Episode 183: Overcoming the Ammonium Death Spiral with Jim Dunlop

Hi friends, welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. This is John Kempf, and today I'm here with one of my good friends who I haven't talked to in way too long, Jim Dunlop. Jim, thanks for being here. Thanks for joining me. You've been having a lot of fun this growing season. For those who aren't familiar with, uh, Jim's name, we've— he's been on our social media a little bit, but Jim is one of our team members here at AEA, and he's done all kinds of interesting stuff. Actually, Jim, I was about to jump in to ask you the question of what you've been working on this year and the fun things you've been having. But I think your experience and the work you've done in the field is an interesting part of your story. Tell us a little bit about your background and the full scope of all the fun things you stick your fingers into that got you here.

Oh, gosh. Let's see.

Well, I was in the Marine Corps and when I got out, I had the GI Bill. And so, I used the GI Bill to put myself through college, and I was living in California at the time. And so I went to CSU Stanislaus, and I was studying biology with a botany emphasis and a chemistry minor. And so while I was doing that, I started a little farm there. Um, this was in the foothills of Yosemite. And, um, yeah, started a CSA, started growing vegetables, um, chickens, things like that. Didn't really know what I was doing. And, uh, that really blew up into a bigger business. I And I started working with Tom Willey and his farm down in Madera. And, uh, I did not know that.

I didn't know that.

You didn't know that?

No.

Oh yeah, I'm gonna go way back. And, uh, also Phil Foster over there.

Mr. Willey and Phil Foster. Oh my.

Yeah, way back in the day. Um, gosh, this would have been like in the late '90s, early 2000s. And, um, yeah, so that CSA really blew up and I was able to get access to vegetables from those guys. And, uh, I lived in the foothills and the soil wasn't very good, so it was really difficult to grow vegetables. Um, and then I moved to the Central Coast and I started another operation there, and that was mostly chickens and pigs. So I raised, you know, thousands of chickens on pasture for me, and then a lot of, you know, thousands of layer hens, all in a movable pasture system. And oh, I don't know, I had a couple— I had like 20 sows and a couple boars, and we produced pigs and, you know, sold them as halves and wholes and sold at the farmers markets. I was in all the South Bay farmers markets back then. And then let's see, uh, we kind of had the economic downturn, 2008-2010 time period, and then I just traveled for a year in an RV and visited farms all over the country with my family at the time. And, um, that was a fun— that was a fun thing. I would just show up and, you know, go through the scrapyard and build a pig house, or, you know, hoe all the vegetables. And it was really fun to do it when you didn't have to work, you know. And then the rest of the time I was trail running, or, you know, riding my mountain bike, or something like that. And then we ended up in the Hood River area, which is where I am now. I live in Mosier, in between the Dalles and Hood River on the Columbia Gorge in Oregon, just right across the river from Washington. And I started working at a compost facility here, and that's where I met Kevin Tully. And Kevin went down to California, and Mike Omeg kind of robbed me away from the compost facility, and I went to work for Mike. I had been spreading compost, working for the compost facility, on Mike's orchards, and that's how we met. And, uh, so I came to work for Mike Omeg, uh, this would have been like 2013, 2014. And that's how I met you and the team from AEA. Mike was using you guys for consulting and for products, and I just saw so many amazing things working for Mike. And, you know, Mike was my mentor in orcharding back then, and I learned a ton from him. You know, I work with tons of orchardists, and, you know, Mike Omeg is one of the best, if not the best.

You know, there's something about that obsessive management.

Obsessive management. Yeah. And Mike's all, and it's really pushed me. I mean, some of the things that I know now and the things that I'm into now, it's always 'cause Mike's like, what's the next thing? What's the next thing? And then, yeah. So then what we had that bad year, we had that freeze in 2015 and the 2016 crop wasn't so great. And then 2017, all the trees really overproduced and Mike was really saved, or his farm was saved, because he had 10-row fruit because they had been working with AEA and nobody else had 10-row fruit. 10-row was kind of like an average size fruit, but everybody else had 11- and 12-row fruit, which is way smaller and hard to, hard to sell. So Mike was able to get into all these packing houses ahead of their growers because we had good fruit out there. And then you know, there was so much trouble with the market and things. That's when Mike decided to join forces with Orchard View. And so I had an opportunity to go work for Orchard View, but I was a single parent and it was really tough for me to work in the orchards. And that's when I hooked up with AEA. And it was really, you know, I was never like a salesperson or anything like that, or didn't consider myself that, but I had seen so many good things with, you know, AEA programs and products that it was really easy for me to join the team. And so the interesting thing was I worked for a year for AEA and then Kevin, who I had met at the compost facility. He came back from California where he was managing a bunch of wood waste facilities down there. And then Kevin and I really built the business here. I was kind of more on the farming side and the ideas about farming. And Kevin is a really systems-minded person and we work together to kind of build our, build our business out here. And yeah, and then what, what is the scope?

What is the scope of your work today?

The scope of my work today?

Yeah.

Well, I'm a senior agronomist here at AEA, and I work on a lot of apples and cherries and blueberries, conventional and organic. I work on a lot of onions and potatoes, and now a lot of dairy pasture and beef cattle pasture, a bunch of other stuff. But those are the main, main things.

Yeah.

That's, that's the textbook answer. So I'm going to ask you a different question now. What do you have fun working on today?

I really love learning and figuring things out and just trying to understand, uh, a lot of times like why the thing that I'm doing isn't working. And the thing that really struck me was last year I was working on corn in— corn and potatoes in Idaho. And just, uh, you know, they've got a lot of sodium, a lot of chloride, especially chloride. And you see that in the sap, you know, thousands of parts per million of chloride. And I was talking to this farmer, these farmers, and they had really high nitrate in their sap. And I said, you know, we're going to put some molybdenum out there and, you know, those numbers are going to come down from, you know, high hundreds and thousands down to, you know, 50 or something like that. And we're going to process nitrate. And it didn't work. And this was right about the time I had started using AI. And, you know, I had like 15 years worth of questions built up, at least, you know, working with sap analysis. And every once in a while, one of them will break loose in my brain. And a lot of what I do now is try and think of questions to that, or just try to understand what I don't know and use AI to figure it out. And so what I realized was the crops that I was, I was working on over there were low sugar. And that really got me into asking the question of what does the plant do with its sugars and how does it prioritize the use of its sugars?. And then I went down this whole, you know, all these rabbit holes about that. But I went back and looked at all this historical sap. You know, we have this huge database of sap, and I noticed that most of the crops that we work on were very low in sugar. And I started seeing a pattern that's pretty typical out here, especially people don't have too much nitrogen. When you have too much nitrogen, it's a different story, but like especially in organics, I'll see this where you have low sugar, low pH, high ammonium, and then flat nitrate. And then that all kind of leads to the inability to uptake calcium into the new leaf. So we'll know the calcium's there because we see it in the old leaf, but we can't get it into the new leaf. And the inability to reduce iron and make it usable, the inability to move potassium into the fruit or into the grain. So just a cascade of effects coming from the fact that we don't have good sugars. You know, the plant wants to—

hang on a second.

Yeah, go ahead.

That the way, the way you ended that where you talked about all those nutrient interactions and then you went back and described that as the source of that problem being that you don't have enough sugars. And that was just— that was your tagline.

Yeah, that's right.

Uh, yeah, elaborate on that a little bit more. How does a lack of sugars lead to all those outcomes?

So especially in this work that I was doing in Idaho, where it was most severe, uh, you know, the plant has to prioritize staying alive first. And so it's going to use its sugars to reduce stress, move things around in the plant, and, um, you know, do all kinds of stuff to reduce stress. But then the next thing it's going to do is process nitrogen and make carbon skeletons for ammonium assimilation. And that's where farmers really shoot themselves in the foot, is because they put out so much nitrogen that they suck down their sugars. And then you get the low pH, and the low pH is just an indicator of something else that's going on in the plant with the low pH and high ammonium.

And so The, the background questions behind this is why do you have low sugars in the first place? I know that historically we've often addressed that by focusing on magnesium and trace minerals and so forth to increase photosynthesis. But what's actually happening in these scenarios with the high chlorides and so forth, it seems you're not able to solve that with just adding more nutrients alone.

Yeah, and it's, it's a combination of things, right? Because the plant has a lot of stress, so it's using sugars for that, and then it's using sugars for all this this big slug of nitrogen that's out there, especially the ammonium. And then there's not a lot left for everything else. There's not even enough for the ammonium processing. And so the plant is constantly in this state of low sugar. And then it's made worse because the plant has to photorespire to deal with the effects of having all this ammonium in the sap. And I call it the ammonium death spiral because you have too much ammonium already. And then a byproduct of photorespiration is more ammonium.

And so what have— as you've been playing around with this this last year, I started by asking you the question of what have you been— what have you been working on that's been fun or that you've been enjoying? What are the results that you're observing as you're playing with this?

Yes, we actually got a chance to mess around on cherries down in Chile over the winter, and we kind of started midway through the season. And we started with a pound and then moved up to 2 pounds of just, uh, I think it was organic cane sugar. And we didn't change the sugar levels, but we did process the ammonium and kind of normalize the nitrogen where the nitrate and the ammonium seemed, you know, really balanced. And, uh, raise the p— raise the pH, if I didn't say that. Raise the pH. Yeah.

All right, let's connect the dots, um, for people who might be trying to follow along. How does changing the ammonium result in increase in the pH?

Yep, so you have to think about the two forms of nitrogen in the sap. You have nitrate, which is alkaline and oxidized, and ammonium, which is, uh, acidic and reduced. And when We kind of want to, we do want a balance of that. And a lot of times we'll have so much ammonium that we have excess ATP and reducing energy that we need to use up. And so the plant uses it up by photorespirating. And so, or photorespiring, I should say. And so when the plant's photorespiring, if people don't understand this, basically it's grabbing onto oxygen instead of CO2 and it's just kind of spinning its wheels in that machinery. To, to get rid of this excess reducing energy. And then the byproduct is ammonium, but you're using up sugars and kind of going backwards when you photorespire versus photosynthesis when you're making sugars and moving forward.

This is fascinating, Jim, because one of the things that I've talked about is, is how nitrogen— excess of nitrogen actually creates a yield drag effect. But often when I was explaining it and talking about it publicly to people, I would describe it largely in terms of nitrate and the additional water use required requirement and the carbohydrate requirement. I've never really gone into a lot of detail about ammonium, and I don't think I've ever connected the dots in quite the way that you're connecting them now. I mean, I'm sure I have at times, but not into— yeah, he's a whole—

yeah, no, it's really interesting, John. And I go back and I've listened to some of this, the older talks that you've done and webinars and everything, and I used to feel the same way about nitrate, you know, because I was, you know, mostly learning from you. But now I see it more as like a balance. Like, I look at nitrate in the sap when it's a good level as showing us that we have good root health and good uptake of nitrogen. I look at the ammonium in the sap as some of it coming from nitrate reduction, So, you know, we're going from nitrate to nitrite to ammonium. So that's just normal, you're going to have some in the sap. But then a lot of it is from stress, so a lot of it is from photorespiration. And so I see that a lot where, where we just have so much ammonium and we've reduced this, the pH of the sap. But as I said, was starting to say earlier, the pH of the sap is just an indicator of the oxidation reduction status of the of the sap.

Yeah.

And so when we have tons of ammonium, the sap is very reduced.

That's one of the things, you know, I've, I've changed my perspective on nitrate over the years as well. There was a point, I'd say 5 or 6 years ago, if you asked me what the optimal levels of nitrate were on, on sap analysis on, on most crops, I would have said that the answer is zero.

Yeah.

But I don't think that's true anymore. Um, yeah, I still think it needs to be low lower than it is on most crops for most fertilization practices. But I've actually— I started thinking about nitrate more as a plant hormone than as, as a nutrient. It has a very pronounced hormonal effect where it has such strong synergy with auxin and drives vegetative growth so much. And it's— I think it's foundational for us if we want large leaf size and fruit size and so forth from an optimal plant health and performance perspective. Yeah, nitrate should be— shouldn't be zero. It should be low, but it shouldn't be zero.

Yeah.

And one of the interesting things about nitrate is it's the strongest electron acceptor in the plant. And so when we have high amounts of ammonium— and I haven't done this, but theoretically what you can do is add small amounts of nitrate in order to balance that. And by, you know, small amounts, I mean like half a pound of nitrogen. Very, very low amounts in like a foliar. But nitrate is the pull on photosynthesis. This is how I look at it, because nitrate is the acceptor of the things that photosynthesis makes, right? And so I don't know if this is true, but my understanding, what I'm kind of digging into, is can nitrate pull photosynthesis and keep photosynthesis strong because there's this immediate place where it can put its photosynthates versus piling up electrons and ATP and not having a place to put it.

You know what is fascinating to me? I, I, it'd be interesting to go back and redo some of this research that Don Huber was a part of 50-some years ago. He describes how they were evaluating the nitrogen profile of corn, of the forms of nitrogen that corn was absorbing for peak productivity. And of course, at this point in the research world, they weren't paying a whole lot of attention to various organic forms of nitrogen. They weren't measuring amino acids and amino sugars and proteins and bacteria on all these various things. They were just looking exclusively at mineral nitrogen. And they, uh, they described— I don't know if this was— I think it was published. I think this was a PhD thesis. Um, of one of Don's students, but they described that the highest corn yields consistently clustered around a nitrogen profile that was 80% ammonium and 20% nitrate.

Mm-hmm. Yep. I think I just listened to that recently. I love listening to that stuff, John, because it really gets me thinking. The first thing to think about when people talk about anything to do with nitrogen is what is the status of the other nutrients in the plant? You know, did we have good sugars in those plants? Did we have moly? Did we have iron? Did we have boron? You know, all the things that we need to process nitrogen. And I hear universities, you know, talk about their studies and things and they'll say, we use this much nitrogen and this much nitrogen and this much nitrogen and here's the results. But it's like, how do we know, you know, one field had moly or good iron or— so without looking at those things, it's really hard to know, I think. Here's an interesting thing I've been thinking about corn, John, and I want to try this. I'm trying to get Beau to do it with me this year. But, you know, as the corn plant gets older and the roots get older during the season, they become kind of sloppy and less selective. And the plant wants to balance, balance its anions and cations. And so a lot of times it's going to pick up chloride as an easy anion to balance its sap. And I wonder if you can't go out there with a small shot of nitrate, because we all see the nitrates— there's— it's almost zero in the sap later in the season. There's tons of ammonium. And I wonder if you can go out there with some nitrate and apply that and then recreate— or just, uh, I don't know how you want to say it, but like get that pull going again on photosynthesis and get the plant to perform better later in the season.

That seems a viable theory because plants would absorb nitrate as readily as they do chloride, if not more so. Yeah, I love that idea.

Yeah. And we, when we see in hazelnuts where same thing happens where they just have so much ammonium and not enough nitrate. And one of the things they do in hazelnuts is they'll apply urea and you'll see this a lot. Guys apply urea late in the season but they have no idea what the sugar status is. And that's why you'll have people say like, sometimes we'll apply urea in the fall and it seems to work, and then sometimes we'll apply urea in the fall and it just doesn't really seem to work. And I think a lot of it has to do with the carbon status, we can call it, you know, I'm saying sugar, but you know, we're talking about carbon, the carbon status. And you know, John, so many people think about the soil and carbon in the soil, and I think about carbon in the plant, and I think about redox in the plant. Like, those are the important things to me.

So let's, let's, let's dig into that a little bit. You've been using the phrase sugar, but how are you thinking about carbon and redox in the plant? You know, this is maybe a bit of a sidebar question, but I want to get it out of my head before I forget it. Yeah. Earlier you also mentioned people describing the use of these various nitrogen studies, nitrogen application rates, but not taking into consideration the trace mineral status of the plant. And I think that's one of the things that I found so intriguing is you, once you get past a baseline level of performance, like we all know that, um, I'm just making up a number here, um, there, there is this somewhat linear increase in yield on, let's say, a corn crop as you add more nitrogen up to 100 pounds per acre. From that point forward, it becomes nonlinear. You don't get— and you reach a threshold, you reach a point where you don't get continued increasing yields. And it is at those levels, it's when you cross that threshold from a linear yield response to a nonlinear yield response, where all of a sudden trace minerals start having this disproportionate effect. Where earlier, when the crop doesn't have enough nitrogen, you might not get a large yield effect from a molybdenum application or a cobalt application. But once you get to that point, all of a sudden it seems your yield responses to the trace minerals can be substantial. And they aren't always, but sometimes they're very substantial. Hmm. I'd love to just get— I haven't clearly formulated a question in there, but I'd like to get your reaction or your reflection on that.

I don't know that I've actually seen that. Exactly, John Kempf. But what I have seen for sure is, you know, spreading out your nitrogen, using less nitrogen, using foliar nitrogen seems to work way better. You know, working with Beau Kempf, I've seen a lot of this stuff, right, where we're applying, you know, 20 pounds in the furrow and then another 20 pounds foliarly and getting 300 bushels. You know, and there's a lot of manure in the background there, but still it's only 40 pounds of applied nitrogen. And a lot of people try to reduce their nitrogen, but they're not thinking about the trace minerals. And so, you know, there's nitrogen management, the form you're using, the time you're putting it out and all these things. But people don't focus on is that nitrogen processing in the plant? And usually it's not. We usually see huge imbalances. And you know, John, I think the reason why you got hung up on the nitrate thing or really interested in it and thinking that that was, you know, really important was because when you see— you work on a lot of like corn and you see corn out there where the guys are putting so much nitrogen on there that we do have that, we have high nitrate and high—

nitrate toxicity or nitrate excess is a prevailing problem in many of the growers that I worked with. Absolutely.

Yep.

And so I don't deal with that as much and I work with more organic producers and their problem is not enough nitrate. And I see that all the time in organic farming where you have too much ammonium and not enough nitrate. And especially when you front-loaded organic nitrogen, we see a big spike of ammonium as the soil warms up, um, and very, very little nitrate. And so now we've got all this ammonium and we need immediate sugar to deal with it, to process it.

And the practical application solution for that is putting on a foliar application of sugar.

Yes. And so we haven't changed everything we're doing, but we've just kind of added sugar. So we're still focusing on all the photosynthetic nutrients. We're still focusing on manganese and iron, but adding a pound or two of sugar or some type of sugar, you know, there's, there's dextrose, there's sorbitol, We're playing around with sorbitol in cherry trees because that's the way they move their sugars anyway.

And what, what has the crop response been to that?

I don't know that I could say that there's necessarily a yield response yet. Although we did do really well out there at Orchard View this year. I don't know whether we can attribute that attribute that to the sugar or not, but we've definitely seen the sugar come up, especially starting early in the cherries. The sugars come up to kind of normal levels, or what we call optimum levels. The pH comes up, and then the ammonium processes. And then when the ammonium processes, that allows the nitrate to kind of move along too, so the nitrate doesn't start piling up. Um, and what's the other thing? We are seeing some better movement of calcium into the new leaf.

That's it. I was just about to go there and I was about to say, when based, based on what you just described, I mean, for people who aren't familiar with sap analysis and who might not be following along with what these various nutritional changes mean, um, when you say that the plant is able to metabolize ammonium, that's a different way of saying that all of a sudden the plant has a lot less stress. And yet you described it earlier as this, um, what was it, the phrase that you used, an ammonium tailspin?

Yeah, like a death spiral. Yeah, I like tailspin though, that's good.

But you've, you've essentially, you've taken it out of that cycle and now you've just greatly reduced the amount of stress that that plant is going to experience going forward. It's not just a one-day, right, uh, response, but it has this long-term consequences and now all of that energy that previously was being depleted to try to tolerate the stress is being used to serve useful purposes. So the net effect is a plant that has a lot more energy.

Yep, that's right. And so then you can move calcium into the new leaf. And we see this all the time where guys will have tons of calcium in the old leaf and it'll look great, and then the new leaf only has a few hundred parts per million., and the typical thing people want to do is put on more and more calcium, but that's not the answer, and it doesn't work. It just costs a lot of money in foliar calcium, and really what they need to be doing is looking at their sugar and their boron and making sure that those are good.

Now I'm curious, um, you've just started looking at this and playing around with it, but one of the things that we know— we know that we have these handful of varieties of, of apples that don't do a good job of moving calcium, and it's also— it occurs in some environmental conditions in grapes and and so forth. And historically, we've managed that or tried to manage it somewhat with potassium and manganese relationships and boron relationships, which has had some degree of success. Have you observed any additional degrees of success with managing sugar levels above and beyond that?

Gosh, I'm trying to think. I don't know that I've seen it in apples so much, but it would make sense that it would work. I know that Stephen tried some, uh, Stephen Barelink tried some dextrose last year, or maybe he tried sorbitol, but he didn't do it—

he did—

I think you can do too high rates and not get the effect that you're looking for. You can overdo it.

And, um, Stephen would never be the guy to overdo anything.

Yeah, yeah, right. Um, but gosh, I don't want to say that I've seen it in apples yet. Um, I think it's too early to tell. Yeah, but in cherries for sure. And then the other thing that we expect to see, and I think we're seeing it some in cherries, is the ability to reduce nitrogen— or sorry, to reduce iron and be able to uptake iron.

That's a big deal.

Yeah, the same thing happens with iron, right, where you just throw tons and tons of iron at it and you really don't see the levels come up. And we need to reduce, you know, with broadleaf plants anyway, we need to reduce you know, iron down in the roots. So we need to send sugars down there and make ATP and NADPH in order to take in Fe2+. Yeah.

You know what's fascinating to me about this conversation, Jim, is I'm always intrigued by these plants' ability to take a relatively minute amount of an input, and it completely changes what can happen in an entire field. And I've, I've talked about this phenomenon in regards to putting on a few grams per acre of a trace mineral like molybdenum or selenium or something like that, or cobalt. But when you think about the, the total quantity of sugar that a crop produces in a given day say a cherry crop. And I've, I've done the math on this. It's been a while since I've looked at these numbers closely, but, uh, let's just say, uh, an acre of cherry trees produces some in the neighborhood of, I don't know, 20 to 25 pounds of sugars a day. It's probably more than that, but let's use that as a, as a starting point for the conversation. And then you're putting on a foliar spray that is a fraction of that. It's a pound or 2 pounds an acre. And you ask yourself the question, well, what difference can that make? Yeah, but it actually, it makes a tremendous difference because it's enough to push it across the threshold. It's a threshold change. It's like a step change instead of just a linear increase.

Yeah, that's right. And so now I look at how I'm making my foliars and it's less about putting giant slugs of certain nutrients and more about making sure the sugars are right. And then, you know, obviously we're using Ocean Materials and things um, but then just kind of like trying to signal or prime the plant a little bit with these nutrients instead of saying like, I'm going to supply all the molybdenum that this plant needs, kind of thing.

Well, my guess would be, you know, I've, I've had these experiences a number of times over the years where— and I'm sure that you have as well— sometimes you— it, it has seemed that you just hit on magical combination or something where the response that you got was entirely disproportionate to what you applied. I still remember— this is probably now close to 20 years ago— this one tomato greenhouse that had serious issues with spider mites. They were Jolly Elf grape tomatoes, which are long since obsolete, but, uh, they were very spider mite susceptible. They had major problems with spider mites, and this particular greenhouse had very depressed levels of metals across the board, just zinc, manganese, copper, iron. Everything was just in the tank. And they put on a foliar application of Seastem and Cobalt. And I think there were some other things in there. I forget what the total combination was, but it was the Seastem and the Cobalt that were really carrying the weight, I think, because they did other applications without those and didn't get the response. But what happened is we had previously made lots of applications to the soil and to, um, and foliar applications and not seen real significant responses on the trace minerals. But we put on that application and zinc, manganese, iron, copper, everything up came up in sap by not small amounts. It doubled and tripled, some cases increased 4x, and we hadn't applied a single gram. Wow. And so what, what you're describing sounds to me like one more dimension and one more facet to consider where you make those types of responses, um, you can, you can get those types of responses more consistently and they're not just occasional outliers that you wish you could replicate.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. The way I look at sap now, John, is less about looking at the levels of individual nutrients and how we might bring those up and looking at sap to get an idea of how the plant's metabolism is functioning. And so it's really— it's a little embarrassing for me to say, even just all this stuff, like, I just feel like, God, I should have thought thought of this a long time ago, but sometimes it takes a long time to put things together.

Sometimes you're so deep in the weeds you forget to see the forest for the trees.

Yep, yep. Shoot, I lost my train of thought where I was going with that.

Well, you started, you started talking about how you're using sap analysis differently today. You're looking at it— oh yeah, plant metabolism perspective.

Yeah, right, right, right, exactly. Yeah, so, you know, we used to really not pay attention as much to the first 3 things on the first 3 measurements on sap analysis, which are, you know, your sugars, your pH, and your EC. And now those are some of the most important things on the, on the sap to me. Like, that's what I really care about. And what, what, look, what sap analysis, what I use it for now really is finding the metabolic bottlenecks in the plant and looking at the plant at the foundational level of getting things right with the metabolism. And so I'm talking about making sugar and making proteins or making glutamate, you know, as our simple kind of currency on the protein side of things. And when you get those right, then other things in the plant can be right. But, you know, when those aren't right and you're like, oh, I need more calcium or I need more phosphorus— I don't really even think about phosphorus. Phosphorus to me is like something that usually just comes along when everything else is right.

Well, essentially what you're saying is if those foundational things aren't right, trying to fix nutrient imbalances is like trying to roll a heavy rock up a hill, and it's just difficult. It's— it just— it doesn't work. You're constantly struggling. And if you get those things right, then the system starts to flow. Yep, you get nutrient flow, you get movement much more easily.

That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah. Oh, this is exciting, Jim. You know what's— it's like, yeah, we look back and say, well, why didn't I think of that a long time ago? But the reality is that's learning and growing, and we're constantly all doing it. And just think about how many people aren't thinking about these things yet at all, right? They're not even thinking about where we were thinking 5 years ago or 10 years ago.

Yep. What's interesting is in agriculture, we're applying nitrogen, we're thinking so much about nitrogen and then we're just expecting the plant to take care of everything on the sugar side. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is we need sugars to make carbon skeletons is a critical thing in order to process ammonium. And when we have so much nitrogen out there, we just use up all our sugars. Farmers create their own problems in most cases, especially conventional farmers. And they think of— they think of lots of nitrogen as kind of an insurance policy.

How much could this carbon deficiency problem be solved by adding carbon with nitrogen?

I don't ever tell people to apply nitrogen now, even if it's amino nitrogen, because some of those things have to be, you know, reanimated and transanimated and that, that creates ammonium. I don't ever talk about nitrogen now unless I'm Talking about adding sugar with nitrogen.

And what about for soil applications, specifically for producing corn, side dress planting? Are you adding?

Yeah, I don't, I don't know yet, John, although I did see something really interesting recently putting sugar through the pivot and it worked really, really well. So I can't imagine that was just from the water hitting the leaves and the sugar changing things on the leaves. It had, had to have done something in the soil. You know what I see all the time, like on, um, on young wheat, spring wheat or winter wheat coming out of the winter? There's no nitrate and there's ammonium through the roof and there's no sugar. And I see that all the time.

It causes lots of— I mean, that's the foundation of all the health problems that winter wheat has coming out of the winter.

Yeah. And so people plant their spring wheat with molasses a lot of times. And I think that the thing to plant with might be dextrose because we're not talking about feeding the microbiology, we're talking about feeding the plant. And with molasses, we have all these enzymatic steps that we have to do. And with dextrose, the plant can just take it right up.

I had a—

I had an important question for you. Um, I need to, um, at some point once we have more data, I need to have Jordan Longberg on here to talk about some of their, um, some of the data that they're seeing where they are— they're very clearly observing that as they're using sugars, and not just sugars but overall nutrition management, they're seeing these clear fluctuations in soil microbial respiration from foliar applications of nutrients. Mm-hmm. Putting on a foliar application and 3 to 5 days later there's this— if I'm— if my memory serves me correctly, there's this tremendous spike and surge of carbon dioxide released from the soil and increased carbon dioxide absorption by the plant. Mm-hmm. So— and that is— they're including, if I'm not mistaken, they're including sugars with their foliar applications. In those regards. And those— they're seeing very positive responses from that. And so this is some of the successes that we've observed, is we're seeing these soil microbial responses in response to foliar applications when we address the carbon status of the plant.

Yeah, makes sense, because, you know, root exudates are way down on the list of what the plant is going to use its sugars for. And so if it doesn't have enough sugars to do the most important things, staying alive and processing nitrogen, it's not going to send anything down to the roots, or not very much. And all this stuff is dynamic, like we're looking at a snapshot, you know, in the morning that we pulled on the sap. So, um, you know, you might have low sugars at that point, but maybe later in the day you have higher sugar, better sugars. Although if it's going to be hot, you know, it's going to be 100 degrees, then you're not going to be making sugar. And I think these are the places where we can really help the plant out. We have these high-stress situations, whether it's drought or clouds, or out here we have wildfire smoke sometimes, that's all going to limit your photosynthesis.

So we had started, um, I think at some point in the conversation I asked you about the crop responses that you've observed. You said that it's, it's kind of premature, you haven't really observed a lot of yield responses yet, but you are seeing these, these metabolic changes which lead to better nutrient absorption. So it seems to me that it's going to be somewhat inevitable that at some point you're going to see quality improvements and yield responses.

I think so.

Yeah.

Um, you know, I was talking to our friend Keith Mortar and he was telling me how he had a friend with winter wheat and the— and it came up all yellow and, you know, I think it had snowed on top of it and everything else and it just didn't look great. And, you know, a lot of guys will go out there and put nitrogen on. That's the first thing they're going to do. And the plant is already swamped with ammonium. And then you go out there and put nitrogen on it and just make it worse. And Keith advised this guy. This— I was talking to Keith about the sugar thing, and he was telling me how he had done some of it, but he had used molasses. And dextrose might have been a better option here, but he had used— he had told his friend to put molasses out there, I think a quart per acre, and it totally turned it around. Um, so we've seen it work, you know. Um, yeah, but in terms of like, I mean, apple storability—

a quart per acre, that's like— that's nothing.

It's crazy, right? Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah.

Wow.

A lot of it is just, you know, the plant is stuck and we're trying to unstick it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a trigger.

Yeah.

Well, this is awesome, Jim. I'm enjoying this conversation. What else have you been having fun with?

Oh gosh, what else have I been having fun with? Um, well, you've seen the cherries out there at Mike's. Yeah, I saw some of those social posts. Like, that is just—

this is incredible.

Oh my gosh, it's nuts.

We actually, um, we had one friend of mine on social media respond. He said, well, what kind of cherries are these? Are these sour cherries like Montmorency? Because sweet cherries don't, uh, they don't cluster up like that. It's like, oh yeah, these are sweet cherries.

Yep. Well, Mike told me he was going to slit my throat or anybody's throat that mentioned what variety it is. You know, Mike, Mike had the trial, the OSU trial, at his cemetery block forever, so he got to see what worked the best, what trees did the best out there. But they're newer varieties. There's some newer varieties that are really precocious. You know, they're going to give you a good crop year 3, year 4. I think those trees are 5 years old. And even last year we got, I think it was 10 tons out there. And, you know, we kind of did the same thing last year, but this year is arguably better.

You know what's happening?

We're snapping branches out there.

Yeah, you told me last year was the, was the cherry crop of a lifetime.

Yep, that's right. Yep, yep. You know, I'm lucky in that I work with some of the best farmers, and, you know, working for AEA, we kind of attract those type of people. Um, so, you know, I can't take all the, all the credit, or, you know, even a large portion of it, but there definitely is what we did with Mike. Yeah, yeah, it's huge, it's huge. And, you know, he's even got a, you know, Javier out there that does such a good job pruning. Um, you know, and Michael talked about how, you know, there's a three-legged stool with pruning and irrigation and nutrition that kind of produces a good crop. And we've done, you know, pretty minor things compared to what we did in the past because we're doing these blends now, and the blends appear to perform better than the products themselves. So we can use low, smaller amounts of nutrients and get the same effect as we would if we used twice as much.

All right.

We need to talk about this a bit because there's lots of people that we work with as customers who aren't using blends for logistical reasons and so forth. So when you describe using blends, what are you talking about exactly? How is it different from just tank mixing a combination?

I think there's just— we, you know, we use a bubble trailer, you know, like a ball tank, and we pump that stuff around and it just mixes really well, pulls out any solids that are in there and just cleans up the product. And then we'll will put some sugar in there with it and blend it all up. And it just must be that effect of just mixing it all up together.

I wonder if it's the combination effect of mixing it all up together, plus giving it a little bit of time.

That could be. Yeah, that could be. But for some reason, it appears to be different than tank mixing because there is—

there's— how much of a time delay is there from the time that you're mixing it until it gets applied?

I'm sure there could be a short— is like, it could be as short as 2 days, but it could be up to a week, you know.

And can you elaborate a little bit more on what are the, what are the effects that you're seeing compared to just putting a tank mix together on farm?

We just, you know, in the past we would use quart rates of almost everything except for maybe molybdenum and cobalt. We would use, you know, pint rates of that. And we would do foliares that were probably, you know, $50, $60. And they they would work well and they'd move the sap. We'd see that, we'd see, you know, the levels come up on the sap. But now we do quite a bit less foliars that are less than $25, and we see the same kind of movement that we used to with higher rates.

And you're attributing a lot of that to just the, the blending and the pre-mixing?

I think so. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know. But honestly, yeah, and the sugars and the sugars. But we were blending without sugars and was working last year. So it's not just the sugars. It couldn't have happened at a better time for us because, you know, farmers are struggling. It's tough out there. And for us to be able to lower our prices to get the same effect has been pretty huge.

Yeah, that's—

it's kept us on a lot of acreage.

Yeah, that's substantial. Mm-hmm. Yeah, this is—

we can change the subject. I got another one if you're ready.

Yeah, let's go.

Well, so we're doing the pinion trial out there at Mike's and, you know, It's too early to say, you know, Mike's not claiming victory yet because we haven't harvested that block, but it's been—

you got to be what, a week or two away at this point, right?

Probably a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, within a week. And so, gosh, what have we seen over the, over the course of the season? We've, you know, looked at it every single week, and one week the control might look a little bit better. And this is a heavy fungicide, uh, you know, situation where, you know, it's getting fungicides every 2 weeks.

You have a highly susceptible variety.

Oh, super, super susceptible in a susceptible area in a susceptible year. You know, we got pounded by like half an inch of rain during harvest, during Chelan harvest. Um, and no, it's been a perfect year from powdery mildew. Um, and so it's been kind of back and forth where, you know, the Pinion side will look a little bit better or the control side will look a little bit better. But honestly, there hasn't been a huge amount of difference. The thing that we noticed is that on the Pinion side, the mildew appears to be less active. It appears to be kind of like dead, like it just looks gray or brown and flat instead of white and fluffy. And on the control side, I think we found a little bit more white and fluffy stuff. And so really it's all a race. It's a race to harvest the crop before powdery mildew gets into the fruit and ruins the fruit. And so this season, oh gosh, what's happened out there? There's been some challenges, um, getting the fruit harvested on time, and so the fruit's hanging for a long time, and we're starting to get powdery mildew into the fruit. And so there's a little bit of powdery mildew in the fruit on the pinion side, and there's a little bit on the control side. There might be more on the control side. And the stuff that we're seeing on the pinion side isn't fluffy and white. It doesn't appear to be moving.

And just to be clear, the control side is a fungicide control, right?

It's a fungicide control. Yeah. Yep. And powdery mildew is such a problem in cherries. I work on thousands and thousands of acres of organic apples, thousands of acres of organic blueberries, and I think we work on like 3 acres of organic cherries, and we work on thousands of acres of conventional cherries. And there hasn't been a good price premium, but it's also so challenging to grow cherries in this area organically because of powdery mildew. And so if you had told me that we could stop powdery mildew with pinion, I would have told you you're out of your mind. And every week that I go in there, except now, you know, I keep on seeing it But when, you know, for the first weeks I was like, this isn't going to work, you know. It's amazing, John. And, you know, I don't want to sound like I'm going off the rails here and being hyperbolic, but it's one of the biggest things in agriculture right now. It's, it's one of the, it's one of the hugest things I've ever seen in agriculture.

You're referring specifically to powdery mildew across all types of crops?

Yep.

Yep.

And then we don't even know what else pinion will work on. And now my understanding is we're seeing crop health response as well. So that's pretty interesting.

Well, I was intrigued at first. People were responding, insect pressure disappearing in response to pinion applications. And I was like, yeah, well, what's that all about?

Yeah, how does that work? How does that work?

And it didn't make sense to me, but it started showing up as a pattern so consistently that— I shouldn't say a consistent pattern, but we definitely, we got enough phone calls about it and enough responses from it that I started digging into some of the mechanisms of why and how that might be happening. And yeah, it's— don't have enough experience with it yet to be able to offer any types of predictions or forecasting, but it definitely is a thing.

Yep. I want to see how it works on things like cherry leaf spot, fire blight, uh, white mold and potatoes and things. I've got a lot of people that want to try it, even in conventional ag.

Yeah. On the— on this, this Pinion testing that you've been doing on the cherries, what have the application rates been?

Everything's going out at 200 gallons, so it would be 2 gallons to make a 2%, and it's happening every 2 weeks.

2 gallons.

And so that—

sorry, 2 gallons at 200 would make a 1%.

Yeah, sorry. Thank you. Yeah, 1%. Yeah, man, I'm messing up on math. Jeez, simple math. Come on, guy. 1%.

Yeah.

And I think that's what we've been recommending for people to do.

Yeah.

And then that's going out, John, with that gallon of blend that we make and, and urea. And, you know, I think Mike would tell you that the key to a lot of his success is the combination of fertigation and foliar together. Those two things. And we saw it this, this year with, uh, with Mike's neighbor Stacy Cooper. Um, Stacy had a block of schena, I think they were, and they weren't really growing. The fruit was exposed, the fruit was small, and there was lots of it. And Mike convinced her to do some fertigation along with her foliares, and I just couldn't believe the response. I mean, over the course of a couple few weeks She had 3-foot shoots. All the, all the fruit was shaded and it was big. It all sized up, you know, 9, 10-row fruit.

Wow. So when you say fertigation's in, in combination with foliars, are you referring specifically to timing sequence that they should be timed together, or you just referring to using them in conjunction with each other?

I'm not sure. I think that the timing thing, I think there's something there. And I'm pretty sure Mike does that. You have to have him on here again soon and pick his brain. But I think, I think that's part of his plan is the timing of it. But I don't know exactly what it is.

I'm supposed to talk to Mike in a couple of hours, so.

Oh, really cool.

Nice.

Awesome. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So what have you been— are you running trials on Pinion anywhere else other than the Cherries?

I think that's all we're doing out here. I know it's not registered in— it's not registered in Washington yet, and that's where a lot of our work was or is. We have people, even old customers that we don't necessarily work a lot with now, uh, calling and asking about it. So we have a lot of places to sell it in Washington and Idaho once it becomes— once it's registered.

Yeah, you know, I'm really, I'm really excited about opinion, um, in part for the success that it's having and the consistency of success, but also in part because I'm looking forward to people realizing the consequences, the results, a year or two down the road when there are less fungicide applications on the soil, right? Because I've seen that now in a couple of operations where there's all of a sudden soil biology comes alive and plant nutrient absorption from the soil just Again, it's like it crosses a threshold and it becomes completely different once you no longer have that continual hammering of fungicide application on the soil. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what that looks like, because that's going to be another layer of improved performance.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that too. Yeah, who knows what we're gonna see? Yeah, we just don't even know. We don't even know what the effects— or can't quantify the effects of using fungicides. Over and over again every year.

Yeah. Awesome. This has been fun, Jim. What have we missed?

Oh gosh, what have we missed? I had some notes here. Let me, let me take a peek here. Oh gosh, we could go into all kinds of stuff, you know, apples and people applying potassium when they should be applying calcium. We've talked about that a little bit, you know, I have some— I have, I have my rules out here, but one of my rules is to almost never apply potassium to the soil if we can avoid it. Maybe in fertigation during, during the crop season, but that's specifically on apples, or that's more generally all tree fruit that I can think of, you know, especially early calcium. If we're applying potassium to the soil, I call it the gift that keeps on giving because next season we'll be competing against that.

That's a poisonous gift though.

That's right. Yeah, it keeps on taking. The gift that keeps on taking. Yeah, I mean, we're gonna compete with that next year when we're trying to uptake calcium. That potassium, a lot of it's still there, you know. And there's typically tons of potassium in the soil, we're just not accessing it. And potassium foliars work so well, and we often don't even need them, you know. Sometimes we'll do a potassium foliar just to be sure, you know, you know, like a quart of Holo-K in the foliar. During fruit fill or something like that, or just color a little bit.

You know what, uh, the one story about potassium that I, I have these data points memorized, and that was the first year that Mike did his experiments with his foliar applications of triple 20 and 5 applications of triple 20, 14 days apart. So that's a pound of potassium per acre, 5 times, 5 pounds of potash per acre resulted in potassium levels instead of being at 3,200 and 3,500 parts per million, they were at 7— in the 7,000 range. 7,000 plus. Sure. 4,000, 7,600.

Yep.

So you doubled the potassium content of the leaf from the 3,000 to 7,000 parts per million range with 5 pounds of potassium per acre. It's again, it's similar to what we were talking about sugar, is this disproportionate response where a relatively— what seems like a relatively small quantity produces this oversized effect.

I wasn't going to say it, but— oh, so we've talked about this before, John, but, you know, say it for the podcast— is up here in the PNW, people applied tons of K-Mag to the soil, you know, sometimes like upwards of half a million dollars a year on like a 1,000-acre orchard. And people did that year after year after year. And so if you look at an orchard, you look at the sap from an orchard where they didn't do that, a normal thing to see would be on the first sap, you would see 5,000 parts per million potassium and 1,000 to 1,500 parts per million calcium, like really good calcium making tons of cells, you know. But if you've applied K-Mag for years and years, that early potassium could be 8,000 to 10,000 and your calcium might be 700 to 800. And so now you got like a 10 to 1 ratio versus a 5 to 1 or a 4 to 1. Just so much potassium.

And what's the result of that?

Bitter pit, typically. And poor storage. Poor storage is the main thing. You know, you're trying to store apples and you're looking at potassium to calcium ratios and nitrogen to calcium ratios, and people factor in magnesium, but I'm not convinced that's as big of an issue. The potassium flows into the plant like you know, candy to a kid. And calcium is one of the hardest things to uptake. You know, people will say, I've got all this calcium in my soil, why would I want to apply calcium? Well, it's all tied up and you're not going to, you know, you're not going to uptake it.

And that also— but what is interesting, and this is what I loved about the beginning part of our conversation, is what changes when you change the carbon status of the plant to the point where the plant has an abundance of carbohydrates and more root exudates and all of a sudden you are getting calcium absorption from that quote unquote tied up in complex calcium.

Yep. Yep, that's right. I should also add, John, when we're talking about sugars, we're usually adding sea stim too and we're doing it as, you know, kind of a, a sugar as well, you know, carbohydrate or carbon source. But then it comes along with all the other good things, you know, stress relief and, you know, resilience to disease and everything else.

Yeah.

Reproductive energy.

Yeah, that's, that's an important note because one of the things that I'm intrigued by is sea stem, the way that it's— because it's not alkali extracted, it contains all of these, uh, the name of the compound is, uh, compound group is escaping me right now, um, osmotic regulators. Yeah, regulators that, um, that allow the plant to maintain water in cells much more readily. And reduce drought stress and heat stress because they have better water regulation. And I think that's, that's, that's actually an important conjunction with a sugar application.

Yep. Yep.

Agree. You know, this, this entire conversation reminds me of one of the things that Arden Anderson talked about back in the '80s. He described nonlinear effects that when you apply a small amount of a certain product, let's say cobalt or sugar or something like that in a biological system, it has this ripple effect, this domino effect of these unintended consequences. And it's nonlinear. You put on a few ounces of molybdenum or a pound of sugar, and all of a sudden you get increased absorption of calcium that represents an additional 20 pounds of calcium per acre. It's like, it isn't— it's this nonlinear effect that's manifested by biological systems.

Yeah, no, I love that. A lot of it is just bottlenecks, right? There's some kind of bottleneck that isn't right, and you apply just the right thing, and the plant is relieved of that bottleneck and can process again.

Yeah.

Well, Jim, this has been a fun conversation. I've been—

yeah, same here.

A lot. I've smiled a lot. Thanks for being here and thanks for being a part of our team and for all the work that you do. Really appreciate you.

Of course. Thank you, John Kempf.

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