Episode 167: Controlling Pests using Boron Instead of Insecticide with Jay Watts

Hi friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have all kinds of fun conversations. Today I'm joined by Jay Watt, who is a friend of mine. I had the privilege of hosting him here at my home some time ago on a day where we also had lots of interesting conversations. Jay, thank you for being here. I've really been looking forward to this discussion and we all have different perspectives, different experiences and, and one of the things that I've always been intrigued by is the, the experiences and the perspectives of people who are actually producing and growing seed or producing and growing a diversity of different crops. Because there is something about growing things, either growing a diversity of different crops or taking things to the kind of the ultimate level of quality that really sharpens your perspective and hones your senses. So thank you for being here. Tell us a bit about your context and your operation and the scope of the things that you're working with.

Thank you. I'm actually a fourth generation farmer in the Imperial Valley, which is the southernmost point in California where a seed production, family operation. I make two different kinds. My main thing is Bermuda seed that is sold, you see it in Lowe's, Home Depot. It's, it's your, your filler grass for a lot of the, the lawn and garden companies. And then I also grow alfalfa seed that we use locally. I sell it to local, back to local farmers and I also have a couple brokerages that I work with that, that sell it wholesale. But our, our seed's a little bit different because we have zero dormancy rating on our alfalfa seeds. So it, it only can go to more southern areas, more warm climates and some of the other, they'll use them sometimes if you use it like a clover as just an annual in, in colder areas. But it, it won't, it won't survive the winters.

And is there anything else going on besides the, the seed production?

Yeah, so we, I do about seven acres of agave that I have been doing for three years. Where that's going to go, we'll see what the market does. As of right now, it's probably going to be into a spirit hopefully. But there are, it's wide open for what it could be. There's inin production which is a prebiotic for a fiber like fib your fiber pills and things like that. There's also a feed like animal feed possibility in that. And then there's biofuel is one of the things that there's a big study out right right now whether it's going to be a viable crop for biodiesel or biofuel. And then my pet project right now is my wife and I are starting a small market garden to have a, a CSA that we can have locally shipped or not shipped out locally, but that we can have delivered locally to all of our friends and neighbors to give them a healthier source of produce that is a little bit more diverse than just the. The lettuce squash, things like that on the, the shelf at the, the grocery store.

So in the context of your. If your seed production operation, what is the. What are some of the historical challenges that you've had to deal with in your growing environment and in your growing context, how is, how is producing seed for those crops different than from producing a forage crop?

Well, the water scheduling is a little bit more difficult in when you're producing a forage crop, you're watering it every two weeks and you want it to grow as much leaf matter and forage as possible. With seed production, we kind of want to, for lack of a better term, mistreat. It's so that it thinks it's going to die and it wants to put off seed to help itself reproduce. And so we will stress it a little bit. From past experience, I have learned that you can overstress a lot of the Bermuda and things like that to where it'll just. It makes blank seeds that are just. They're a husk with no. No seed inside. They will go through the, the cycle of producing seed three or four times throughout the growing season. So you'll have different flushes come through and you kind of have to time it because you're trying to maintain the. The plant and keep it growing. And you're also trying to help it be stressed out and want to produce seed. So we usually will change our water schedule as we go through the season. In the beginning, when it's cooler, we'll probably water every 30 to 40 days. And then once it starts to warm up, we start to taper that back until we get to about 20 to 14 days there at the. The last one. Our last two waters are probably 14 days apart.

When you, if you have multiple seed flushes or head flushes coming through in a year, are you on the. In the case of the Bermuda grass, are you harvesting seed multiple times per year or just one harvest per year?

Just one harvest. Bermuda doesn't shatter like other seeds. It. We do also do a winter seed that we've started doing rather than cutting for hay because it's just more economically Viable the, the hay you have to put a lot of inputs into it and then you also have to cut it and don't, you don't have the capability to make as much. So we'll, it can sit there in the field either wind road or just upright in before you cut it. And it will hold for. I mean we've held it for two months just sitting in the field before we could get a combine to it. And it, the. The yield didn't, didn't change.

So you have the, you have the benefit of being a fourth generation farmer and having, having observed lots of. Of changes in the way farming is done and ecosystem management and so forth. What have, what have been some of the challenges that you've observed over the last couple of decades and how is your farming operation evolving?

Changing crops is one of the main ones. My dad was a pretty large cotton grower in the area when we would grow cotton here and up until probably two years ago we had no acres of cotton and this year we have a couple hundred acres when we used to have 85,000 acres of cotton in the area. And as the, the crops change the, the methods of farming have to change. Our, our bed sizes will change, our methods of cultivation will change. The, the fertilizer companies will have to adapt and move their products into a more like Bermuda or alfalfa or produce centric model and they'll have to focus their attention other areas rather than what we had. We just lost the sugar beet plant that we had here for I think it was. I'm probably getting this number wrong but upwards of 75 years it's been here since the 40s I think and they, the company, it just wasn't economically viable for them. And they are from Minnesota. They decided to shut this plant, take their sugar allotment and move it to Minnesota and. Or no. Yeah, Minnesota. And now we've got 25 acres of or 25,000 acres of sugar beet production that isn't going to happen this year. That's going to have to move into a new crop and that's going to affect everybody from the beet harvesters all the way up to the like city managers and things that are having to figure out they actually declared a state of emergency for it. I'm not sure what it's going to do but besides maybe help with tax revenue and things like that. But that's been one of the main things that we have experienced that has forced us to adapt. We. When I my dad started farming Bermuda seed when I was probably 11 years old and before that he. Nobody farmed it and. And it was a pretty unknown crop at the time. And now it's one of the main crops in the Imperial Valley besides alfalfa.

When I think about crop production in the Imperial Valley from the perspective of. There are many of our listeners who don't particularly have perspective on the Imperial Valley. Tell us a little bit about the growing climate, the growing conditions and what irrigation water management looks like and availability and future supply and how you are.

Thinking about that in the Imperial Valley. We are a 400000 acre valley in the southernmost portion of California. We get our water from the Colorado river and it's all gravity.

Oh dear.

Yeah, we'll get to that. That's. That's a whole nother hot button issue. The. It's all gravity fed for us. There's no pumping stations. There's just. There's dams that have. That produce hydroelectric power and then we have canals that get smaller and smaller and, and feed into our fields. We have laterals that take a large portion of the water down and then move it into our, our actual field irrigation. And they. It's. I, I don't know the actual percentage but I would say we are probably upwards of 80% flood irrigation. And my sister who's on the IVH2O board or well, she's the executive director of it is probably going to kick me for saying wrong numbers. So I'll just say we have a lot of flood irrigation. There is some sprinkler and some drip. But we have a bit of a different situation than most areas because we have a lot have a high salt content in our Imperial air. In our ground we have a high pH. We're upwards of 8.1 to 8.4 in most areas. Our water coming in is 8.4 pH also. So even if you were to bring the PH down on your soil, your water, the next irrigation is going to bring it right back up and it just, it won't hold down. So we have to adapt. And most of our, our crops are geared for the more alkaline salty areas. And we are a desert area. We get upwards of 120 degrees in the summertime. We have to. And we have a, a great winter growing season starting right now. We're planting lettuce for the winter and fall. We grow a lot of cauliflower and broccoli corn, carrots where between us and Yuma. I think we supply most of the the United States with winter produce. So it's, it's a very interesting growing region. Our. I, I have to pay attention when I'm looking at growing new crops and things like that to check when they're, what their temperatures are that they're growing in. Because it's the opposite season for us here. We're just very kind of niche.

Are you adding any irrigation water to, in the case of the, the vegetable crops, are you adding irrigation water at all to compensate for temperature stress and to help cool crops down? Is that something that happens during the winter months at all or not really.

During the winter months? I, I doubt it because they're the. I'm not a vegetable grower so I, I can't really speak for them, but I don't think that they do. I've never heard of that management pro practice because the varieties that we use are geared for a winter crop, not a summer crop like our, our onions that we grow here are short day onions instead of long day onions, which means we need a shorter day for them to make bulbs and, and grow. So we have different varieties that are, that are catered to Our area. Texas is very similar to us in their, their growing season in some of the southern tips of, of Texas.

So the, the historically the perspective has been that Imperial Valley, Central Valley, these, these desert areas of the west have had a significant competitive climate perspective and from a disease susceptibility perspective because of an ideal growing climate. And what is interesting is if you look at the historical use patterns of fungicides and insecticides, in this case particularly fungicides, there is increasing use of fungicides in these production regions quite rapidly. If you're looking at over a 20 to 30 year time horizon and even longer. So how in, in this environment, how are you observing disease pressure or an insect pressure shifting and changing? You've been, your father was one of the pioneering growers of Bermuda grass. You've been growing Bermuda grass seed in the same location for quite a long time. How have you seen that shift over.

Time in the Bermuda grass seed? We're just starting to see a shift. It's. It's a little bit behind, I don't think because we rotate it a little bit more. Well, it's also, it's a perennial, so it stays in. But we're, we're not just Bermuda after Bermuda. After Bermuda we'll rotate some alfalfa and some wheat, maybe some sedan. So ours hasn't been that bad. But the, for the fungicide or for the, the fungus problem, we have a rust issue here. Um, and we can solve it. With a little bit of. Most guys use like Tebistar or something like that. Other guys will use sulfur. Sulfur doesn't exactly work on rust. It's long been a prescribed treatment for rust but it doesn't quite manage it. But the main problem for Bermuda has been in the recent years we have started to get a lot more pests. We Bermuda historically didn't have any pests that you had to worry about besides maybe some flea beetle coming in when it was germinating and they would just clip off the, the growing small plants. But once it grew it grows so fast and so vigorously that even if you had worms come in it wouldn't eat it down. But we this year had an army worm problem which was unheard of in, in growing Bermuda, not in Germany. Bermuda. We have a leaf stem maggot that comes in and will lay its egg. The, the fly will come in and lay its egg in the stem of the Bermuda stock and kill that entire stalk up and it won't produce seed. And there's also a mite issue but that's always been there and that was very easy to solve. If you just put on one application of sulfur it basically broke the life cycle of the mites and you didn't have to worry about them anymore. But we're definitely seeing new and emerging pests coming into the Bermuda. And then I can't quite speak for the produce guys because I'm not a produce grower but I am a pest control advisor which is a pca. I prescribe the chemicals for farmers and I go to a lot of meetings. And a couple years back Sclerotinia was rampant in the Yuma area and the Imperial Valley. It's slowly becoming more managed I think through more fungicide uses and, and, and practices like that. But there's also new bugs that are coming in from. We had the brigada bug that was a big problem in broccoli for a while. It's a true bug that comes in and stings the growing point of the broccoli. And the broccoli makes a, a triple head or a double head that's, that's non marketable. And then you have the newest one that's coming in is, is a virus carried by thrips. And it, you can see it, it's, it's like a, almost a mosaic pattern going through the field of where the thrip lands and feeds. It infests the, the lettuce plant and it just died. I think it's called INSV is what I don't know what it stands for, but it's, it's a big product problem in Salinas right now. Not so much here, but it'll get here. Most things in Salinas come down to us because we're just, we don't have as much produce year round. They're able to grow pretty much year round because their climate and we were only half the year. So they have a little bit faster development of these pests and diseases.

I'm curious, I'd like to understand your perspective and your thought process. You as a pca, you get to see what's happening and what's going on. You have the benefit of some of a historical perspective. What's your take on the increasing pressure and what the long term solutions for some of those challenges might be.

The increasing pressure I think is just because we do the same thing year after year after year. And it's almost a, I mean it's a foregone conclusion that you're going to get something to come in. I mean avocados are a good example. When they first started planting avocados in California there were no pests. They planted them on this, you can see them still if you drive to San Diego. They're planted on the side of hills where you could harvest them but you can't do it. You can't drive a tractor around there. You can walk. And they've stopped, they've just abandoned those because now we have pests that have come into the avocados and they can't spray them. They can't do anything to manage it with ours. What I have seen is just a lack of diversity in our management practices. We just, if it's a bug, we spray it with an insecticide. If it's a ween, we spray it with a herbicide. We don't look at any other processes. Which is kind of what I'm trying to do with my farm right now. The, the main thing that I'm doing is a boron regimen. I put boron through.

Oh, this is going to be a fun conversation. You just hit one of my hot buttons.

So I'm, I'm using soluble to put boron through the, the, into the roots, through the water. And then I also come in with a foliar application of, of boron throughout the year trying to, I try and get twice a year and I have actually seen a decrease in ligus pressure in my alfalfa seed compared to a neighbor who sprayed. I was getting upwards of, I think it was, it was at least half the ligus pressure that he got. I've got my notes here, I'm trying to look at them and see it was at least half, but sometimes it was three or four times more in the conventionally managed field compared to mine that had a boron treatment and inoculations. Just in my opinion, a healthier, happier plant that was able to, if for nothing else, not let the ligus get established and reproduce like the other fields were able to.

All right, you, as I said, you hit on one of my buttons, so we're going to dig into this one because I don't know that if I, if I've made this comment on the podcast, but I certainly have in many presentations. But I'm of the persuasion that if crops generally had adequate levels of boron, or even on the generous side of adequate levels of boron, insecticide use would probably drop by in the neighborhood of plus 80%, upwards of 80% across the entire industry. So this is something that I'm quite interested in digging into. So in your LIGOS bug experience, just to understand the context, when you talk about conventional treatment versus your boron treatment, with the fields that you applied the boron on, did those also have an insecticide treatment or was that without any insecticide?

No insecticides? I haven't sprayed an insecticide on my ranch in. That was probably three or four months ago. I said, did the math and it was about 18 months. So we're going up, we're coming up on almost two years with no insecticides whatsoever on my ranch. I most conventional practices for alfalfa and alfalfa seed treatment are usually about one spray per cutting and probably two to three sprays. On the conservative side for seed production, some of the, the farmers that are on the nicer ground that are able to produce large yields, they will get probably five to six sprays.

When you say five to six sprays or two to three sprays per cutting, are each of those sprays an insecticide spray? Is that what you're describing?

Insecticide spray? It's heavy, heavy insecticide. I'm gonna get crucified for bringing this up on, on a podcast, but I don't care. It's the truth. I, I just, I found that I don't need insecticides.

My goodness. Going from that type of regime spray regime to, to no insecticides in 18 months or 24 months is, that's quite a shift.

There was some, there was definitely some growing pains. It was a, a conscious decision. I made the. I don't know why, but this Agave has been kind of a gateway for me to get into the regenerative movement. The. I won't say organic because I, I look at organic as more of a marketing scheme than anything anymore. It used to be something that actually meant something, but anymore it just means that you spray a lot more of a lighter material, in my opinion. And that's not a popular opinion, but it's. It's in my view.

Well, you. I think you have kind of a front row seat as a PCA to know what's actually happening and what's going on in the fields of California, that your opinion has some merit.

It just seems like with, with the organic they, they use, it's. It's softer chemistries, things that are derived from plants, but they're sprayed. You know, in an organic spinach, you might spray every two or three days, something like that, or I mean, corn, it's just, it's just a ton. And again, they're lighter, they're derived from plants most of the time. But there are, you know, there's still plants that are detrimental to humans out there. So I don't, I don't know about the whole organic movement. I know there are some very, very good organic crops out there and there's some very good organic growers. And I, I've tried to support those over the years by purchasing their products, but I. I just see that it's a little bit of a. A marketing thing. But back to the agave, it was kind of a gateway to get into this. And I first put in my agave on a field and I sprayed everything over the top of it, from Roundup to Prowl to. I mean, just any. Anything I could because I was trying to see if it would survive. And it does, because it's got a waxy cuticle. It. Stomach or stomata are open at night. It's just. It's a pretty resilient, awesome plant. And then most of the chemistry that I was using ties up in the soil so that the roots don't uptake it. And then I moved to a different plot of land that I started planting the agave and for whatever reason, started looking into regenerative practices on agave and just in general. And I stopped spraying my agave. Didn't spray it. I put. The one thing I did do is I put some diatomaceous earth because we had a cricket infestation that actually ate them down to the ground.

Wow.

Yeah, it was. I've never seen crickets eat something like that, but I mean, they ate pretty much foot tall to foot and a half tall agave down to the ground. They've all come back because they're just tough plants. But that got me into not spraying on my Bermuda. And I stopped putting TR10, the, the pre emergent herbicide, the granular herbicide that we would all put down, I, I stopped, I didn't, I didn't do it. And then I would walk my fields and I would walk the other fields that I managed that were conventional. And I didn't see a lot of difference in the Bermuda. Yeah, I had a few broadleaves here and there, but when I started looking at them and figuring out what they all were, they're all Forbes. So I, I don't mind having them out there and they all die off before the Bermuda gets harvested. And I don't have to worry about them gumming up any of the, the combines that led into my alfalfa production, which I just stopped doing any pesticides. I kept with the herbicides for a while because I wanted a clean, pretty field. But the insecticides, I stopped because they, they didn't make any sense to me in the economics because I could look and see it was, you know, maybe it would eat the, the insects would eat a quarter ton of hay. I make another ton and a half of hay, ton and a quarter. But I have to spray a pretty expensive spray. Most of them, even the, the low end generics are 20 or $30 to the acre. And then I've got a tractor that has to go through a field, a guy that has to sit in the tractor. And the economics just didn't work out for me. So I stopped. And for probably the last five years, I haven't sprayed my alfalfa seed with an insecticide throughout the year. I would spray what we called a cleanup spray in the beginning, which was a heavy dose of herbicides, insecticides, pre emergent, a little bit of fungicide, a little bit of miticide. I mean it was, it was a huge cocktail and it was $100 an acre to put that on, if not 120. And I don't produce enough seed. I'm, I'm on tougher ground. I'm not a seed grower in the alfalfa sense. I grow it for hay. I'm learning now how to grow it better for seed. But that's only been in the last five, six years that we've grown alfalfa for seed on a regular basis. And I just, I couldn't make the production that some of these other guys could on their ground. So I didn't see the point in putting $120 worth of expense for something that even with that I would make marginal yields. And when on the fields that I didn't spray, I made the same yields. So I, I haven't lost anything, in my opinion. And people look at my fields and they'll tell me if I had done it, I'd have made 200 extra pounds. But I don't really agree. I think that it would have been the same whether I sprayed or whether I had left it alone.

When you consider that cocktail that you're describing, you had a pretty heavy dose of herbicides. There has, has not putting on those herbicides affected your seed purity in the, in the alfalfa in any way.

Through the roof.

Okay, that's. Wow.

Yeah.

How has your germination rate changed from historically to present?

Well, so it's relative. Through the roof to me means I have another half of a percent germination rate in alfalfa. 99% germination rate is the, the bare minimum that you want. And I would have stuff in the 98s, 97s. Now my germination rate is upwards of 99.8, 99.7. One of the, the seed wholesalers that I work through, their number one grade and number two grade differs by 1.10 of a percent. If I'm 99.5, I'm number one. If I'm 99.4, I'm number two. And you lose about 10 cents, if not a little bit more per, per pound. So it's gone from in the 97s and 98s. Some of it was 96s all the way up to the last germination test I got was 99.7.

Wow.

I actually think there was a 99.8 in there also.

And. Okay, this is a slightly different question or response than the question I was asking. I was actually asking about if you have any contamination with other weed seeds or anything like that. But, but so, so you're ascribing the improvement in germination rate to a lack of herbicides. Primarily.

I'm prescribing it to my entire practice of no herbicides, no sprays, soil inoculations, a different minor nutrient regimen, and a lot of just management practices that have, have changed. Maybe I'm a better seed grower. Maybe it's been five years, I'm learning the ropes. I don't know. But I, I don't think that's the case. I think that maybe I am a better seed grower, but I don't think that that's increasing my, my germination. But the purity, that's never been a problem with most of the weed seeds that we have here. They're of a very different size than our alfalfa seeds, so they're easy to mill out or to get out in the combine. The combines are able to take them out pretty easily. The only ones we have a problem with our daughter and Curly Dock. And Curly Dock's pretty easy to spot. It's bright red out in the middle of the field. You can go pluck it out if you have any. And daughter a little harder to spot. I did have a big of contamination with daughter this year, but between me and the seed miller aren't sure whether it came from my field or whether it came from either a contaminated combine. And it was. There was literally one daughter in a pound of alfalfa seed, which is enough to. To bring down the purity to critical levels. They have to run it through another machine to clean the daughter out. But daughter has a rough texture on the outside and alfalfa seeds are smooth. So they run it over essentially Velcro. And the daughter stick to the Velcro and the alfalfa seed keep sliding so it'll be cleaned out, no problem. And I'll be back into 99% purity. Yeah.

All right. So you mentioned you're giving credit to the combination of all the various things that you're doing. And so far we've talked primarily about the, the reductions in pesticide applications. And I'm still have this thing in the back of my mind that I'm going to come back and talk more about this boron issue as well. But let's talk a bit about what are, what are some of the other changes that you've been making. You mentioned the inoculation and the trace mineral applications and things that you've been working on.

Yeah, I inoculated for the first time last year. My, my alfalfa seed is also one of the changes that I made. I only use my own seed now because I make enough that I can sell it, sell probably 90 of it and use 10 for myself. If, if not less than 10%. It you don't. For the seed that you plant, you get a lot more than that off of it. So I haven't had to buy seed. And so I know it's coming off of my field, my regimen, my soil microbiome, all the things that are conducive to Me having a better beginning and a better final product. The micronutrients here in the Imperial Valley. Yeah, we would do some soil sampling. My dad and I never did any petiole samples or anything of the sort, but I started doing some SAP samples and working with you guys to get a better grasp on the. The soil mic or the. The micronutrients and the mining of the soil nutrients that are in there to help get the plant onto a more balanced footing and a better. Just a better base.

Well, you also, you have some interesting soil challenges to deal with with the salinity and the alkalinity and the challenges that you have there. So how. How have you been addressing some of those trace mineral imbalances that you've been uncovering?

The main one before, what we would do is to counteract the salts. We would put a. We have a liquid calcium product that we would put on, and it would help leach out the salts, bind the calcium to the sodium, help leach it out in the tile lines. It also increased the. Or helped with the soil structure. So we would do that. And then the other thing that we would do, because we're on a clay soil, we would put a lot of nitrogen. We upped our nitrogen, depending on what we had, by up to 20% on some. Some fields, some crops, to help with. We also have high calcium soils, which doesn't make any sense that I would put calcium on. But, you know, the forms of calcium are different than in that it's a plant available calcium. So we would do that to manage the salt and the sodium. I mean, the. The calcium tying everything up. Now I'm working to use SAP samples, look at what's going on in the plant, rather than just kind of guessing. Before we did NPK and we didn't really do a lot of K. It was mostly nitrogen and potassium. And then we would.

Do you mean nitrogen and phosphorus?

Yeah, sorry. And then we would do a little bit of potassium for root development here and there. And most, most farmers around here don't even think about it. The only other thing we would do that was a little bit outside of the norms. If we would put a sulfur solution on to help with the nitrogen uptake. But now I've started working with a lot of different chemicals that I never even. Are not chemicals. Nutrients that I never even thought of, like molybdenum and copper. That. The only time I ever thought about copper before was for a fungicide. Now I'm using it for increased pollen vitality, for just plant vigor. And then the Molybdenum. I have really seen a difference in using molybdenum and my nitrogen has, I've cut my nitrogen back by about 20%. Hopefully going to cut it back a little bit more. I don't want to cut too much back. As I've heard people say, the ground's kind of like a drug addict. It's hooked on all of the conventional products. You can't just pull it off and not give it anything. It'll, it'll kind of seize up and, and well, your plant won't be ready for it.

So go. It'll go through withdrawal symptoms.

Yeah, exactly. So that, that's, that's been, the main changes that I've made has been to balance the, the miners so that the macronutrients are more plant available and the ones that are in the plant are used to the highest benefit of the plant.

In those alkaline soil conditions, are you, how are you addressing those trace minerals? Are you adding them in your irrigation solution? You're adding them to the soil, how are you ensuring they get into the plant?

The only trace mineral that I apply to the soil is soluble or boron through the irrigation water. And I also put a calcium solution in with it when I do that. But everything else, any of the miners are foliar. I, I don't, I don't think in our soil that with the small amounts that we use, it would even make it to the plant. I think it would tie it up before it, before it even had a chance to get into the plant. So I've been doing everything full yearly.

Yeah, I think in your soil conditions that's probably true. Molybdenum actually is quite available in alkaline soil conditions, but that's, that's, that's an exception. So you mentioned boron again. Remind me. I think you, you said you applied a pound of boron in the irrigation system and then you did some foliar as well in your alfalfa seed production.

So I, almost everything I put boron when I, when I went through foliarly I would, I would put boron. But. And now everything that I do with an irrigation, I put at least one boron application and it is five pounds to the acre of Solubor.

So one pound breaker of actual boron.

What does five pounds. Oh yes, yeah, sorry. Cause it's a 20% solution.

Yes. So what does your, what does your total boron application look like over the course of an entire 12 month season?

It's probably about, I would say between 6 and 7 pounds of boron with depending on however many waters I get and cuttings. Because every cutting I try and put an application of boron. Since I've taken, if I do cut for a hay, I will put another application of boron because I just, you know, you're bailing it off, you're taking all the nutrients out of the field. But if I sheep it off, I won't, I will probably, probably do, I'll probably skip that one and put it on the next one.

So again, just for clarification, when you say six to seven pounds over the course of the season, you're referring to pounds of actual boron.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So I do, I do five pounds per cutting. Yeah. Of alpha. So it ends up being between five and six.

Yeah, yeah. So you, you have. It sounds, what you're describing is almost, is this magical combination. I've observed it in a number of areas around the country where you have high calcium soils. You have a strong calcium foundation to work from. And then of course you're adding further calcium that is actually plant available. And against that foundation of calcium, you are leveraging boron. And it seems every time I see that, that that combination, not only are there very strong quality responses, but there are also consistently just simply exceptional yield responses where we get very strong yields. So since you've been, how, how long have you been doing the boron and, and what aside, we spoke about the Lyus beetle, the change in lyus beetle pressure and insect pressure. But what changes have you observed in crop yield and performance and quality since you started doing that?

The crop yield hasn't changed just yet. Our, our soils are very, where I am, are extremely high clay. So it, most things change very slowly in there. When you start, start adding minor nutrients, they get tied up pretty fast. They just don't, they don't show up in the plant for at least a couple of years if you do a long term treatment. But the quality of the plants has changed drastically. The, the Bermuda we watered back after our seed harvest because it's so hot here. We have to keep it, keep it alive. If we don't water it, it, it'll just, it'll die. You'll lose half the, the year or half the established crop. So I watered it back and no fertilizer whatsoever. Just put irrigation water on it. And I had people calling me asking me how much fertilizer I put, how many pounds of nitrogen did I have on because it looked better than any other fields around the area. And I had not put. Granted, there's probably some residual from the, the Bermuda crop before, but not, not that much to where it would look this vigorous and, and healthy. So that's one of the things that I've noticed is the plant bounces back a lot better. I've got two alfalfa fields that are side by side. One was inoculated and treated with the boron all year long. One wasn't inoculated and got a boron treatment during its seed production. And I'm going to have to replant that entire field. The one that had, that was inoculated and got the boron. I don't know if I'm going to have to replant it all. It came back from the summer and is looking, it's ragged right now. It needs to be sheeped off and cleaned up. But none of it died. Usually here we have such a hot summer and our soils are so tight that the water sits on it for too long and it will scald out the alfalfa and you'll lose some fields you lose the entire field. Other fields you'll lose 50%. And then on the sandier soils you don't lose any because it doesn't sit, it's on and off so fast. But I, I, all the boron fields have come back a lot faster and a lot healthier than the fields that didn't have it.

You mentioned the inoculation as well. Was it inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi?

What was the inoculation with your product? The, the pbs, the Biocode Gold? No. Well, Bioco Gold was in the sea, but I inoculated the soil with. I'm drawing a blank on the name, but it's Spectrum. Yeah, Spectrum pbs.

The, the phosphorus solubilizing bacteria. Yes.

So that was because I had a lot of tied up phosphorus. We decided that that would be the way to go. I think this year we're going to switch to the DS because of all the salinity and because it's a lot of drought stress in the summertime. But the phosphorus solubilizing bacteria has, I think it did a great job because I never ran low on phosphorus and I never applied any.

So I'm, I'm quite. I have a follow up question on the, the boron. With the boron soil applications. You mentioned your high clay content soils and you sometimes have difficulty getting applied trace minerals and minor elements into the plant. How have you seen boron move from that slot application in the SAP analysis?

The Boron. I've seen it in the, the SAP analysis. It's, it showed up not nearly as strong as for the application because it's, it's just not getting the plant. The, where it really showed up and you could see it moving was the foliar application of the boron. But it's just so easy to put soluble in the water. It's. And it's cheap.

Exactly.

That I, I, I do that. But I, I'll never depend on that anymore now that I've seen an entire year of foliar applications, which was never a thing on our ranch that we did. We ran everything. Either we dry spread urea and 1152 or we water ran all of our other fertilizer, our liquid UN32s and an 20s and things like that. I will never not do a foliar spray going forward because I just have seen the value of it in how fast it gets into the plant and the small amounts that I can get a large boost in the plant using. I mean if I were to run it in the water, it would get so lost in, in my water that it wouldn't.

Yeah. You don't even see anything.

Yeah. So but if you put it on by, put it on foliarly, I have a big spray. Boom. I go through there. I can knock out a field in a day and we water right afterwards and it's, it's great.

Out of curiosity, what form of boron were you using in your foliar?

Rebound.

Rebound boron. It's an important point and I, I've, I've posted a couple of clips on this, but it's, it's worth reiterating reminding people because we get these awesome results from, from boron. There's, there's a handful of crops that can thrive and can transport soluble if it's applied as a foliar. But for the most part you have to have a chelated boron, otherwise it's flowing, immobile, you apply soluble and you never, you don't get the types of responses that, that you're describing that you experienced. And, and then people are puzzled about why that is the case.

That's what I found with almost any of the fertilizers. The, the company that I also work for, we have a chelated sulfur, potassium and phosphorus that is 95 available as opposed to the opposite in 1152. It's 95 tied up and it gets into the plant, it moves. It's, you can, I mean they've, the, the company that started it Has a, the where they did the radioactive dye and you can see it moving through the plant. You can see how fast it gets in as compared to, compared to standard 1034s, 1152s that just get tied up in the soil and don't make it into the plant. But the foliar with, with any of, any of the foliar applications, I've just seen 10 times more activity and availability even than the chelated stuff running in the water at, you know, we'll run 25 gallons of, of phosphate in the water which is, it sounds like a lot, but it's, it's really not because it's, it's like a 1% solution of or I guess it's 6% solution, but it's, it's all available to the plant. But doing a foliar application, it's, it's night and day even to water running high quality products like I use the foliar just is it outshines it 10 times.

On a couple of occasions. You've mentioned sheeping off the alfalfa and perhaps the Bermuda as well. And one of the things that I've observed is that anytime you add when you have these generous levels of boron, I think if there is any one mineral or any one nutrient that I would associate with high brix content, higher sugar content, it's probably boron. It has, has almost the most direct analog. Obviously elevated sugar production is, is involved. There's, there's a suite of nutrients that are involved in that process. Not just one, but boron has perhaps the most direct analog effect. And so quite commonly I see improved palatability and desirability on forages from higher boron applications. Have your have. Do you have any indicators of, from the sheep or any livestock of changes in perception and quality?

Yeah. So on the sheep production or on the sheeping off the field, two fields I was talking about that had the late season boron application and then the boron application and inoculation. All year long the sheep fed for about seven days per block on the standard field. And then on the inoculated field treated with a boron, they got at least one more day per block. Some of them were two days per block. And the, the, the fields when we would bail them off are almost identical in yield. They're, they're very similar size, very similar ground type. And they would just, they would always. And actually the, the one that was untreated would usually beat the other field by a little bit, maybe two or 300 bales something like that. Not a lot. But in this case the sheep were in there and they ate on it. And it. I took seven acres of that field out and put in agave. So the field was even seven acres smaller than the other field. They're 140 acre fields apiece. So we were looking at 130 compared to 140. And they fed for a total of about five and a half days more on the, the treated field.

So if I'm, if I'm following your train of thought here, you're describing that there were, there were smaller yields in terms of biomass per acre, but larger yields in terms of animal feed days per acre. In other words, the animals were getting more out of the forage. They were more satiated with what they were feeding. Is that, is that what you're describing?

Yeah, sorry, I kind of rambled around a little bit right there. I had a bunch of thoughts bouncing around in my head. But. So yes, the animals fed longer on the field that was treated compared to the field that wasn't. But when we would cut them, historically those fields yielded almost identical. And then I also have taken acreage out of the treated field for agave production. So there's even less acreage on that field. And the sheep fed for five to six days more on the treated field.

Yeah, got it. So when we think about observations around quality, we spoke a little bit about alfalfa seed. We spoke about the livestock indicators. We haven't really talked about the performance. Bermudagrass. Have there been any observations of improved quality with the bermudagrass seed production?

The. This was a bad year to try and evaluate that. We've got a water program here where we were able to shut off our water. Abel. We were compensated for shutting off our water for two months in the summer. And I didn't see the writing on the wall. It was too late. When they had us do it. We did it August and October, which. This was one of our hottest. October. Last October was one of our hottest Octobers. I think on record. We broke at least two records on during the year for high temperatures. I saw 118 in the middle of October. And it dried out the fields so much that that I think it killed at least half of the established Bermuda that was out there. So the sea deal this year was, was terrible. Luckily this year the, the same program is going on, but we were able to choose a different date. I did mine earlier. I'm already out of the program and watering again in our hottest months. So it hasn't seen nearly the effect that it did last time. So hopefully next year I'll be able to see some improvements. But this, this year, the field that was completely treated with inoculation, boron, all of it. And I, I didn't listen to my AEA advisor and he told me to only take the nitrogen down by 20%. I have a bad habit of if 20 is good, then 50 is better. So I took my nitrogen down way, way lower than you're supposed to, which is why I know now that plants go into withdrawals. But it produced the same as the field next door that had the full standard regimen on it. So I, I definitely think the minor nutrients attributed to that. And I would, I kind of regret not, kind of, I 100 regret not putting the full nitrogen package on there plus the miners to see what it would have done. But it was the same yield on the two fields that had the same treatment or had the different treatments. And I had about 50% less nitrogen on the treated field.

So, Jay, I've got to ask the question. You're a pca, you made lots of pesticide recommendations. How are these experiences that you're having on your own farm influencing the recommendations you're making for other people?

The guy that trained me was very frugal with the way he managed his fields. For his farm. It had nothing to do with, with plant health. He just wanted to do the best job monetarily that he could for his growers. And he passed that along to me. In the way that we manage fields, will you have to tailor it to your grower? You can't. You know, some growers want no bugs whatsoever. If they see a gnat flying around that doesn't even have mouth parts, they want those sprayed. But on other farmers that are willing to take a little bit of damage but not have the cost of the spray, those are the ones you can really dig in and start working with. And maybe you can skip a spray on one of the, one of the cuttings, but it's definitely. That was already part of my DNA. And now that I'm seeing this, I can, I can use my experiences on my fields. And I'm always the canary in the coal mine that does stuff first with, with any new treatments or new products that we have. Because I farm and I work for a fertilizer slash chemical company.

How does, how does this work that you work for a fertilizer company and.

You'Re using AEA products and hopefully they don't hear this. He understands my. I have a great boss and he understands that. I, it was on my Instagram and I had a, a friend of mine that kind of laughed, but he's like, so are you just kind of putting this out there, hoping that your boss doesn't see? I said, yeah, that's exactly what I'm hoping. So, but if they work, they work. And that's just the, the nuts and bolts of it. If, if a product works, it works. And I'm, I'm not ever going to say one of our products is better than another when it isn't. If there's another product that another company has that is better, I'll recommend that they go use that product. But, yeah, that works. I will always recommend mine or my companies before I recommend another. But when the products work, they work. And so I have definitely moved my management practices more to nutrients than to chemistry, depending on just coming in and doing a rescue spray. My wife lasts me, because my wife is like Maha, movement to the max. She loves all of the natural foods, and I don't even think we have Florida in her toothpaste anymore. So she always asked me about things and, and my stance is that I believe pesticides and herbicides and fungicides are a necessary evil to, for lack of a better term, that they're, they're a tool that should be used like you would any other tool. They're not everything that you should be using. You should look at all aspects of it. You can't use a hammer to take out a screw. You have to use a screwdriver. So that's the way I look at pesticides and herbicides is if they work in this situation, and that's all that you can use, say you're, you're getting eaten up by, by worms or weevil or something along those lines, and you don't have time to manage the nutrients. Yeah, absolutely. Going and spray, because it's a lot better getting a yield and having to spray than getting eaten up and not getting anything. But now, next year, learn from that and manage your nutrition like you should and, and pay attention to those things. And eventually you can get to the point where you're not using them, but for emergencies.

Where you just went with this conversation, Jay, is so important. And it was earlier when you were speaking about how you make fertilizer recommendations for the company that you're working for versus and then you, in conjunction with using AEA products on your own farm. This leads so beautifully into this conversation. I was going to make a comment that your stance, your perspective is about integrity of Recommendations the integrity of truly doing what is best for the grower. And it's. I think it's this, that foundation of integrity that has really allowed us to have the impact that we have as a company because we only don't have a universal product lineup and we recommend many products that are not a part of our lineup. And I think it's to me that is a mark of integrity in agronomic recommendations when you're willing to take and to truly advise and recommend what is what is the best and produces the best response. And it occurs to me that in what you were just describing about pesticides from a pesticide use perspective being a necessary evil, the challenge or the conundrum is that the knowledge and the information to as well as the incentives for or integrity of recommendations related to pest management. The conversation we were just having around boron, for example, and the responses that you saw with ligas bug pressure on alfalfa, like there are this knowledge of how to use nutrition management for disease control and insect control is knowledge that I would desire and many other people I'm sure would also desire to be much more widely known and understood in agronomy. And so there is, there are many people who have integrity but who perhaps lack the knowledge to truly make the best recommendations from, from this nutrition versus pesticide dimension. And that's. That's an interesting place to find ourselves in.

I completely agree with you. It's one of the things that has. I like the products for one, but I just to put him out there and let him know how much I appreciate it. Pedro has been fantastic. There are very few times that I've seen someone that's selling something look at a soil sample or even just a field and say yeah, everything's good, I think we're good. I don't think we need to do anything. And at least a couple times he don't get him in trouble for this. He has said, no, you're good, everything looks fine. I don't think we need to apply anything. And that solidified my relationship with him as a customer because I knew he was taking the same approach that I do that I have talked farmers out of chemicals or putting extra nitrogen or something like that on because I didn't feel think they would need it. As opposed to just being a salesman and pushing the sale and making more recommendations. I had a conversation with a co worker of mine and he was asking me what because I he has a very good grasp of the basic NPK and some of our calcium and we have Another amino acid product that we, that our company makes. And he is in instrumental in a couple of getting those off the ground and, and getting them into farmers hands and showing them how to use them. And I pick his brain constantly because he's been in the, in the industry about 10 years longer than I have. And he started asking me why are you asking me that? What's going on with, with this direction of questions? Because he knows I'm a pca. And I told him, I said I'm trying to find the best way to manage things for the grower, for myself because in the long run I made a joke that, that if I do my job or if I do everything right that I'm trying to do, I'll be out of a job in 10 years. But that's not the case. I don't want to be out of a job. I want to make a different job. Well, yes, essentially I want, and I told him I want me to be the most valuable aspect for a grower, my knowledge base, my experience to be what I know to be the value as opposed to the fact that I can sell you a 1200 a gallon fungicide that is a, you know, miracle cure. And that's all, that's all I have to know is, you know, in March I put this fungicide on and everything's golden. But I, I would rather it be if we need to, I know how to use that. But if I don't need to use it, I know other aspects, other avenues that we can take that maybe, maybe my bonus isn't as big, but my conscience is better. And that's kind of where I've gone with most of the things that I've done in everything is I have to make a living even in farming, like my market garden that I want to do. It has to make money to be reasonable. I'm not going to go lose money on it. But it was more of a calling to do something good for the community and people around me to give them something healthy and beneficial to them than it was to find another revenue stream. Obviously I would love for it to take off and have 140 acres of market garden that I'm selling at grocery store prices and you know, retire by 50. But that's not the goal. The goal is to do something that makes my conscience, my soul, my, whatever you want to call it, content. And that's the way I try to approach all of my dealings with the fertilizer industry. I. If, if you need me to prescribe a pesticide or herbicide, that's no problem. I don't, it's not, I'm not one of those people that, that gets the, the icks trying to use a pesticide or even, you know, God forbid going in there and disking up a field if you have to. I, I've, I've learned that there are uses for everything. There are also alternatives to everything. And I try and do the best thing for my customers, my field. And one of the main things that drove this is I have three kids. My oldest daughter is six years old. She's decided she wants to be a flower grower and seller. So I'm learning how to grow flowers. My middle son is 4 and loves everything about the farm. So I want to give him something that he can look at and be proud of. Not, you know, say oh well, you know, the farm cost me million and a half dollars a year and I make, you know, million six profits. So I got a hundred thousand dollars to live off of. That's pretty nice. I want him to know, yeah, dad worked on this. He built up this soil. There's a reason that we don't have all the issues that the people around us do. Have some pride. Maybe we lose some acres, maybe we, we cut back and, and we focus more, more on smaller acreage. But we can, we're there doing what's best for the ground and I'm making sure that he has something if he, maybe he doesn't want to be a farmer, maybe he wants to, you know, use his head and be a doctor or something like that. But I, I want this to be.

Something that for the record, I don't think doctors use their heads any more than farmers.

I think we use chat GPT anymore.

Yeah, thank you for that, that monologue there at the end, Jay. The, the legacy of farming and I think what you described is this fulfillment aspect of that. All of us want to find our work fulfilling and fortunately most of us as farmers and growers get the opportunity to do that. And particularly if we able to take this approach and this, this mindfulness perspective into our operations. So we've had a very wide ranging conversation which I've greatly enjoyed. What, what important topics have we missed talking about?

The only one that is, is kind of interesting and it goes to multi species cover crops and the plant interactions. I, this is just my little pet project that I keep noticing and wanting to dig deeper into. But the alfalfa that, you know, the, the stray seeds that made it into the agave area and grew have unfortunately I Can't harvest them. They're right next to the agave. But they're triple the, the seed production. The ones that are growing right next to the agave are much healthier and much happier. There's also. I've had three cover crops in there from Nebraska, heavy cover crop to some pollinator mixes and a lot of things that, that I've had specialty blended up for that exact area and they, the alfalfa keeps coming back in there and it looks so much better. So I, I just, I think that there is something. Plant interaction that unfortunately I can't do it in my broad acres. But in the agave and for trees and, and vineyards and things like that, I definitely think there's something to be explored with putting other crops around that. I, I think they just, they're meant to grow together instead of separately in a big, wide open field. I wish I could figure out how to do it in my broad acres, but I just. Especially for seed, it doesn't work. But that's one of the things. The plant interaction has been fantastic in the agave because of all the different crops.

It's, it's a, quite an, an intriguing observation. I'm wondering is okay, does the agave, and obviously it's a desert adapted plant with different photosynthetic pathways and all the various pieces that that means and the implications from a soil microbiome perspective. So there's a few thoughts that went through my mind and one of those is did the benefits from whatever that microbiome association or root association is, to what degree do those transfer to the following generation to those seed. You might want to start collecting seed there for your next generation.

Go through there?

Yeah. If they're producing triple the yields, it'd be interesting to see how that transfers.

It's just, it's one of the, the, the small observations that I've made. My wife laughs at me. I spend probably 90% of my time walking up and down Those agave and 10% of my time driving around the other fields because they're so broad and so big that and, but I can walk the entire agave field in one, you know, one hour. I can walk up and back and look at the whole thing and I'll just, you know, I, I name all my plants. But it's, it's interesting to see. It's, it's a very nice little snapshot of everything, what everything could be if you were able to put everything out there and, and just not have to worry about what it's going to produce because it's just almost a test plot. And I'm, I'm very interested to see what all the interactions do.

There's so much left for us to explore and so much to be observed. Well, Jay, thank you. Thank you for being here, for the work that you're doing, for sharing your experiences and your observations. And I look forward to coming to visit at some point and having more conversations like this one.

Absolutely. I look forward to it. I think Pedro is coming out sometime this year. He wants. He was pretty curious as to how everything works here because it's, it's a whole different world, the way we irrigate, the way we have to farm. So I think he's looking. He's coming out.

All right. Thank you, Jay.

Thank you very much.

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