never expected our farm to become vertically integrated. There's not a lot of people, we're a long ways from people. Our valley is narrow and we don't have the big open spaces that a lot of the large vertically integrated farms enjoy in the southern part of the state. So we wanted to get really good at something that we thought they would want. And so our, our ticket was organic. So we started learning and converting to organic early on, relatively speaking, to the, to the industry and you know, took our learning lumps early because there's, there really weren't any books or any recipes or any help to learn the organic tricks or the tricks of the trade. So we've learned the hard way by trial and error and, you know, just continuing to be innovative and looking for new ways and better ways to do things. So we've seen our scale, you know, the first, the first year and on my, the farm that my father started, you know, we started with, I think it was like a 20 acre block that was organic. Now we're farming. Of the 300 acres, about 225 are organic. And my brother who I partner with has another 300 plus acres that's organic. So we're pushing about, together we push about 600 acres of organic tree fruit, mostly apples and pears. We have a small amount of organic cherries left. At one time, my whole 60 acres were organic. We've had to pull that back. We're down to where we only have about six or seven acres of organic cherries left because of the problem with powdery mildew, which is a really tough disease that we face. My hope Is, is that as we get these blocks fully integrated into a regenerative practice and we have better, stronger, healthier plants, maybe we'll be able to convert our cherries back to organic in the future once we prove that we can, can manage powdery mildew. But that's, that was really the disease that pushed us out of, out of the organic cherry business or for the most part.

Yeah. That is interesting. That'll be an interesting conversation. I know there are several cherry growers that are running trials right now with Pinyon and I'd like to have a conversation with you on that. Right. That as well. Because what we've seen so far, it's still early days, we're still gaining experience with it, but I think that one is going to move the needle for organic management of mildew and various diseases.

So yeah, that's, that's mildew's tough one and it's, it's especially hard for us because we're so far north, we're late. And what we found is that before the 5th of July we can manage organically and, and usually get an organic cherry crop delivered without too much problem. When you get after the 5th of July, it gets really difficult. And we picked cherries, I think we finished this year on August 17th.

Wow.

So. So when you go that late, it's a long time. You're exposed to weather and opportunities for, for mildew.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in, as you transition from that original 20 acre block, what were, what, what have been the cultural management practices and what have been the. What have been the things that you've learned from experience that I'm asking for the benefit of other people so they can learn from your experience instead of from their own.

Sure. So what we found is the prescription for converting to organic is you got to farm it organically three years before you convert on paper to become an organic farm. I mean, that's just the legalistic rules of organic from the Department of Agriculture. What we found is that especially with large canopy orchards, you really have to start about two years before that working, softening your conventional program and kind of stepping back with a good IPM approach to build predators and to get your orchard ready, ready to start the organic transition. What we found is that when we just tried to go cold turkey from one to the other, there was usually a train wreck in year two of the conversion where something would spike out. You know, thinking about pears as an example, the first year, it's like there's enough residual carryover from the fertilizer and all the practices you've been doing conventionally that you don't really notice it. But in year two, tree decline starts and then the onslaught of scill and mites and different pests come in and it becomes very difficult to manage. So you end up losing a year or two of production because the pests get their share right, one way or another. But by softening the program for a couple of years before you start the transition, you kind of help give the good bugs a chance to catch up before you put them on the spot. So I guess that's probably my biggest, biggest thing from a pest standpoint.

Were there any things that you were doing specifically to try, other than softening the chemistries and the frequency of applications, Were there any things that you were doing to specifically try to build the populations of beneficial insects?

Well, we do beneficial insect release as well as sterile insect release to help control problem pest, which is, I think, a pretty standard practice now that a lot of conventional farms are even doing some of these practices. I think that, you know, the organic way is finding its way into the mainstream in the, in the apple industry especially. So there's companies out there for hire that provide these services on large scale to, to many, to many big farms.

And do you think the pressure, where's the pressure coming from to adopt these practices in more mainstream apple production? Is it just as a result of market pressures and demand?

I think it's. I think it's 85% market pressure and demand. There's a small group of us who are still kind of altruistic and we think, you know, if it's good for the planet, it'll be good for our farm. And so, but, but because of the price differentials that we've seen over the last 15 years, a lot of people have dipped their toe into organic. What I tell people is I don't think organic farming of tree fruit is harder. It's just different. You're managing it at a different point. And the biggest difference is, is there's no safety parachute. If you mess up, you're going to damage crop and you're going to lose productivity. Where conventionally, if you make a mistake, you can usually find a silver bullet. And it may not solve the problem, but it's going to keep you from losing the battle with whatever the problem was. In that, in that instance.

One of the observations that I've. One of the things I've observed has been that as, as we get more plants growing underneath the trees, particularly in apples, when you have, you no longer have an herbicide strip and you have the root system surrounded by other plants and grasses and so forth that there can actually be beneficial fruit quality effects on a number of different apple varieties. Have you observed this to be the case? What does your under tree row management look like?

Yeah, there's two parts to that question, in my opinion. So if we're talking about a tree that's under 4 years old, that's where you're still growing the orchard. It's very different than if it's a mature orchard and you're producing fruit. So in the first three or four years of the tree's life in the orchard, you have to pay very close attention to that tree row because you don't want to out compete the tree with weeds and other, other things. So we spend a lot of time and money managing weed control, especially in young and developing orchards. It's really, really important because most of the modern trees, if you're growing high density type trees, which are all shallow rooted trees that top 16 inches of the soil is where everything's happening. And it's really, really important to manage the weeds without pruning the roots because you don't want to stunt the tree growth. So that's the first two or three years. Once you have an established orchard and an established tree. You're absolutely correct. We're big practitioners of mow and blow. Our soils are highly variable. Where we grow, it's a glaciated soil that is within the orchard. We'll have sand, rock, gravel and maybe a clay silt all at the same in the same two or three acre section. So we really work hard. We use a lot of chicken compost and chicken feather meal. That's kind of a backbone of our fertility program. But we also use a lot of fish, we use some hog and we've, you know, we seed a lot of clover in the orchard and then mow and blow that for, for trying to, to get more organic matter and nitrogen because our soils are so poor.

I'm surprised by that many cases when I have conversations with orchardists around recommending or suggesting the idea of clover in an orchard that produces quite a reaction in regards to low pressure.

Yeah, we're, we're, our soils are so old and we can, and we've been, I mean some of my orchards have been in orchard for over 100 years. So I mean, we have to, we spend more money and time trying to manage and build soil than anything else we do on our farm. I mean, it's the number one thing to have in a healthy farm is having good dirt.

So when you are, let's talk a little bit about the clover and also any other. Are you with your, with your mow and blow, are you actively planting cover crops to be able to move those cover crops into the tree row? What does, what does your, when you say that you're spending more time and energy actively building soil, what does that look like?

Yeah, so, so I mean we bring in a lot of additives from like perfect blend chicken, processed chicken. So it's, it's basically composted chicken waste or litter. So that's a big source of our npk. We, we have used a lot of. There's in our area there's a peat moss or there was a peat moss place. So a lot of times with new orchards we would bring peat moss in to add water holding capacity and, and more organic matter into our soils. We've also, we've, we also in all of our orchards, when we plant new orchards and work them up, we, we, I have a blend of. It's a low profile growing grass, white clover and vetch that we like to use. And then we mow and blow that into the, into the tree rows. So we just can't get enough. I mean there's, it's transportation is so expensive. We can't transport enough material or afford to transport enough material. We just have to try to grow more of it ourselves and provide it just because of the cost of transportation. So to give, to give everybody an idea, we're located about 25 or 30 minutes from the Canadian border, almost in the center of the state on the east side of the Cascades. So we're in the bottom of the Okanagan Valley that extends up into, into British Columbia. And the town, the town I live in has a, maybe the outlying area, the population, you know, 2500 people maybe if we count everybody on a good day and, and a dog or cat or two. So it's a, it's a remote area.

So with, given, given that distance that you have both from the perspective of bringing in raw materials, but also then how does that, how does that influence your, your market marketing and market demand?

Yeah. So, so because of our location, I'll use cherries as an example. Cherries are a really sexy product. People really love them, but they're really fast. You pick them one day, they're packed the next day and then they're on a truck or an airplane going somewhere the third day. And you know, the lifespan of a cherry is seven to 10 days, typically. So it's just a very rapid product. Our cherries are predominantly, are predominantly packed in Wenatchee. So that's a two and a half hour truck ride from our farm just to get to the packer. So we've built hydro cooling facilities on our farm so we can chill the cherries to get the heat out of them before they go in the truck to go to Wenatchee. So all of our, all of our products, our apples and pears, go to Brewster, which is an hour south of us. So our shortest ride is about an hour to get it just to the packing facility where then it gets, you know, stored or processed and, and ultimately sent to a consumer which is, I don't know. Wenatchee is probably 45 minutes north of I90, I would guess, and Brewster's, you know, almost two hours north of I90. So for, for our trucks, for the, the trucks hauling it to the consumer to get back onto an interstate, it's a, it's a long ways. It's a big, big consideration.

Yeah. And then in many cases you're migrating or you moving fruit from there to the East Coast.

Exactly. So fruit, fruit can go all the way to the East Coast. It can go to Mexico in the south, up to Canada in the north. And a fair amount of it, or some of it goes on a, goes on an airplane or a, a boat heading overseas.

So it's primarily to Asia.

Asia is a big, is a big target. A big target market. Yeah. For the, for cherries, especially Korea. Asia. And then I think there's some, there's some, some in South America, so down to Australia or New Zealand. But Asia is the main, the main market for or for that, for the export.

So in this environment, what are the, you've been organic for some time and this entire marketplace is. As you said at the beginning of this conversation, the marketplace is relatively saturated for cherries and for apples. You made the transition to organic root some time ago to try to give you additional, an additional market advantage. What are the, what are the incentives that have motivated you to consider a regenerative approach?

Yeah, so. I, We've, we've always been innovative or wanted, trying to be innovative. I, One of my fundamental beliefs is that as a small family farm, if we're competing solely on economies of scale, we're going to lose that race. We're going to get ground up and we're going to, I mean, we're going to lose. So as we evaluated and talked about it with my family and, and we've We've worked through this, came to the conclusion that we really have only have one true competitive advantage and that is since we're smaller, we can change easier and faster. So if we're willing to innovate and willing to change, we can out compete the big guys to the breadcrumbs of what's new and next and better if we're willing to keep our minds open and keep flexible and striving for that. And that's the game we're playing now, is we're trying to anticipate where the next advantage is and then get there first so that we can enjoy that premium for that time. Always looking for the next one because we've got to kind of jump to the next. I mean, that's the merry go round or the wheel that we're on now is this constantly innovating and, and you've seen it in, in tree fruit in the state of Washington. You know, we've been labor disadvantaged for 25 years. It's not new, it's just more urgent now because it's hit the tipping point to where the wages are getting so high that it's hard to keep finding the next thing that's going to make you offset that cost of labor. Whether it's, you know, better tractors or more efficient sprayers or harvest platforms or whatever it is, we're, we're constantly chasing mechanization, looking for the next labor savings in this really labor intensive industry of tree fruit.

So you've described your motivation in terms of capturing market premiums and constantly being innovative, being at the cutting edge, if you will. And I find it interesting that you framed it this way because in many cases, well, I'm seeing that there is a wide disparity or I suppose a great deal of diversity in how farm products are being priced. If they're being grown regeneratively, occasionally there is a premium, frequently there is not. What are you observing? Where are the advantages for you? Are there price advantages or what are the incentives?

There's a couple of incentives, I think so. We haven't proven it yet. I don't have the data to say with certainty that this is going to happen. But my expectation is that as we get the soil in balance and we get better at regenerative, we're going to have less inputs that we're going to have to put in because we're going to have healthier soil that's generating its own nitrogen. For example, we did save about 10% on our nitrogen inputs last, after one year of experience we'll follow our SAP analysis and we'll decide this, you know, this spring or this spring of what we do, but we're continuing down that, continuing down that path. I think there's some savings to, by not applying stuff you don't need once you build confidence in the system, you know, organically, there was a premium because of the belief in organic production early on and that, or as supply of organic has outpaced demand, that premium shrinking. And over the last 25 years, we've seen this, it's like a roller coaster. We've seen the wave where the prices look organic, prices look great, a bunch of new farmers jump in, supply goes up, prices shrink down to near conventional pricing, a bunch of people lose interest because the premium's not there. They jump out, the prices grow back because now supply and demand are back aligned. We've seen this is our third cycle of that. We expect that that's just kind of the nature of the game we're playing.

So if that's the third cycle, in 25 years, you have roughly an eight year cycle.

Exactly, exactly so. And people who aren't really committed to or don't believe in organic, who are just chasing dollars, tend to jump in and out. And the people who think that organic truly is more flavorful food that's better for you, that has, has more value than just being organic, the, the name they stick in it and they keep, they keep trying to figure out ways to innovate and get better and, and find the next, you know, the next good thing. So, so on our farm, we feel like regenerative is the next logical step beyond organic because of the focus on the soil, because we found ourselves doing this stuff anyway. So if there's a way to, to potentially monetize that in the future, and I think through Roc and some of these, it's so new, we don't know exactly how it's going to all play out, but I think there's an opportunity to monetize this. And, and in, in the tree fruit industry, you know, there's one large organic outfit, Whole Foods, I don't think it's a, they've been committed to organic for a long, long time and have been champions of it. And they're the only people right now that are really, I think, supporting regenerative monetarily. And hopefully they continue to do that, that starts to trend. And other people who want to jump in and get regeneratively certified stuff, well, we'll put their ante up to be able to get into it to get the surety of supply that everybody wants or needs.

Where do you see the significant opportunity for, for growers in the future?

Well, I can, I can share a little bit about our, you know, how we, how we're looking at things and I, I'm going to talk specifically to tree fruit. In the tree fruit industry, we have moved to a model to where most of our new investment we have a very standardized platform. All of our trees are 10, our rows are 10ft, our trees are 2ft apart. We're doing everything the same way because it allows us to have standard operating or standard work rules to get really good at managing the envelopes in the environment that we've set up. It also because of how far north we are in our lower degree degree hours, we're kind of paying more up front because we're planting more trees per acre. But we don't have to grow as big a tree to get the same volume of fruit per acre. So we've done the math and convinced ourselves that that's what's best for our latitude and longitude and location. I think the biggest advantage for growers in the future is to find the partner that you're going to work with. Unless you're big enough to be vertically integrated, find the partners you're going to work with and get really good at delivering what the consumer wants and needs and that they recognize as value. Whether that's organic or regenerative or you know, the best gala grow or conventional gala grower on the planet that delivers only the perfect sizes for, for the, for what their sales company needs. You have to be really valuable to, to those larger organizations so that they, they'll want to keep, continue to handle your products and, and include you in the, in the game. We're also trying to ensure that by we've moved to mostly proprietary genetics. So by getting to genetics that have some favorable benefit. So for example, we started growing Honeycrisp in the 90s before Honeycrisp was really the apple. And the primary reason that my father started that was because our sites are farther north, they're colder, our soils are poor. We couldn't grow good galas. We grew a really good small gala. Well, nobody wants a small gala. Everybody wants a medium to Big Apple. HoneyCrisp team tend to be too big, put them in our soil type. We grow a really nice medium sized honeycrisp which is really difficult to do in good soils in the south. So by finding the right genetics and the right match, it's allowed to give us a competitive advantage with honeycrisp. So we grow a lot of honeycrisp offspring, proprietary genetics. We have Cosmic Crisp planted. We grow a phenomenal Cosmic Crisp with unbelievable color. We grow a Sugar Bee apple, which is the mother is a honeycrisp apple. It's a later developing but super sweet, super exciting apple, probably. Well, I know it's last year. It's the fastest growing by volume and dot and price of all the apples in the apple category. We grow Lucy Rose and Lucy Glow, which is a red flesh. The internal flesh is red, but its mother is a honeycrisp. So we have these proprietary varieties that we're partnering with to grow, to grow varieties that we think, we hope will allow us to build our brand and have something other than just another apple on the shelf.

Sam, I'd like. I'd love to get into this conversation with you because I'm so. Apples are so genetically diverse and there are such incredible flavor profiles available, including many that are not even grown commercially yet at this point. That. That's. That's a very fun earthworm hole to go down, but I have a feeling that's an earthworm hole for another time.

Okay.

We. We started this conversation by talking about cherries and some of the quality improvements and the yield improvements that you'd seen with cherries. And this. I'm not surprised by your experience because we found that very early on, 15 some years ago when we first started working with a lot of tree fruit, I had the. The expectation that tree fruit would be inherently slower to respond than annual crops because there is this physiological component of dealing with the entire trunk and branches and the mineral, the nutritional integrity of this entire tree structure. And we've found that to not be the case, particularly for the stone fruit and particularly for cherries. Apples tend to be a little bit. They. They have cumulative responses that build year over year. But I'm, and I'm intrigued by this aspect of cherries because not only are they amongst the most responsive tree crops, but they're also the shortest to harvest. I mean, many cases we've started working with a crop at bloom or shortly after bloom and bud break in the spring, and you've got two months till harvest, and in that time window, the trees are able to respond to nutrition in a significant way. So all of that as context to say, I'm not really surprised by your cherry responses, but what have you been observing with the apples and pears? How. How has that been developing?

Yeah, that's a great question. So when, when I think about, when I think about and compare and contrast the three varieties, you're absolutely right. Cherries. The reason cherries, I really enjoy working with cherries is because they respond immediately to whatever you're doing, whether it's a pruning cut or no matter what you're doing to manipulate the tree, you see the results right away and it grows very rapidly. So we may get two or three feet of growth in a cherry tree in a single season. So you make the cut and you see the horticultural impact from the timing and all of the manipulations you're making, whether you're trying to break buds or whatever it is you're trying to manipulate. So cherries are fun because you get that feedback that year. Apples are kind of in the middle apples. I would say it's a two to three year window. So it's a, probably a third as fast as cherries when I think of the horticultural responses to the manipulations. But because of that we've, it allows us to develop some rules in apples to say, hey, we know, look, when we make this cut, we'll see a bud break behind the cut at this time frame as an example, so we can develop prescriptions to get the tree to do things we want to do. Now with feeding the tree, we're seeing the, the same thing. So getting the rights, you know, starting feeding at the right soil temperatures, for example, to maximize root, root growth and root penetration, we use a lot of fish product. And getting that fish product fed at the right time so that it's breaking down and available in the right windows, that's a lot of what we're playing with and we're trying to figure out now as we work through the programs and it takes a couple of years to see that residual effect. We're in year two of the journey. I think I see results in the SAP analysis in year two, where in my apple blocks, I'm starting to see trees balance out. I'm, I'm starting to see some patterns where, you know, the boron, magnesium and zinc are three things that we're always low in. But I see that we're not as low as we were last year. We're low still, but we're not as low as we were. So there's hope that we're going to build those and re. Mineralize the trees to the point to where the, the, the spring application or the fall application. Whatever we're doing is, is sufficient to, to span us through the, through the window. But we're watching that Peers are like bonds. They don't do anything fast. It's a, you know, an angel pear. It's eight or nine years before you see your first pair. So it's just everything slows down and, and we're, we're still on the journey and we're chasing pears. But our expectations are different because of the way pears and pears are a lot more complex. They just behave differently. The fruit's much more challenging to get it harvested right. It really is. It's a totally. Horticulturally, it's another step up from apples. It's a real challenge, but it's a fabulous piece of fruit when it's done well. And that's the other thing that we focused on as a small family farm is our fundamental belief was, is if we could get really good at really hard things, it's harder for big companies to knock it off and do it on thousand acre scales. We'll do it on 10 acre scales or 5 acre scales and get really good at doing something that's very challenging and ultimately deliver high quality fruit. It didn't talk a lot about how I got to the farm, but I grew up on a farm. I trained as an engineer at university and I worked in Aerospace for 15 years before coming back. I wanted to, I wanted to prove to myself that I could go make it on my own before just following in my dad's footsteps. Even though that's what I always wanted to do, I wanted to be a farmer. I knew that when I went to college. But some of us, it takes a little time to learn that we got to just go back to the dirt and get into it. So. So it's when we came back to the farm with my wife in hand, we, we really wanted to do what was good for good for the farm and for the planet and people. But we wanted to grow what we felt like. We wanted to eat. We didn't want to just deliver another red apple that's red and that's why we're selling it. But we wanted to deliver something that truly excites people when they eat it.

That. Sam, thank you for saying that. Because I think this is such an important motivation. There's something that I've observed in many cases, the growers who go down a pathway of beginning to grow differently. Quite frequently they are. They're initially attracted by a market incentive of some type, or they're motivated by economic duress. But often as they, and occasionally they're also motivated by health concerns or health challenges. They really want to do the right thing from a health perspective for the health plan, on their own health. But for those who don't come from that perspective, many times there is this gradual transition. And those who thrive, they don't just survive, but they actually thrive. Those who thrive are the ones who get to that place where they're not just motivated by the economics. The economics are important, they're essential, of course, but what they are really motivated by is this desire to do the right thing, to support people, to support the planet, to support their own operation and for optimal health for everything that they are stewarding and caring for. And it's when they get to that, they may not necessarily start there, but once they get there internally in their hearts and minds, there is, there is this, this takeoff ramp that happens in the way that they interact with their farm. It changes the nature of the interaction and it changes the quality of the outcomes.

I agree with that wholeheartedly. My motivating factor for coming back to the farm was one I'm clearly passionate about farming and growing food and feeding people is I can't think of anything that's more exciting to do than to be able to offer really good tasting food to people. But more importantly to me, it was. I spent enough time in the city to know that there's a lot of people in the city that are dreaming about when they can retire or move back to the country or find a way to escape the city. And so I wanted my children because I had a young family, I wanted them to experience living and growing up in a rural community on a farm the way I had. And so we needed to get back when we got back so that my, my oldest was in eighth grade, so she was, you know, 13, 14 years old. And I wanted her to be able to experience high school in a smaller school in a rural community and learn about the farm. And we've raised two other children on the farm. And what motivates me today is about, it's really about figuring out how to bridge the next generation. So I'm happy to report that my oldest daughter lives on the farm with her, with my son in law and they're raising my grandchildren on the farm and we're working through the transition so that they're slowly becoming more engaged and they, they both work on the farm. So we're trying to build the next generation and, and continue the cycle so that this revolution, let's call it, can continue to, to do what's right and, and deliver really good quality food that people can enjoy for years to come.

That's outstanding, Sam, because I think that this issue of succession is the issue that far too many farms are failing to think through and failing to prepare for and so easily cause a legacy of outstanding work to just fall off the end of a cliff or come to the end of the road.

It's sad, but true. It's sad, but true.

Yeah. Sam, we've had a very wide ranging conversation. What important aspects of your operation or of your work have we not yet talked about?

Well, so the, so the, the next part of the, of the, of the journey for us, I think is we're continuing to invest in our brand and trying to differentiate our farm so that we can, so that we can continue to build or build equity in that, in that brand and not just be another apple on the shelf. And, and in doing that, we also, we also want to kind of navigate this transition of what's next in regenerative, in the regenerative play and you know, how certification going to play and how are, how are all the policies and politics and all the stuff that, that ultimately set up success. Try to navigate that without stubbing our toe or wasting a bunch of time and money chasing, you know, a piece of paper that says we can, that we're certified to only find out that that paper doesn't really apply or fit or it's just a step in the journey. I guess the example I'll use is Global Gap. So we went through the, we went through the race and got Global Gap certified because that was the food safety model that was being followed. And then as that took off, it got more expensive and became a burden instead of a benefit and ended up, you know, morphing to, to sqf, which is, you know, a more farmer friendly approach to, to ensuring that we're uniformly applying food safety standards in our daily operation. So we want to avoid those missteps as much as we can, but we want to also. It almost feels like being a Boy Scout, we, we need to, as a family farm, we need to get badges on our belt so that people know that we care and we're trying the right thing. So whether it's, you know, be smart or be safe or, you know, having, you know, work with the Xerxes society to have beneficial pollinator habitat and, and being able to get some of the, some of the recognition for some of the activities we're doing that are the right things to do so that it helps people in market understand that we really do care. Because at the end of the day, that's What I want to come out is it now we really care about giving you something that we serve and eat in our, in our home. It's not just another apple in a box being shipped around in a semi truck and having people being able to connect and feel that. That belonging. Maybe it's my Southern roots. I mean, my parents were both from Texas, and you couldn't come see my mom without getting a glass of iced tea and a cookie or something that she had just taken out of the oven. And I think that's still part of my, part of my upbringing and heritage is that we, we want people to leave feeling like they're better off than they were when they showed up.

Thank you, Sam. That's a wonderful note to end on, because ultimately, the value of our work is in regenerating relationships with landscapes, with people, with each other, with our supply chains. And you are well, well down the pathway towards regenerating relationships on multiple dimensions. So thank you for your work, thank you for being here, and thank you for being willing to share your experiences.

Thanks, John. Have a great day.

The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At aea, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At aea, we don't guess. We test. We analyze, and we provide recommendations based on scientific data, knowledge, and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing, someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow, visit advancingecoag. Com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you.