Long-term pesticide use, non-target species & regen ag | James Johnson of Carzalia Valley Produce

Hi friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic science and the cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health and public health and that should also regenerate farm profitability. I'm very happy today to have James Johnson here as a guest. James and I have known each other now for I think maybe three or four years, something like that. James is an AEA customer. Just want to put that out there. So all of you are aware he has been very gracious in sharing his story and some of the work that we're doing at aea and he has a really incredible story. So I wanted to have him here to share that with all of you as well. James, thank you very much for being here today. Can you offer a little bit of context for our audience? Tell us a little bit about your personal story and background, the scope of your farming operation and the work that you're doing and the context of what's going on.

Well, thanks for inviting me, John. I'm humbled by the fact that you felt that my story was worthy of being told on this platform. So I'm a fourth generation farmer here in southwest New Mexico. Our operation started off as a cattle ranch. And in the 1950s during the drought, much very similar to what we have today, they started drilling irrigation wells, trying to grow feed for the cows. Ultimately, back then the farming kept the ranch afloat. They started off producing cattle feed, switched over, started producing at that point canning tomatoes, then moved into grain, sorghum, cotton, and then we've diversified over the years into onions, chili peppers, pecans, pistachios, and during certain years we've grown watermelons, pumpkins, spinach, lettuce. There's, we have a very different microclimate here. Our elevation is 4, 300ft. So even though that we're at a real south latitude, we still tend to get cold in the wintertime. We have about 222 degree frostery days that allow us to have a pretty diverse crop. Really what hinders us most is probably the extreme heat that we have. I mean today it's supposed to be 105 degrees.

That's probably combined with low humidity given the southern location where you are.

Yeah, it's probably going to be about 8% humidity today. I think our average annual rainfall here is about 10 to 10.5 inches. And I think in the last year we've had just right around 1.5 inches. So we where it's extremely dry and extremely challenging.

How has your agronomy management and soil and plant and crop management shifted over the last 20 or 30 years over the time that you've personally been involved on the farm?

So 30 years ago, we were all flood irrigated or furrow irrigated. We did everything out of cement ditches with siphon tubes. About 22 years ago, we started installing subsurface drip irrigation. The only constraint to that was the cost. So it's. It took us about 10 to 15 years to get the entire farm. And we're still not completely into drip irrigation yet. We're still slowly installing some. On the last 600 acre block that we've got, we've been high intensity chemical fertilizer applications as well as pesticide applications for the last 45, 50 years. We were highly successful with that, I would say, right up until about 2005. That was six years into our installation of the subsurface drip irrigation. And it's kind of interesting because things didn't really hit me as to what was happening and how we were starting to degrade. I knew that we weren't in a place that we wanted to be. I knew we weren't yielding what we had when we first applied subsurface drip. We doubled our yields and then we plateaued at that double yield for a couple of years and then we quickly went off of a cliff. At the time, we had a crop consultant that had worked for us for several years. He had several other customers that used drip irrigation as well. But ours was a little more of a challenging area because we had higher sodium water. So a lot of the things that we did here, we're trying to mitigate sodium. We used heavy amounts of gypsum, trying to get sodiums to move. We've tried a little bit of it all trying to get that sodium level to go down and only to find out 10 to 15 years later that we were probably working exactly contrary to what we actually needed to be doing.

What were some of the things that you were doing that were contrary to what you now think is effective?

Well, when we pulled soil samples back then and they saw the sodium levels, I mean, at one point we were talking about or laughing that we were going to have to build a railroad to get as much gypsum in as the soil scientists were claiming that we needed to apply, there was some of the recommendations that were for 10 to 15 tons per acre of gypsum. Wow. So we knew that that wasn't possible, that we, you know, we just absolutely couldn't afford that. We were Having to haul gypsum about 100 miles. So the freight was, you know, the gypsum wasn't the cost, it was the freight and the application. But we went on a pretty intense application rate. We were using 3 to 5 tons before all of our vegetable crops. And the vegetable crops at that time were chili peppers and onions. And so we. We were about every other year applying 3 to 5 tons. And when we first started applying the gypsum, we saw a yield bump again. And then a couple of years afterwards, it was very similar to when we. When we started installing the subsurface drip irrigation. We saw a plateau and then just a cliff again where we started tumbling. I actually, at the time, had a organic consultant that stopped by, and he was selling a few different products to us. He took some samples, some soil samples and water samples, and came back and basically informed me. And that was the first time that I had ever heard anybody talk about nutrient balancing, and the first time I'd ever heard about that we might be causing our own ultimate demise. When he looked at the sulfur levels after that much application of gypsum, we had some of that stuff that he actually talked about potential sulfur toxicity. And it was interesting because when I talked to the soil scientists, everybody said, there's no such thing as sulfur toxicity. And yet we were seeing that we weren't in the place and we weren't going in the direction that we wanted to go. So he asked one, you know, one of the reasons that we were using it was we were looking for a good source of calcium. So he asked that we find a different source of calcium. He wasn't a constant part of my operation at that point. He was, you know, he was trying to sell a few different products. So he was in and out. And so we looked around and talked to the reps here as. As well as our. Our consultant that was working for us at the time. And he convinced us, well, if. If all we're going for is calcium, why don't we use this great liquid fertilizer that can be injected into the drip irrigation? It's called Can 17. Well, we had used Can 17 for several years, especially in our lettuce crops and spinach crops. And so we integrated that in. You know, I remember the day that I ordered several large fertilizer tanks and had them set up on my drip irrigation systems. And, you know, one of the inputs that was put in, you know, these are highly technology advanced irrigation systems. And so I can. I can apply these fertilizers basically at this. At the stroke of a mouse off of my computer. So I plumbed that input in and we started railing this, you know, railing this can 17 into a siding that was close by and delivering it by the truckload onto the farm. We thought that that was going to be our fix. And over several years and finally coming to some conclusion, we found that wasn't the case.

I think you need to elaborate on that story a little bit, James. What happened that you concluded it wasn't the solution for a calcium delivery mechanism?

Well, you know, I guess I got to kind of digress. And so I got to talk about your first encounter, or my first encounter with you. And so you put on a cotton grower school in Lubbock, Texas, and you stood up and you told your story that you tell on almost every podcast that you're a guest on, and you've told it a couple of times on yours of where you oriented the rows differently when you took on some neighboring ground and all of a sudden you didn't have powdery mildew. I don't think you could have gotten my attention better if you had walked across the room and smacked me in the back of the head with a baseball bat. I was absolutely blown away because I had never heard anybody else have that problem. In the early 2000s, after we put in drip irrigation, we started growing a lot of curbits. We were growing multiple, I mean, 250 acres of watermelons, couple hundred acres of pumpkins every year. And I actually had to give up the curbit business because I couldn't control the powdery mildew. The last season that I had watermelons, I had applied over $1,500 per acre in fungicide applications. We were on four to seven day rotations with fungicide.