Honeycrisp Grower Discusses 100 Bins at 97 Percent Packout

Hi, Steven. Hi, Jim.

How are you?

John?

John, I'm having an awesome afternoon.

Good enough.

Maybe I'll just take a minute to say that the goal of this webinar is to have a freeform conversation about perennial crops. Though there may be a bit of a focus on apples and particularly honeycrisp. And we've got special guest Steven Beerlink, and we are going to try to cover a handful of topics. We could spend an hour and a half on each one of these probably, but we're going to try to keep moving through them. I'll go through them real quickly to give us a bit of a idea of where we're going. The broad topics are chemical thinning, alternate bearing, calcium and bitter pit, and pests and diseases. We have time. Some other cultural practices like deficit irrigation and overhead cooling. So we should introduce Stephen. Jim, I'm going to pass that off to you.

All right. So, yeah, we're thrilled to have Stephen Berlink as a panelist on the webinar. Today we work with Stephen on his honeycrisp apples in Quincy, Washington. In the past two years, Stephen has produced huge yields of exceptional quality honeycrisp apples. This year he produced 100 bins per acre with fresh packouts of 97%. So maybe Stephen, tell us. Pretty incredible. That's year two, as far as I know. But Stephen, maybe you can fill in the blanks and tell us a little.

Bit about your farm.

Yeah, that's been true the last two years. We've been able to maintain that yield for two years. And I'd like to say that confident enough to think that it's going to be like that for the future. We'll see. Time will tell. I was basically driven to learn quite a lot more after probably the 2014 and 15 seasons. I wouldn't call it a total disaster, but it was a near disaster. We were field sorting probably around 70% of what was on the tree and just throwing it on the ground. And those things drove me to start researching anything I could about what was going on. It's really difficult to find information on honeycrisp specifically on the Internet. It's still largely a pretty understood, misunderstood variety. And people frequently try to throw more at it to fix problems rather than stop throwing things at it or try to prevent things from happening. And so through a Google search, my dad had found a article that John wrote years ago about potassium specifically and honeycrisp and the effects that it can have negatively on that. And that was kind of the tip of the iceberg that led me to a lot of other research and a lot of conversations with you guys. So that's what's brought me to where I am, and I hope that it continues in a successful way for the future.

Awesome. Let's start with chemical thinning. Something that Jim and I encounter with all our apple growers is trying to balance what we do with chemical thinning. And it's this necessary, kind of a necessary evil in that we're trying. We're hitting the tree with something pretty harsh during its most vulnerable time when it's bud break and bloom. And so we're always trying to figure out how to best work with that. And there's a lot we could talk about regarding lime sulfur and other chemical thinners, but let's just. Let's just dive into that.

So for lime sulfur specifically, one of the biggest issues I've always had is what do we do for foliars during that time? We're almost coating every surface that could photosynthesize for us in something that the tree hates. And that coating that it leaves on there, I think largely makes it unavailable for the uptake of nutrients. And so one of the things I did over the last couple of years is just stop the foliar sprays during lime sulfur. I think it's a waste of time and I think it's a waste of money, and I think it's counterproductive to the tree's ability to have the effect, the stressful effect that it needs to have for thinning, because we're just coating the leaves with more things. It's like we're stacking layers. We're stacking lime sulfur on top of, you know, let's say it's calcium and boron or whatever it is. We add all those layers on there. I don't think it makes the lime sulfur work any better. And I definitely don't think that the tree is uptaking those nutrients. So that's something I've changed over the last couple of years. Lime sulfur should be a per hundred rate, not a per acre rate. And I think that's true for everything, but especially for something like lime sulfur. So the focus is ensure good coverage on the tree in your target area. And the gallonage is the gallonage. If you calibrate to a specific gallonage, you may be over applying or under applying. But if you instead say, what does it take for adequate coverage? Ensure that's happening. And the gallonage that ends up being the gallonage doesn't matter. Sometimes it might be 80 gallons an acre, and sometimes it's 250. It just depends on the scenario, the density of the tree, what exactly we're trying to do, where our target area is. A lot of times the target area may be high in the tree and we're actually applying 120 gallons an acre just from the 8 foot and above level. So that's something that can help too. I don't use ATS ammonium thiosulfate, so I can't speak to anything there.

Steven, how do you manage, do you manage foliars differently immediately before or immediately after the lime sulfur spray because you're not doing any during that period?

Yes. So as I've told you guys before too, from Half Inch Green, we start with calcium sprays. At least calcium sprays every other day. And I also do my nutrient sprays at a per hundred rate rather than a per acre rate. And most of our early sprays are applied around 50 gallons an acre. There's just not a lot out there at that point. So we keep it low and we base what we put in the tank on the prior year SAP analysis. So if we have a good indication of what's deficient in the tree from very early on, that gives us a reason to apply those things because it's shown after you have a few years of SAP analysis results, you can say, okay, know what's deficient in the tree very early on. Well then start applying those things before it becomes deficient to try to compensate for it. And then we also, when we're done with the lime sulfur sprays, we go back to every other day spraying. Calcium is always in the tank. It's it never go. I never do a spray without calcium unless it's lime sulfur. But other than that, every single spray we do has calcium in it.

Did I hear you say that? I know this is going through people's minds. Did I hear you say you're fully applying every two days?

That's correct.

What has been the response that you observed? Obviously you're still doing it, so that's a logistical challenge for a lot of operations. And. Yeah. Has it been worthwhile?

I think it is for something like Galas and Fujis. I wouldn't necessarily say it's guaranteed to be worth it for those varieties. The reason specifically that it is for honeycrisp is because it just, I mean, to put it in the simplest terms, it seems like Honeys don't like it. It's almost like they don't want it. And so if we can give the tree every chance it can to uptake it when it's ready for whatever reason, then we might as well make sure it's available. If I had the time, I would spray every. So it's hard enough to do it every other day. But I put an emphasis on specific people and specific equipment to make sure I can make that happen. And I do think it makes. I do think it makes a large difference.

I think that's ultimately the question that other growers would ask is what differences? Have you observed that you believe that it's worth it?

If I see SAP analysis results that show calcium in deficiency all the way up until we figure cell division is over. So let's call it maybe not over, but it's tapered off to quite a large extent. So if we say, okay, we're at the middle of June, maybe towards the end of June, at that point, I would say, okay, I see the calcium levels are coming up in the SAP analysis, and maybe I don't need to be applying every other day anymore. But I would only do that after the SAP analysis confirms that the tree or that the leaf, that the SAP actually has the adequate amount of calcium that we'd like to see in it. And again, that's. I mean, we know that calcium is the largest contributor to firmness and storability. And so if the other nutrients aren't having trouble, then it would make sense that they would tend to hyper accumulate in the place of calcium. So whatever we can do to make sure it's there at any chance it wants, I want to make sure we do that.

Yeah. 100 bins per acre at 97% packed out. Kind of speaks for itself to a degree, doesn't it?

Well, that pays for an awful lot of labor in terms of how many people you can afford to put on a sprayer. So that's a big thing. See, there's a question here from Claire. Yes, I do use Holical. I use other types of calcium also. I think it's good to keep things in rotation. I think Holy Cal is a great product and I think there's a lot of other great calcium products out there. I don't think you necessarily need to rotate all these calcium products. I use different organic calciums and other non organic calciums sometimes including calcium chloride. Wait, what? What's that?

I said, wait, what? You're using calcium chloride?

I know it's the devil term you're not supposed to use. Yes, sometimes. Sometimes. But I'm doing it in. I'm doing it in some in some different ways that I think help the actual fruit. So I do think that calcium chloride can provide a benefit. Like say, we're past. They were past. You know, the cell division stage has tapered off by a lot. And we say, okay, now, you know, there has been quite a bit of research that shows that when you actually dip apples in calcium chloride, that the storability has gone up. And I don't know if that's true or not, but if I. Calcium chloride is free. It's like 30 cents a pound, it's so cheap. So I think, okay, as long as I'm not going to add so much that I. That I create a chloride layer on the leaf to prevent photosynthesis. If I'm not doing that, then how could the calcium chloride potentially positively impact the fruit surface? And is there a way as that. As the dermal layer, as the skin of the fruit is expanding, is there a chance that some of that calcium will be absorbed in any sort of way by the dermal layer or by anything underneath? And if there is even a potential benefit to that, I think it's worth spraying every once in a while. I don't know if that's actually true because I haven't noticed any research on that. And I'm working on finding some of that stuff out for myself with my own research. So time will tell as to what rates that I spray every other day. Hola, cow. I mix at one gallon per hundred ton. And so early on in the season, I'm applying probably 50 gallons an acre. So that would be two quarts an acre. Most people have a really hard time thinking in terms of gallons, you know, in terms of gallons per acre and just doing per hundred rates, rather than how much do I apply per acre? And one of the best things I've learned from. A guy in Canada once asked me, he said, do you think that the tree knows what its spacing is? Well, no, it doesn't. So, like I said before, ensure good coverage, then the gallonage doesn't matter. So that's what I base all the things I apply on. And the other things that I spray for calcium are generally that rate too, at one gallon per hundred.

Just to give you a bit of insight into skin absorption from the fruit, there's. I conducted a podcast interview which will be posted in the next few weeks or months by Dr. James White from Rutgers University, which was a fascinating, fascinating interview. And one of the pieces we spoke about was this cellular process called endocytosis, which basically is the cell membrane being Able to. On either a leaf or the skin of a fruit, being able to actually kind of inhale and balloon around a nutrient and pull in a very large particle that's on the leaf surface or in the skin and actually internalize it into a leaf or into a fruit or into a root system. So they're actually, there's. There's been conversations about absorption through the stomata and. And how nutrients are transferred across cell membranes and across leaf membranes. And he's saying, no, actually, plants can absorb extremely large particles, proteins and larger enzymes, etc. That are actually on the leaf surface or in close proximity to the root system, which makes a great case for the capacity of fruit skin to absorb calcium chloride directly into the fruit.

Okay, that's good news.

Yeah. I'm still not a fan of calcium chloride because I still see way too many tree health challenges showing up when the chloride levels. I mean, there's this delicate balance between chloride and nitrogen, and every time chloride levels get higher than total nitrogen, we see all kinds of disease and insect susceptibility show up. And that happens very easily on tree fruit. So I'm still not a fan of calcium chloride because of that. Now, with that being said, there is another aspect of calcium chloride which I think would benefit many growers if they were. If they used it intentionally. And that is that it has a very high point of deliquescence, which means, very simply, that it keeps drop of foliar spray solution liquid on the leaf surface for much longer. So the longer your foliar spray stays liquid, the more efficiently and more effectively the plant can absorb it. And calcium chloride, we know, is one of these very hygroscopic materials which pulls water to it very effectively. So as that drop begins drying out on the leaf surface, it actually pulls humidity out of the air and keeps that drop liquid for a much longer period. So it can actually, even when used in tank mixes at very small concentrations, it can contribute that effect and increase the absorption of other things that it's combined with.

John, what is your take on timing of nutrient applications around bud break and blossoming and cell division while we're doing all these chemical thinning sprays?

Well, obviously, Stephen's results are exceptional, and I think there are many growers who would have a fantasy being able to apply that frequently, but may not be able to pull that off logistically. My general approach would be conceptually to say that we need to provide very good, abundant calcium and boron and manganese and trace mineral nutrition before the lime sulfur sprays. To actually get those absorbed and into the tree. And then we know that the lime sulfur sprays obviously are. They're very harsh and they function as a biocide on the leaf surface. They degrade or destroy the microbial community on the leaf surface, which I actually believe then is a significant contributing factor to mildew and disease susceptibility on the leaves later in the season. So I think that immediately after the lime sulfur sprays, once we've applied the last one, that's when we need to come back with our microbial sprays, the micro 5000, etc. And try to re establish that microbial population on leadsurface as well. It becomes really important and critical.

Question here asking how often do I apply liquid calcium to the soil? I usually do that early on in the season until probably four weeks after pedal fall. I would say I put on about a gallon per week per acre through the drip system of an 8% calcium hydroxide liquid, or it's derived from calcium hydroxide. And that's the only soil, that's the only soil calcium that I apply. Specifically. I do gypsum in the fall and in the spring, but just for a specific calcium thing, that would be the liquid calcium and then the dry would be in the form of gypsum. £500 in fall, £500 in the spring.

I think the gypsum application is very important. How do, how do you say fall and spring? Do you have any particular timing that you target particularly for the spring application?

Well now my timing, after having more conversations with you, I think is supposed to be 45 days before Bud break. But correct me if I'm wrong on that because I think that's what I have written down in my notes. That sounds accurate.

Yeah, that is correct.

And then the fall one was mostly as a form of if I needed to do any other soil amendments in the fall, then I would just add the 500 pounds of gypsum into that. If I didn't do that, then I would probably just say, okay, wait and put a thousand pounds down in spray.

There's another question that has come through from Michael Grove. How did you determine that you could spray every two days? Were you measuring brix readings or what was your. How did you develop and arrive at that spot?

As a general rule for the way I like to think about things is I hate it when people tell me you can't because that's BS and I think you can. So part of it is saying in my own way rather than just telling someone else, you're wrong. It's more about saying, okay, what am I doing now? And what could I do to make a difference? What would make a possible difference with something I can change? And so I was trying initially to do calcium sprays every week and that wasn't so hard. So then I changed to five days and that wasn't quite so hard after I got used to it just like anything. And so early on I thought, well, geez, what if before cell division is over with, what if we could spray every other day? When I thought about that, I thought, I need to spray every other day. And then I started doing it. And I can't say for sure if that makes a huge difference in comparison to every five days because I don't do like test areas. Once I decided I was going to go every other day, I just did it on everything. And so I don't have a control to say that it, you know, this spraying every five days or every seven days would be, you know, equally beneficial. But I do believe that doing it every other day does help. There's a lot going on in the tree early on and it's under a tremendous amount of stress and bloom is a tremendous amount of stress. And so I think whatever we can do to give that tree everything, everything that it wants that it can't quite get enough of, let's try to provide that foliarly. And we won't be able to do everything the tree wants anyway, but we might as well do everything we can to try. And like John, you said, it is a logistical nightmare for most farms to try to spray at that frequency. They just don't have time and they don't have the resources, especially with most of the acres that people have. And I get that too. But I can't necessarily say that what I'm doing is guaranteed to be more successful than if you had done it every five or seven days.

And as you pointed out, the economics for honeycrisp specifically are there to justify that level of input and intensity.

That's right. That's right.

Well, great guys.

The next challenge that a lot of apple growers struggle with is ultimate bearing, where one year we're going to have an accept acceptable yield and the next year we might have half of that yield. So what are some of the nutritional and cultural practices that we see that.

Affect this alternate bearing? Yes, that is a really difficult one to deal with. I initially started dealing with that with Fujis, and I think now Fujis are more difficult to manage alternate bearing than honeys because they're a more aggressive variety. And so there's a lot more growth. And sometimes it's really hard to say what's correct to do when you have that much growth, especially when you may end up with, you know, two or three inches between buds. Generally, my thought process with biennial bearing varieties is that whatever bud is a fruit this year will lay dormant the next. And so if we want our bud density per tree to be 200 fruit on a biennial bearing variety, that tells me we need 400 buds or 400 spurs. And half of those will be resting and half of those will be fruited. And that's the idea. I mean, it doesn't quite work out that way. Sometimes even on biennial bearing varieties, you'll have buds that will produce year after year, but it's not common. So bud testing is absolutely critical. And learning how to do that is not that difficult. There's a, there's a little. You can buy a stereoscope. It's like, it's basically a microscope, but it goes on both your eyes. You can buy them on Amazon for probably 50 bucks. You only need a 10x magnification to see it. And if you get decent with a razor blade, you can cut that bud lengthwise down the middle and see the bulbs inside and tell whether or not they're free. Most growers don't do that, and some will send wood prunings off to a different area and have it tested to see what their percentage is. And that all sounds good, but if you're not doing it yourself, you don't really gain the feel for where your buds are. Sometimes on Fuji you might have your fruit buds for the next year. Might might be on a growth shoot that was 18 inches long and maybe your fruit, because of the heat and the previous year, the conditions things were under, maybe that fruit is on buds number four and five. And if that's the case, you might be pruning every piece of new growth to 8 inches. And that's going to be ugly looking pruning, but you'll save your fruit and in some other instances it might be on buds number one and two and then, you know, you can prune to buds number one and two and still there's your fruit. That doesn't take into consideration your spur density where you have, you know, spurs on, spurs on spurs and all that. But at least it saves that bit, especially on young honeycrisp when we still have terminal growth. Doing that sort of testing is absolutely crucial because if you leave an 18 inch shoot on honeys and if that shoot grew on the off year, that means every single one of those things is going to be fruit. And that puts the tree under way more stress than if you can get in there and prune it. And there's only two buds that will bloom. So getting down to your final number for your bud count while pruning, I think is big. And then making sure that you have at least twice the amount of buds than you need fruit for whatever year you're in.

What is the impact of the timing of fruit thinning on biennial bearing? I've observed a number of occasions where the growers who got the final fruit count early had a significant impact on the following year's fruit. And I think there's a lot of connections to what's happening in the plant hormonal profile that impacts that.

Yeah, the spinners that we use for honey, specifically, it's called amethystin, we use that after two lime sulfur sprays. And it's a long acting chemical. It takes probably 25 to 30 days to go through its full process of working through the tree. And so during that time, the tree is still pushing energy into those fruits. And so a lot of times you'll see a cluster that has five fruit on it and you have to wait to thin because you say, I don't know which one of those is falling, or I don't know how many of those is falling. And so during that time when the tree's still pushing energy into those fruits, we know that a spur is almost like a pipeline. There's only so much energy that can go into that. And so if I look at that in terms of there's only so many cells that can be developed with this pipeline, then that gives me a little bit different thought process on, oh, I need to get the four that I don't want on there off as soon as I possibly can. And so part of the way I do that is making sure that I do the lime sulfur sprays on time. And I think that lime sulfur doesn't thin fruit. I think it stresses the tree so that the tree decides to thin fruit. And then I think the amide thin, and then I think the amide thin is what finishes the job, which basically amide is a form of naa, basically, and that's what's causing the fruit to drop. So if we know there's only a certain amount of cells that can be developed in a spur, we want to make sure that those cells are going into only or that pipeline, that energy flow is Only going into a single fruit and a lot of people say, well, why not just hang doubles? Well, why not just have more buds? You shouldn't have to hang doubles unless you can't get to your final fruit count. It's better to have a single because if you do that pipeline is dedicated to that one fruit.

How much hand thinning do you need? Do you find that you need to do following those two lime sulfur and the final application?

A lot of that will depend on the year. It kind of depends on what the weather's like when we do the amide spray or the NAA spray for other varieties or you know, whatever people use K Salt or Fruit Stone Pomax or whatever it is. If it's not warm enough, that stuff just doesn't do a great job. So if we just make sure that we spray when it's going to be, you know, at least 70 degrees for the, for the day current when we spray and the day after, that's a huge advantage for us. And generally with honeys, I'll probably only have to go through and knock a few doubles down to singles and maybe a few triples here and there. I think my thinning bill is pretty easily under a thousand dollars an acre per year in honeys. And to some people that might seem a little high. But when you're picking 100 bins an acre, there's a lot of fruit to thin. Even if you don't have very many doubles, there's still enough where you can get a thousand dollar pruning or a thinning bill. But you know, what's a thousand dollars an acre to thin Panthen, if you're getting enough bins per acre and your packouts are good. That just said, that's a non existent cost almost compared to the revenue you're making.

There's a question that has come through from Tim. Singles tend to get very large. Do you have problems growing really large apples, pumpkins, when you leave singles? And of course you have a large number of fruit on as well when.

The trees were young, yes. And that's something that's difficult to deal with. It's hard to pick. It tries to push itself off the spur and if there's doubles, they push each other off the spur. And that's largely managed by the maturity of the tree over a long period of time, let's say five to seven years, rather than trying to deal with that in the first three or four years. Those are challenges that everyone's going to have with young honeys that I really don't think you can get away from. I think it's almost like a rite of passage or something with honeys, where it's just like, hey, you're gonna have to deal with this horrible time for a few years. Be patient. It'll get better. And in general, if you're still dealing with large fruit after the trees kind of pass that five to seven year mark, then I would say there just needs to be more fruit per tree. I think the tree as a pipeline, as a single tree, has a finite. A finite amount of cells that it can produce also. And if we divide that power source by the total amount of fruit that we need, we can get a better idea of what the total crop load is. It seems like the total crop load has more to do with the final fruit size than factor.

Good. Claire also asked a follow up question on the lime sulfur. Am I correct to assume that you use the lime sulfur to thin blossoms and the amide thin to thin fruit loops?

That's somewhat correct, yes. So I used to think that I was using lime sulfur to thin blossoms, and now I, and I think that it can be true. You know, you can burn. You can burn the style and the pistol of the flower enough to where it seems like the fruit set, but maybe it will still drop. But instead of using that as my thought process, I instead kind of think, okay, I'm using lime sulfur specifically to stress the tree to set it up for the amide thin. If I stress it enough with lime sulfur, then I'll be able to use the amide to kind of give it the knockout blow where the tree finally says, okay, I need to drop a bunch of these fruits.

Yeah, I agree with your thought process because it is a significant stressor on trees, an extraordinary stressor.

All right, guys, let's move on to pests and diseases. Stephen, what have you dealt with as far as pests and diseases in your.

Apples in the last few years? Not a lot. It was very common in years past to have a field representative from my, you know, from a chemical company or whatever come out and tell me, okay, well, we found this in the trap, or we see this, or you need to spray for that. And I've changed my thought process in that too, in just saying, well, let's wait a while, because it's not a problem yet. The way it used to be with these field reps or salesmen, whichever you want to call them, would say, well, we see this as a potential issue, so let's spray as a preventative measure. And that Sounds good. But nature has a much more efficient way of dealing with things. And so if we can wait for a beneficial to come in and take care of the issue for us, it's better for every aspect. So if I have an aphid problem but I see ladybugs, I'm just gonna ignore it. Actually, that's not true. Let me rephrase that. I wouldn't ignore it. I would monitor it and make sure that the ladybug population is what it needs to be and that the AZID population is continuing to be suppressed. If that's the case, then I would take the hands off scenario where I'm just going to observe if something does go past the threshold. The threshold would be defined just kind of as whatever I'm comfortable with. Then I may go and spray. But you know, with the things we have available to us now, I mean, isomates take care of coddling moth and leaf roller almost entirely. We still catch a few in the traps, but that just tells me that the traps are working. It doesn't tell me I need to go spray. So things like that, using logical deduction to make your own decisions rather than scare tactics from a salesman is probably a good way to start.

That can be really hard for people to do when you have a lot of crop at risk.

It's horrible. Yes. And it would be gut wrenching the first several times, maybe the first several years. But it gets better. It's just, you know, we're, because we're farmers anyway, we're, we're basically hanging out in Vegas. So, you know, once we become, once we become more comfortable making those $2 bets, maybe we move to the $5 table. So.

I've not heard agriculture described quite in that way before, but it's not entirely inappropriate.

Yeah.

Talking about coddling moth specifically, John, what are your thoughts on coddling moth in an organic system?

Coddling moth are one of these insects that are really interesting. They're extremely easy and very hard to control with nutrition at the exact same moment. Why do I say that? Because the insect, the larvae itself is very easy to produce an environment that it can't find a food source and sustain itself. So we know that from the work that we've done with larval digestive systems. They're very dependent on soluble nitrates, soluble amino acids, and the moment we get a leaf or a fruit that has complete proteins, they can't survive on that and the plant in effect kills them. And there's obviously a lot more biochemistry behind that. So that's the easy part and it's very easy to produce that effect on a plant's vegetation. It can be very challenging to produce that effect in the fruit because the fruit, particularly the developing fruit and young fruit, are growing so rapidly. There's so much cell division happening, there's so many nutrients moving into that fruit, that it really requires an exceptionally healthy tree to have only complete proteins in the fruit itself. So it would be very easy if it were a foliage or feeding on foliage. But feeding on fruit makes it a lot more challenging and gives us a much higher threshold and bar that we need to achieve from an overall plant health perspective. So I guess if I had to summarize that and just wrap it up very simply, I would say that once you reach a certain overall plant health threshold, controlling coddling moth becomes very easy. And whereas on other crops, if we're dealing with cabbage loop or tomato hornworm or other larval type insects that are feeding on leaves, you might be able to produce that same effect in 48 or 72 hours with a well designed foliar spray. You won't see that happen usually when you're dealing with larvae in the fruit.

We've talked about fire blight before, but maybe let's take just a couple minutes to talk about fire blight and how we might approach that. And I don't know. Stephen, have you dealt with fire blight?

I have, yeah. It was 2004, we had a hailstorm roll through and we had no idea there was even fire blight in the area. People in this area hadn't even really heard much about it. And yeah, we probably lost about 20% of one of our blocks. And that was with constant work of going through and printing out everything we could find. So during that time, I think it's a pretty normal reaction to do research once you've had a panic scenario and figure out, okay, I need to dive deeper into this and figure out what's going on. That was when that block was pretty young and vigorous, and I think that was a huge contributor to that happening. The block that was right next to it, which was Fuji, is less susceptible than GALA to fire blight. But that was a much older block and we really didn't see much of an effect in that block. And I think it was largely because of the aggressive nature of a younger gala tree. Galas, as you know, tend to have, you know, two or three foot tall suckers in their younger years. And that was also long before we had anything like apogee to use for a plant growth regulation tool. To suppress some of that growth. I think nitrogen, having excess nitrogen can cause problems. I think it makes, I think it makes a more. I don't know if the right word is porous, but it, it's like it gives the bacteria something to latch on to a little more easily. Those fresh growing tips that just don't stop that obviously would have a big infection site to deal with. Bloom is not the only thing. A lot of people really think that, oh well, there's no bloom out there. Well, that doesn't have anything to do with it. Your infection site can be anything. Even wind, even wind can cause leaves to crack and break, especially on those fresh growing tips. In a shade cloth scenario, we've seen things where the wind will blow the fresh growing tip across the shade cloth and that's enough of an infection site and it's hardly anything. And that can do it too. Overhead cooling mixed with that abrasion on something, there's just, there's so many different things. So until your average temperature on a daily basis gets high enough, that is a concern. But just knowing enough about how the bacteria works that it takes an infection site, it takes active bacteria and it takes moisture over a period of time. A lot of times a field man might say, okay, well it's going to rain, so go spray Micro shield or whatever the product is. That might sound good again, but just because you have a little sprinkle of rain, well, maybe it was only wet for 10 minutes. You know, they say the wetting period has to be a few hours. Well, it doesn't work like that. It's not, it's not like at the two hour mark, all of a sudden everything's infected. There's just, there's a sliding curve that slowly goes up and your, your chances of having an infection go up as the moisture period lasts longer with an infection site and with active bacteria. And when you have things like a lot of insects around that can transport the bacteria or wind, those things increase those risks. So it's, I think it's largely site dependent and site history dependent. So if you're able to suppress the growth with plant growth regulators, I think that's another thing that really helps too. You don't have as much terminal growth and so things are just growing more slowly.

The underlying characteristic that is at the foundation of all the pieces that you described, additional applications of nitrogen, very fast and vigorous shoot growth. There's one characteristic that is the foundation of all that all those share in common, which is a changed amino acid profile. I think this is an important consideration that the bacteria needs a specific amino acid profile and it is possible to change that amino acid profile even on a vigorous and fast growing tree when you have the right enzymes, the right enzyme cofactors and so forth. So we've actually there, there's more homework and research that needs to, or I shouldn't say more homework, there's more validation that needs to be done on this. But we have worked with orchards where we've been able to completely stop fire blight, where there was an active infection in progress at multiple places in the orchard and with a single or in a few cases, two foliar applications of nutrients, very intense applications, we put on strong applications but those infections in the treated area completely stopped and the surrounding areas, they continued. So I think there is. We haven't appreciated the impact that nutrition management can have on changing the profile of the tree and removing the food source for the bacteria. Because the difference between those susceptible varieties, resistant varieties or more mature trees that or trees that have been treated and don't have the rapid shoot growth is really a difference of the shoots nutritional profile and the nutritional profile, the leaf. That's really what's going on at the foundation of that.

Yeah, I'm really excited to actually try what you guys are talking about if and when I run into another fire blight scenario. Because yeah, I think whether or not, I don't know if you use the word validation or you know, the continuing research that you need to really confirm that what you're doing is working. I believe it and I'm definitely going to try that if I, if I run into more Fireblight because I think, I think you're totally right. You can do it with the right nutrition.

The only challenge in working with you on that, Steve, is if you're out there doing foliar applications every two days and you're doing SAP analysis, you're probably never going to see Fireflight again or that.

I hope that's true. I hope that's true.

Yeah. There's a question that has come through from, from Tim. How much nitrogen do you apply on your bearing? Honeycrisp.

I'm trying to think of anything that I apply that has nitrogen in it and I don't think I have anything that has nitrogen in it. So at this point the answer would be zero. That doesn't mean there's no nitrogen there. I specifically based that decision off of a SAP analysis. So if my SAP analysis is showing that I have adequate levels of nitrogen, then I'm just not Going to worry about it. Sometimes I'm even worried about there being too much early on in the season. Specifically, the SAP analysis will generally show that there's an excess and I'm not sure where that comes from. I mean there's, there's some organic matter breakdown that's happening in the soil on a regular basis and that provides some. We know that the tree's ability to uptake nitrogen from the atmosphere is. We know that that's true, but we don't know how much. And so that's why SAP analysis is such a great tool, because we don't have to say, well here's the program, follow the program. We can just say take the SAP analysis and see what you need to do, make adjustments as necessary to keep things as level as we can.

Yeah, it's a very important point, is not guessing and actually knowing what you need to apply, what you need to manage. Because you can do a lot of damage when you apply too much of something.

Yes.

One thing I might mention, Stephen, is I was just glancing at some of your SAP is your nitrogen levels and your honeycrisp are higher than a lot of the nut levels that we see on other farms. Just a comment there.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, I don't really know why that is. I don't. In fact, it would be nice if we could find a way to quantify the amount of nitrogen that is being uptaken by the tree just from the atmosphere. I don't really know. Or by the root system through good microbiology in the soil. If we have good airy soil or aerated, whether it be by bugs or just by microbiology, that could be a large factor too. And I just don't know how to quantify that or if it's really accurately measurable.

That's an excellent point and I think something worth pointing out just a bit is there's this. Within apple production, there is this fear of the disease enhancing effects that nitrogen can have. Justifiably so. But similar to the obsessive focus on increasing calcium for Bitter Pit, there's a bit more to the story than just the nitrogen profile itself. There's actually a combination of nitrogen to calcium to potassium balance and even other mineral interactions that we should be looking at. So to the point that you just made, Jim, Stephen may have much higher nitrogen levels than other operations that we're working with, but he also has something else. He has significantly higher calcium. And so it's like that ratio between those two elements is not particularly leading to increased disease.

Susceptibility so to piggyback off of that also, you know, SAP analysis is great. It tells us a certain amount of things that we really, really need to know. And so we also do soil tests because we want to know what's in the soil. So now if we can say, okay, we're confident with what's in the soil, we're confident with what's in the SAP, and then the last piece of the puzzle is we need to be confident in what's in the fruit. So if you do a fruit analysis test, that can confirm whether or not you're getting too much nitrogen in your fruit. And there are several labs that do the tests and they'll tell you kind of what your target range is for certain nutrients. And those are. Those are pretty close. Their recommendations are pretty close. They'll at least tell you, you know, if your nitrogen on a fruit, on a Honeycrisp fruit at harvest is at 35 milligrams per kilograms, just stop, just leave. Like, don't even. It's going to be garbage. But if it's down below 30 or down below 25, down below 20. Now, you've got different levels of success in storage that you might have to deal with. There's companies that do certain tests with the skin of the fruit now, too. You can send it in and get that tested. And they're supposed to tell you, okay, well, you could store it this long. They won't give you any reasons why. They'll just say, this is about how long we think it'll store. So, again, Honeycrisp is specifically a largely unresearched and unknown. There's still tons of problems that we run into with storage and we don't know how to solve them yet. So that's, again, what's driving me to do more research is, you know, trying to figure those. Those things out.

I think your point is very well made, Stephen, and that ultimately the fruit is the final report card. And that is really what we need to be measuring on what's actually happening, what's actually going on, what the actual final results are. And that reminds me of a conversation that I had with Bruce Tineo, who's now no longer with us. But Bruce described a grower that he worked with where he was also very intensely putting on foliar applications and biologicals, and they were actually able to change the carbohydrate profile of the fruit to such a degree that people with diabetes could consume the apple and they would not produce. It, would not produce a blood sugar response. And an insulin response because they had changed the carbohydrate profile to be such complete structural carbohydrates. And of course the additional part to that then is when you have such complex carbohydrates, that means they don't oxidize very readily when exposed to the air. So he described how they would have apples that did not brown because they had a different carbohydrate profile from having such complete nutrition. So I wanted to share that because I think that's an important story that just an example of what can be achieved and what the possibilities really are. I also wanted to mention you mentioned being curious and it would be nice to quantify the nitrogen response that is actually coming from the soil and from the air. There are ways of measuring what's coming from the air, although that's challenging and complicated, but we can actually much more accurately measure the soil's contribution from the soil microbial community today than we have been in the past with the Haney analysis. There's now a few laboratories that are conducting the Haney analysis. I'm personally a big fan. We've started using it internally at aea and it can measure, they measure the microbially active carbon in the soil profile and the microbially released nitrogen and it actually corresponds to what the plants are actually absorbing as evidenced on a SAP analysis, better than any other soil assay that we have observed.

I did want to mention a question came through about SAP analysis and I don't know how many participants haven't done it before, but it was basically just how does that work? So if one of you guys would want to answer that, you're probably a little bit better at explaining in a short version of exactly what it is and how it does work and why it's effective.

If you have more questions about SAP analysis, check out crop healthlabs.com There are sample collection guides that give you specific instructions on frequency. So I think Stephen and many of the growers that we work with conduct them every two weeks, every 14 days. Some on some crops they even do once every seven days through the season. But there's very detailed information@crophealthlabs.com alright, so.

Our next topic is cultural practices and we have here deficit irrigation in regards to bitter pit and preventing fire blight, overhead cooling and we should probably touch on coloring. So deficit irrigation. Stephen, do you do any deficit irrigation?

I do not do any deficit irrigation. I know it's a cool thing to think about. I know a lot of people that are growing honeys really like the idea of deficit irrigation. Some people like to do it because they want to control growth, which to that I would say specifically to answer one of the other questions I had was for apogee. We have really great plant growth regulators that we can use to suppress that terminal growth. And I don't think we want to try to do it with starving the tree of water. If you do it at the beginning of the season, you're completely restricting the uptake of all the nutrients that you want to try to suppress the ones that you don't. And so the problem's already occurred and you can't fix it with water. You'll just cause another problem and you're just chasing your tail, going in a negative circle. So I don't believe in it for that. If your total crop load is correct, then I would also say that you don't need to use deficit irrigation to control fruit size. If we figure that the, the tree has already kind of decided what the final fruit size is going to be when it's at maybe a 35 to 45 gram size, based on the total number of cells that are in that fruit at that point, we might be able to starve the water down and cause that fruit to be smaller. But again, that causes other issues in the fruit fill stage. And that's not something we want to deal with either. So that's when you can wind up with stuff like pork spot or you might get a little too dry and your Lenosil cracks might open up a little bit more and then you run into a storability issue later on when you try to drench the fruit or fog it or whatever, you get soggy breakdown and soft scald and things like that in storage. So I'm not a believer in deficit irrigation. I do think that it's possible to over water. And I think some people confuse deficit irrigation with just a lack of overwatering. Overhead cooling can unintentionally lead to deficit irrigation because the top of the ground stays wet, especially in clay soils, and you feel like, oh, everything's wet, it's muddy and slippery and it's terrible to even walk around out there. Well, okay, yes, but without digging, you don't know what's underneath that. And six inches down, it might be drier than you think. And when we look at the root structure, especially of these dwarfing rootstocks on apple trees, there's a ton of the root structure that's in that first six inches, but there's a whole bunch more in the next six inches. And then our large roots that end up creating know being underneath that those could be using water and there's no water down there. The water monitoring is a huge aspect of that.

Stephen, I'll add two other very important points to build on what you said. The first is particularly in the case of calcium. Calcium flows through the plant on the water stream. So as water moves from the soil up into the tree, that's what carries calcium. So if you don't have water flowing through the tree, that's not going to. Your calcium isn't going to move. That's point number one. The second is that when you have deficit irrigation and when you have a dry tree, that tremendously increases the concentrations of abscisic acid, which leads in many cases to fruit drop. You can actually trigger. We have a lot of growers who has pretty intense challenges with fruit drop. And it's simply a result of deficit irrigation because it can lead to a hormonal profile that triggers fruit drop very intensely.

I want to point something out here, Stephen. You're talking about you do this bud testing, you do this fruit testing, you do this SAP sampling, you dig in the soil to check your irrigation. And I kind of know the answer to this, but I want you to speak about it because I think it's super important. How much time do you spend in the orchard walking trees on a daily basis?

It's at least an hour a day just walking. And if I have. If it's a SAP analysis day where I need to collect samples, it'll be two hours at least. There's just. And that's. I have 62 acres. That's. That's my whole orchard. And so I do have the time to do that. But the largest issue in a lot of orchard scenarios is an inability to spend enough time there to really grasp what's going on. And that's where we start trusting our field rep from wherever it is. And we rely on that guy to tell us what to do and when to do it. And when you walk through, you may notice dry areas, you may notice, you know, you might notice wet areas, you might notice these trees look a little sicker. Well, what happened here, you know, it gives you more time to think about what's going on there and what you could be doing better. And that's really, I think, where the profit margins change is when you start looking at, like, what do I have to do instead of what else could I be doing? To add to this. That gap between those two issues is the profit Margin. So being able to do more and concentrate on those details is what puts more dollars in your pocket. A lot of times it feels like it's too much. I shouldn't be spending time on this. I need to go do something else. But during that process, especially with Honeycrisp, if you're missing a detail that could cost you thousands of dollars. So knowing what's economically smart rather than letting emotion creep its way into our decision making process is a good practice.

It's very hard for humans to be logical.

Oh yeah, we're terrible at it. Sometimes I wait for a very emotional speech.

Yeah.

We have a couple other questions that came through. John, do you want to take that one from Michael Grove?

Do you have nutrients or foliar applications apply directly to bark instead of leaves after leaf drop until bud break? Are you applying nutrients? So I think, Steve, this is a question for you. Are you doing nutrient applications when there are no leaves present on the tree? And the piece that I can just add to that is definitively. There is a lot of research that describes plants can absorb and do. Trees do absorb nutrients through the bark, particularly younger, thinner bark. And the optimal would be to get it applied before that point. But many orchards, we've done applications only on bark with very nice plant responses.

Yeah, I think I haven't really done a lot to that point. Most of the, most of the sprays we do, they're going to be for the bark are going to be like for disease resistance, you know, stuff at the very, very beginning of the year right at bud break. But well, this fall for example, was the first time that I did the post harvest foliar and in preparation for next year's fruit. So I am making some adjustments on that because I do think that, I do think there's a lot of, a lot of nutrients that can be uptaken during that time when the tree is shutting down and bringing things in. And I do think that's going to give it a boost for next year. So hopefully the results will be positive and I'll just continue to do that. Yeah.

We've many times observed that the single biggest foliar application has the biggest impact on overall performance year over year is that full year post harvest. And it's a challenging time for many growers to get it done because they're busy with harvest. They've already got more things going on than they can get covered in many cases. But that can have a huge impact.

We have a question from Anson who sent this in before the webinar. One Question I have is nutrient fertility considerations for new plantings during initial establishment years. I'll be raising up a host of perennial fruit nut crop crops in a nursery space next season, with the intention of planting most to their final locations in the fall of 2020 and following spring.

I would say just two general principles. First of all, I don't think it's a wise idea to stress any plant. If we want it to grow to its fullest and optimal potential, then we should avoid stressing it, whether that's through deficit irrigation or not, managing attrition well. And the second point would be, don't guess about what those seedlings actually require. Use a SAP analysis and identify it. Exactly. We can't put together a program for you in this conversation, but you can conduct a SAP analysis and know exactly what's going on with these without having to guess even.

Do you maybe want to talk about.

Coloring a little bit?

Yeah. So probably the biggest thing is making sure that we have the correct exposure to light. I mean, everybody knows you've got these leaves in front of an apple that's otherwise all the way red, and you move that leaf and there's a big yellow spot there. Well, what's happening? Direct sunlight does have a real and important impact on the fruit's ability to color. And that chemical reaction, if we can give it a better chance to happen by exposing it to more light, then we need to give it every chance we can to do that. You know, galas may not be the most economical apple to grow, but if you can get them red enough and if you can get enough of them, then they are. So I do two main things for fruit coloring, and one is summer pruning. And we do summer pruning for a couple different reasons. One is light exposure, and the second is that is our main pruning. We don't do winter pruning anymore. So we've got enough control over the growth with plant growth regulators and the general lack of over application, I guess, in either. In either way, of nitrogen. So we don't have crazy terminal growth anywhere. Those things allow us to do our winter pruning and summer pruning at the same time. So we get a lot more light exposure from that. And the other thing we use is reflective fabric on the ground, and we try to keep it as clean as we can. We may, in the morning especially, you might be blocking out, you know, 80% of the light coming into your. Because, you know, the sun. The sun's at an angle, and your trees here, it's the other way here, and you're getting a ton of shades. And so during the time when the sun is straight up, we need to be recycling as much of that light as we can. And so the reflective fabric gives us that. And then light transmission down through the canopy will be obtained by summer print. So those two things, I don't use any other chemicals or anything like that for coloring.

Stephen, this last year you had really dark red fruit, nice, very nice uniform fruit. I was very impressed with the color. Have you observed changes that would correspond to changes in the trees nutritional profile with nutrition management, or have all the effects been a result of different cultural management?

I'm not sure that's a good question. It's hard to tell. There's so many changes that I'm making on a yearly basis that it's really hard to apply a result to a single thing. I don't really know exactly what it is. I think it's. There's a lot of different facets to the whole thing and it's very likely a combination of things. I think the nutrition has a lot to do with it. I think the light transmission has a lot to do with it. I think accurate water management has a lot to do with it. Our pruning has a huge amount to do with it. I also want to go back to that point about biennial bearing. The reflective fabric. And summer pruning, I think really helps biennial bearing because those spur leaves that need to get enough energy to produce next year's fruit will have a better chance of absorbing more light if you go in and summer prune out what you don't need. And so your return bloom issues are not solved. They're helped by summer pruning and having that reflective fabric on the ground too. So you get a lot of different things that are benefits from one thing. A lot of people say, oh, well, you should summer prune. Well, what's that mean? Why we need to have more details about, you know, what exactly is going on there.

Yeah, I know that we've observed differences when you manage nutrition differently. There's many different photon receptors that are based on iron, that are based on manganese. And when you change the trace mineral profile, you actually change the photosensitivity of the skin as well as well as of the leak. So we've seen. We don't, as you said on your operation, we. It's difficult to quantify where exactly the effects are coming from. But I know with other crops and other operations we've observed significant color differences simply from managing Nutrition differently. Your point about summer pruning also and looking at buds and managing bud count. There's a very important question here from Greg Pennyroyall. When you're dissecting your primordial buds to get a bud count for next year's crop, have you seen any correlations between SAP analysis profile and where the buds are located on the tree?

That's a good question. Generally what I'm looking for when I'm, when I'm doing that is I guess I'm trying to get a better idea of where are the buds for next year. You know, if it's on a, it's probably not going to be on a 12 inch terminal, terminal growth branch. Reason being there's enough energy in the spurs that are being developed that that's generally where it's at. It's a resting spur and it's the active spur. And so we do recycle some of those spurs by, you know, by doing summer pruning. And I haven't tried to correlate especially say like in a tip bearing variety like Fuji, I haven't tried to correlate specific SAP samples to that. And I suppose the reason behind that would be the tips of your growth shoots are going to be your young SAP analysis test and the base is going to be your old SAP analysis test. And so I'm not sure exactly which one would produce higher or lower quality fruit or anything like that. So that's an interesting question. I have not looked into that enough.

Yeah, that is an interesting question.

Okay guys, we made it through all our topics and I want to thank Steven for joining us. It's been great to get your insight into what you're doing on honeycrisp, Steven. And thanks John, also for your time. And Kevin, do you have anything else to add?

Nope.

Not in particular.

Stephen, I've really enjoyed having you. Thank you very much for joining us. I'm sure many people found the conversation valuable and useful and I want to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. Have an awesome week and we'll talk to you soon.

Thanks very much, guys. Thank you. Thanks.