Micro-Sprinklers & Foliar Nutrition with Peter Henry

Hey, what's up guys? Um, my name is Peter Henry. I'm a farmer exporting a bunch of different crops to the United States, and I'm an ambassador for Advancing EcoAg. I've now been using their products for over a year with great results. And so in today's video, we're going to be collaborating with Advancing EcoAg to show you how we have the irrigation system set up on our farm and how we apply different types of AEA products to our different crops. So make sure to like and subscribe and hit the bell on the AEA channel. And I'd say one more thing, um, a lot of things I'm going to be talking about require some calibration given the different, uh, sprinkler emitters to be able to push out something that's similar to a backpack sprayer. So we do use backpack sprayers for more precise— how do I put that— more precise foliar if we need to. But generally, we're pushing out nutrition once or twice a week via the irrigation system here. And so a lot of times the most complicated part about that is dialing in that dose so that the amount of solution that hits the leaves mimics that of a backpack sprayer. Also calibrating the PSI and other things like that. So it's really important to, um, have tools available. And one tool that I'm using, which also comes from AAA, is Fieldlark. So I'd also say check out fieldlark.ai. It's an amazing tool. If you don't use the AA products but you have something else available, you could just upload the ticket, um, with the ingredients and some background, and it will tell you more or less what to do as well. It's not just for AA products, it's basically the AA philosophy from John Kempf and the team to be able to dial in nutrition and work as best as we can, um, regeneratively to reduce those chemical inputs and have a more birational approach to agriculture as we transition from conventional into something more ecological. So check that out, fieldlark.ai. It's really important because when you're trying to dial in that dose, whether you push it into a drip line or a system or any backpack sprayer, you need to know the PSI and you need to know the correct dose, water pH and all that kind of stuff. As you can see, our farm is extremely hilly. We're about 800 to 1,000 meters above sea level. I don't really know what that is in feet, but essentially our main crops are different types of solanacea. So we really focus on exporting 3 types of peppers. 2 capsicum chinense and 1 capsicum annum. We've done African eggplants in the past, but we currently have that subcontracted out. And we also have a new project for regenerative chemical-free tobacco. So we have about 4 acres of tobacco right now and about 6 acres of pepper crops for export. So here we have the same irrigation, but it's on the ground because we just haven't had time to basically harvest the wood and, and put up the, the system. But it's essentially the same thing. They're micro sprinklers. As you can see here, I have the package. So these green ones spray at 90 liters per hour, and the red ones that we currently have spray at 120 liters per hour. So you just have to really calibrate how it goes, and they more or less have a, a radius of about 2 meters. So I put them about 1 meter apart. I'm not sure if this is blurry, I'm getting wet. That's another problem with this, you just get wet every time you spray it. But essentially you can use this for irrigation on hot days like it's doing today. We have some Saharan dust, we could use this around 12 PM to 1 PM to open the estomas, estomatas, in the leaf, distress the plant. But essentially that's more or less how it works. On the other side of the farm we have other types of sprinkler heads. Let me see if I have one. Let's check it out in my bag. So we have these types of sprinkler heads. We have another one, this one does 3 meters radius. We have another one that does 6 meters radius. As you can see, it's like relatively no drift. Obviously if it's windy, it changes the application timing, but essentially the only issue with this is that you got to run up and down to open up the, the key valves. Given that, um, it works in a 40 meter by 40 meter block. If you have more than 40 by 40 with this system and have a relatively high potential diesel pump, which is 10 HP and 85 TDH— I'm not sure if I'm saying that right— height, this shoots out about 85 meters. So you have to basically divide the sections off with T-valves so you're able to spray in 40 by 40 meter blocks to get the right pressure for what you're doing. I would even say when we do nutrition, we go about 30 by 30 or 20 by 20 to get a high pressure push of the nutrients into the crop leaf without wasting product because given there's a dilution of about 5x on the bypass where you would use about 1 quart or a liter of solution in a backpack sprayer for a 200-liter tank, we actually have to pump in 5 or 6 times that to get the right rate. So you're looking at 3 or 4 10-gallon, um, buckets of AA products. So it, it does require a lot of product if you're going to do it like this. The savings that you'll have is on labor, um, so you'll have good savings on labor. So here's another angle. We just changed the key valves. You can see if you use a good dispersant and wettable agent, when you put on the products, you'll get a pretty good coverage. The only issue, like I said, is it won't get under the leaf. So if you have any issues with, um, whiteflies or any type of leafhopper that likes to lay their eggs under here, and you want to put like a Spectrum or a Bacillus uh, turnip hen sees some type of BT product, or even like a conventional insecticide, a neem oil, something like that, you're gonna probably want to come out with a, with a sprayer if you're doing tobacco, if you're doing larger leaf crops. If you're running corn or C4 grass or a sorghum or a soy, um, it's probably not necessary. You could, you could get away with the, the sprays on the pivot. Type system that we have running out. So it really depends on the crop. Um, right now I'm doing a mixture. I'm trying to dial in a bunch of nutrition with the Rebound Moly, Rebound Copper, um, Rebound Boron in every single application. We're doing about 5 every 5 days, so I'm pushing out like mini doses of those, um, products with HaloFoss. I'm pushing pretty hard the HaloFoss. To get these crops to where I need to get them based on my soil. So I have really low moly, I have extremely low copper, and I have high nitrates. So, nabohame, lower disease. We really haven't had any issues with the tobacco. On the peppers, on one variety we've had a bunch of issues with bacterial wilt, bacterial leaf spotting. It's been getting pretty gnarly on the fruit, and that's actually, um, hurt my first harvest for export. I couldn't harvest that first one, so we've been adjusting out the stuff. I finally got access to the Rebound Copper, and night and day with the higher doses of the copper, um, extremely high doses of the, the Rebound Boron and Mali. I've been pushing up the Mali, um, really high. So yeah, that's, that's basically what we're, we're doing here. I'm just irrigating with a little bit of humicarb. So we'll go over to the, the estanque, or the tank that we have. It's about 11,000 liters. I'm adding in a small amount of, of humicarb, about a liter of humicarb every time we irrigate. And I'm also adding in about 30 pounds of white sugar to every irrigation event with the hopes of injecting a little bit more carbon and complexing that high nitrate that we have in the soil. So I mean, to kind of circle back on the cost of all this, it's a relatively cheap system to install. Each of these micro sprinklers that I was showing you, that you can see here, are throwing it down. Each of these micro sprinklers that look like this Let me see if you get that into focus. It's not wanting to focus right now, but each of these micro sprinklers that look like that, um, cost about 1 penny. So you have 1 cent on the dollar for that, and you're throwing it down more or less in a 1 by 2 or whatever the crop density is. I have it on a double line on the terraces, but really it can handle a 1x2 to get good, good crop coverage. Um, so it's relatively cheap. I mean, you know, you could use 16mm or 20mm lines. You could even use, uh, 40. You can use 32, which is one. Um, it's a little bit big, but you could do all of that. It works pretty well, and your irrigation time drops to about 3 to 6 minutes per section. If you're doing foliares, you're doing about a minute, you're doing about a minute per section, whereas with drip tape, you're gonna have to let that thing run a long time. So you use maybe less water, but you're using up a little bit more energy on the fossil fuels if you're using a a pump and you can't do gravity. I can't do gravity because I'm pumping the water. I'm pumping the water all the way from that corner. I'm not sure if you can see it, but there's that corner over there with something white, and I'm pumping it through. It crosses the river, it comes up, and it sprays out here. Then it goes all the way down there, and I pump things there. So You got to take those things into account. You'll use more product, and basically you'll, you'll use more product. One person can essentially handle 4 or 5 hectares on an irrigation day, whereas with a backpack sprayer for nutrition, you're talking about at least 4 people with backpack sprayers and 4 people with buckets, moving the product from where you mix the product up to the different sections, going up and down the hill. So that's why we built this out. Um, albeit I have been using the backpack sprayer more just to be a little bit more, um, precise on the application rates and get nutrition on the underbelly of the leaf. But it essentially all works well. One of the pitfalls of this is sometimes the micros— if you can see it they break. They're a little bit cheap, they're from China, so you just have to replace them. But again, they're like about a penny, um, so it works well. Another thing is you really have to install them with the, with the head facing down. If they turn with the pressure on the water, then I'm gonna have to go through and move it around because that's going to be drifting off that way. So there's some caveats to it, it's not perfect. But as Voltaire said, "Perfect is the enemy of good." So, I mean, it works more or less, um, how we need it to work for what we need to get done. So here you can see we have the micros on the ground. They work that way as well. Obviously you're not going to get foliar coverage for this. Like I said, we just didn't have the time to put in the overhead side of things. That's that's coming up. Um, we have the, the corn as a support system because the corn is going to act as the, as the stakes for the, the crops. And we have the capsicum chinense, African habaneros, um, our Scotch bonnet type peppers rolling in. They're about 4 weeks from transplant. They've suffered a little bit just given the climate. It's not drying up, so They've been responding well to the, the rebound products and the hollow floss. So we'll come through, we just weed whack this part, we'll come through by hand and we'll clean up the, the areas there, and then we'll start to take off kind of like the, the leaves that dried up. This was not a very good variety of sweet corn. It's pretty susceptible to, um, Stewart's wilt and some other issues. We haven't been fertilizing that, it just kind of gets the the crossover of what's happening with the, um, with the peppers. But it's not a main crop. This will go to like some animal feed or possibly to a local market. We don't really care too much. The good thing is it brings in a lot of bees, um, and it's injecting carbon into the system. And the, the disease that might happen with the, with the sweet corn is not going to cross over to the peppers. So it's more or less a companion crop at this stage. Um, we're mainly focusing on our export crops. So like I was saying, like sometimes the little head gets cut off. A lot of times like the workers might come through, or even I might do it, I might just step on one of them. So it's fairly simple to get rid of. You just pull it out, then you have this guy and you put it back in like so, and it starts spraying out. So that's one of the caveats. You also have to have a good filter because, um, sometimes— let me see if I can get an example— what will happen is on the, on this part of the head, um, sometimes like some sticks or some, some grass or some dirt might get in there and get stuck. So you have to pull it out and kind of like blow through it. Or use a small wire to get that out and then put it back in. But it's fairly simple. As you can see, um, it wets the ground extremely quick. So here I can get through 4 or 5 hectares in under an hour. Right now what I'm going to do is I'm about to push out to the other sections. So I'm just going to open up two of these valves, close this, and now the water is going to pump through the and go down the mountain. Excuse the mess here, we got to clean this up again. We're going to be putting a red sweet passion fruit variety called Gulupa from Colombia here. And as you can see now, it's starting to spray the water on the other section. So like I said before, you really have to think about the, the irrigation sections in a 30 by 30 or 40 by 40 on a fairly easy slope. On a steep slope like this, you're gonna have to roll out with a 10 by 10 or 15 by 15. So basically what I did was I divided the lines with a 32mm, um, hose. So basically this— each of these hoses go about 15 meters. So I'm running about 1 into— I'm running about 30 minutes right here. For this line, which goes all the way down, I need to push it out with a little bit more pressure. So that's going to go by itself and I'll roll that section out in less time. So if I'm going to go 3 minutes here, I'll go a minute and a half over there and it's going to spray out enough water to get me where I need to get with the plants each day. You could also see some of those heads have been split out. It's probably because when we were coming through and weeding the other week, one of the workers just stepped on one of those. So that's one of the main issues of having them below. I prefer to put them up or even put two sticks here and keep them elevated so that any type of, of work that you're doing, especially when we're talking about tobacco crops, you need to hill it up. For the peppers, you don't hill them, but for the, for the tobaccos, you got to hill them. And so if they start hilling them and you have the, the lines on the ground, they'll cover it, um, if they're going fast with the, with the dirt. Um, and so if you're not on top of it or you have to do some other work, which is generally the case, it could cause some issues. So basically here, when we put in the passion fruit, we're gonna go one line passion fruit, one line service line. So basically you'll go passion fruit, service, Passion Fruit service, you'll be able to pollinate and, and harvest. Um, so I need to fix that up, but this is going to be a fairly difficult slope. We're going to have to divide it up into a different amount of sections. We have right now currently only one line going down. I'm going to have to divide it basically by 1, 2, 3, 4 lines. So I'm not sure, but now you can see that it's starting to wet at the bottom. So we're going to let that roll out about a minute 50, and then I'm going to go over here and get ready. When when the bell rings to change out the irrigation line there. And yeah, as you can see, gets good pressure, and so it wets extremely well. Super quick, super efficient.

So yeah, that's it.

Let's go check out the, the main tank and the Venturi system. So we're back again with the other system. That we use for foliar and irrigation. And as you can see, it's a little bit different because we have every 2.53 meters by 3 meters on the line, we have micros that basically are sprinkler heads which are gonna push a 6-meter radius. So to account for laps and stuff like that, we have it there. Um, these give off about 60 liters per hour, so you can see that's pretty good pressure. You can control the different lines here to push more pressure. So if we were going to do a foliar, for example, I would probably only do a minute and a half, or maybe 1 minute or 45 seconds with one or two of these open so that the pressure pushes out into the 16mm line from the, um, 1.5-inch tube, which is the mother tube, and it pushes out the solution. You can see that the, the leaves are, are quite wet. You get good coverage. So it's, it's definitely viable. If you want to be super precise, there's nothing like a backpack our drone for the amount of trees that we have. Um, these are pine trees that we can't really do anything about, so we can't throw a drone in here. Um, the mountainous terrain, as you guys can see, makes a lot of the backpack spraying difficult. However, we're doing a lot of that to be more precise on the peppers since this variety in particular has a pretty high incidence rate as an open-pollinated variety from Africa. With bacterial diseases. But if we're not looking to be so precise or we want to push out like Spectrum, PSB, we want to push out halophos, get that phosphorus and calcium into the system. This is a great way to, to do it. A couple of things that I didn't account for was that when we planted the corn, I wasn't accounting for it to get so, so tall. So it kind of blocks some of the stuff, but the corn has already been harvested, so we're going to eliminate that. Um, then we set these up a little bit lower because technically here I could put in a, a screen, like a netting, um, to basically reduce the impact of rain. That's why these are lower. What we're probably gonna have to do is come through and throw it up. We actually tried to install plastic but the microns on the faucet were too little and it broke. So I need to fix that. But the whole idea was to actually have a semi-roof on this part of the land to avoid damage from rain. But yeah, that's basically it.

So it's going to be pretty loud with the pump. Oh, you are back. We have a diesel pump about 10 HP with an 85 height. So that allows me to basically pump the water from here all the way to the other side of the mountain and push it out. We have a screen here, we have a double screen there, pumps through and it goes to the injector system. So we just have a simple venturi, you connect it to a tank and you push out the solution that way so you can do your full We have about 11,000— we have 11,000 gallons here in water that's basically being irrigated. So we push it in from a river that we have going to the property, pass it through, and then when we're not using the water, we send it back to the river.

Hey guys, so we're back here without seeing pump turned on. I want to show you what we're, what we're doing, how I use this system, because the last time I didn't show you guys. So basically I have this 265-liter tank, and as you can see right now, I have Humicarb, I have Sea Shield, I have a little bit of moly because I like to add in moly with the Sea Shield anytime I'm using any nitrogen source. I'm always putting in, um, molybdenum. I have sugar, and then I'm putting in BioCoat Gold, and I'm putting in Spectrum. Um, I might be the only person using the BioCoat Gold through an irrigation system and through foliar feeding. I've seen that it's really helped boost the plant. Like, for a 265-liter tank with sugar And the Sea Shield, which gives the microbes food, you only need about 50 to 100 grams. And I put in about 200 grams of Spectrum. I'm putting in about 5 liters Sea Shield and like 300 cc of Molly. And I put in about, um, 5 liters of Humicarb. So all that gets mixed in this tank. So all I have to really do— I actually kind of messed up here. I'm gonna have to pull this out and plug that in. Okay, cool. So I just plugged this in, wasted maybe a small bit of product. Smells terrible, um, but the plants like it. It's that Sea Shield. Anyways, when I turn on the pump, I'm gonna open up these valves here and I'm gonna choke it down here. So it's going to suction out at about— I usually have it about 500 to 600 liters per hour, and I'll push it out into the irrigation system. And so it's going to basically wet the entire thing. This is really good for non-precise applications, or where, for example, I don't have time to do a drench on a couple hectares. So it's going to take me 2 days to do an entire drench. I could basically push this out. Maybe it's not the, the, the correct amount of microbes, but it's, um, per plant, but it works. And I basically get the entire thing broadcasted with nutrition, microbes, everything. The walk paths and the beds, the leaves, everything gets their, their microbes, their sugars, their C-Shield. Um, so it's an effective way of doing it. It's not precise by any means, but if you're looking to save time and labor, which I'm trying to do, that's what I have. So you could essentially have a bigger tank if I wanted one.

You could—

if you're gonna do like 10 hectares, you could actually just mix all that stuff in this tank. Sometimes I go ahead and I throw in to clean it out the humicarb, and it gets rid of all the calcium buildup and everything. I mean, our water's pretty good, but right now it's pretty clean. I mean, technically I should have a top on it, but you can see there's no algae growth or anything like that. It's well oxygenated because when I'm not rolling out the tank, the water just keeps flowing in. So yeah, that's basically it. We'll go ahead and finish this out and then we'll turn on the pump. So here you could also see again how it looks. We have the spacing a little bit different on this plot, and we also have the sprinkler heads facing upwards. So obviously we need to clean up the, the bamboo here, um, and we have to get rid of the, the corn since we already did that, but Yeah, essentially this works for foliar. As you can see, all of the, the leaves are getting wet. For the chili peppers, it actually works quite well. It will wet the bottom of the leaf, but for things like tobacco, eggplant, it's better to probably do a backpack spray, especially if you're combating like whiteflies and trying to get that, that underbelly of the, of the leaf. But generally it just all depends on how precise you want to get to and what you're looking to do. We actually have a broken sprinkler head there, so I'm going to have to go and fix that. But yeah, essentially that's the reality of farming, I guess. It's— you have to find the balance between trying to be perfect and just getting the job done. So we'll let this section run and then we'll go over here. I basically have it timed out so that I know each sprinkler head. So basically I have, uh, 2.5 plants per meter squared. So then I calculate the amount of water that's going to be pushed out, and that's more or less how I run the, um, run the timing per section. Like I said, we generally run each section I'm gonna show you these sprinkler heads before I get wet. We generally run each section, um, in a 40 by 40 meter spread. I don't really know the, the yard or the feet length. You guys can calculate that in this— in the stateside. I generally run meters because it's just a lot easier to calculate given that most things come with meters per hour. But essentially each section is a 40 by 40 or 30 by 30. If you're really looking to be precise and you have budget for more, um, key valves like this one here, you could actually do a lot better job, um, controlling the pressure because obviously for the foliar you want high pressure. So in that case, I would recommend actually a 20 by 20. If you do a 20 meter by 20 meter sector you'll be able to push out extreme pressure into the, into the system, like push out if you're not checking the pressure around 80, 90, 100 PSI, and you'll be able to basically mimic a pretty good pulverization. Obviously, you need to control that pressure when you're pushing out microorganisms and lower the up to 40. So if you're going to be doing that, also it helps to have a, a smaller sector to be able to make sure that the right amount of microbes get to the, the different areas. So really the, the main difficulties here, and the reason why we set this up, is also drip tape doesn't work on contour lines really well. Um, you can see we have a pretty difficult slopes here. Almost all of the farm is sloped. So this is the easiest way for us to irrigate. The other option would be a drip hose, which is more or less like these hoses that you could spread out on hills and slopes. And so it's basically like the drip tape, but it will be able to manage a curve. However, the cost per meter squared on that is a lot more. Because with each of these I'm just pushing out a line every 3, 4 meters. In this case, I actually have it every 5 meters. But when we're dealing with the other stuff and cost and things like that, that means you have more key valves running out here, more hose lines, and at about $25, $30 a pop, um, per, per hose, that only gives you about 200 meters. I mean, if we're running like we have here about 5 hectares, uh, that adds up pretty quick. So this is a lot easier way for us to do it, and plus you can push out full years if you want to. So for example, if I can't get labor or I'm all alone on the farm on a Sunday, I could essentially handle the nutrition myself on 5 hectares, um, or 50,000 meters squared, versus having to have 2 or 3 people with a backpack sprayer and 2 or 3 people carrying buckets with a solution to the different areas of the farm. So what would take 4 or 5 hours to spray with a backpack sprayer with 2 people takes me about an hour to do the entire thing. So you also have to just have a cost-benefit between precision, just good enough, what you're doing. If you have high insect and disease pressure, there's nothing better than a backpack sprayer. I would recommend doing that. That's what I'm doing. Right now on this side of the farm because I have this open pollinated variety that's just getting ruined and wrecked by bacterial issues. However, I will say you can see the new growth coming out. You can see that we actually slapped on Macro Pack, Halo Foss, and Pinion, and you can see everything's looking great. And the Pinion is actually pushing out a ton of flowers. Um, So it definitely has a biostimulant effect. And yeah, um, we're almost ready to go for the first harvest. So thanks so much for watching this video. Remember to like and subscribe to TAA for all the content that they have. They have some really great podcasts and really great nutrition that's super compatible with a lot of things. I'm really enjoying a trial that we're doing with Finian. It's really helping me out with some bacterial blight. That we have on one of the peppers, just that it's more genetically susceptible. So I'd really check them out. They have a really amazing team. Um, I am an ambassador for their, their products, um, for that very reason to kind of like evangelize and spread that out to other producers that there are some really good products and there's also a team of people that are there to support growers, um, and not just sell them stuff. So, you know, our terrain is a little bit different than what you might have in the US or Canada or even Mexico. Um, we are super hilly, we're in the mountains, we have to terrace everything. It's a lot of work. And so given that and given the diverse climate and the difficulties that we've had, the AA products have really helped me. So make sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you guys on my next video and leave your questions and comments below and we'll answer them as best we can. If you're interested in setting up some sort of irrigation system to basically get rid of those backpack sprayers and be more efficient in terms of your sprays.