Episode 181: Plant Immunity Through Custom Foliars and Targeted Nutrition with Peter Henry

Hi friends, this is John Kempf. Welcome back to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast, where we have all kinds of fun conversations related to improving our soil's health and our plants' health and ultimately our health by the cultivation and production of very high quality food. Thank you all for being here, for tuning in and for listening. I'm here today with Peter Henry from Pieter Rico, who is someone I've been looking forward to chatting with for quite a while. Peter, I've, I've heard about the awesome things that you're doing on your operation from our team here at AEA. Tell us a bit about your personal journey and story and your farming context and what you have going on.

Cool. So, extremely excited to be on the podcast. It's kind of surreal hearing the intro. Generally, I'm listening to the podcast on our way to drop fruit off or pick up products and things like that. So, Amazing to be here. I guess like super, super high level, I've been more or less full-time farming for about 6 years now. I would say we've had this farm for 6 years. We purchased it in the pandemic and I've been like really living off of farming for around 3 years now where it's a full-time job that supports our family and the entire workforce. I guess like super quick, I don't come from a farming background. I mean, I grew up between the United States, Puerto Rico, spent some time in other places like Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia. So I would say like farming has always kind of been around me in the sense that in most of those countries and even in the United States, there's always farms, like in Florida, California, you always see farming around you, you hear about farmers, you kind of see what they're going through, you consume their products. But I never thought that this would be what I do for a living until maybe 3 years ago. So I mean, like, I was pretty big on baseball most of my life. Like, I was, I guess, like, good enough to play in college at a D1 school. I wasn't good enough really to make it to the pros or maybe like my mental whereabouts on the baseball game weren't necessarily where they need to be to kind of handle the ups and downs of like having a 3-strikeout game and trying to bounce back from that. So when baseball was done, my most typical pathway was, well, I need to make some money, so let me get into tech and I'm bilingual so I could work in sales or something within Latin America. And that's pretty much what I did. And I was able to kind of get pretty high up into like the VP level of a couple different startups and start my own startup, mainly in like digital identity fintech space. But I always kind of like had an idea that I wanted to live somewhere tropical, maybe Puerto Rico, maybe Mexico, and have my farm. I just didn't know when that would be. And so basically that happened in the pandemic where everything went remote. So we just took a trip, my wife and I, to the Dominican Republic, stayed there for a couple of months. And then I just was like, well, how much would a small, you know, abandoned coffee farm or something, how much would that cost? And it turned out to be not too much. So we ended up purchasing a farm of about like 7 hectares of land. I'm not sure what that is in acres, but it was purely—

15 to 20. It was 2.7 times. Yeah, around 20.

Yeah, so it was abandoned farm. Like, the guy who had it before actually worked for like a, um, one of the entities that does stuff for like reforestation. Um, so he reforested with a bunch of like non-endemic pine trees and maybe some other things like that, but it was kind of just like abandoned. There's a little shack there, so we, we just set up a couple solar panels so I could work remotely, um, and kind of like do farming on the weekend or after the, the workday was done.. But at that point in 2020, it really wasn't something that I was thinking about doing full-time. And I guess a little bit of background into how we got to this part was probably in high school, I started roasting coffee. So buying beans from Sweet Maria's and roasting it. And I think that that's really what got me into farming because I started seeing like, oh, there's these different varietal types and these different flavor profiles. And stuff like that. So at first it was kind of like, specialty coffee's really cool. How do I roast my own beans? Maybe I'll open up my own roastery, but that's quickly turned into actually wanting to grow the trees myself and kind of do all that, the entire process of coffee. So when we bought the farm, the actually the idea around me working on the farm was to turn it into kind of a specialty coffee farm. The whole thing, shade growing, all that kind of stuff. I didn't really know much, too much about farming, row cropping, all that kind of stuff. But that's how we kind of got here. And we actually did plant some coffee. We planted the entire farm in coffee. But I guess when you do something the first time and you're kind of like a newbie to it, you don't necessarily understand the complexities about varieties or the importance of good seed genetics, good nurseries and stuff like that. So we went through pretty much, we did all the mistakes that you're probably going to make. We quickly—

Oh, the pain, the pain of learning from experience. Oh yeah.

So we quickly got rid of the coffee. We still have some, like a couple thousand plants, but we really flipped that into actually a passion fruit operation. And from the passion fruit operation, we got to where we are today where we're mainly focusing on a niche market in the United States and Canada where our buyers are generally supermarkets and direct-to-consumers in the African diaspora, mainly from Nigeria, who are looking for their heirloom type vegetables and tubers to be able to cook their traditional foods. And currently right now in the market, they have to adapt to substitutes which don't necessarily have the same flavor profiles or the quality that they're looking for. So that's kind of how we got into that. I'm happy to jump into how we got to that niche market as well as it's a pretty interesting story.

Yeah, I'd love to get that story and then for you to elaborate a little bit on— many of our listeners I'm sure are not familiar with what the production of passion fruit or some of these more tropical plants looks like. So tell us a little bit about the actual process and the management of the farming operation as well.

Of course. Yep. Passion fruit, we're actually going to be going back to it. I just picked up a new variety of a passion fruit called Gulupa, which is from Huila in Colombia. So I guess it's pretty similar to what you guys have in the United States where it's a smaller red passion fruit. In Colombia, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, you generally will find the larger yellow one. In the US, you probably won't find those larger yellow passion fruits because they're actually banned from import. I think there's only like 2 countries that can import passion fruits, and generally the consumers and the buyers want the red passion fruit. So you generally won't find that unless you go out of the country. So The variety that we were growing before was a Brazilian variety where it's like a giant passion fruit. It's a variety called Sol. It's from Brazil, and each passion fruit weighs about 450 to 600 grams. They're just these massive fruits, but the ones that are better for export are generally red and smaller, weighing about 100, 110 grams.

Grams.

In terms of a passion fruit orchard, I guess, and just excuse me if some of my terms might sound weird in English because I literally only know most terms of farming in Spanish, so I'm going to try to get them going. But essentially, a passion fruit orchard is more or less set up like a wine vineyard. It's a semi-perennial plant, so you could generally push it to maybe 3 or 4 years before you have to, um, replant. Maybe it could possibly go, uh, a little bit longer, but if you want optimal production per tree and per hectare, um, generally replanting is going to be important. And I would say in passion fruit, a lot of people have issues, um, because it is quite susceptible to a bunch of disease. So you generally have, um, Atrachnose, which is a big one. You have a lot of like Pithium, Fusarium, um, damping off, Rhizoctonia, all those good guys. But really Fusarium is a pretty big one that attacks the root zone, um, in most plantations. And then a lot of like leaf blight. So you'll have a lot of, um, issues with Alternaria, which is the big one. Which is pretty dangerous to the passion fruit because it will dry up the plant if you don't catch it soon enough. And what really affects the quality of the fruit really is the, the Atrachnose and Septoria type blight. You might have some bacterial diseases, but generally these are the things that make it so a lot of passion fruit growers have a lot of issues and have to use a ton of, uh, chemicals. And so I always say, if you are going to any of these countries, uh, beware of the passion fruit that you're buying because it's probably pretty high on the residual chemical level because they're using everything from, um, carbendazim to all your triazoles to Ridomil, like all those types of things, um, on a constant basis. And because they're not going for export, a lot of times they're spraying today harvesting tomorrow and it's just gotta be careful. And I think a lot of that has to do with possibly genetics with the seeds. A lot of it has to, a lot of these diseases actually come from the nurseries, which has been a big challenge for us across the board with all of our vegetables. We generally have our own nursery right now on the farm that we built out to avoid those issues. But I would say at least in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Mexico, or have experience in that, most of these horticultural crops bring disease into the fields and they cause, they have a lot of economic losses for growers. So in our case, we actually had to deal with all of those diseases plus a virus. And the problem with the virus, which is, I'm not sure what the variety of the virus was. It could have been a tomato virus or it could have been a tobacco virus, but One of those varieties actually lives within the seeds, so it's really hard to know until you're 7 months in and then you start seeing issues with the virus. And so the virus will generally create kind of like a shriveled fruit that looks really weird and make the leaves look pretty blotchy. So those are a bunch of things that you have to figure out. But in terms of the way you can grow passion fruit, generally you grow it um, like a, more or less like a grapevine, but you just need to have a taller trellis system. We generally put it around in feet, maybe 7 feet high from the ground, um, with a 12-gauge wire, um, and generally bamboo stakes. And then generally you're planting— traditionally you would plant about 2.5 meters by 3 meters. Um, what I figured out is actually when you do a bunch of different cutting, um, or trimmings on the, on the plant, you could actually increase the density a lot more. So I'm actually planting around 65 centimeters by about 3 meters. So I'm increasing that, um, a lot more, but it takes a lot of prunings to be able to get the, uh, the plant to, to fruit and be productive. During its life cycle. And yeah, I think the other cool thing about passion fruit, and if you have a vine at home, is if you want good production, the number one thing you could really do besides giving it good nutrition with calcium and moly and boron is the manual pollinization. So you have to pollinate it by hand every single day. Wow. If you don't pollinate it by hand, you'll have a very poor production. The the fruit might look like it's full, but it will be empty. And there's only one bee that pollinates it. It's like a silacopa. It's a big bumblebee type thing, but the regular bees love the pollen, but they won't do anything but rob the pollen from your tree. So if you're not getting out there around 12 in the afternoon to pollinate it by hand, good production, like bees will be happy. But, um, your pocketbook will probably be suffering.

Wow. All right, so I want to dig deeper into, uh, you mentioned the number one thing is good nutrition management. And I know based on— I, I'm not really familiar with your operation, but people have been highly recommending that I speak with you, and that is indicator to me that you're doing something different from the mainstream. So what's— I'd like to understand, how are you managing diseases and how are you How are you managing nutrition and how does that compare with either what you've been doing historically or what contemporary practices are?

Yeah, for sure. I think so. My, my kind of journey to the regen ag space, if you will, kind of like, don't like the labels of regen and all these other things because I think it's just, it's like, they're great for dividing people. Yeah. That, that's what it's always like, us versus them or stuff like that. I, I feel like, There's a couple things. Like, for me, I live on the farm. We have workers here that also live on the farm, and our house is quite close to the, to the crops. So just from like my own health standpoint, I don't necessarily feel comfortable mixing up a bunch of different mixtures with a bunch of different molecules and spraying those just from a, I guess, an egotistical, selfish standpoint. I don't think that that's a great idea. Second off, if you're looking to actually export to Europe or the US, you have to be very careful about what molecules you put on because you have the pre-harvest interval timeframe. And so it actually limits the amount of chemicals you can use. And I would say the last part though is actually from a standpoint of what I see works and what doesn't work. And I've just seen that chemicals don't necessarily do much. I think they're good tools, uh, in the sense that if you have an issue and it's going to cause an economic issue for you, um, down the line, and you can understand how to use a chemical in the right way, that's great. But if you don't correct the underlying issues of nutrition and biology, um, after which, or before, from a preventative manner, um, you're gonna be basically a slave to using chemical after chemical after chemical. And as these things, like for example aphids, that basically can morph— like one aphid can turn into millions of aphids in a blink of an eye— there's no way that those chemicals are going to penetrate all of those guys at one time, and you could just cause resistance and issues. So, um, basically how I've been approaching nutrition is One, trying to understand what the plants need in, in terms of nutrition to prevent or to cure any type of issues that are ailments that come onto the farm. And then see how I can incorporate more biology and more carbon into the system to allow me to stop using completely any type of chemical input., or even like a copper fungicide type thing. So in terms of new nutrition management, I think like my main thing came from when we started the passion fruit crop. We had a bunch of issues with a couple of the diseases. And so me kind of being a newbie into both passion fruit and kind of into farming, it was like my second year. And kind of my first year actually doing like a real agricultural setup. As you know, with coffee, it's fairly easy. They're perennial trees. You don't have so many like nutritional requirements as you would with a horticultural crop. And so I kind of, you know, followed for the first few months the traditional way of doing it. I had a couple colleagues and friends in Colombia that do big production. I kind of just like followed their plan. So you know, uh, Rito Mill, mix it with some carbendazine, um, maybe come through with some other type of molecule. Um, maybe, you know, you need a neonicotinoid insecticide. Um, and, and kind of like you're, you're throwing these things on preventatively. Um, and then you're not necessarily focusing on, on the nutrition. So while there was nutrition in like the products that they were recommending, were like chelated with EDTA and some other things that I kind of was— I wasn't necessarily convinced. Um, as I started questioning what they were, were telling me and seeing the results that I was getting and that the disease never went away, um, that's when I started to, to really dive into like plant nutrition, um, understand the, the whole context between mineral deficiencies and mineral excess. And why certain things happen at certain timeframes within the crop's life cycle. And that kind of drove me into solving issues from a more nutritional aspect than from a more chemical aspect. So I quickly got out of that and started trying to find a way where I could reduce that chemical load. And be able to, you know, have a healthy crop and have a, have something that produces money but also doesn't kill me in the process and kills other people eating it in the process and killing all the bees and everything like that. So that's kind of how I, I got into, to that time frame, into that mindset.

So bring us, just maybe flash forward to today. Well, you could also talk about the transition, but what does, what does your nutrition management look like today?

Yep. So today, um, we mainly focus on foliar feeding, and we also do a couple soil drenches right now. And I also focus on like a pretty aggressive pre-planting, um, soil amendment, um, plan. So generally what I do is before planting or anything like that, I'm taking a complete Melek, um, with your moly, with your total carbon to nitrogen, um, with your nitrates and your ammonium. And then I'm also taking a Haney. And then from there, I'll— and I'll take a soil test per irrigation sector. So our farm is pretty mountainous terrain and we, um, have a river that goes through it. So on one side of the river, the soils are like super red and very high manganese and low iron— well, relatively low iron to manganese. Like, um, to put in perspective, we're about 208 parts per million in manganese and about 80 parts per million in iron on this side of the river. And on the other side of the river, um, we're about 108 parts per million iron and about 60 to 50 parts per million manganese on that side of the river. We're talking about generally red sandy loam soils, pretty acidic. Before liming, you're looking at like a 4.9 to 5.2.

Ouch.

Yeah, it's pretty gnarly. And generally we have like two seasons, like a rainy season and a dry season. Right now it's just kind of—

I was just about to ask, what is— what do the rainfall patterns and the quantity of rainfall look like?

Yeah, so generally, I mean, you're supposed to have from around November to now, it should be dry. And then in May, the rain should start picking up and roll through the entire monsoon season into November again. What that's kind of looked like in the last 3 years has really been unpredictable, where, for example, last year it rained until April, stopped raining in May, and then it rained again until November. And then it just rained every single day, um, from November into, into like about 2 weeks ago. And then the rains have stopped. So really, like, May, which used to be the, the rainy season in most of the subtropics, um, at least in this part of the world, has turned into more like a dry season. So May, June, July, August, September October are pretty dry, which makes things actually a lot easier for us to manage. Luckily, we have water and we're able to irrigate. And then in the season when it's a little bit colder, it also is now raining a lot more because a lot of the cold fronts push down and pass a lot of rain into the system. So I would say from a management standpoint, one of our biggest hurdles besides the highly acidic and minerally complex and the complexity on the mineral side of things on the soil is the rain. Because when you're looking at those types of soils, when the soil gets saturated and reduced, you're looking at issues, maybe not from a— I haven't ever seen, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, but I haven't seen manganese or iron toxicities, but I have seen that those things do cause deficiencies or issues with other nutrients. So for example, like generally phosphorus, potassium is something that is generally down. Calcium is also something that is generally an issue. And boron and molybdenum are, are generally an issue. So when we pulled out the soil test, I mean, some of the biggest limiting factors besides the excess of manganese and iron have been kind of like the absence of molybdenum. I think it's like 0.01 parts per million on across the entire farm.

So it's essentially basically the detection threshold.

Yeah. So there's basically like no molybdenum and then we're at like 20 to 30 parts per million in nitrates and around like 6 or 7 in ammonium. So obviously there's gonna be some issues with disease and, and bugs there because if I don't have molybdenum, then how am I gonna convert those nitrates into into something useful for the plant. On the high manganese side of things, just to add more complexity to it, we have 60 parts per million in sulfur. Intriguing.

That's interesting. Like, I guess that's, you have an igneous soil. It's uncommon to have that combination of high sulfur with the high rainfall pattern that you have unless you have an igneous soil. Yeah, it's fascinating.

And that's on just one side of the river, because as soon as I cross the other side of the river, I'm at 10 to 11 parts per million. So it's, that's been quite interesting. And on the side where there's high sulfur, I generally have most of the disease pressure because I mean, with the sulfur, from what I understand, that's going to be, you know, blocking out the calcium that I have. It's going to be acidifying the soil as it gets kind of like saturated. It might create a more a less oxygenated environment and creates all sorts of issues there.

So in a sense, from a soil type or a soil mineral profile, it's almost like you're farming two different farms.

Essentially two different farms. And I have four irrigation sectors on the four different sides of things. And so generally what I'm trying to do to keep kind of like sanity and costs down, I'm trying to have a semi-omni approach, but I do have different varieties growing on different sections so that if I do need to do a foliar, you know, for the side with the high sulfur, that I don't want to add more sulfur to the system or something like that. I can, you know, do that one day and then I can go to the other side and do another application the next day.

So if you have irrigation available, why did you choose to primarily focus on foliar applications?

So the complexity, and I'll talk a little about the irrigation system because I think one of my biggest challenges here, especially running horticulture stuff. So with passion fruit, it was a little bit easier to run irrigation. We did micro-aspirators, one per tree, but you're talking about, you know, 60 centimeters, like on a, on a line of plants, you're talking about, you know, a plant between 60 to maybe 2 meters between trees, and you have 3 meters in an alleyway of space. So there's less irrigation, there's less materials that you need to irrigate from that. But I think the biggest limiting factor for me in terms of irrigation and why I'm not necessarily fertigating with drip line is I, Actually, I physically can't do that because we have the mountainous terrain that we've terraced out. So we have everything terraced on kind of like what you would see in maybe some of the farms in Asia where they terrace them out. We've done that by hand with a pick and hammer, me and the crew, which is like 4 other people, and we created our own A-frame. So we terraced everything out and so we have everything with contour lines. And so they do sell like a drip line where it is a, it's kind of like a hose where it might be able to follow the curve. But the cost of that is extremely elevated. And so what I actually did was I, because I'm pretty, I would say I've become an expert at creating like a trellis system from the passion fruit. So we just created a trellis system in the entire farm. And then I took the irrigation lines and I, instead of crossing them perpendicular to the slope, I actually went with the slope and just sent the irrigation lines down with micro-aspirators or micro-sprinklers. And so I have that connected to a Venturi system and an injector. And so I actually can do foliars from that system when I don't have to— Awesome. A backpack sprayer. So in that sense, I could wet everything. I could get everything irrigated fairly quickly. So where a drip system, I would need to run the drip line for maybe an hour on a section or maybe 30 minutes. I could pretty much get the water that the plants need in maybe 5 minutes.

So you mentioned that you are primarily doing foliar applications, but that doesn't mean that you're using a sprayer. You're sending it out through the micro sprinkler system essentially.

Yes, I would say in last year, 100% of all the applications were sent through the sprayer for, through the irrigation system sprayer, just essentially like a pivot. I, I would say like I, I basically designed like my own pivot. Right now to hone down the nutrition a little bit better, it's kind of like a mix. So I'm doing 50% backpack sprayer and 50% sending it through the system. And what I've kind of done with the system is the things I send through the system are generally your humics and your biology and some stuff like molybdenum. So for the humics, we're using Humicarb, that goes in, Holofoss goes in, we'll use Spectrum PSB, that will go in, white sugar will go into the mix as well. And maybe sometimes BioCoat Gold. Maybe I'm the only one using it like that, but spraying it out. I think that there's, I mean, there should be microbes on the leaves and on the floor and everything. So just trying to broadcast that as best as I can.

There are indeed.

And so from there, what we'll do is if I need to be more precise on some sort of application, like for example with pinion, I'll go through with a backpack sprayer., or if I really want to, you know, get potassium into the fruit, and I know that we have a harvest coming up in like 4 or 5 days or maybe 10 days, then we'll go with the backpack sprayer and we'll probably maybe do like Haloka with some Rebound Mali and some boron in there and spray that out. But it really just depends on kind of like the workload as well with what we're doing because for me to go with the backpack sprayer, if I'm spraying myself and I have 2 other backpacks, then I need to have, you know, 2 people or 3 people carrying, you know, jugs of the liquid up the mountain, this and that. And so I kind of like lose a couple hours of work time that we can be using to weed or trellis or stuff like that. So it's kind of just trying to figure out what works best at that moment and just understanding the best way to do it. But I mean, the system that we created is really great because I could essentially do a full year across like 3 hectares right now in like an hour and 20 minutes. Just me. Like I prepped the tank, like pull the diesel pump, and then I just have to go run to the other side of the river and switch out the switch up the key valves and do that. But I could, I could get through that just myself pretty easily. So I think it just really depends on what you're, you're trying to do or how much product you're trying to use because you will— in this system, I have to use probably 3 or 4x the amount of product that I would be using on a backpack sprayer just because of the dilution from the pass-through. Yeah.

So we got to this conversation about nutrition management and how you're managing nutrition. From a discussion on disease pressure, disease susceptibility, we're describing the quite intense disease pressure that this crop has generally. How have you— how has that disease pressure shifted with your different approach to nutrition management?

Correct. So, so yeah, I think like, just to follow back on that, because I think I got a little bit off topic on the irrigation system. So essentially how we manage the nutrition is first and foremost, the soil test, extremely important to have that data point to understand what you want to apply, what products you need, and what diseases might come. And so generally what we do to control pH is liming, and we'll mix that lime to add a little bit more calcium to the profile with gypsum, but only on the side with low sulfur. On the side where we have lots of sulfur, the gypsum doesn't go in there. And then we might even add in some SOP, some potassium sulfate as well to some of those mixes. And there's a pretty good quality granular humic available here. So I generally will mix everything with a granular humic as we kind of like broadcast that onto the growing lines. So once we do that, then my main focus in terms of nutrition from a disease prevention standpoint is focusing on the minerals that I know are going to be difficult for the plant to get. So generally, I'm focusing on calcium, I'm focusing on boron, I'm focusing on molybdenum, zinc, copper, and actually iron, just given the antagonism with the high manganese. So those are generally the main stacks that I try to focus on. And I would also add phosphorus is something that just from an observational standpoint, I've seen that the plants really respond well to phosphorus applications. So really no nitrogen at all.

How common is that for passion fruit production? I'm not familiar with common nitrogen applications.

So for passion fruit, for the growers that know about passion fruit, they generally don't use nitrogen too much. A lot of them will use the, maybe like a calcium nitrate maybe ammonium sulfate in the beginning stages. But for passion fruit, if you use a lot of nitrogen, especially in the early cycle of the plant, you'll have a non-reproductive plant. You'll have a very vegetative plant, and it's really hard to reverse that. So I guess for—

It'd be interesting if more crops had that problem.

Oh, and I mean, that's, from the passion fruit into our peppers, into our African yams, okra, all of those crops, African eggplant, there's very little, if not any nitrogen. The only nitrogen that might get into the system would be like an organic nitrogen, for example, from MacroPak or maybe what's in SeaShield or an amino acid.

But both of which are very, very small.

Yeah, there's small amounts. And I mean, I have to check the— I don't know the exact numbers on the soil test, but I mean, we have per acre around like 28 to 30 pounds of nitrate and maybe 9 to 10 pounds of ammonium. So if I were to ever need to use some sort of nitrogen, probably the only one I would really use would be maybe a small foliar with an MA with a MAP or MAP and obviously complex that with a Fulvic and a Rebound Moly. But I generally don't need to, I haven't had the need to do that. And on some areas where I've just played around with and I've put like a 12-24-12 or like a 15-6-25 granular application, within 2 weeks that plant's gonna get some sort of disease pressure from an insect and it will get some sort of issue with like bacterial blight or some fungi will get it. So I try to really stay away from the nitrogen and really focus on kind of like the key nutrients that we need. I think from a nutritional standpoint, where I'd like to get at would be to start doing sap tests. We have just logistically, for me, it's been a little bit difficult for me to get those out, just given where we're based. And I kind of like need to— maybe it's my ADHD type personality, but I kind of like, I want to get that, you know, that decision. I want to be able to basically take the sap in the field and understand what I have right now so that the next day I can put on a foliar application. Just given in the horticulture crops like a pepper, eggplant, okra, you kind of need to make that decision right away. And so waiting maybe a week or even 2 weeks for a result, you pass that timeframe when you really need to make a decision on if I have a molybdenum or a potassium deficiency and I could spray tomorrow potassium, for example, foliar, then maybe I can get rid of aphids or some sort of whitefly. So we need to get on that. But I would say from how I've been managing that is just kind of like knowing my soil really well and understanding what is going to be more or less efficient from visual signs. So one thing that has actually worked out really well for us is this year on our pepper crops, I decided to intercrop it with sweet corn. Because I have the grand idea that the corn would inject carbon into the system and consume the excess nitrogen, but it would also serve as living stakes for me to tie the peppers up.

Yep.

So we have a ton of bamboo on our property. I planted hundreds of trees of bamboo, but it takes a lot of time and effort to go pick the bamboo, cut it, putting the stakes. So preemptively we did that. And what I did notice, because those, those sweet corn got almost zero nutrition, they just were kind of like left to, to do their, their thing. And basically the, the main nutritional deficiency that I saw visually on, on the sweet corn was potassium. No nitrogen issues, nothing with phosphorus, nothing with any of the, the micros, no mag magnesium or anything like that. It was mainly potassium, which kind of gave me the clue that if it's deficient in corn while it's a C4 and it's not a pepper, it's probably going to have the same issue on the pepper, even if it's not showing that, which allows me to know that maybe we should be adding a little bit more potassium to our foliar program. So yeah, that's kind of like how we've been doing it. Right now, but I think adding in sap would be super helpful.

So you still haven't answered my question about diseases. What does disease pressure look like today?

Okay, so today disease pressure actually varies per soil and variety. So right now we have 2 varieties of peppers on this side of the river, which is called the high manganese side of the river and high sulfur side of the river. We have a Capsicum annum variety. It's an heirloom Nigerian bell pepper, if you will. So it behaves a lot like a bell pepper. But the, the fruits are a little bit smaller and they're spicy, like almost like a jalapeño type spice. On the Capsicum annum, those guys, I don't know if it's a genetic thing from the seed or if it's just more propense to, to disease. Um, but generally those have a lot of issues with, um, the bacterial leaf spotting. And they do have some issues with sometimes Rhizoctonia, um, Phytophthora, Fusarium, all of the root issues, um, that, um, you would get in, in a pepper, especially during rainy season. On the Capsicum chinense, we have two, um, different sub-varieties of those. One's called ensuka and one's called atorodo. So an ensuka pepper and an atorodo pepper are basically African heirloom descendants of a Scotch bonnet, um, that were probably brought over in that transatlantic, uh, slave trade or something, and they kind of became endemic in Nigeria. And those peppers don't have any issues. Um, there's no leaf spot, there's no root issues. I'm almost convinced that I don't even need to fertilize them, or maybe I could cut the fertilizer on them by half the rate. So it's a pretty interesting dynamic right now on our farm because I have one side, which unfortunately is the side that's closest to the house, and I have to see it every single morning and every single night. It's kind of like the side that is affected by some of these diseases. Now, on the other side, it looks just amazing. We also have tobacco, which also, the two varieties of tobacco which have no disease pressure at all, no bugs, no mold, no bacteria. They don't even get any fertilization. And so it's been actually really interesting to see the kind of like the relationship between the soil types and the varieties. And I think in terms of us managing these tatashi peppers, which are the Nigerian bell peppers, we've been doing a lot of things that have definitely helped. And we've successfully, after the last month of using pinion, we've successfully gotten rid of all bacterial leaf spot and any of the issues on the stem. Which, you know, hey, I didn't even know you were using pinion. Yeah, yeah, we've been, we've been using, uh, pinion for the last 6 weeks. Been doing a, a trial, and, um, that's almost day and night on the, on the, on the side of the, the peppers that have that bacterial leaf spotting. It's gotten that fixed. Um, it's taken a couple a couple of pass-throughs, but within— with every single foliar we do, we add in pinion and we do some just like only pinion foliar with that. But that has really been the night and day correction on that side. And I also think that it also coincides— I don't know, but it also coincides with me finally getting my hands on Rebound Copper and adding that into the mix. So it could be that those plants were crying out for, you know, a nice healthy dose of copper with the moly and with the pinion to, to get that dried up.

Particularly with your high presence of manganese and iron, them possibly needing some copper would not be a surprise.

Yes. And you get a, you get a significant greening effect from, from copper applications, especially intriguing the chelated ones.

Yeah.

So I think, I think like the, I mean, the pinion definitely works for the leaf spots and things like that. So now that's not an issue. What's been our biggest issue right now currently that we're dealing with is on these peppers. So it was raining all the entire growing season, raining, raining, raining, raining, raining, raining, pretty cold weather. Like we were dropping at night into like 10 degrees Celsius. Every night. And then one day it just decided not to rain and become— and get really hot and dried up. And within 2 days I started seeing some wilt on some of those same peppers. So we finally corrected like the leaf spot, and then I'm starting to see some wilt. So first I kind of didn't know what it was. I was thinking that it might be like Ralstonia, which would have been terrible. So I pulled out some of those affected plants and cut them open and used both field lark and AI to kind of like understand what it was and like put them in a water jar and see if there's like some milky substance coming out. It wasn't that. So we kind of like were able to break it down to a couple things. It's possibly like a mixture of like Phytophthora, It could be some Rhizoctonia, it could be some Pithium. It's probably a mixture of some of, some of those, plus maybe some Fusarium, cuz they're there in the soil anyways. But also, just root stress from, from the heavy rains when it was washing away some of the, the, the soil around the root zone, then it got hot, so it oxidized. And then since the plants are quite big and filling up and trying to fill in you know, 10 or 15 fruit at a time and constantly flowering, those are the first ones to kind of get affected.

So I have a question for you, Peter, going back to your copper comment. With your high manganese and iron soil and the responses that you got from copper, have you experimented with cobalt at all?

I haven't. The only cobalt we've used is what's in MicroPak.

Okay, there's a bit there, there's enough there to make a difference.

But I I don't know if maybe that would be interesting to, because I think from that perspective, and I actually wanted to talk to you about that, not just cobalt, but I was doing some research on silver and thinking about maybe it might be interesting to add a small, tiny quantity of silver into into this part of the system to test out if that might help with these kind of like, um, crown root diseases on these more susceptible peppers. Because I think in terms of the, the annum type, um, peppers to your bell peppers, your Fresno chilies, your jalapeños, their root structure is quite superficial and it's not very strong, and they are filling big peppers. Whereas your habanero types, your chinenses, fill small peppers and have massive roots, and they kind of look like a coffee tree, like they're, they're really robust. Yeah, so yeah, um, possibly cobalt would be interesting. I was thinking maybe some sort of, um, small tiny amount of silver that might be able to boost some sort of, uh, um, you know, immune defense in, in the plant could be something. Where I've seen what couple tools that I've been using apart from your guys' products that have worked across all of the crops that we've run from peppers to passion fruits to yams have been phosphites. And so I think one of my goals for the future will be how do I stop being reliant on phosphites?

Yeah.

But I have seen that phosphites haven't been able to help, like a potassium or calcium phosphite has been able to, to help us reduce disease pressure without having to succumb to some sort of chemical, chemical spray. So I'm thinking like, you know, pinion is probably one way to do that. Maybe what you're talking about with cobalt could be another way. To do that possibly small amounts of like a chelated silver could help us well to reduce the reliance on phosphorus.

Yeah. Chelated silver is worth paying attention to. Iodine is worth paying attention to. Selenium is worth paying attention to once you start getting into those. But for those trace elements, and I'm sure you're already doing this, you really want to pay attention to where the Goldilocks zone is in the soil profile from a pH perspective because you have some From what you're describing, you have some— I maybe use the term volatility— you have soils that can fluctuate quite rapidly, and that can spell the difference between optimal applications and toxic applications quite quickly with some of those trace elements.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think about like a volatility is a, is a great way to describe the soils. They're definitely difficult to work with, but what I think ultimately the issues that are happening right now, I mean, some of them are due to climate type stuff and just kind of like was in the wrong place at the wrong time for this variety. And maybe I grew it on the wrong side of the farm. I should have flipped it. In terms of that sense. I think a lot of these things have to do with the genetics of this one pepper as well. And so, you know, part of our work that we're doing right now is trying to understand as we scale this variety up, because it is a variety that like a lot of our customers really like and it's an important part of their diet, is how do we scale it and improve the genetics somehow through maybe, maybe cloning the peppers in vitro or finding a better rootstock to place them on. But I think like we need to dive into that sort of, that side of things to reduce this disease pressure overall. Because I think one of the things that is extremely interesting is, you know, you have on this farm, you have your peppers, two types, and you have a tobacco crop. And we've grown tomatoes before and I've never had this issue. And now I have this issue on these peppers. And when I look into where they come from in Nigeria, they also have issues with these peppers. And actually it's a, A variety that's slowly disappearing because more and more farmers, at least in Nigeria, are actually growing, um, your new hybrids on the, uh, red bell peppers just because economically it's just not feasible for them to, um, to do, you know, or they don't have access to the right nutrition. Um, and it just becomes very, very difficult to get those things to market. So I think part of a lot of the things, whether it's like regen or getting into organic or getting away from from chemicals and just being better, we're just reducing your input load, is also finding good genetics and good resistant varieties, or maybe like a good rootstock or something to be able to also have something more robust that is more resistant over time. So I think that's something that we probably need to figure out as well, at least for this variety.

One of the questions that I have for you is I've been thinking about— you've been on this journey now for 6 years, learning very rapidly, sometimes painfully. Um, what has surprised you? What has been unexpected or intrigued you?

Um, yeah, I mean, uh, I would say farming. This is probably the hardest thing I've— I mean, I've worked like long hours before when I was working in tech, And you also have the stressors of your investors and the board and all that kind of stuff. But farming takes that to the next level. So I think every day, and it seems like in farming, it's always like every day there's something new, something breaks, there's some issue, you fix something and like 10 more things. Like you take one step forward and 5 steps back. But I think one of the most surprising things, at least for me, is that As long as you're on top of these things and you're passionate about what you're doing on your land and what you're building, there's always a solution to it. And sometimes I think one of the most surprising things that I've seen is sometimes you make a foliar application and the next day your problem is gone. And I'm not talking about using a neonicotinoid for whiteflies, but I'm talking about, well, you know, a rebound, a Mali application on an eggplant with Humicarb and BioCo Gold and Spectrum, and the next day there's no more whiteflies. And I've seen that happen on eggplant. It actually, we did, that happened to us on a couple areas of tobacco where because we didn't fertilize the corn, some aphids came from the corn and into the tobacco once we cut the corn down and harvested it. And so we just did a rebound moly, humicarb rebound moly, small amount of MicroPak and Holofoss, and did a foliar with that with BioCoat. And the next day, I couldn't find any aphids and I couldn't find any whiteflies, and they haven't come back. So I've done that. I've been able to repeat that many times. So it's been pretty interesting to see how you can use nutrition at fairly low rates to get rid of some of these problems that most people can't get rid of.

Or they use insecticides for.

Or they use an insecticide for. So I mean, in that application, I could have said, screw it, let's put a Spinosad in. On it and just let's get rid of the issue. But one of the reasons why I'm not touching even like a Spinosadum is because we have so many ladybug larvas everywhere and just ladybugs all over the place. So I'm trying not to kill these guys that are working for free. So it's been really interesting to see how you can just maybe have some faith in some nutrition make sure that you're mixing it the right way with the right pH and clean water and all that kind of stuff, and just see how fast those results happen in the plant. I would say that in terms of like, um, something that's really cool and, and that just is really amazing about plants themselves is that as long as you give them a small little boost of something that they might have needed, um, they respond extremely well to it. So that's been extremely surprising, and I think like it, it makes it worthwhile, all like the, the hard work and the stress and the no sleep and all that kind of, kind of stuff, because you could see how you could actually move the needle without having to use toxic substances.

For, for your environment, your context, what, what were the application rates of molybdenum and, and other compounds needed to achieve those results?

So I'm generally using It really depends on what it is, but generally every week and every single foliar, I'm putting in between 300 and 500 cc of Rebound Moly per 240 liters of water. We have about 240-liter water tanks, so I generally will fill those out and we'll spray those out. For Rebound Boron, that also kind of goes in every single week. And I kind of—

how many hectares is that supposed to cover?

One tank of those will get me— that's not going to cover a hectare. It gets me about 5,000 meters squared, half a hectare, more or less. And we're generally prepping between— we're generally using right now between almost 1,800— yeah, almost 1,080 liters per application to around 1,220 liters, more or less. So we're going fairly— we're consuming a lot of the moly. But generally, I've been using that dosage of moly and seeing really good results, trying to kind of like spoon-feed it every single week and just have a constant. So supply of, of moly for the plant. Um, I'll also use about— per one of those 240-liter tanks, we'll put in between 200 and 300, uh, cc of rebound boron, and then around 300 to 400 cc of rebound copper if I'm using that, and around 200 to 300 cc of rebound iron. Um, Those are generally those rates. For Halophos, I'm generally in a little bit higher. I'm going about 1.5 to 2 liters per, um, per one of those tanks and, and mixing those in. Um, Macro Pack 2, more or less in that, um, in that range. And I would say one thing that's actually interesting, it has nothing to do with who we're talking about, but One thing that I found extremely helpful from working with Field Lark is before I would have to use some sort of like citric acid or something to acidify our water. Water's pretty low in parts per, total parts per million of like solids, but it's still around like 8 pH. And so just, you know, 400 cc of humicarb that goes in the tank the tank will drop that pH down to a nice, um, you know, 6, and, uh, stays there, and it stays there. It's really cool. Um, so I've been pretty excited about that.

Yeah, it's one of the things I perhaps haven't talked about enough, but Humicarb has just this incredible buffering capacity. It's got this huge buffer, like citric acid. You, you put it in, the pH drops, and over time it creeps back up again. Not with Humicarb. It will buffer out a tremendous amount of alkalinity.

Yeah. And it just helps with the, with keeping, you know, even a product like HaloFoss, it, you do have to suspend it, but it, it helps keep that suspended pretty well and doesn't stain the fruit or anything like that. We haven't had any, any issues that you might get with like a Fulvic or some sort of humic. So that's been super helpful. But in terms of our approach, I try to have a rotation, I guess, getting back to answering your question after talking this entire time, I try to build out the rotation where I'll have a calcium-focused foliar and then I'll have a more phosphorus potassium focused foliar. And I kind of try to keep that more or less in rotation every 7 to 6 days. So the one cool thing about HadoFast is it has calcium as well. So I kind of can do a, a two-in-one with that, which has been pretty good. And when you think about like plant health, I mean, they really need carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and then available calcium and available phosphorus. Essentially, um, to, to be health— to be healthy. So I, I've been having some good results with that. Um, but I, I think in, in terms of how we're managing that nutrition, it's really, you know, calcium-focused with your Molly and your boron, maybe some zinc. And then you'll have your potassium-phosphorus-focused, um, where maybe you'll add in some of the micro nutrients as well. And so you just go rotate those back and forth and, and possibly do a soil transfer through the system that we have with, um, something that's more, um, calcium-phosphorus focused. Um, so that's how we kind of manage the nutrition just to keep things simple. And then on the other side of things, um, I'm always trying to add in as much carbon as I can. So with most of the irrigations, I add in some humicarb and sugar to try to feed the microbes. And even in the foliars, we've been using a lot of sugar. So I generally use about 2 pounds of sugar per one of those tanks on a foliar. I'll use around 10 pounds of just white sugar for any type of soil drench or irrigation event. And that has also helped out a lot in terms of just adding more carbon to our soils where they are fairly difficult soils to manage. We have like around a 13 to 14 carbon to nitrogen ratio, but I'm pretty sure that that could change fairly quickly over time. So I guess like more car— for us, I guess more carbon is better than less carbon.

That's true almost universally. Peter, I've really enjoyed this conversation. There's about a dozen questions left that I'd love to ask you, but I'll stick with just one. What is a key— what, what is the key thing that you would like for listeners to take away from what you've learned, your experiences, and what do you think people would be able to benefit from the most?

Yeah, I think, I think a key thing to take away is that whether you're conventional, organic, regenerative, whatever you wanna call it, I think there's, there's always a, a solution from a nutritional standpoint. And also from a biological standpoint. But I think baby steps. So like first things first, figuring out your, your nutritional side of things. First and understanding what's kind of like that limiting factor and maybe focusing on that is pretty important. So I would say getting data on your soil test and making sure that you have recent soil tests and that you're testing your soil and obviously sap pre-irrigation sectors is really important. And then designing your program based off of that. And I would also say that because I get like a lot of farmers here and on social media always asking me for advice or this and that, or kind of like questions that I don't want to sound rude saying this to them, but I think a lot of these questions for especially farmers are— a lot of the answers are available, but a lot of times someone could teach you them or tell you them. Like how to do something, but it's not as valuable, I think, for you as a farmer than you trying to find those answers yourself. Because during that process, you're going to learn a lot more. And that's how I learned all of these things. And I'm continuously learning and trying new things. So I would say Fieldlark, even like ChatGPT, there's some cool AI tools out there and there's tons of information on just Google. Google Scholar that you could find and podcasts and stuff like that. So really trying to find the answers yourself and question everything, even if it's a recommendation from a really good agronomist, like question it and try to understand if this really works or if it doesn't work and what's your soil context. And I would say ultimately just try new things. Like don't be afraid to try something if you have a, an infestation with, I don't know, some sort of blight or bug or disease pressure, maybe try, um, based on the data that you have, some, a foliar, um, with, uh, a nutrient that your plant might need, and you might see some, some good results. And if it goes really bad, then you could always fall back on maybe some of the other things. But I think that if you, you really understand the data of what the soil is telling, what the plant's telling you, and you're able to correct that, you'll, you'll get some surprisingly cool results and you won't have to use some of those, those nasty chemicals.

Peter, I really— your answer to that question has given me something to think about because sometimes when you learn from others who have experience, you, you can— there's no doubt that you can benefit immensely from from their experience and their perspectives. There can be a great deal of wisdom captured there. But I think there's also some discernment required that sometimes a lot of— I'm not quite sure how to articulate this. I'm hesitant to call it traditional wisdom. That's kind of the popular term, but— or even indigenous wisdom. But there is a lot of the wisdom of the land, knowing the land. There are certainly people who who have that are able to teach that and pass it on very well. But much of that has also been lost and has been replaced with— I'll use the phrase conventional wisdom. It's like, oh, we do this this way and this is what we learn, this is the best way to— and that quote-unquote conventional wisdom has never been stress tested. It hasn't been thoroughly vetted in many cases. And what you're describing is do the vetting, do the due diligence, and evaluate what the possible alternatives are. Sometimes there is a great deal of value in local wisdom and the wisdom of the land, and sometimes that has been replaced by supposed wisdom that isn't really wise.

Yeah, I would say 100%. I mean, I think everyone's on their own pathway and their own journey. And I think when you say local wisdom too, from maybe like elders in the community, they know a lot. A lot of that has been actually replaced because now it's just like, put this chemical, put this product.

Exactly. That was my point.

But one of my neighbors is a pretty big producer of chayote squash. And the other day he was just— I forget why we were talking about this, but he was saying no, after after it rains, if it's sunny for 2 days, your plants will become yellow. So you have to irrigate. And he's, I mean, he's been living on his farm doing like chayote squash for ages. And so maybe he doesn't understand the whole science behind that or how the oxidation of the soil or something happens there. But it's pretty true. If it, I mean, I've seen it myself. If it rains a lot and then it stops raining right away, a lot of disease comes into the field. And I also think that it's very valuable to obviously learn from people with a ton of experience, both on the conventional side, maybe on the land side of things, the scholar side of things on the academia. But if you're a farmer on your land and this is what you are making your money off of and you need to make decisions yourself. Even if you could hire an agronomist to do it for you, I would still question everything and try to just really maybe try different things to see what works and always try to implement new things. And sometimes that actually just might be do less of what you're doing right now because, I mean, One way where I think conventional wisdom kind of fails is everyone says that planting habanero peppers at 10 centimeters apart by 1.2 won't work. There's too much competition. And then also adding in a corn plant to that won't work, or planting tobacco with corn won't work. But I've seen firsthand that it works and it reduces disease by a lot, and you can make more money off of the same plot of land. Um, so a lot of times like people will say you can't do something when you actually can do something. Um, and they're just saying that because that's what they, they were taught maybe, or that's what the schools teach them. So I, I would say question everything, be super skeptical, try to learn from different, all the different like tools that are available out there, and then just start trying things and see what works and, and figure it out yourself.

Yep. Very good. Well, Peter, thank you very much for being here. Thank you for being willing to share your story and, uh, your journey and your successes and failures., and I hope to, I look forward to chatting with you again soon.

Awesome. Thank you so much for the time and a big fan of all the content and thank you so much for the space.

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