How You Work with AEA, featuring PNW Sales Consultant Jim Dunlop

Hi friends, and welcome to our webinar where we're going to be having a conversation about how we work with our growers at advancing eco agriculture. I've become aware over the last several months many people have been asking questions about what does our consulting process look like as we work with different farms. And many people are becoming aware that we actually take a very different approach at AEA to many other agronomy companies. And, and our unique approach is based on our history as a company. When we first started in 2006, we didn't begin as a products company that offered specialty plant nutrition products and biologicals and so forth. Instead we started as a consulting company and we did consulting only through 2000. Actually. It wasn't until 2012 that we first started selling products into the marketplace. And prior to that point we did R&D 2009, 10 and 11 for three year period. But we're still primarily consulting work. And so we come from that history and that background of doing very in depth agronomic consulting. And today we pay our bills and are able to support our team by selling products. But the products that we sell and that we use to pay our bills represent only a fraction of the total recommendations that we make. And it's become clear lots of people have started to sense this and have started asking questions. So I wanted to offer some clarity on what does the consulting process actually look like as you work with advancing eco agriculture. So I'm joined here today by Jim Dunlop, who is one of our awesome team from the Pacific Northwest. Jim, can you take a couple of minutes and just introduce us, introduce yourself, give us a little bit of your background and the scope of the work that you've done historically and are now doing for aea.

Yeah, sure. So I kind of grew up around producing my own food with my family. And you know, we had chickens and rabbits and had a big garden and my dad hunted and we fished. You know, I grew up on Long Island. There's a lot of shellfish and fishing and that kind of thing. So I've always kind of been into that. And let's see, I joined the Marine Corps and when I got out, I put myself through college with the GI Bill and I was studying biology and botany with a chemistry minor. And when I finished that, I started a CSA outside of Yosemite national park. And that turned out to be pretty good. And it was a good business. And that was with a partner that I split with. And then I moved to the Central coast near Watsonville and I started a farm that was started out as broiler chickens that became more of a layer hen farm. So this is all on pasture with like a maximum of 5000 layer hens on pasture, but typically like 3000 layer hens on pasture, producing 325 dozen eggs a day and producing a couple hundred pigs a year on pasture. And all that was going through farmers markets and Bay Area Whole Foods. And when the market kind of crashed in 2008, my family and I, we got an RV, we bought an RV and we traveled around the country and we volunteered on farms for about a year and ended up out here in the pnw. And when I first got here, I started working at a compost facility. And that's where I met Kevin Tully, who's my partner now at aea. And that's also where I met Mike Omeg. And after I met Mike, he had me come out and work for him. And I worked for Mike for, gosh, four or five years. And at the time, Mike hired me to kind of implement all these biological changes that he wanted to do to his farming practices. And he was working with AEA. And so that's how I got to know AEA. And I guess it was 2017 where we had had a couple really bad years in a row in terms of the market, not in terms of fruit quality and tree health and all these other things that we were just dominating at. We were producing cherries with 500 grams per millimeter firmness, where 350 is considered amazing. Huge cherries shipping to China with green stems and all this kind of good stuff. When I was working for Mike, it was pretty much like every week Mike would text me or call me and say, jim, you're not going to believe this thing that I'm seeing on the farm, whatever it was. And Mike had been in cherries all his life, and working with aea, he had seen things that he had never seen before. For instance, fully loaded Skeena trees loaded with cherries with 110 degrees days, four or five days in a row of 110 degree weather. All the trees and the other neighboring orchards just melting, cherries turning into raisins and that kind of thing. Or where our trees were just super strong and resilient to the heat. So we had tons of success with Mike. And when Mike merged his orchard with Orchard View, I came to work with AEA. So that was 2018. So I've been here for three years, and Kevin and I started working together halfway through the first year. And. And that's where we really took things to another level, where we took. We set up lots of systems where we were able to work with really big farms and lots of SAP reports and that sort of thing. And 2020 was probably the best year that we've had so far. I'll just say real quick, John, 2020 was an insane year with the best first year results we've ever seen on several different farms and several different crops and just, just great results all over the place. And on farms that we've been working on three or four years, we saw yields and quality that we didn't even think was possible. And I think if you told people in the industry of what we achieved, they would say that we were lying.

It's exciting to hear that you're having lots of fun. Can you give us some examples of the scope and size of operations that you're working on? How many operations, just between you and Kevin working together as a team, what's how many acres of how many different crops are you working with?

So the main crops we're working with are apples, cherries, blueberries and potatoes. Now we also work on grapes, some hops. We work on, you know, a few hundred acres of hops. We're probably working on 5,000 acres of really high value crop and another 5,000 acres of pretty high value vegetable crops, potatoes mostly. That's the metric that I like the best, is how many acres am I on? And I'm gonna say that this year Kevin and I went over 10,000 acres.

Okay. And when you say that 2020 has been the best year ever, you're speaking in very broad generalities. Can you give us a specific or two? I know it's kind of outside the topic that we started on, but why are you, why are you so excited.

That we did is. Sorry. One of the fun things that we did is working on potatoes with farms in Warden, Washington, Eastern Washington. And oh my gosh, the things that we saw out there. Where do I start? They had hired us to get bruised, higher bruise free percentage because they have contracts and if they have too much bruising, they get docked off of their contract. It's you know, money, money taken away from their contract. So we were hired for that and we achieved that. They saw some of the highest Bruce free percentages they've ever seen. As a matter of fact, the manager told us that he had never seen some of the highest, some of the Bruce free percentages that we had, you know, high 90s, above 95% and that kind of thing, all while getting Good specific gravity, good fry color, and 40 to 45 tons per acre. You know what happens with the potatoes is they use so much nitrogen that they bring in pests and pathogens from everywhere. And they're basically creating a lot of their own problems with such high nitrogen. As a matter of fact, one of the metrics that they look at to see if they have enough nitrogen is their nitrate and their petioles. And for us, we're aiming for zero nitrate because we don't want nitrate floating around in leaves ringing in pests.

Right.

So we were out there in August meeting with the potato manager and all the farms around there, all the circles around there with potatoes that weren't, were dead. And what happens is they get verticillium and they're just kind of dying through July and August. But all of the circles for were still green. This is in August. And I called in September and I said, story, man, is it still green out there? And he said, well, it's September right now and it looks like it's June. We were able to keep on filling potatoes really late into the year.

Wow.

One of the things.

Yeah, I know you have. So let's get into some of the details of what does our agronomic management system look like, what does the process look like, and what do we walk through? So I'm going to share my screen. All right. And through this process, if you have any, Jim and I are just going to go through the slide deck and kind of give you a very rapid overview of what our process looks like, of what when we begin working with a grower. And if you have any questions for us at any point in that conversation, just type it in below in the Q and A box and we'll answer some of those questions as we go through. And then we'll also make sure to answer all those questions when we get to the end, if there's any questions that you have for us. All right, so in a very quick high level overview, there's kind of four different major categories of what the consulting process looks like. The first is what's the initial information that we gather your soil analysis data and so forth. We will go through the details of that and then the observations actually being out in the field, what is it that we see? What is it that we see happening with plant structure? What is it that we see with soil structure and soil health? And the third part is what are the. All the various components of the recommendations that we make? And then the fourth area, of course, is in season support and how do we work closely with you during the season to make adjustments to what is happening and what is going on? And there's a really important aspect or consideration that I would want to describe within the overview of these four major pieces, which is that plant nutrition. And in order to have a regenerative model of agriculture and to have a good approach to plant nutrition, we have to take a complete systems approach. We have to take into consideration what biology is contributing. We have to take all the various factors into consideration. This is something that mainstream agronomy often doesn't do well. And I think this is the one piece that we are exceptionally good on as a company. And so we're going to go through some of the pieces that we include in the data that we collect and the observations that we look for and so forth. And there's a very exhaustive list that we have internally at AEA that a list of things that we look for that we try to identify even bigger than what we've included in this initial outline. But this outline is fairly broad and a very good starting point. This is the awesome team that we work with at AEA because of COVID We actually haven't been together for over a year. I guess maybe it's now about a year that this team photo was taken and our team has continued to grow. I'm not sure by exactly how much, but it's quite a bit bigger than it was when we took this photo. And we have. You're getting the chance to listen a little bit to Jim, but we have a really incredible team of people who have some very deep agronomic knowledge. And I believe I have a biased opinion, of course, but I believe that our team is some of the best educated agronomists in the field. And we invest a lot of time and energy in all learning together collectively every week. It's part of our system and part of our approach every week to make sure that we stay on top. So the first step, what is the information that we collect when we first start working with a grower? So this initial information, one obvious piece that everyone is familiar with and everyone kind of expects and anticipates, is soil chemistry. What do the soil analysis look like? So this has become a fairly standard expectation for lots of consultants and agronomists. The second piece that needs to become much more common is soil geology. So what I mean by soil geology is what minerals and nutrients the soil is composed of. It's possible to have a sandy soil in Florida and a soil in Nebraska that Both on the soil chemistry test, they both report 12 to 15 parts per million manganese. But when you do a soil geological assay, the soil In Nebraska has 400 parts per million manganese total. That is actually a part of the soil mineral matrix. And the soil in Florida has only 12 to 15. So 100% of what is in the Florida soil is showing up on the soil chemistry test. And it's not enough to grow a really healthy crop, whereas the soil in Nebraska has a tremendous reserve of manganese that just simply needs to be released to the function of soil biology. So it's not enough just to look at soil chemistry alone and soil analysis alone. We also need to look at the geological assays of what does the total soil profile contain. Then the third aspect is looking at soil structure. What is our aggregate stability? Do we have good aggregation? Do we have good biological activity? And that then of course, leads us to looking at soil biology. In some cases, in some contexts, we are actually running laboratory assays to measure soil biology. Increasingly, we're starting to use the Haney analysis to measure biologically released nutrients and the capacity of biology to supply nutrition. Some cases, and we're still, we're in the process of becoming familiar with various tests that can actually measure the populations of soil biology reliably and repeatably and give us good management information. Then we also look at irrigation, if there's irrigation happening and if this is appropriate. We also look at irrigation water quality, because this has obviously a significant impact on what is happening with the soil microbial population as well as soil nutrient release. Then we look at actual measured absorbed plant nutrients. I gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago at the ACRES conference, and we'll be sharing information in some other places here as well. But basically we've come to the realization that there is no correlation between the mineral content of soil and what plants are actually absorbing from the soil. So we have to measure, and we use plant SAP analysis to measure what are the plants actually absorbing from the soil profile. And it's sometimes surprising to observe that what shows up as being excessive in the soil analysis is deficient in the plant SAP analysis, or vice versa. It's a very common scenario. Then additional data that we collect and initial information that we collect is what is the historical disease in insect pressure. This is very important because for us, we correlate all the various diseases and all the various insects with specific nutritional profiles. We know if a grower tells us that they have aphids, we don't need a SAP analysis to know with complete certainty that that plant has excess nitrate and is deficient in either magnesium or sulfur or molybdenum or some combination of the three. So we know that whenever we have the presence of aphids, we have this existing nutritional profile. And we have those nutritional profiles not just for aphids, but also for powdery mildew and downy mildew and verticillium and all of these different soil borne pathogens, airborne pathogens and insects. We, as we gain experience with a crop, we develop an expectation of what the nutritional profile looks like based on the disease and insect pressure. So if a grower tells us that they have had historical challenges with aphids, we immediately know some of the nutrients that we need to address and how we need to begin managing nutrition differently in that context. Some of the data that we collect is also an understanding of how nutrients and fertilizers have been managed historically. This is very important in the context of what I was just speaking about with disease and insect pressure, because in many cases, disease in insect susceptibility is a result of excess of nutrients that have been applied either in the wrong form or at the wrong time, or both. So we will want to have a conversation not just about when you're applying nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, but also changing the forms of those nutrients and changing when they are applied, because that can have a tremendous impact on yield, productivity and disease and insect resistance. The example that Jim just provided of potatoes staying green all the way through until September is an excellent example of just simply how changing nutrition management changes plant health and their ability to continue longer into the season.

On potatoes that we cut the nitrogen in half. You know, in conventional potatoes, these guys are looking at putting out 300 units of nitrogen per season on their crop. And on some of the circles, we were down to 75 units and we were at 150, 165, that kind of thing on a lot of them. So, you know, people, nitrogen applications is what's causing them a lot of their trouble.

Did you change the application? How were you able to reduce the rates that much? Did you change the timing or the form of application?

So I think it's pretty standard for these guys to put out like 10 pounds per week. And when they started working with us and hearing what we were talking about, they took it upon themselves to reduce their nitrogen. I didn't have any part of that at all. You know, I told them that they could probably reduce their nitrogen, but they just started looking at SAP analysis and, you know, petiole analysis and soil analysis is something they do just about every week or every two weeks. And potatoes. And the minute they started working with us with SAP analysis, they threw away their potato, their petiole analysis just stopped doing it. Soil analysis they were doing to kind of give them some confidence that there was some nitrogen there and. And just stopped applying until they needed it. The other thing that was really interesting, too, is, you know, they had so much nitrate that when we just put out a little bit of molybdenum, the nitrate numbers just crashed, and all that nitrate went into total nitrogen.

That is really impressive. And that's probably a significant reason why they were able to stay green for those additional months is because they had greatly reduced their disease susceptibility as a result of not having the excess of unneeded nitrogen and particularly nitrates.

Yep.

Yeah, that's a great example, Jim. We also look at what products and practices have been used historically for pest management. So if you have a practice of intense fungicide applications or insecticide applications, one of the things that we will want to have conversations about is, as we, we know with complete certainty that as we change the nutritional profile, your disease and insect susceptibility profile is going to change as well, and that you may no longer need the intense insecticide of fungicide application. So if you. Depending on the crop, depending on the context, we recommend a more cautious approach of not discontinuing applications until you're sure you don't need them anymore. And depending on the context, with some crops and some environments, we encourage people to begin backing off and try to discontinue those applications because, one, they're expensive, they cost a lot of money and time and energy, and two, they actually have a negative impact on plant health and soil biology and the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. So it's very common to see reduced pesticide applications anywhere from 30% to as high as 90% in the first year to two years that we start working with a farm. Jim, what happened with the potato experience? We didn't even. We've never even spoken about this example, so I really have no idea what your answer is going to be. Specifically on the potatoes, how did their pesticide applications change in the first year?

You know, I don't know exactly, but I know that they were reduced quite a bit. They actually had a person come out there with a drone that was kind of quantifying the insects that were out there. And I can't remember exactly how many circles they looked looked at, but it was quite a Few and the circles from were at the very top in terms of the least amount of insects, pathogenic insects. And the guy who was doing the survey asked them, what do you got spraying out here? What chemical are you using to control these insects? And they said, as a matter of fact, in some of these fields we haven't sprayed anything and in others we haven't hardly done anything at all.

That's so much fun. That really is so much fun.

Super fun.

Yeah. All right, then let's. We're going to move on to the next category of initial information that we collect. So there's obviously a lot of the things that we spoke about is data that exists in existing farm records. The second category is kind of the observations that we make of what's actually happening and going on in the field. So one of the questions, it's very important for us, we emphasize a lot our desire to help farmers, growers be more profitable and make more money by managing nutrition differently. So one of the questions that we ask when we start working with a grower is what are the crop characteristics that determine how you get paid? So in Jim's example that he was describing at the beginning, it was on bruising. And so we were able to have a significant impact on bruising. Jim, I'm just curious. You spoke about how you had a high 90 percentile bruise free potatoes at 40 to 45 tons per acre while reducing nitrogen applications in half or more. How did the Yield Number of 40 to 45 tons Compare with historical averages or regional averages?

You know, I think it was as good or better. 40 tons is considered really good and 45 tons is great.

Yeah. One of the pieces that I think all of us as farmers and as agronomists need to pay very close attention to is what exactly are the specific characteristics that determine how we get paid? Is it, do we want, in the case of potatoes, do we want fewer tubers with larger size, do we want more tubers of a smaller size? Because we have an incredible capacity with nutrition management to change those characteristics. You can change cherry firmness, you can change the number of cherries, you can have cherries be softer or harder or smaller or larger. And there's almost any direction you can imagine or any combination you can imagine that you can move crops in with nutrition management. And this is, I think, very underappreciated. Jim, what other experiences have you had changing influencing crops quality and yield characteristics?

Yeah, I'll just say real quick on the potatoes, they get a bonus for being over 6 ounces and so we achieved that in most of their pivots where they got it, they got a nice bonus for having potatoes. Gosh, let's see. Seeing, you know, in the first year. So I said earlier that we saw some of the biggest results in the first year. And so we worked on say 800 acres of cherries and apples near Wenatchee. And on the cherries they saw bigger row size cherries. So just bigger cherries, firmer cherries, better coloring on their rainiers, you know, a better blush coloring. And then along with that, they had no black cherry aphids when they have, when they've had them every single year for a decade. And this is a farm that just started with us, you know, the year prior in the fall. And then on apples, I love the anecdotes from the pickers and the people that actually work in the field. And one of the funniest things on apples was they used to step on these apples and they would kind of crush. And now they have to be careful because they'll roll their ankles because the apples are all like little rocks on the ground.

That'S firm.

On the same, on the same ranch, they saw 20 to 25 bins extra on their off year blocks. So, you know, we have biennial bearing on a lot of these. And that's a big thing that we work on now. It used to be all about bitter pit in honeycrisp, but now it's about biennial bearing in honeycrisp and other apples as well. What they've done is to avoid bitter pit. If they, they've sucked down these trees so hard and they don't give them any nitrogen at all or very little, and there's, there's not very good tree health. And so they'll get a decent crop one year, but then they'll get, you know, 30% of that crop the next year. And we've had really good success in kind of evening that out and getting rid of the biological biennial bearing. And like I said, 20 to 25 is a serious increase. And that is just from starting the fall before. And I think a big part of this is there's so much hydrocarbon in the soil on these orchards that have been farmed for decades that what we see is this, what we call a hydrocarbon lag where you see a block that is maybe seven years old, but it looks like it's three years old and it's not filling its space. And that's because everything is so chelated in the soil. And we have a product called OP8, it's a soil biology inoculant that will actually break down this hydrocarbon. And we get huge results from using this OPA and using that as a starting point with our biological inoculations.

Jim, you're being very diplomatically correct when you talk about hydrocarbon accumulation. Let's just be very straightforward. It's pesticide accumulation that's the problem.

Right?

Poison.

It's poison to your trees for sure. And I see it all over. I'm gonna say, John, this is like the number one. That thing that I see that's really dragging farms down, dragging these orchards down, is block after block of young plantings that just aren't performing. And you ask the farmer like, hey, so what's going on here? What was here before? And you know, we had pears here for 40 years, you know, and there's just been a lot of really pretty harsh chemistry used on, on these orchards.

And it is really amazing. At some point, we may need to do a webinar on this specifically, but it is really amazing to see how we just start remediating the best, the pesticide accumulation. And it's magical. What happens these, these, these orchards go from 5 miles an hour to 60 miles an hour in a matter of months as, as you described, Jim. It's just starting with fall applications with our soil primer with rejuvenate and seashield and spectrum, and perhaps adding OP8 into that. And by the next spring, it's behaving like a different orchard.

Yeah, one of the big orchards that we're working on did their whole orchard with OP8. And I'll be honest, I used to hate working on apples, whether it was organic or conventional, because I couldn't stand just the way the trees looked. You know, they're just so dragged down and people are using so much calcium chloride that, you know, the leaf margins are all burned and the orchards just look terrible. And we've hooked up with some of the best farm managers and orchardists out there, and now apples are probably my favorite crop. And another thing about apples is we didn't think we could see very much in the first year in apples. And we saw so many things in apples this year in the first year that it's changed the way I think about it.

And I think to that Jim and I were having this conversation previously is how has our approach changed with apples? And why did we used to think that it takes two or three years to start getting a response, and now we see these immediate, strong responses and there's one significant difference, which is that as we've gained more experience, we have changed our desired values for trace minerals. We've realized that these trees have much higher requirements for zinc and manganese and copper and iron and cobalt than has historically been thought. And so we've raised our trace mineral applications, sometimes significantly. And the trees respond incredibly rapidly. So that's where a lot of these responses are coming from as well.

John I think the other thing is we're now hooking up with these farms and managers that have pre educated themselves on our techniques and what we do. And they've watched your webinars and they listen to the podcasts and they're geared up and ready to work with us. And they believe in what we're doing, and they're not doing it in spite of the fact that they don't believe in it, or they're not doing it because the farm owner told them that they had to do it. They're doing it because they want to do it and they know that it works.

So we're going to get to that in just a moment. We need to keep flipping through the slide deck we're having. Okay, okay.

Go, go, go.

That's good. All right. In our crop scouting initially, when we start working with a farm, we'll actually look for disease and insect presence. This, of course, also corresponds to the historical presence. We look at soil physical characteristics. We look at root system health, which is an obvious one, but one that many people miss. If you hire an agronomist or a consultant who doesn't carry a shovel, you should get someone else then. One of the really important things we look for is looking at the plant's structure and vegetative versus reproductive dominance. So I did a whole podcast episode on this very important topic. But looking at node spacing, looking at the number of fruit per node, looking at leaf size versus total leaf surface area versus the number of fruit that we have developing a sense, because plants can vary widely these characteristics. And again, it's possible to completely shape the way a plant expresses itself with nutrition management. You can have a plant that has short, tight internodes with a high number of buds per node, or a plant that has very widely spaced nodes with just a few buds per node or fruit per node. And so this, this also tells us a lot about how nutrition is being managed currently and where there's room for improvement in increasing yields and incre profitability. So then we look at all that, and now it's time for the rubber to meet the road. How do we translate all of that into recommendations. And what are the types of recommendations that we make? So we're going to go through this fairly quickly because I know. I want all of you to hear from Jim some more. I'm just going to give you an overview of the types of recommendations that we make. And obviously, there's a lot more, a lot underneath of these that we could get into. But actually, before we go into the types of recommendations that we make, Jim, I'd like for you to speak a little bit about how we customize and the importance of a farm's culture in successful execution. We customize everything we do to fit whatever the farm's capabilities are. We can kind of do whatever is necessary. So what does that look like?

Yeah, you know, one of the things we learned this year working on these potatoes, we had started out putting our micronutrients out through the pivot, and we saw some good results. But things really took off when we started using the airplane, and we were able to use half as much product and get way better results. So we're willing to flex on that for sure and always find the best way and work with the farm to figure out what that is. In orchards, you know, for Fergie, if you can't fertigate through your irrigation system, you can use a weed sprayer. You can use, you know, like a rear speed sprayer, and, you know, just put a couple nozzles on there and kind of aim it at the ground. You know, something I mentioned. You know, people kind of get hung up on the fertigation and figuring out how to do it all. But some of the most sophisticated farmers that know, that I know, are now just taking an old sprayer, ripping the fan off, and setting it up as their fertigation machine. And they'll just pull that. Pull that rear sprayer around and hook it up to their injection port and inject like that. In some cases, these guys are putting diaphragm pumps on there so they don't plug up. But there's a lot of ways to get the product out there, and we're willing to work with you in terms of culture. I'll tell you what I've seen out there, you know, working with lots of different farms, you can almost feel it when you get on the farm where the employees wave, people smile, people are happy to be there, and people care. It's not the kind of farm where somebody's gonna walk past an irrigation leak and say, well, that's somebody else's problem. And then I work on farms where people are not very happy on the farm and it's just not a good culture. I go as far as to say that it's somewhat toxic where people are just not looking out for each other and not looking out for the best interest of the farm. Farming, unlike other things, really requires you to care. You have to care about the success. And I know that that's the standpoint that Kevin and I come from is we don't succeed unless you succeed. So your success is number one to us. And success means making money. So like we were talking about earlier, what are the things that make you money? We're going to focus on those things and we are going to do everything to make that happen. And then the success follows for us.

And the reality is that for us as a team at advancing eco agriculture, we want to. We want our growers to be successful. We want to participate in that success. It's. We have a lot of fun. As you can tell, Jim and I are having a lot of fun in this conversation. And we have so much fun working with growers who are experiencing and achieving amazing successes. And we've experienced a few too many cases where the farm culture is, as Jim described, bordering on toxic. And there's a couple things that happen. First of all, it's no fun working with such a farm. And secondly, they also don't experience the results because execution is lacking, things get missed, things fall through the cracks. People don't look out for each other. And we are, of course, we're growing very rapidly as a company. We have lots of people who want to work with us, and that's a very enjoyable position to be in and also allows us, to some degree, pick and choose a little bit to say, it looks like this farm is going to be a real nightmare to deal with and ask the question, do we really want to work with them? So when we look at our set of recommendations, you'll be surprised as I go through this list, because I did it very deliberately. Fertilizer recommendations are actually at the bottom of the list. They're not at the top, they're at the bottom of the list. So the first type of recommendations that we are going to be making, if I can get my slides to advance, is on cultural management practices. Because invariably when you start managing nutrition differently, the plants are going to behave differently from what you are familiar with. Potatoes might stay green for 60 days longer. Apples might need to be pruned a little bit differently. There's all types of cultural management changes that you may need to make as nutrition management changes, plant behavior changes and we need to adapt to that. So. And we also find that a lot of disease in insect pressure, particularly for all the soil borne pathogens, is brought about as a result of cultural management practices. Do you typically inject hydrogen peroxide into your fertigation system? If you do, we can be almost certain that that is going to increase the susceptibility to soil borne path.