Managing Ecological Systems with Living Mulches in Orchard and Vegetable Production | Helen Atthowe

Hi friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we have lots of fun talking about regenerative agriculture, agronomy, regenerating, soil health and public health and what it takes to regenerate farming across the entire landscape. I'm looking forward to a really fun conversation today with Helen Athow. Helen has authored a new book that is coming out titled the Ecological Farm from Chelsea Green. And you know, it's very seldom you get to engage in conversations with people who have taken some of the concepts and principles of regenerative agriculture and made them work at a production scale in vegetable systems. Particularly when you start talking about no till organic vegetable production. There's a very tiny handful of people who've actually done that successfully on scale and there's an even smaller number of people who've done so for a long period of time. So I've been really looking forward to having this conversation with Helen and allowing her to share her wisdom and knowledge with all of us and the things that she's learned over the years. So Helen, welcome here to the show. Really excited to have this conversation with you. Can you tell us a little bit about your history and story and the life journey that you've been on?

Well, thank you. It's such an honor to be here. I listen to this podcast and it helps confuse me and inspire me and give me new ideas. So thank you.

That sounds like quite a compliment. They say that confusion is the beginning point of learning.

Absolutely. And that's been my evolution, I have to say, over the last 40 years. Trying to figure things out, becoming confused, having moments of epiphany and, and then making more mistakes. So I started in western Montana and surrounded by ranching and, and grain crops. And I went off to college and gradu and studied agricultural ecology and then horticulture, plant physiology. But in between, I was lucky enough to study with or learn from Masanoba Fukuoka, who taught me to really listen. Yes. To natural systems. And of course I have spent the last 45 years trying to get living mulches right. And maybe the last few years I think I'm getting it. I also was lucky enough to spend a year at the Land Institute in Kansas with Wes Jackson and he introduced me to plant population biology. And that really made me think differently and add that whole ecological literacy to the way I approach agriculture and horticultural problems. And so I continued on trying to do both farming and understanding academic approaches to all of this. And that was confusing, but it aren't.

Those a little bit in conflict with each other. One is thinking about systems and the other wants to reduce all the variables to one.

Exactly. But I think living peacefully or at least comfortably within that contradiction is where some of the inspiration comes. And then the absolute best part for me, I farmed and did extension work and did experiments on farm. And my students would say, well, why can't you do organic no till? And why are you still doing it that way? And of course, you know, you can ignore students, but you go home at night and then you think, well, yeah, maybe we better do better. And when I finally went to the eco farm conference in California and met my late husband, that's when everything changed. And we started partnering on this crazy soil revolution that we were going through in our brains. And we said, yeah, let's develop a system where we can do no till, no spray, no weeding, and grow our own fertilizer. What could go wrong?

I love the vision. And you know, that vision that you just encapsulated is like you, I was also really inspired by the one straw revolution and the books that Fukuoko published on just the idea that there is a possibility that if we understand our agricultural systems well enough, the only thing he was doing once he had his system refined, granted that took 40 years, but with a refined system broadcasting seed and collecting the harvest, that's remarkable.

And yet timing was key. Timing and managing. What Carl and I came, my late husband and I came up with was instead of focusing on crops and managing all the details of the crops, we began to manage the ecological relationships. And that changed everything. But it also meant that details matter. And what some people call managing the fiddly details, we called managing the ecological details. So Fukuoka did that. When you were right there, you realized how vital that was to the whole system.

Yes. So I interrupted you. Tell us about the rest of your story. You decided that you would develop this perfect system that required no sprays and nothing could go wrong. What happened next?

So we started on my. On my husband's farm in California, woodleaf farm. And he had been developing this no till living mulch system for about 30 years when I came into the picture. And my focus was entomology and looking at biological control systems. And so I did the monitoring and we said, oh, look, when we mow the crops for nutrient cycling, which of course I meant the COVID crops, the living mulches, when we mow them for nutrient cycling and to make ease of orchard management flow better, we also get changes in our microbial system. What's going on in the rhizosphere just the simple act of mowing, and we change what happens with our predators and our parasites and our pests. So, for example, if we mowed at a particular time during bloom, we would send thrips that would attack our nectarines and peaches into the orchard. But if we mowed selectively every other row and maintained blooming habitat for the thrips in the ground cover, and also maintained habitat for a couple of the predators of the thrips, it turns out we didn't have to spray for them. So we began to see that these management techniques that we did a simple mowing had huge consequences throughout the whole system, and that the timing of the mowing was vital. And then we learned, oh, wow, if you're going to work with legume living mulches or legume cover crops, you don't have to worry about nitrogen interactions quite so much. But if you're going to have lots of species diversity, grasses and other forbs, other people call those weeds and legumes, that you might want to manage the carbon to nitrogen ratio of the residues that you're surface applying. And so we started looking at that as well. And then we were able to finally do no spray at all on every pest in our orchard. Except there were two pests we didn't have what I would call economic success with. One was on cherries, spotted wing drosophila. And my late husband said, well, we just need to let the system calibrate more. And I said, yeah, but we're getting too much damage. And so we argued, which happened periodically, and we decided that we were going to let the system calibrate. And we still didn't get to the point that I feel was economic, which we called our tithing to ecology, and that was we wanted to have 10% or less damage to a crop. And with the spotted wing Drosophila, it was a little high, and sometimes with codling moth on apple, but since we were mainly peach and nectarine growers, we were down to about 2 to 5% insect damage with our no spray system.

That's impressive.

Well, I didn't think it was possible. And then over the last five years of farming together and minimizing our input so significantly and maintaining our yields, we made enough money that we were able to retire to 200 acres in eastern Oregon. But I'm being facetious, but we really did consider it a semi retirement. We put in an orchard, we put in high tunnels and vegetables, but we didn't feel the need to go to seven farmers market A week. And we were able to slow down on marketing and not worry so much. But because we could do that, we started from the very beginning with a no till orchard system and a minimum till or strip till crop row only with maintaining wide living mulches for the annual crops, the vegetables. And boy did we learn. And we began to cut out. We just cut out all sprays except a mineral mix bloom spray to. It's almost what I would consider a homeopathic spray, if that makes any sense. We apply minerals to the blooms and it seems to enhance their ability to set fruit and to suppress disease. So we did that and we cut out the very last of our spraying, which was a lime sulfur spray for peach leaf curl. And of course I sweated it out. But over time, indeed, we stopped having high levels of peach leaf curl. And I learned that it's as exciting as it is in terms of activity in the rhizosphere. There's a phylosphere indeed. Exactly. Who knew? And that if I stopped killing the microbial populations with my lime sulfur spray, I might actually start getting biological control organisms to kick in. And then we wouldn't see some of the diseases that we've been seeing. And I haven't monitored that as well scientifically, but in pure observation, I would say that's actually occurring. Isn't that amazing?

I'm sure it must be a lot of fun. It must be a lot of fun. So, Helen, this is an incredible story you've shared. So much for us to unpack and to dig into. I scarcely know where to begin. You retired from the farm, Semi retired, from the farm in California to the farm in Oregon. Can you tell us a little bit about the scale? What was the scale of those operations and what were your primary crops? You mentioned you were working with stone fruit and cherries and apples.

Yes. So actually, in my book, I go through the journey that encompasses three farms. My farm in Montana was six acres of purely vegetables with just a home orchard. The farm In California was 26 acres of basically all fruit crops. 8 acres of peaches and nectarines, and then cherries, apples and pears, and a little bit of vegetable production, but, you know, less than an acre of vegetables. And then the farm in Oregon was a two acre orchard. Well, two and a half acres of orchard and about an acre of vegetables and a little bit of high tunnel production.

And what has been the diversity of different vegetable species that you've worked with?

Well, in Montana, because I was the extension age and I didn't want to compete with local farmers. So I decided that I would be the field grown tomato and red pepper queen. And so those were my main crops. But to maintain a rotation, I had to do brassicas and onions and cucurbits as well. But mainly tomatoes and peppers in Montana and then in California, the vegetables that we did were cucumbers, trellised cucumbers, and of course tomatoes and peppers.

What a rich lifetime of experience. You know, Helen, it really is an honor to speak with you because I'm not aware of very many people who've been on the journey for as long as you have been in this particular type of domain. And so I'm really grateful to be able to talk with you. You know, you described this vision for an ecological management system, a farming system where you're not spraying, you're not applying inputs, you're not doing most of the things that people do. So the obvious question becomes what is it exactly that you do do?

Boy, that is such a good question. And I'm so glad you asked it, because when I was in my 20s and learned from Masud Noba Fukuoka, he talked about do nothing farming. But there were all of these mental things that were going on and watching and timing of the minute management. So in our system there's quite a bit more management than in Fukuoka system, but it's the timing that is really vital. So starting with the fruit system, which I have to say has been really effective, the no till, or what I'm now calling a minimum till vegetable system is still evolving. The yields are good enough, but haven't met the yields that we had when we applied lots of compost and did lots of tillage for, you know, more conventional tillage. But the fruit system, for example, basically what we do is once we've got the trees, we've got them planted, we've got the living mulches in between the trees. So it becomes managing that residue and managing it in a way that we multitask with both nutrient cycling and habitat building for biological control organisms. And so what we try to do is pay attention to the carbon to nitrogen ratio of the residues. And in the early spring, when the trees are just starting to bloom, and when they seem to have the most pest issues by the way, we try to mow only underneath the tree and leave the alleyways to grow up and be wild and full of COVID and sequential season long blooming for predators and parasites and for birds and snakes and frogs and everybody. That's part of our free ecosystem provider system. But we want to diminish the competition in the tree roots when they're really starting to take up their nutrients. And we want to mow in, especially the grasses when they're young and succulent. And the carbon to nitrogen ratio is lowest. So highest nitrogen, lowest carbon that those grasses are going to have later on when the clovers and the alfalfa and some of the other forbs are more prevalent in the mix, then we can think about their carbon to nitrogen ratio. So too many nerdy details. I know, but this is, this, this.

Is why we want to have this conversation, is to get into the nerdy details. Because I'm sure if I don't ask the questions, lots of people will be left wondering and saying, I want to do that. How exactly do I go about it?

Exactly. So, so we mow early in the season, but we still leave habitat for the beneficials. And then as the season goes on, of course we don't do any tillage and we don't do any spraying for pests. But at bloom, we do this wonderful mineral mix spray that my late husband researched for many years in the 90s. And then we have evolved. And basically it applies things like manganese and zinc and iron and sulfur. And if it's a really rainy season during bloom, we might up the sulfur and use it as not only a nutrient but as a protectant as well from disease organisms. But not too much because we don't want to kill off some of the natural yeasts. And some of the beneficial microorganisms that we have found in our research are in the blooms and on the leaves. We found a native Orocidium bacillus, or I'm not saying that properly, it's a native yeast that is very important in suppressing brown rot disease, for example. And so if we sprayed too much sulfur or too much lime, sulfur, we killed it off. So where is that balance between adding nutrients for the tree, suppressing the disease causing microorganism, but not decimating the beneficial microorganisms on the foliage? So obviously we don't have all the answers yet. I know that will shock you, but we are trying to learn them. So we put on this mineral mix spray. It also has seaweed, it also has azomite, which is a mineral. And what we believe it does is to also coat the blossom and protect it from things like the brown rot organism. So we do that and then no more sprays. No more sprays. And we just monitor the beneficial insects, the predators and the parasites, both the flying predators and parasites and the ground Dwelling. We now realize, for example, how vital spiders are to our biological control system. There's some good science from Washington State on that, but we've learned and have identified all of these different species of spiders that stay on the ground and that also move up into the trees. And I didn't bring it with me, but I have my pinup Spider calendar for 12 months of all the best spiders. But you'll have to look at the book to see pictures of the spiders.

I know many of our listeners, and we know this when we think about it, but we think in terms of ecosystem services and the benefits of all these different species, how easy it is to disrupt that with our modern practices. I mean, how many growers are putting on mite sprays for acaricides and are destroying their spider population?

Absolutely. Oh, my goodness. Exactly. So basically, then we. We begin to mow a little bit more and a little bit out into the alleyway as the season progresses. And then by the end of the season, we mow it down to a golf course. As the leaves start to. To turn color and fall, we want to recycle the nutrients from the tree. Right. With both the prunings later in the winter, and with the leaves that fall, it all goes back to the soil. So we mow very heavily in the fall to help with nutrient cycling. And because we have voles and to manage voles, we of course have the snakes who are in that living mulch and all of the other wildlife that come in and go for voles. We have owls and hawks and things. But we still don't want voles in the orchard overwintering, especially under the snow. So we mow and then we do a last irrigation and encourage the voles to go downhill into grass that we leave tall for them. And we make the habitat within the orchard a very bad place to overwinter for voles. So that's the orchard system where we've had great success. I would love to tell you about the vegetable system, where I think that our no till has not been as effective. And so we've moved to what I call a selective strip tillage.

We definitely want to talk about the vegetable system as well, but I feel like we need to bookmark that because the topics, the questions that you've raised for me in your orchard system, we could probably fill an hour with on their own.

So let's.

Let's dig into some of this. From what I understood, you are essentially doing two things. You're mowing multiple times and you're Spraying once. And that's it. Is there anything else that you. Obviously there's the pruning and the harvest and the tree care.

Yep, yep.

Thinning.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

All right, so let's talk about the mowing and the living mulch a little bit more. What exactly is your living mulch? What are the species composition? Or perhaps a better question is what are you planting? How has it evolved? And the partner question to that is, what is your mowing? You spoke about the value and importance of mowing timing and placement in the row. But what is your season long mowing frequency? How many times are you going across it in a year?

That's a good question because it has indeed evolved. When I started using living mulches in Montana, I would plant them every spring and then I would replant them every spring, and then I would. The following year I would till them in. So it was more like a year long cover crop. Right. I would use legumes because I was a nitrogen hoarder. I was all about nitrogen. And of course, the legumes were so much more easy to manage with their low carbon to nitrogen ratio. And they're succulent, easy to decompose. So every spring, I would till them in and I would give the soil microbes this huge meal of lots of nutrients, and they would feel a little like we feel after a big Thanksgiving dinner when you're kind of sluggish on the couch. And then I realized that I could start leaving islands of undisturbed living mulch from the previous year each spring. So I started doing a little selective tilling. And then I realized that, well, maybe I didn't have to be such a nitrogen hoarder. That's a long story in and of itself. And soil tests helped me realize that. Wow. I was getting excessive nitrogen levels, nitrate nitrogen levels in my soil. So. And seeing a little bit of the signs of high nitrogen.

I can tell you why you had nitrogen excesses in your soil.

Please. And I think I know too.

It's because you weren't applying any. No, I said that as a joke and to be a bit facetious, but it's absolutely true. If you want to shut down that system from functioning effectively, it's really easy. You add nitrogen fertilizer and your soil will deplete of nitrogen.

Exactly. Back to that living root concept. Right. When you minimize your tillage, nutrient cycling and recycling starts. But let me stick to the question because I'll get easily distracted. So, started with legumes and started planting annually every year so of course I had the cost of COVID crop seed every spring, right? So when I moved to Carl's orchard, we would renovate the orchard, maybe every 10 years, but otherwise it was no till. And it would start out with 5% legumes and then a mix of grasses and then the weeds would come in for free. We didn't have to plant them at all. And I am being facetious, but it turns out that the diversity of forbs or weeds in the living mulch at Carl's orchard or our orchard in California, Woodley, turned out to be really vital to the biological control system, that we had different things bloom sequentially at different times throughout basically 11 months of the year in California, providing pollen and nectar and seed for all of our free ecosystem providers. So that diversity became important. So we didn't have to seed, but every 10 years or so. And in the book I go through what, what we seeded all the different species and I also list which of the different species supported what beneficial insects at what time of the year. So I think that's kind of thing we want to pay attention to. And then when we got to Oregon, remember we were trying to do this minimal approach, no till. So we had a 50 year old pasture that had moved already to weeds, thank goodness we didn't have to seed weeds. And we had alfalfa and red clover and a couple of different white clovers. We had some annual grasses, but mostly perennial grasses, the main being orchard grass, timothy grass, some of the brooms and oh, about 15 different species of weeds, some deep rooted perennials like chicory, and then some lovely little annuals that would bloom early in the spring. So we said, well, let's see what happens if we just did no till. And so we cut a bunch of hay and we put about what would constitute about 50 pounds or about a half a bale of hay on every place where a tree was going to be. And we let that just be mulch and then we gave it a couple of months and then we dug the hole and planted it and then we started the mowing process.

Can you give me some insights? In the orchard system, what was the number of mowing passes that you made in a year?

Oh, yes, and my brilliant husband, being one of people that think in this engineering way, measured exactly how many mowings and exactly how much diesel, bless his heart. So it was usually about three to five mowings, you know, depending on how things grew. Three to five mowings per year, and it was about 10, 10 gallons.

That's not that many at all.

No.

I was expecting you were going to say a dozen or more.

Oh, no, no more mowings in the vegetables, but less in the orchard. So about 3 to 5 and about 10 gallons of diesel per acre a la Carl Rosado's measurements.

That just seems like entirely not enough work to justify an. Having an orchard.

Yeah, you know, if it weren't for thinning and harvesting, I would still be doing it. But I need to tell you that as an old lady, for the last three years, except for harvest, I was able to manage that orchard almost entirely by myself.

Wow, that is impressive. So let's talk about thinning a little bit, because obviously the industry standard is chemical thinning, and I can't imagine that you're doing that. So how are you managing the thinning?

Yeah, I have to admit I've never figured out organic chemical thinning, although people certainly have done some research on it. But again, we're trying not to spray. So hand thinning, it's a laborious process, but it's one of the three places where the labor goes. Pruning, thinning, and harvest. So, yeah, it's all hand thinning.

So how. I would guess that you try to eliminate or not eliminate, but to reduce the need for hand thinning as much as possible through your pruning practices? Partially.

Exactly. And so we are trying. I did not do as good a job after I lost my husband, but we did try to bring the trees down so that, number one, we didn't have to use ladders, and number two. Right. We didn't have to thin as much. But especially on the species that I really liked, I would. Or the varieties that I really liked, I would tend to let them grow taller than we should have.

Yeah. And then with the hand thinning, was there a. Did you have a particular priority? Obviously, you probably had a lot of that to do since you were exclusively relying on hand thinning. What stage of fruit development did you try to get that accomplished?

I would start when the fruit was marble sized and try to be done by the time it was golf ball size. And I would do the earliest peaches first, all the peaches first, and then move to things like pluots. And if I didn't get to pluots, we would just have smaller pluots that year.

All right, I'm not losing sight of our conversation around the vegetables, but we're not done unwrapping the. The orchard here yet. You mentioned that on the orchards system, you eventually arrived at the stage where you only had some residual challenges with SWD and codling moth. I'd love to hear more about your journey of disease management and insect management. What were some of the things that you learned along the way that contributed to successes with other specific diseases and insects?

Oh, I'm glad you asked. So understanding the biology of the insects was basically my job. And we learned that with all of the other pests we wanted to not mow to encourage the beneficial insects. But with the Drosophila, we wanted to mow underneath those cherry trees and have low humidity because the Drosophila really liked the humidity. And so if we could have it dry underneath the trees about the time the cherries were just starting to color, well, even when they were green, that that was our best way to what I call shift the balance towards the crop and towards the beneficial insects and away from the pests. So understanding the Drosophila really like that high humidity, making sure there wasn't much high humidity underneath the tree. But near the cherries, say in the row where there were persimmons or pears, we would have the higher living mulch where we did have blooming plants and we had the COVID for the beneficials. So they had to move in, but they didn't have to move in from distance. One of our goals was to make sure that our beneficial insects didn't have to commute to work. They could live right where they work, so that their habitat was right where the tree is. Not in a hedgerow, not in an insectary, but right underneath the tree. But with Drosophila, we mowed and mowed and mowed early in the spring underneath the tree, watched our irrigation and tried to keep it dry during that period when the cherries were just starting to ripen. The other thing that we did, of course, was when we picked cherries, we moved them immediately to the cooler and kept them at as cool as we could so that if there were any eggs, they weren't able to hatch and turn into those worms or those maggots that everybody hates to find in their cherries.

It strikes me that the strategy that you're describing for the SWD is a parallel to that of what you were using for the voles, which I've heard referred to as a push pull strategy, where you are creating ecosystems, ecosystem dynamics, to move them from one place to another place.

Brilliant. That's exactly it. Thank you for pointing that out. I couldn't have said it any better. In fact, I may steal what you just said and put it in the next book.

Well, given the conversation we've had and the amount of stuff we've talked about on.