Honeycrisp blocks packing out at 160 bins per acre? It's possible for orchardist Steven Bierlink

Hi, friends, this is John. And this is the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast where we talk about agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate plant health and soil health, and of course, ultimately animal and human health and the entire ecosystem. My guest for this episode is Steven Beerlink, who I've been privileged to know for several years as an AEA customer and apple grower in Washington. Steven spends lots of time thinking about the things all of us should spend more time thinking about, and I always enjoy my conversations with him. So, Stephen, welcome to the show. I'm really glad to have you here. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Steven, can you tell us a little bit about your story in the context of your farming operation and the types of the things that you're working on?

Sure, I guess. First off, I. I've lived on a farm my whole life, grew up doing it. It was all row crops when I was young. My dad decided to plant some orchard in 1991 and slowly grew from there. When I graduated from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I went to college and got a generic business degree. That ended up being a really great asset for me after I came back. But I wasn't planning on coming back. I went through college and the only reason I came back to the farm is because it was in 2008. The market crashed. I couldn't find a job, so I moved home to work for my dad for the summer. And from what I had learned in business education, orchard became a lot more attractive to me because there was a way to apply calculated math to how you might make a certain type of profit or an amount. And that made a lot of sense. So I started running some numbers and doing some things and it started to take off from there. But I wasn't seeing the results that I wanted. The questions that I had asked consultants were kind of just responses were shrugged shoulders.

What were the types of questions that you were asking that you were not getting responses for?

More or less, like, why are my. Why are my honeys getting completely wrecked? There were, there were honeycrisp crops that were just absolute garbage. You know, you could crop load it to 70 or 80 bins per acre and you'd, you'd maybe be able to put 10 or 15 bins per acre into a bin. There were bitter pit issues. There was stuff that looked like cork spot. There was lenisal decay in storage. There was just tons, tons of things. And we ended up deciding it was potassium over application, which takes many years to get to a point where you can create a crop disaster. But that drove me to learn more. And the way that I came to AEA was I found an article that you wrote several years ago that was titled the Myth of Calcium and Honeycrisp. So I thought, okay, that makes an awful lot of sense, but I've never heard of these people, and I don't know anything about them, and I don't know. So I finally decided to call aea and I talked to Jason Stoll. That was the first phone call. And I obviously naturally had many reservations at the start. It's a company that was very far away from where I was. There were no representatives in the area. No one in my area had heard of aea. But during that call, I realized that there was nothing pushy about sales or the information that was given. And the more time that went on in that conversation, the knowledge and intelligence with Jason was very obvious. And it kind of hit that tipping point. Just a few minutes after I realized that, that the intelligence shown pretty much overwhelmed all the concerns I may have had. So I took the plunge, you could say, ordered some SAP labels for SAP analysis, started gaining some trust. Some success came. Success was repeated. Trust got established. At that point, there's a certain level of confidence. So confidence is gained from expected outcomes occurring repeatedly. And so the more time I spent trying to talk to Jason about those things, the better and better it got. So now it's. It's a lot more fun because I'm not spending time being worried about what's going to go wrong. I'm thinking about, you know, what else can I do here to make it even better? And that's a. That's a very exciting thing to have on a farm.

Well, that's quite complimentary, Stephen. Thank you. I wasn't intending to solicit any of that, but for the benefit of our listeners, I'd like for you if you could offer some context about your farming operation. What are the types of crops that you're growing and relative degree of scale and. And what are some of the major concerns on your operation? I think just to add some flavor to the conversation.

Sure. Since most of this is going to be directed at orchard, almost to keep it at that. There's. There's some row crop stuff, but we've moved mostly away from that in favor of the orchard. I've got 70 acres and 20 of that is not producing right now. So I have a lot of time to spend on a very small amount of acres, and that gives me A different ability to pay attention closely to details and make sure that I can respond to the little intricacies of things that could make things better. And the more time that I spent in the orchard rather than the row crops, the more I saw plan profits go up overall. And so it got to a point where I was no longer willing to put hardly any effort into row crops because it just wouldn't matter for my size farm. Obviously, there's very different scenarios for different people, but for me, that's what worked. And because there was success there, it made it a lot more of a driving factor to keep putting more and more time into that. So we've talked about this before. It's very often that I'll spend two or three hours a day just wandering through the orchard. I shouldn't say wander. I'm wandering with some sort of intention. I'm looking for something. The whole kind of cornerstone of what I'm doing out there is trying to have the mindset of, what else can I do? Rather than being worried about what I missed or something I'm behind on. Those things are already addressed. So I can take a different mentality of, you know, what else can I do? And varieties are honeycrisp. We're pretty heavily weighted in Honeycrisp, about 65% of its honeys. And then there's Galas, Fujis, and Pink Ladies.

It's really interesting. I know we've had this conversation before about spending time walking through the orchard and just being present and trying to determine what is happening, what's going on. And this is something that there really is no replacement for. You can't do that from a tractor or from a pickup truck. You have to be out there and actually working with the trees very closely to get that sense of what is happening in that space, which is something I think you do exceptionally well.

Thank you.

Because you take the time for it.

Right. And there's just yesterday I needed to do a foliar application in Pink Ladies. So I took the tractor and the sprayer out myself, and I set up the nozzles, and I was in the tractor, and I thought, okay, that pattern looks really good. And before I actually had one of the spray guys go out and start that application, I thought I should probably go double check it with him in the tractor. And I should. I frequently stand on the back of the sprayer and watch. And so I took around, and as soon as I got on that thing, I was like, wow, that is not at all what I wanted. And so I Spent some time on there and adjusting nozzles and where the air was directing the spray through the canopy and things like that. So you can really target the quality of the application just by being able to have time to do it. And I understand most people aren't in that scenario, and no one's going to care the same amount as the owner. And it's difficult to commit to spending that time out there. But by doing that, you can cover both the quality of the application and the timing of the application. We have all these products available to us that can do these great things, but if you don't put it on at the right time and if you don't have quality of application, you're not going to get the results that you want.

You mentioned a moment ago that when you walk through the orchard, you're able to really consider what are the additional things that you could do because you're very comfortable that you've already have a lot of the foundational pieces in place. So how has that evolved for you over the last 10, 12 years since you came back in 2008? How? I guess there's a couple of questions here. How have your goals evolved? Is one possible question. But another possible question is what have you done? And how has your operation shifted in the last decade for you to have that level of comfort that everything is in place, the foundational pieces are all there.

That's a good question. When you have time to walk through the trees like that and just be looking at different things, because it depends on what you're looking for, too, when you're out there, or if you're looking for anything, or if you're just trying to absorb information, watching the trees as if you were almost. This sounds crazy, but as almost if you were listening to them, that they have something important to tell you, but they can't talk, obviously. So you know, what. What are you trying to gain from that? Are you looking at leaves? Are you looking for bugs? Are you. Are you looking at the fruit to see what spots are on there, the size or what's, you know, what's the total crop load or there's just so many aspects that you need to try to absorb. The trees looking happy actually really matters. And that, I know that sounds crazy, but crazy at all. If they had something to say, what they say, and then how might you respond to that accordingly? And that's what's so great about SAP analysis, is if something doesn't look quite right, generally it will be reflected in the SAP sample results. And then we can address it properly and within a time frame that it's relevant.

I'm going to go back to the question that I asked and I'm going to ask it again. How has your operation shifted that you are comfortable, you have all the foundational pieces in place that you can now think about all of the other things that you could add. So you mentioned SAP analysis, but how have practices changed, if at all?

Mostly I would say it's details. It's the little finite details. As you have some success, obviously that creates a revenue, revenue stream that allows you more opportunities. You can, you can not be so worried about maximizing every single dollar. You can say, you know, I'm going to try these five things and four of them will very likely fail. Maybe all five, but that's okay, because in that process, not only will you learn something, but if one of them works, especially in a variety like honeycrisp, it will more than pay for the other ones that failed. So as you get a chance to see some of that success, it gets a lot easier to invest in other things that aren't being done. And there's so many practices that are just set in stone that this is how you do it. And questioning that and adjusting those things has been a huge, huge help to say it's just not as we thought it was. It's different than we thought it was. And so you have to take some of that conventional knowledge and toss it to the side and say, well, are we sure that's what's happening here? Or is there another way? Or is it just completely not true anymore? A lot of the things that I've tried I ended up finding out from a poem fruit book from the 60s that had tons of references from, from papers that were written in the 20s. And so, so this knowledge is out there, it's available, but you, you have to have the time to look at it, digest it and decide how it could apply to your situation.

It's really incredible to me when I think about all of the information, the knowledge that is out there. How often, not, not always, but how often with our modern agricultural practices, we really shoot both feet off with a big shotgun. Yeah, with some of our practices we.

Do and it's, it's quite unfortunate, but that's, it sounds, it sounds a little bit odd, but you know, universities rely so heavily on what they think they know based on past research and they always have this forward looking mentality, which is great, but sometimes it's time to revisit old ideas and you know, There's a pretty big motivating factor with larger companies that are selling products to suppress any of that information because it would be cheaper for the grower. And it seems like it's backwards thinking, but when, when those companies are prioritizing sales over the quality of the product or the storability of the product, or to maximize the grower's revenue, that motivation isn't putting the grower number one. And so you have to do that yourself.

So far we've been talking about these ideas from a very abstract perspective. Can you give us some examples? What are some of the ideas and the historical knowledge and information that you have learned that has really changed your operation? Or maybe I'll ask the question a bit differently. What are some of the more modern practices that you have discovered that are completely contrary to the way things should be managed in an optimal manner?

Yeah, well, nutrients being applied at the wrong timing is absolutely number one. You know, we've thought for a long time that you've got to add all these things into the soil, potassium in particular. And that's why that's one of the biggest successes I've seen is by learning that we had completely over applied potassium to such an extent it was almost impossible to correct. And thankfully I didn't get to that point. And everything can be corrected over a certain timeline. But will you still be in business by the time you could have got it corrected? If it's gone far enough the wrong direction. So thankfully that didn't happen to me. But that was a huge one. But the only way really that you can find that out is by doing accurate analysis for nutrients. And you're only going to, you're only going to get that through SAP analysis. You can take fruit analysis tests and that'll tell you what's there. But SAP analysis gives us a completely different idea of what we should be doing right now. I can watch what's going into a piece of fruit, nutrient wise, throughout the season, but the SAP analysis really gives us a better tool to say, well, what needs to happen now and how do I address that?

So you have used, you use both fruit analysis and SAP analysis side by side. How do you think about those two tools differently? What, how do you think about managing the information they give you?

There may be, there may be a healthy way to grow a tree and my trees might look happy and that's great, but I'm not really making, actually I'm not making any money on growing a tree, I'm making money on growing fruit. So I use Fruit nutrient analysis to say, okay, what are my nutrients at right now? Where should they be? And it's taken years and years of weekly tests throughout the season to come up with a timeline of how nutrients dilute throughout the season and how they'll dilute differently as you have a more healthy tree. Or maybe with SAP, you can say, okay, if my levels of potassium are low, the tree normally my reaction would say, okay, maybe I should do a potassium application. But if my potassium level in the fruit is where I want it to be, then I'm not going to make that application because I have to prioritize the fruit. So that's, that's been a big help, learning about how the tree doesn't. Well, in terms of honeys anyway, it really doesn't want calcium. You've got to try to coax it somehow to do what you want it to do. And early, early, early calcium, that cell division stage that, you know, if it's warm, maybe only lasts 10 days and maybe if it's cool, we can, it would last four to five weeks. So getting those applications on at the right time, prioritizing them correctly, it sounds crazy, but yeah, I do calcium applications while I think cell division is still occurring at maximum every other day, and I would do it every day if I had time, but I don't. So it's difficult. And early in the season too, you have to prioritize calcium with something that's going to aid cell division. So cytokinin, we've got to make sure that we maximize everything we can. I think that's where the biggest change in yields has come from, is saying, well, yes, we need to prioritize calcium, but we also need to make sure that there's a cytokine source out there and if there's not, it's not going to work. And synthetic cytokinins might work, but natural ones have absolutely proven to work better.

So when you think about the historical practices that you've been using, perhaps detrimentally, you start spoke about potassium over application, how when you shifted that and you moved away from that potassium application, what changed with your fruit quality and yields? You just now mentioned yield improvements. How, how have those shifted and changed?

A lot of times we would actually see that the, the crop load didn't really change much, but it was, you could make sure that you were getting what you needed into that fruit at the right time. So potassium was being completely antagonistic to calcium and not allowing it into the fruit or at least not into the spur, which then into the Fruit. So we were noticing what I would say you'd call cork spot. Sometimes in July, you know, the fruit was maybe an inch and a half wide and it was like, why, why is this happening? But the fruit analysis tests during that time were showing very, very low calcium and ridiculously high potassium. So being able to use, you know, how you, how you had said in that article that you wrote that manganese can act as an effective thermostat for upregulating or down regulating the absorption of potassium, that that single issue by itself was able to correct it to such an extent that we weren't having cork spot or we weren't having bitter pit and calcium levels in the fruit rose. So it's not just that you need to put a lot of manganese out there. That's, you know, it has to be the correct form, it has to be the correct timing. But it, that, that's definitely made a huge shift in, in all the nutrient availability. You know, you might be able to get fruit size, you might be able to get all this other stuff, but it doesn't really matter if there's a bunch of spots on the fruit because of potential.

You know, it's really interesting. I, after that article was published, I found out a couple of years later actually, that there was a group of growers, or one grower in particular in upstate New York, in the food production region there, who just without talking to anyone, without using any SAP analysis, he just elected to apply lots of manganese. And he actually applied manganese to a point where he created a potassium deficiency on honeycrisp. And the crop ended up never ripening and maturing properly and never got, never really ripening and turning red. They ended up all going for juice because of the systemic potassium deficiency. And that happened in a single growing season, which is kind of impressive actually, that manganese has that level of an impact on a variety that is so aggressive at absorbing potassium. I was, I was surprised to see that happening.

I think a lot of times it's easy to get stuck on one issue and then over apply it to such an extent because you feel like you're doing the right thing. Especially if you've had disasters, your reaction is going to be, oh, this is the cure. And then you end up completely overdoing it. So you can, you can create an entirely new problem by trying to correct an old problem. And again, that's where SAP analysis is great, because you can say, well, all right, now I've applied enough manganese, my levels are where they should be. I can prove that it's actively down regulating the absorption of potassium and I don't need to apply it anymore, or at least maybe in reduced rates. Calcium, on the other hand, I'm not sure I've ever seen, you know, calcium over application issue unless it was a chloride base. But aside from that, as long as you're applying the right types of calcium, I'm not sure there's a way to overdo that. But that's probably the only nutrient. I would say that that could create a situation where you can do it as much as you want and it's just not going to hurt anything.

Yeah. And I think it's worth pointing out that you're specifically having this observation experience in the context of honeycrisp. I've actually, I don't recall. I've certainly seen calcium excesses on soil. That's, that's fairly common and we also see it high on some plants. But you're absolutely right, we don't see it causing problems in plants even when it is really high, which is probably the one of the only nutrients that we can say that about.

Right, right.

So what has been the bottom line for you? You mentioned that back in 2008 you were having 70 to 80 bins per acre fruit set, but only having a small proportion of marketable fruit. And that today you're still observing similar fruit set. But how has the quality shifted and changed for you? What, what has been the bottom line take home from shifting and changing nutrition management.

There's a couple things to think about there because depending on the variety that you're dealing with, something like a gala is going to come back every year. The bloom is not going to be a problem. You don't have to worry about return bloom. Biennial bearing varieties, Fujis and honeys specifically are a lot more difficult because you have this up year and the down year, up year and the down year. And it's always a challenge for growers to deal with something like that. So generally speaking, 60 to 80 bins per acre is about all you can do to get a good return bloom scenario. Anything more than that and you would stress the tree too much. Because of the crop load, you would stress it too much and the tree is not going to have the ability to put the hormone flow and the energy required into next year's fruit buds to create a good fruit set. Sometimes you even have bloom come out and you think your return bloom is good, but then all the fruit falls off and you happen to over thin chemically and that's more a result of what happened last year, not the conditions that were during thinning this year that, that made that happen. If the tree's not strong enough, it's just not going to produce good fruit. So pruning has been huge for that accurate pruning, the easiest and cheapest and most effective way to guarantee your crop load consistency year over year is going to be your, your spur density. And so if you know you have a biennial bearing variety and say you want 200 fruit per tree, you should have 400 spurs and half of them should not be producing. And even if that's the case, say, say the hundreds or say the 200 spurs, you want to be fruit this year, that could end up being a lot of fruit for that year. So even if you have the correct spur density, if the tree doesn't have what it needs to put into the, the dormant buds or next year's fruit, it's still not going to bloom on those. It doesn't matter if they didn't bloom this year. If the tree doesn't have enough energy to put into those for next year, it's still not going to work. So you've got to make sure it has everything it needs.

How do you manage the. Obviously you can manage spur density with pruning, which you alluded to, but how do you manage the proportion of spurs that are reproducing or not reproducing? How are you managing that thinning process? Are you actually making sure that some spurs don't reproduce by hand with pruning?

Yes, because we would say on, on a really dense system, you say 4,000 liters per acre, you, you still want a certain amount of fruit on each of those. You can't just say, oh, I'll have half the leaders producing for this year. And so one liter might have, you know, we'll say 100 spurs on it, but you only want 50 of them to produce. And so most of what we do with pruning is traditionally forks are kind of a bad idea. You know, if you have a lateral branch growing out of a tree, you would prefer to not have a fork. I'm completely against that thinking I would rather have a fork because it gives me a way easier ability to say, well, no, this year is the right side, next year is the left side. And sometimes, you know, you can't control it on, on that micro, micro level. But at least you could say, you know, at one of them is going to fruit, one of them's not. Or maybe they both fruit, but maybe there's another fork right above it and both of those won't. And so on average, you at least need to have, you know, twice as many spurs as you want fruit.

So you're not actually going through and taking fruit off of specific spurs once they have pollinated. If I'm understanding correctly, you're just doing all of that through pruning management, Correct, Correct.

And then hoping that you, your chemical thinning usually is going to be lime, sulfur at the start, that you can burn some of those spurs off entirely. Because if you don't get it during that time, that may be about the only time to make that spur reproduce for the next year. If you do it any later than that, it's, it's possible that it won't come back because the tree won't have the energy to put into it. Especially if you get past cell division before you take it off. Hand thinning will not, it will not produce fruit for next year. You can't just say, oh yeah, all five of those fruit set, I'm gonna go pick them all off when they're, you know, one inch in size and then that'll be next year's fruit. No, you're already past time. It can't do it.

Interesting. So you have to catch it early enough that you're not even at the cell division stage yet. I was not aware of that. That is much, much earlier than people commonly think about effective thinning, particularly thinning in the way that you're describing it for next year's spur development.

Sure, yeah, it's, it has to be very early. And the, the reason for that, I think, is because you have to consider that if all of those fruit, if all those spurs are, are flowering and then you go and hand thin half of them off so that you can have, you prevent your biennial bearing cycle. The tree sees a massive amount of stress during, during cell division. And so you're already stressing the tree to a huge extent. And because of that, it's not going, it's not early enough. You're not going to be able to get that fruit to produce for next year. So by doing it as early as possible, that's the best way to make sure that the tree has the energy and the hormone flow that it needs for the resting spurs to then produce for the next year.

So what is your thinning process? You mentioned the use of lime, sulfur. How are you using other thinning sprays as well, and what's the frequency and timing of those, if any?

Yeah. So on, on pretty much all varieties, I only ever direct thinning sprays into the top of the tree. So it's going to be the top half of the tree. And I use 6% solution. And depending on how aggressive the variety is, I'm either going to apply it at 100 gallons an acre or 150 gallons an acre. But the mix is always the same 6% mix. So for weaker trees like honeys, I would probably apply that at 100 gallons an acre. Stronger varieties like Galas, Fujis, Pink Ladies, that would be applied at 150 gallons an acre, but again only into the top part of the tree. The timing for that is going to be probably around 80% full bloom. Lime sulfur, in my mind is going to act as a stress on the tree so that it chooses to abort those flowers. Most of them will, most of them will get pollinated, most of them will get fertilized. But if the tree chooses to abort them because of the amount of stress it's under, that will make them fall off earlier. So I would apply that probably twice and I would put a two day to three day period in between. The first one being at, you know, 80% bloom, 80% full king bloom, the sides don't really matter as much. The second one, two to three days after that, depending on heat. And then we wait for petal fall. And then petal fall is going to be an application of naphthiatic acid. That's the main thinning function. And the timing of that one is absolutely critical. I mentioned earlier the timing of the application or the quality of the application for the pedal fall spray with the. It's more commonly referred to as naa. That one has to be timed correctly. The quality of the application, obviously you'd prefer to have that good, but the timing is way more critical. And the reason for that is that it doesn't work properly if you don't have a minimum of 70 degrees of heat the day you spray and for two days after. So if you don't have that scenario, you just can't spray. And it doesn't matter if it happens the day that you assume petal fall starts, or if the fruit is at 8 to 10 millimeter, you need the heat for it to work because if you don't, it's not going to knock anything off. And because NAA has a cumulative effect inside the tree, you'll end up doing a second application. And if it ends up being too hot during that application, it will stack on with the first one and then you'll completely over Thin. So the timing of that is incredibly stressful. That is the single most important spray of the year.

A few moments ago you mentioned the importance of thinning and having these fruitlets off the tree before the cell division stage. Otherwise it produces so much stress on the tree that it limits return bloom on some of those firs that you want to be dormant. And just a moment ago you mentioned that lime sulfur and now also the NAA produces stress on the tree. But I'd like to specifically lime sulfur because we're applying before we get to that cell div. How is that stress from the lime sulfur different from the stress of having all of those small fruit go through the cell division period?

So I think the tree will choose to go into reproductive mode if it sees, if it sees a certain type of stress. So if the stress is coming from the crop load, then it's not going to put its energy into reproduction. So there's a certain type of reproductive stress that we're trying to gain from a thinning spray like lime sulfur or the naa. The crop load stress is an entirely different thing because that's, that's putting the tree in a. I don't know if you'd call it a different mood, but it's going to prioritize things quite a lot differently if it's seeing stress from crop load rather than from, you know, outside outside forces which might be, you know, the heat from the year or, or the sprays that you're putting on. You know, the tree doesn't know the difference between a hot day and whether or not I sprayed something. All it knows is it's stressed. So somehow, thank goodness we've learned this. But you can use those chemicals to stress the tree in the proper way to provide the correct response to get next year's crop to produce. So somehow with those, with those chemicals, we're able to get the tree to prioritize the nutrients and the hormone flows that you need to those resting spurs by doing it early enough. So I guess a good example of this is June drop. Why does June drop happen? If the crop load is way too heavy, a lot of varieties will self thin and it doesn't happen until June. That's the point where the tree is so stressed that it goes into abort mode and fruit will just start dropping. And a lot of people, you know, for a long time would say, well, that's just what happens. Well no, it's not just what happens. There's a reason for it and it's because the tree is under A massive amount of stress because of the crop load. So by doing it early enough and stressing the tree in the correct way, we can provide the nutrient flows we need for next year's crop.

So how has this, since you've been making these changes, how has this influenced your biennial bearing? Are you able to get out of the on year, off year cycles?

I'm getting closer, but no, I have not escaped it. I think the most common thing for something like honeycrisp is to get it to bounce between, for a normal grower, maybe 30 to 40 bins an acre on the off year and sometimes upwards of, you know, 75 to 90 maybe. And I'm still going through that biennial bearing cycle, but it's not dropping by 50%. It's, it's, it's a lot different than that. So we've been able to go from some blocks, we've been able to go from 100 bins an acre to 90 on the off year and then up to 120 and then 100 and then most recently up to above 160. So we'll, we'll see where the limits of those things are. There's, there's certainly a, an upper limit to what's possible, but we don't know what it is. And it's, it's a lot more fun to, it's a lot more fun to play with that, with those, with those types of cycles.

I've made the comment, I've just. We've observed so many different crops where what we, with a bit of experience and managing the nutrition and the cultural management practices a bit differently, as you're describing. With thinning, we soon discover that what we thought was normal is only normal because the plants have been really suppressed or have been really mismanaged and that we don't actually know what really a really healthy crop looks like for a given crop anymore. And so what, what you're describing certainly strikes me as, as a parallel to that. I mean, doing 160 bins an acre is very different from an on year. Is doing very, is quite different from having 90 bins an acre on an on year.

Right, right, it is. And part of that's. Honeys are a lot more difficult because it's, they're not an aggressive variety. And so when they're young, yes, they're aggressive. And one of the things that honey growers have an issue with is they're trying to get this good quality fruit out of a young tree and it's just probably not going to happen. It's very, very difficult to get, to get honeys calmed down, to reach a maturity level with the tree, with the roots to, to really produce good fruit. And that's generally why older blocks have higher quality fruit. But it's also very difficult to make sure that you can fill the canopy on young trees. You want to be able to prioritize that, but the more that you do prioritize that, you're playing a little bit of an antagonistic game with later on down the road, it might be 5 years, 8 years, 10 years. By applying all those fertilizers early to try to get good growth and fill the canopy, that can be, like you had mentioned earlier, shooting both your feet off. So you've got to find a balance. Every, everything needs to have a balance, and the balance really, really matters. In something like honeycrisp, there's other Fujis are a little bit different, that's a more aggressive type of variety. We've got to use growth regulators pretty heavily in there to try to suppress the terminal growth that always tries to occur. But with accurate pruning and by using those plant growth regulators, we are able to get out of a biennial bearing cycle in there. So the last several years I've been able to entirely eliminate a biennial bearing cycle on Fuji. And that's been, that's been a lot easier to deal with. So now we're depending on the year, depending on the size, things like that. We're, we're between 100 and 120 bins per acre in, in Fuji, and I'm pretty confident we'll be able to stay there.

So what do you think the upper limits are if we don't really know what an actually healthy apple tree actually looks like? For the most part. Where, where are the upper limits? Where can we get you?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I suppose Plato might have something to say about this with the allegory of the cave. I mean, we're, we're getting closer. We're not just looking at shadows anymore. We're, we're getting closer to seeing what a healthy tree looks like and what it can do. We don't know what that is yet, but, but because we're getting closer, we have something to strive towards. One of the things I've noticed the last few years is I almost feel like there's a hypersensitivity to little things that will start to go wrong in trees and I'll get very concerned about something and say, gosh, there's definitely something wrong here. But to most other people, they would not even notice that anything is even close to wrong. It's like, oh, these trees look healthy. But when, when you get a healthier and healthier tree every year and you're getting used to what that looks like every year, you start to get hypersensitive to those things and you're more able to quickly respond. And then when you can back that up, when you can back that feeling up with results from SAP analysis, now you have something that you can use to say, oh, well, here's why. So that, that's been, that's been a huge change to see what a, what a more healthy tree than what it used to look like, what a more healthy tree should look like. But yeah, we don't know where the upper limits are. One of the things we talked about yesterday is the goalposts have moved. We don't know where they are anymore. And that's a great thing. That's very exciting because I, I do have. This is kind of a, maybe a bombastic statement to make, but I, I think we're within 10 years of seeing 200 plus bins per acre crop load. That's, that's insane. And I don't know, I, I don't know how many people will be able to attain those things. But I'm, but I'm confident right now that we're not that far off. And that's going to be a, a wild shift in this entire industry.

I think one of the key pieces that we've talked about to getting to that point, and I don't think we should discount this, you spoke about how you're managing pruning differently and how you're managing thinning very carefully. And I'm sure these are things that many other growers are doing as well. But there is going back again to a statement I made earlier. There is no replacement for you being present in the blocks all the time, paying that close attention. And I think that's really what is going to be required for any grower who wants to get to that level of increasing average yields by a factor of 2 or 3x or whatever the number turns out to be.

Yes, that's absolutely right. And like I said too, I have a different ability to do that because I only have a small amount of acres. But if you can get, you know, the same amount of bins on 50 acres as a normal grower could get on 100, it sure seems to make sense to do less. But that's, that's for me also too. There's a certain amount of efficiency, a certain type of efficiency that you can gain by. By having more acres. And it's the ability to take a smaller amount of profit on a. On a unit basis, and that's fine. And if that's what. If that's how your management style is and you want to do more acres, then that's great. And some of these farmers have, you know, over a thousand, two thousand, five thousand acres. And it would be unbelievably difficult to manage it at a micro level like I can, again, just because of the size. But I suppose it depends on the grower and what the final goal is. You know, I enjoy spending time out in the trees and I enjoy being able to pay attention to those details. Some people thrive on being operation managers, and that's how they want to do it, and that's fine.

It would seem to me, though, that even on those larger scale operations which you have as neighbors and some of which we work with, there is still the economic rationale with the improved performance to perhaps hire the people needed to be able to pay that level of close attention.

And the only issue with that is it's unbelievably difficult to find somebody who has the motivation and the emotional involvement that they need to do that. Those are very, very difficult people to find. Most of the time the owner is the one who is the most emotionally involved. And getting other people to that level is. It's not impossible, it's not unattainable. It's just unbelievably difficult. And then for a lot of people, if you can find someone like that can't stomach the amount you'd have to pay them. And I understand that too, because it would be unbelievably expensive to hire somebody like that who has that motivation. But if you could, that person would very more than likely pay for themselves pretty quickly.

So one of the pieces I want to not lose sight of is what are some of the things, other pieces that we haven't yet talked about that you might be doing differently? So you manage. You describe a little bit how you're managing pruning going down a slightly different direction there, and how you're managing thinning and thinning really early. You also made mention that you're putting on foliar applications during the cell division stage every 48 hours, which I think would raise eyebrows for lots of people. But it's certainly a contributing factor to your success. What other pieces are you doing differently now than you have in the past that you think are a part of that overall success.

I think water management is a big issue. I have a water monitor every five acres around the orchard and I check them once a week and come up with a schedule for how, whether it's drip or under tree irrigation, to try to manage that properly. And the consistency of where those water levels need to be throughout the season, I think is. Is really important. If things get too dry, obviously you're not going to have the nutrient flow that you need. If you were to dry things down, say, to the extent that, you know, calcium falls out of solution, or it's not like there's a hard limit and all of a sudden there's no calcium available, it's just it tapers off to such an extent where you're not getting any uptake. And so drying them down could produce a certain result for the tree that you'd like to see. But if that's going to create a separate problem where you can't uptake the nutrients that you need for good fruit quality, then it doesn't really make sense to do that. So there's a lot of people, I think, over water in the spring, it seems like it's hot outside, and so you just kind of get going a little too early and you get things a little too wet. And it's not that the tree can't handle a wet scenario, you know, too wet. It's more that you're cooling the soil temps down and you're not going to get as good a root function. So if you can't get good root function, you're not going to get good nutrient uptake. So having the correct amount of moisture throughout the growing season, depending on what the tree needs right then, or depending on the type of stress that it's under, water management is. Is huge. And it depends on soil types, too. There it's going to be entirely different depending on what types of you have. And even within one block, you could have three or four different soil types.

Do you use any water deprivation or limit water later on as you approach the harvest season for any reason?

No.

And that's quite different from the mainstream practices.

Yes. And, and I can't give you. I can't give you a specific scientific reason why I think that's relevant. It's more of a feeling for me, you probably would be able to answer that question in a much more capable manner than me, but it just doesn't seem like stressing the tree towards the end of harvest when you're. Or before harvest anyway. That doesn't make sense to me. You know, the cells are absorbing a massive amount of water in their, in their elongation stage. And it's. To inhibit that is, in my head, not going to solve any issues.

I know what we have observed is that, as you alluded to, it really limits calcium absorption and transfer. And it also has some interesting effects on soil biology and a soil's overall capacity to deliver calcium that I don't fully recognize or understand. But it seems that once you suppress the soil's capacity to deliver calcium at that stage of the season once, then it never fully recovers for later on in the growing season either, which is important for the next year's crop, of course. And getting calcium into all the developing embryos.

Yeah, there's too, there's too many things. There's too many things that could, that could go wrong during that stage. And whether it's, whether it's wanting to suppress the terminal growth or, you know, limit fruit size or something like that. If you're trying to restrict water to get that result, you might be able to, let's say you could limit your terminal growth by limiting water. And while that's true, you're also destroying the tree's ability to uptake calcium, which is going to create a scenario where you have no storable fruit. And so you might get the desired result, but there will be lasting effects on the crop for that year that will outweigh what you were trying to do in the first place. Or if you're trying to limit fruit size, you might be able to do that too. But like you said, if you're creating a scenario where the tree doesn't have enough energy to put into next year's crop, then you've shot yourself in the foot again.

So, Stephen, you prune radically differently from everybody else. Other people don't want forks. You want forks. Other people are doing water deprivation at the end of the season. You absolutely do not do that. And I kind of had to dig that out of you. So now I'm just going to ask you the very simple question. What else do you do that is the direct opposite of what is most common practice?

That's another good question. Summer pruning. Summer pruning, I think, is, is a, is a big deal and we call it summer pruning. Right. But you know, really, really what the goal is. The, the tree makes a push towards terminal growth at the beginning of the season and it's trying to, it's trying to prioritize that. And that's one of the reasons why calcium is so important early in the season because those terminal tips take a lot of calcium and the tree will prioritize it to the terminal tips rather than the spurs. And so that's a, that's a use for PGRs, plant growth regulators. Because we can say, no, don't, don't do that. Well, you can't always control that. So the other plant growth regulator you can use is loppers and say, no, you're not going to do that. But the timing of that is, is definitely, definitely different. Most people will summer prune in July, August, you know, somewhere prior to harvest to try to open up the canopy a little bit and get a little bit more anthocyanin production, coloring, fruit coloring, and that's good, that's effective for fruit coloring. But that's not the goal of summer pruning. For me, it's going to be how do I place the fruit buds or the spurs that may be created this season where I want them. And the only way to do that is to say I'm going to stop this terminal tip from growing, whether, whether it's by cutting or using a growth regulator. And then by doing so, where the tree was trying to push those nutrients will no longer be there. And because it's no longer there, it goes into the buds that are more, more close to what I would call a power source, closer to the leader. And by doing that you can say, okay, well now I, now I've chosen where the next spurs will come out and maybe that won't be a fruiting spur for next year, but at least I've shortened the terminal length to the point where I can say even if it's not fruit for next year, I've at least shortened it to where it could be a non fruiting spur next year and then a fruiting spur after that.

And you've taken away a calcium sink quite early. So you're, you're summer pruning very early. I would guess probably in late May or possibly early June, right?

Yes. I think if you're going to summer prune for next year's crop or to try to prevent terminal growth, especially because it's going to, if the trees, if it's an aggressive variety, the tree will continue to prioritize nutrients to that terminal growth rather than to the fruit. So if you can cut that off at the right time, that's, that's going to change everything. Now probably if I had the time, I would do it, I would do it as early as possible. One of the issues with that though is you can't see the fruit in May and June very well. You know, the leaves are kind of hiding things. And so to go out there too early, you might end up inadvertently cutting off quite a lot of your crop. So you have to wait until you can see it. But generally the goal is to do it before the second week of June. That's about the cutoff period, I would say, when the tree has already provided the nutrient flow and the hormone flow to define where and how many fruit there are next year.

Stephen, My guess is we probably have, we'll have lots of listeners to this interview who may not be familiar with apple production and fruit production. So we're having a fairly detailed conversation and this is, this is why I'm, I'm asking for very perhaps overt comments from your perspective on what are you doing that is so dramatically different. Because I think this, there's a lot of really valuable insights that may not be obvious to people who don't, who don't know the total scope of what you're, what we're talking about. So when given the, the research that you have done and the very different perspective that you have developed on managing really high performing apples and really healthy apple trees, what, where do you see areas of opportunity for growers today? Where do you see that they should focus on in developing their operations?

Sure. I think in terms of management, when it comes to people, I think that's a big, big adjustment that could be made. I have two guys that work for me that I would not be able to do anything close to what I can do without them. They both have completely different abilities and, and, and one of them happens to be a really, really great people manager. And the mood of your employees is absolutely paramount to their performance. And so our top priority is for everybody to be in a good mood. And whether that's through, you know, paying slightly higher wages or, you know, trying to do barbecues for people, or, you know, making sure when it's hot out, hey, we've got sodas, we've got Gatorades, we've got ice, ice water, whatever it is, play loud music, do whatever it takes, don't cause drama. There's lots of things that you could do to keep people in a good mood, and that's very difficult to do. If you're the owner and you're stressed about everything. It's going to be incredibly difficult to try to keep everybody else in a good mood. Moods are unbelievably contagious, especially in stressful. Scenarios. And so if you get, if you as the owner, are in a bad mood or if you have an aptitude for getting angry, all that's going to do is the, the people that are working for you are going to feel that stress there and they're, and they're going to perform accordingly. So being very encouraging and trying to make sure that people are doing what they, what they want to be doing. You know, obviously we don't all love work, but can you, can you at least enjoy it? To the extent that you don't mind? You know, are, are you getting paid what you feel like you should be getting paid? And if you don't, can you tell me and then we can talk about it? There's open lines of communication is probably the cornerstone to that whole thing is making people feel that they have an ability to come and talk to you if there's an issue or that they can at least get access to the person they do need to talk to. And then say, what's wrong? Just say it. You know, if you, if you make a mistake, just say it. You'll feel the weight come off of you. So just say it. I'm not going to get mad at you. Yeah, you screwed up. Okay, I screw up too. Whatever. So now we can look forward once, once you admit that thing. Now we can look forward. Say, how do we fix it? You know, let's look forward here. We want to, we want to stay eyes forward. What's the goal? We have to be very goal oriented and to be productive in that mindset is going to happen through being in a good mood. So making sure people aren't overworked. You know, some, some people on row crop farms are working over 3,000 hours a year. And I've been there when I was younger, and you get to a burnout point and you just don't care. And complacency is a killer. If you need someone to perform to a high level, but they're being overworked, they will become complacent. And you can't pay attention to detail if you're complacent. So making sure that people aren't working too many hours and if, if they do feel like they're working too many hours, okay, say that thing and then let's find a way to ratchet back your workload a little bit or if you feel like your responsibility level is too high, let's see who else in our team can take some of that over so that we can relieve some of that stress. Everybody has A different capacity to deal with certain things. And so if. If somebody else has more of a capacity to deal with a higher level of stress, okay, well, then maybe that guy can take that off your plate. So working together, open lines of communication, those are all good concepts for. For management, I think, in general.

And it's interesting because I asked you this question as where do you see as areas for opportunity? And I think it's, you know, there's this conversation today about agriculture being exploitive, exploitive of the land, exploitive of water resources, or whatever the case might be. But I think something that the con. This conversation sometimes loses sight of is that it is also exploitive of farmers and can obviously also be exploitive of labor, but it's also exploitive of farmers. And so the comment. I find your comment really intriguing, that being overworked leads to complacency. And that isn't immediately obvious, or. It kind of caught me by surprise a little bit. It was not what I was expecting you to say. Not that I knew what to expect exactly, but when you stop to think about it, it's. You can't possibly be. You can't turn. Be turned on all the time. It's exhausting to be focused all the time. And so it's. It seems obvious when you think about it that, yes, that would lead to complacency.

Right. And part of that too is for me as the owner, I have to look at somebody who might not be performing at the level that I would expect. And instead of saying, what's your problem? And pointing the finger at that person, what's your problem? The first thing I need to do is point the finger at myself and say, okay, what else could I do to help this guy out? Or at least is something that I did causing that level of stress? And then how might I correct that? And then with the open lines of communication, you can end up finding a solution. And what's difficult for the employee, too, is to do the same thing, to point the inward finger first and say, you know, what else could I do? It starts with me. You can't point the finger at somebody else because that's the. That's the common thing to do, especially in business, is the employee looks at his boss, points the finger and says, I'm making you money. And then the employer would point the finger at the employee and say, you only have a job because of me. It's like you both need to turn your fingers around first. That's the best thing you could do for. For the both of you to get into a better place.

Yeah.

Thank you, Stephen. With the.

You really enjoy the liberty of questioning the status quo or the freedom of mind to question the status quo. And so I want to ask you, the question is, what is it that you believe to be true about agriculture that might be very different from the view of others in the ag community?

That's a good question. Consultants. We have a lot of really, really great resources in consultants these days. They're nearly all college educated. The younger generation has access to information that was just not even possible 20 years ago. I mean, everybody has phones, we can Google anything at our fingertips. And that's great. But it's turned into a scenario where growers will rely too heavily on their consultants for answers and they'll ask questions basically to the point where the consultant becomes the grower. They say, hey, what should I do? And then whatever the consultant says, that's just what they do. And they think they're doing the right thing. And in a lot of cases they are, but then also in a lot of cases they're not. Nobody knows your ground like you. And I think consultants need to be viewed more as assets to assist us on our way, not hold our hands along the way. You know, it's not, it's not a parent taking a three year old on a walk. It's like, no, I'm going to use the knowledge and the education and the access to information that you have and the products that you have, but I'm still going to make my own decisions. But the only way that that can happen is for the grower to be motivated enough to educate themselves to the point where they can make more decisions on their own or at least be able to plan on making their own decision and then maybe reinforce that decision with what the consultant might think afterwards. So that's a big shift in mentality for a lot of growers to get to a point where you could say, okay, my consultants there to help me on my way, rather than me just calling them for every little detail and say, hey, what should I be doing right now?

One of the pieces that we've really observed in growers that we've worked with that have been really exceptionally successful in making shifts and changes is that they refuse to delegate the knowledge base of the various factors that actually drive their profitability and that drive crop performance. So you and I have been able to have a deep conversation about thinning and about pruning management and cultural management practices, nutrition management and so forth that all lead to specific outcomes around fruit Quality and storability and ultimately to profitability. And that is the one area where we find the most successful growers really focus on very intensely. And they do not want to delegate that particular knowledge to a consultant. They want to know that for themselves.

Yeah, and that's great to be driven to that extent. Even, you know, going back to consultants, there's a lot of times where a consultant might pull a fruit sample in the middle of the season and say, oh, gosh, well, we're way, we're way behind on this. We need to apply this. And it's like, well, now wait a minute. That might be what the soil test shows, or that might be what the fruit analysis shows, but without being able to see what the tree wants to do or what the tree is currently doing, which is only something attainable by SAP analysis, we really just can't make the right decision without that information. So I had probably never, prior to 2015, been asked how, how my fruit had packed. Like, what was the, what was the quality of the packout or what percentage of the packout did you get? How long did it store? You know, I don't think I ever had a consultant actually ask that. And that really struck me probably in 2015, as it had never been done before that. And I thought, well, gosh, if I've never been asked that, it's obviously not a priority and it should be. We're here, we're here where I'm here to grow fruit that's storable quality, high pack outs, you know, high percentage of, of of fruit that's actually getting to a store shelf and in good shape and the length of storability that we have. And so that's, that's when I started doing all the, all the testing and research myself and logging all the data and putting it all in spreadsheets and figuring out, you know, what are the, what are the rates at which certain nutrients dilute throughout the season and being able to kind of come up with some sort of roadmap for, for where things should be at different times of the year. And yeah, storability goes way up, fruit quality goes way up, coloring goes way up, the whole thing.

So this is actually something that I was wanting to ask you about and hoping that it would come up organically in the conversation. How has your fruit storability, you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that just a small proportion of your fruit was actually marketable. How has that shifted and changed? What are your packouts and what is your storability levels like? Today, compared to where they were 10.

Years ago, that's been quite a large shift. We had some things early on that you would put what you thought was quality in the bin and then you didn't know how long it would store. So we'd say, okay, well, let's pack it within, you know, let's try to get it in a box within a month and a half or so. And so you'd pull it out of storage and you'd pack it and put it in a box and then it would just blow up in the box. And by blow up, I mean we would see Lenosil decay or we would see bitter pit show up. And then you're in a scenario where not only did you throw half the crop away before you could even get it into a bin, but the other half that you did put into a bin, now only 30% of that is actually getting to a store shelf. So that was problematic, obviously, for profits.

Because that's 15% of a total fruit on a tree.

Yeah. And that can wear you down quite quickly in terms of your motivation to keep going. You know, you get knocked down and you keep getting kicked. When you get knocked down, it's easy to give up. But thankfully, that's not what happened for the long term. And, yeah, storability has gone way up. We've been able to. The earlier pack stuff, you know, we've had, we've had some pack outs that were over 98% and that, that's something that I never thought was attainable.

You have packouts of 98% of what's in the bin, but how much of the fruit on the tree made it into the bin? That's the other important question.

By the time we were getting 98% as a, as a packed product, we were putting 100% of what was on the tree in the bin.

Wow, that's impressive.

So there's, yeah, that's, that's quite a large shift. So it's, it's been a lot better. And store ability is always a, always a tricky thing too, because there are certain things that are going to happen throughout the season in storage, you know, say from October until June. There are certain things that can go wrong there too. So that's been another aspect of learning. Honeycrisp is very, very difficult to store correctly. The temperatures have to be perfect, the CO2 levels have to be perfect. Everything has to be exactly right. And if it's not even just by a few degrees, you can lose another 20, 30, 40% just from that. And so there's a huge amount of trust that's put on the storage warehouses and there's a huge amount of stress on them to get it right. So there's been a lot of disasters and storability over the last 10 years in Honeycrisp, they've made a lot of advances. People in general are getting pretty good at storing them, so we're getting a lot better packouts later on in the season. Generally, I would say that 98% that would pack out very early, say somewhere in October or November, would probably go down to about 85 to 90% in March. And it's the same fruit. But that's still. That's still a really good number.

That's an impressive number. What are, what are industry mainstream numbers? And I know it's hard to ask that question because it's probably all over the board with different batches of fruit from different blocks and so forth.

Right. In general, everybody's going to have a different level of storability because of the timing. There's going to be a small amount of your product that you can.