Omeg Orchards' AEA Program

The the order of the day is going to be as soon as Mike gets here off his call, he'll be talking about his experience with AEA and what's the history of some of the trees here on his farm and some of the changes he's been able to make. And then we're going to take a walk up through the trees and explain some more. David will be talking about what he was thinking behind making some of the changes. He's been the primary consultant here for the last three or four years and help us kind of walk through the changes that have been made from our perspective as far as programs and nutrient applications and things like that. We've got a series of ideas we call our core concepts, and one of those is that plants have an immune system just like people. Plants in different situations have immune systems that can react differently. Just like five people in a room can be exposed to the same germs and only one or two will get sick. The same works for plants. You can have powdery mildew spores in an area, and if a tree is actually susceptible to can start an infection, but if the tree's immune system is functioning properly, then it'll have an inherent resistance to those spores and to that infection starting. And what we do is kind of learn the keys to being able to turn that immune system on and help it become as functional as possible. One of the other ideas is that a lot of our fertility programs are, in a sense, creating the problems that we're dealing with. You know, we've come to the understanding that, you know, overusing nitrogen, nitrogen in the wrong form, nitrogen, without being balanced by things like magnesium and sulfur and moly, can actually cause the tree to become more susceptible and actually kind of bring in some of the insect issues and the disease issues that growers deal with in a lot of situations. And a lot of what we do is bring the tree back into balance nutritionally, be able to give the grower very strong feedback, very accurate feedback on what's out of balance and how to make those changes, and also how to provide supplemental materials that can be able to fill in some of the holes. We do focus a lot on tracement, on nutrition. There are a lot of these key functions in a plant. A lot of the enzyme pathways, a lot of the reproductive function, a lot of the immune function, has trace minerals like manganese, like zinc, like copper, as a key part of that pathway. And when those materials are missing from a fertility program or when those materials are coming in the wrong form, then it's very Hard for that tree to reach its optimal function and performance. And, you know, part of our success has been in providing the right form of the material at the right time during the tree's life cycle and be able to fully energize or fully make effective those pathways. One of the other ideas that we work with, also a corollary to that, is that soil biology can feed the plants in ways that we can't. So if you look at a very healthy soil biological system, you've got, you know, multiple layers of microbial communities, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, actinomycetes, all kinds of different organisms that are constantly cycling nutrients through that system. They're dissolving minerals off of the soil colloids, they're breaking down organic matter, they're breaking down other microbial organisms, and in the process generating materials like organic acids, sugars, other carbohydrates, amino acids, volatile fatty acids that can be absorbed directly by the plant and used as sources of nutrition. And when a plant can absorb a lot of its nutrition out of the soil as microbial metabolites, it's actually a much more efficient way for the tree to get the material it needs to grow and build its own compounds. We like to say it's like you can go into the woods and you can cut down trees, saw lumber and build a house, or you can order pre built walls and trusses from a lumber yard and put it up. You end up in a similar place. But the time and energy it takes to get there with these pre built compounds that are coming out of soil biology is much faster and much more efficient. Some of the results that we see, we believe can only be had in plants that are getting that type of efficient nutrition through soil biology. Some things you can get to with just mineral nutrition, with magnesium, with sulfur, with trace mineral, with balancing NP and K, and then some levels of tree health and performance need to have that soil biological component to really take them to the next level.

Anybody who's producing food is more important than all the doctors in the hospitals everywhere, because doctors and hospitals can only treat sick people. People who grow food can help prevent people from becoming sick by growing food that is higher in nutrition. We all know that we feel better when we take our vitamins, we take our minerals, we're more energized. Why not get that from food and get it from the sores and the form that we were designed to get it from? So that's why we're here, and that's why I'm here, and that's why I get up every morning. It's not for my paycheck, but it's to help growers like you, who.

I.

Am sure think about the people who eat your food. And the benefits of all of that is that when we have plants that have higher levels of minerals and higher levels of nutrition in the correct form and the correct balance, guess what? Farming suddenly becomes a lot easier and, and a lot funner and a lot more profitable. So it's pretty much a win, win, win situation all around. And that's why we have so much fun. So I guess we invite you to join that fun. So in 2012, it was when I first heard of the Dalles, Oregon, and we were in Columbus, Ohio, when I met Mike Omega. Mike told us that he's fairly happy with where he is, but he's kind of hit a plane where he feels he can't go higher. With. Different trellising methods and all of that, he felt like he had kind of reached a plateau and he wanted to really focus on the soil and the health of his plants. And so he was looking for, you know, for somebody to work with on that. And we met up, we started, you know, looking at where Mike was. What, what are the. What were the, you know, the nutrition he was applying, what was the timing that he was being applied, what were the challenges that he was looking to overcome, which is what we do with all farms. We look where you are, we look where you want to go, and then we help you draft a roadmap. It depends on how you want to get there and how fast you want to get there that determines the route that we help growers put together. So looking at the information that Mike had in 2012 and looking at the challenges he was trying to overcome, which were he was really having a challenge with cherry splitting. He had a major problem with powdery mildew. And he was just looking overall for overall size and firmness of his cherry. Size and firmness was the. The first thing on his list in the email that he sent to me. So with that, we kicked off and we started with looking at soil samples, and then we put together a fairly generic program looking at how do we enhance photosynthesis. We put some magnesium in the program to enhance photosynthesis. We looked at micronutrients, and we put in some. Our micro pack, which is just a blend of all the different micronutrients. We added some calcium we put in. He was applying 7 to 10 pounds of triple 20 every application. So we maintained that to have the nitrogen and Phosphorus. So we kind of took what he had been doing and we added in some of the missing links and we put together a program that would fit into it. We started with 37 acres that Mike was doing. And Mike is very much detail oriented. He measures everything and he wants to know how it works. So his idea was that we do this for three years, and then if it paid, great, and if it didn't pay, then, you know, our time would be over. And we asked that. That first. That first conversation that John and I had with Mike, you know, he gave us the blocks and the specific ones we were working with. But we then asked him for a block to work with that we could do exactly what we wanted to do with it. Not in with this program, just we want it to be our block. And so that's how I got 12 acres of cherries in Oregon and didn't pay a dime for it. Of course, I haven't gotten a penny from it either, but had a lot of fun. So Mike gave us 12 acres, which is the block that we're going to be walking today. And they were badly infested with bacterial canker. Mike said, they've got, you know, one more year and we're tearing them out. We started working with that block. The other blocks we were working with responded quite well. This block was just not really. It was better, but it was not doing what we wanted it to do, which is when Jason and I think, Gary, you might have been on that trip too, made a trip out here and they walked the orchard and started looking at things, and they determined that there was something wrong with the roots. And today when we walked that block, I want you to look for bacterial canker and see if you can find some bacterial canker that's active. We walked the block last night and I wasn't able to find any. So what happened? We started with that basic generic program that we had, you know, that we just outlined based on the information that we had. And we did SAP analysis, which you might think, well, we'll just do tissue analysis. And there's a very important difference when we talk about SAP analysis. It's kind of a bloody example, but maybe I'll give it anyway. If you went to the doctor and you asked the doctor for an analysis of how much calcium you had, and if you had enough calcium in your body, and he said, all right, well, we'll do an analysis, and he cut off your arm and. And he sent the whole arm in and they tested it, you probably have plenty of calcium because of all the calcium that's in your bones. Right. But what if the doctor took a blood sample? Would you get the same calcium reading? Probably not. Probably not. And so that's one of the big differences between a tissue sample and a SAP sample. Tissue samples are they're measuring all of the minerals that are used to make up the leaf that are structural in the leaf and will not be a part. There's no indication of how much is actually available to move into the fruit. The other part that differentiates the SAP analysis from the tissue analysis is that the tissue analysis generally only measures one area of the plant. So sometimes they do the bottom leaves, sometimes they do the middle leaves, and sometimes they do the top leaves. With SAP analysis, we do the youngest fully developed leaf and the oldest viable leaf. And what that does, and the reason that that's such a big difference is some nutrients are mobile within the plant. Nitrogen, potassium, magnesium, phosphorus are very mobile within the plants. And what I mean by saying mobile is that the plant will draw nitrogen or potassium or any mobile nutrients from the lower leaves and move it into the new shoots and. And into the fruit as needed. But calcium and boron and most of the micronutrients are very immobile. So your deficiencies of the immobile nutrients will always show up at the top of your plant. The deficiencies of your mobile nutrients will always show up at the bottom of your plant. So when you look at a tissue sample, you must always ask, is it the top or is it from the bottom? Because if it's from the top, you will very rarely see a potassium deficiency. So you might have. And I've experienced this where we sample cucumbers or looked at cucumber tissue samples before we had SAP samples, and it's like we got plenty of potassium, but there's obvious symptoms of potassium deficiency. How could that be? And that's simply because the potassium was moving from the older leaves to the new leaves, and therefore the symptoms were not showing up on the tissue sample because we were sampling the new leaves. So the important difference between SAP analysis and. So we took that original program that we put together, which we kind of just. It was kind of a shotgun approach where we tried to cover all the bases. And then we used SAP analysis, and we adjusted that program based on the SAP analysis. Every application, you know, it's like we tweak this down and tweak this up, and we don't need potassium. And so very quickly, triple 20 was moved out, and we got a different phosphorus and a different nitrogen source to Replace that. Because we didn't need 20% potassium. Potassium competes with calcium. We were trying to get calcium into the fruit to have a stronger cellular structure so that we have less splitting. And so we, you know, triple 20 went out and we replaced that. And that's basically what we did all along, is just look at what the plant was telling us and then changing and adjusting according to that. And it's been amazing what's happened on Mike's farm and across the country. When you listen to plants, when you listen to plants, they will tell you what they need. And when you give them what they need, they will give you what you want. So, Mike, I'd just like to maybe have you share what we've seen with that and then we can go look at it.

I'll just be really brief as to why. Why I started working with the folks at AEA and with other folks involved in restoration agriculture. And that's because I saw the writing on the wall for our farm that our profitability was becoming less and less every year. We were slowly going to be going broke eventually. We needed to be able to maintain our profitability for the continued longevity of our operation. It was just that simple. And I think we should always question what we're doing. Is it the best thing? Is there something better? And I felt like I needed to be looking into different ways of doing things. So I started working with these guys. And at first I said, well, you know, we'll just do a foliar trial on we'll just do a foliar trial and we'll do a side by side comparison because I'm naturally a skeptic and I wanted to see that their products worked. So we did side by side comparisons and I did it with several different locations. And I kind of quickly learned that I was losing. And so not being one to like losing, I started cheating and modifying my program based upon what they said. So then the next year I decided that we would give them our worst orchard, which is the Stinson orchard that we're going to go into. And these trees weren't growing. They had no leaves at all. Nothing but blind wood roped on with cherries. And we were thinking about taking them out, but we kind of left it and said, I will work with it and we'll try it. Well, I gave, I gave this orchard to these guys and thought, all right, you know, sink or swim. And it's really been interesting to me. I thought it would be, you know, cherries are long lived. They're a long Lived crop. I've always kind of. You always hear like, the soil is really hard to change. It's really hard to get results. But what we saw really quickly was that we were getting results that if I hadn't have seen them with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have thought, ah, they're just selling me a bill. Bill of goods here. But we've been able to really change this orchard. We're. It's still a work in progress. We aren't where we need to be. And it's not the best orchard that we farm here at Omega Orchards, but we took it from just being a dog to now it's all right. It's an average. It's an average block, and it's. It's a profitable block now. And I give the AEA approach that we took most of the credit for doing that, and then some skill with our team here figuring out how to implement that approach effectively and efficiently. So it was us working together, our team here, myself helping make the decisions with these guys, and then our staff here getting on and doing some of these things because it. It is. It is not. It's not cheap, and it's not easy to turn an orchard around. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just open up the jug and put something in the tank, make a couple of passes? Done. Boy, that'd be great. But it's not that way. It's a very complicated thing, and it requires a lot of work and at times, some investment on my part as an owner. I have to put money into that orchard in order to change it around. And I definitely think that the thing you don't want to do is if an orchard is suffering is say, well, we got to cut expenses. Cut expenses, cut expenses, cut expenses. That just leads you down to a fizzle really quickly. And so we took the approach that we're going to invest what's necessary on this orchard because we see that it's working, and we've done that. And so this has not been exclusively AEA products that we have used on this orchard, but we've used the AEA approach using AEA products, but also using other products that AEA does not produce and does not sell. And we've been able to put that under the AEA approach and really have positive results here at this orchard. Yeah, you can drive up. Just drive up this pavement, and there's a porta potty right there. Let me go back.

Go ahead. You can go on around.

It rotates different angle. What we think happened with this, this block is that we, we had a, we had a negative impact from an herbicide that we were using in the orchards. We don't know that for sure, but that's what we suspect. And we believe that that herbicide suppressed the root development of these trees. So what we saw a lot of before was we saw these really weak, really weak leaves that just looked really sick. And the trees were really yellow. And we had a significant amount of blind wood in the trees. So the only place where we had any sort of growing points was at the outside of the tree, which is not a good situation. It really produces an inefficient tree. And interestingly enough, the pollenizers in these blocks weren't affected. It was only, only the Regina. Don't, don't know why. This is a young pollenizer tree here. And you can see it looks pretty good. There's nice lush growth and big leaves there. But then this is a Regina tree next to it. You can barely, you can barely see it because there's so little, little of the tree left. And it had no shoot extension. And it was just literally at the end of these blank branches there were just little tufts. So that was the challenge that we faced here, was how do we, how do we turn this around? So we started out by applying, by applying compost and, and mulch. And then we started working with advancing eco agriculture because we, we saw that the compost and mulch by itself wasn't, wasn't doing what we, what we needed it to do. So we started doing a comprehensive program here of really intense foliar sprays. Foliar nutrition sprays. I was spraying on products that I never used in the past, like manganese and copper and a lot more boron than we'd ever used. And we were following SAP analysis, guiding us with these applications. What I really like about SAP analysis is it allows me to see in real time exactly where the minerals are going that are important to the trees. And by the way, it's not just NP and K that are important to the trees. It's everything. SAP analysis allows us to be economical in our use of these products. So we aren't overusing anything. And it's just as expensive to screw up and under use something if your trees need it and not be putting it on. So we were really successful in turning this, this block around. And now these trees aren't perfect. You know, very few trees are. But what I see here is now I see trees that have, they have much more Increased vigor. We actually have shoot extension here. And Regina is a tricky, tricky variety because usually there's only like two or three tons an acre, if that in Regina. And now these suckers are loaded. So are we going to be able to size these cherries? I sure hope so. And the only reason I have hope is that we have shoot extension and we have vigor. So the tree is sizing the cherries and growing. This orchard was also exposed to really cold temperatures in the 2014 freeze. And that complicated our job because we had the experience on our farm that Regina was more harmed by the cold weather than any other variety. These trees survived the cold and have done fairly. They're doing quite nicely. You can see here that one of the reasons why this orchard is a challenge is that the soil is very poor. We have some really great soil on our farm and then we have some real junk. And this is what we would categorize as the technical term as junky, junky soil. Where there is soil here, it's pretty. It's pretty marginal. It's pretty heavy. It's been farmed for a really long time. Dry land irrigation is hard on. Hard on land. All your topsoil washes off over time. And this was in dry land irrigation for quite some time. So we, we've been able to turn this orchard around and suddenly we started seeing white roots. When we dug and we had shoot extension start. It was really amazing. Once we put this stuff on, I thought, oh, you know, this seems like frog's eyes and newts tails to us. But the orchard started to grow, which it hadn't done in years. It looked like those pom poms in that, in that picture there. So I was surprised.

One of the other things that was really a different thing for Mike was post harvest foliage applications of nutrition. When we first talked about that, it was a totally new concept. And again, Mike was skeptical. But I think you've come to believe that post harvest applications, when the tree is not putting all its energy into the fruit, is developing the buds for the next year, that's when you can really make a difference in setting your crop and determining the quality of your crop is how much attention you pay after the trees are no longer putting nutrients into the cherries.

Yeah. Before working with aea, our post harvest program was kind of the industry standard fall urea sprays. And now we continue to spray on a either bi weekly or monthly basis to keep these trees in peak health. And we continue to monitor what the trees are needing even after harvest because you're growing that next year's crop. As soon as you pick, you start next year's crop. There's just winter in between your two growing points for that, for that crop. And one thing that we've learned through SAP analysis is that it's very difficult to, it's very difficult to influence your crop this year. If you only start putting on your foliar applications and making the effort this year. There's not much time between bloom and when you pick for the trees to absorb this material, integrate it into tissue and get it going. We can have an impact. And we saw that. We know that we can have an impact, but that impact is far muted compared to the whole season long impact meaning from basically we figure from August 1st to the previous year to harvest is our growing season for this crop. One of the things that that's been noteworthy and definitely not something that I expected to see is that this block, particularly this variety, was really suffering from bacterial canker. It appears that this variety on a dwarfing rootstock, particularly the Giesla series, in our experience is just a bacterial canker magnetic. And last year we started to see this, make this observation and we see it again this year that there just is not active bacterial canker cankers in these trees. So as you walk around, you can look and you can see that the cankers are there, but almost all of them that you cut into, they're going to be dried up. And I don't know exactly what we did to do that. And I was very skeptical when David suggested to me that he thought that if we took this comprehensive approach to our nutrition and focused on a couple of the nutrients that in other crops had helped with bacterial diseases, that we could eliminate it from this block. And I thought, ah, this guy just doesn't know cherries. I mean, that's not going to work. But I stand corrected. This is the second year now that we see that the bacterial canker is really of no significance concern to us here in this orchard. So why that's happening, I don't know. Did we put a nutrition in the, into the tree that the tree used to fight the bacterial canker off? Is it just we know that vigorous trees can combat bacterial canker better? Is that what it is? I'm not sure. It could be. It's probably all kinds of sorts of things working together. But what I know is that this, this orchard was dripping with bacterial canker and it's not. Now explain what bacterial canker is. Bacterial canker is a, is a disease of the vascular Tissue of the tree. Do you know what it is? So it's a disease of the vascular tissue of the tree, where you have a species of bacteria that begin to live in that vascular tissue, and they feed on the SAP of the tree, and they essentially plug up the vascular tissue. They get into the tree from wounds either caused by pruning or by freeze damage to the bark or any number of things. But once they infect that site, they slowly spread around the tree and they girdle. They girdle the branch that they're on and they move down. So if bacterial canker starts at a cut up high, it moves towards the central leader of the tree, and once it gets there, it kills everything above where it's located, and you either have to take the tree out or restart the tree.

While I don't want to make it sound like extremely complicated, there is complexity, and it's more than just putting on a foliar application. And, Mike, I think it's important that you also talk a little bit about the mulching that you've been doing and the soil applications. Maybe you want to talk about how we did the rejuvenating seashield application and how you saw the fungal response.

Yeah. So one of the principles that we follow on this farm, that we're trying to follow on this farm to the best of our ability, is to mulch our orchard rows. Cherry trees grow in forests. They don't grow in open plains like a savanna. They like to have debris, woody debris on top of the. On top of the soil. They don't do well when it's hot and you have bare ground above them. They have to be mulched in order to. In order to optimize their genetic potential. And so we have made multiple computer, multiple compost applications in this block. And we've also applied straw mulch on top of the block. And in some areas, we've applied some wood chip. We have gone through an evolution of what's the best mulch. We started years ago here applying no compost and just applying straw mulch. We could buy it in big bales for pretty cheap. And with a straw chopper, a small straw chopper, we could blow it on. Then we started experimenting with putting on compost, some compost, and then mulch on top. And now what we're doing is we're actually blending wood mulch with compost at a certain ratio, and we're applying that blended mulch as well as amending it with a multitude of biological stimulants, calcium sources, rock Minerals and that sort of thing based on what we need in any given block. And we blow that on with our compost spreaders. And we found that to be. We found that to be a very successful means of getting mulch on, because to apply mulch is very expensive. Now, to enhance the value of the mulch even more, we then go on after the mulch has been applied, and we go on with a biological stimulant mix that is, it's made up primarily of rejuvenate, which is an AEA product of SeaShield, another AEA product. And then C crop, which is a. Well, they're all AEA products that we're doing. And then we'll occasionally in that we'll apply some soluble gypsum or some calcium chloride to boost our calcium levels. And a lot of people, if you say calcium chloride, they start to freak out because they think the chloride is a negative thing. But in our SAP analysis, we're fairly consistently actually low on chloride. The trees need chloride. And that could be in part because the irrigation water that we apply here is so pure, being from. Even though you look at the Columbia river and you think, oh, wow, what a what. What a junkie. I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to swim in that. The water from. It's pretty, pretty. Almost like rainwater. It's pretty dilute. And so we actually find ourselves needing some chloride. Not sodium, just the chloride. The other thing that we've done is we've started to implement fertigation in a real way on our farm. And this is something that I played around with for years and really was missing the boat on fertigation. And so over the last few years, we've started putting on some banding on product with the speed sprayer, putting it on. And then this year we've started in last year, and this year we've started actually injecting it at many sites. And so we are taking a real broad approach to how we're putting nutrients on. Because foliar application is probably the least efficient way to get nutrients on. Because the tree naturally wants to be absorbing its nutrition through its roots. That's what it's most adapted to doing. And I kind of liken it to. If we, if we want, if we want, if we need something in our body fast, like we were stuck out in the desert and we need water, they could. The doctor will give us an iv, but you have to pay a pretty expensive medical bill to go down and get that iv, right? So to me, that's what the foliar applications are, is they're a way to sort of jam into that tree. What we need to get in there. And we can get it in there fast, but it's expensive. The soil is going to be our long term approach. And so one of the principles that AEA taught me that really resonated with me is this idea of the process of restoration that we're doing here on our farm. And so what we're doing first is we're using foliars intensively to get the trees what they need right now, because they lack it. And then we're focusing, we're at the same time we're focusing on the soils and improving our soils through the mulches, the biological stimulants and the products that we fertigate and then bulk corrective applications with lime, gypsum and that sort of thing. We're taking the approach of restoring our soils, but with the idea in mind that we can over time reduce the amount that we put on foliar and have the soil. As the biology becomes more active and as the nutrition in the soil becomes better balanced, we'll have the soil providing a lot of what that tree needs.

A foliar is the fastest way to rebuild the soil. When you have healthy plants, they produce more sugars. And when they produce more sugars, they push more of them out through the roots. And when they do that, they feed more bacteria and more microbes. When you feed more microbes and bacteria, guess what? They digest more minerals. And when you have more nutrients in the tree, they become healthier and they produce more sugars. And it's just an ever increasing cycle where those foliars are doing more than just providing this tree with the nutrition that it needs today. It's building the soil and it's expediting the process of rebuilding that soil. And when that tree gets to the point where you have waxy, shiny leaves and it's building high levels of fats and of plant secondary metabolites, and you start pushing those out through the roots, those are digested by the fungi. And now you're building carbon. You're not only just stimulating bacteria, you're also stimulating, supporting the fungi, which will build the carbon. So it's really the foliar does a lot of things and the most efficient way to restore the soil.

So these Regina trees here, which is a variety that's known to be resistant to powdery mildew, but not immune, we haven't sprayed any fungicide in this block. This is its third Year we sprayed no fungicide in this block at all at any time on the pollenizers or on the Regina. And David's gonna offer a five dollar gift certificate to anybody that can go out there and get a leaf that's covered in powdery mildew here. You'd have a very hard time doing that. But more interestingly is I took, I took a step even more in that we had not seen any powdery mildew in our sweethearts, which are here. And maybe let's go to that next and we'll talk about some of the interesting things we're seeing there and can take a break to answer some questions then. He's very helpful and he's very pragmatic too. Yeah, circle back. Eventually, for those who aren't don't want to walk, we're going to circle back down to where we were after a short trip. One of the, one of the things that, that I mentioned was that we cut down on our, our use of powdery mildew products down, down in the Regina block. And that, that's a pretty easy, that's a pretty easy decision to make because we have good experience that powdery mildew is fairly resistant or, excuse me, that Regina is powdery mildew resistant, not immune. You can still find it, especially later in the season if you haven't applied any fungicide. But we haven't seen that here. And so what we did starting last year and then again this year is we started applying our fungicide in these sweethearts, which is a highly susceptible variety to powdery mildew, if not one of the most susceptible varieties to powdery mildew. And so we started cutting back on our, on our fungicide applications here. And at, at present we're, we're doing every other mildew spray on this block. And I'm not saying that we have no mildew because I don't want to speak in absolutes.

I'll put $5 on it.

But David, what I'd like to do is as we're walking back, see if you can find some mildew in here. And if I were to ask a average cherry grower, hey, do you think you could find some mildew in a sweetheart block? Everyone would say yes, I think, but I think you would have a hard time finding it here. And if you did find it, I don't think there would be that much, but we'll see. I could be totally wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. But one of the things that we're seeing as we take on this approach and as we're restoring and bringing up our soils and improving our tree overall health is that the trees themselves appear to becoming resistant to bacterial canker. Very likely. And also very likely mildew. Now, I think it's premature. We don't have. I don't have enough experience under my belt to say with certainty that this is the approach that everyone should take and that I'm not going to have any problems with bacterial canker with mildew. But I find it pretty darn incredible and quite exciting that we don't have powdery mildew issues in this block and that we don't have bacterial canker issues in the block below. And I don't think it's a stretch of the. I don't think it's a stretch for me to say that. A good reason why that's happening is because we are taking this comprehensive AEA approach to these blocks. The other thing that I want to talk about in this block here is, is this Sweetheart block has always been a loser for us. Until we started working with aea, this block was always weak, which means that it really overcropped and it never had very much canopy on it. And the wind just howls down this canyon here and really would always. Either it would shrivel the block, the block would get. The fruit would get sunburned, or they wouldn't size, or all of the above. And what we see here is a pretty good look to this orchard. We see a lot of shoots growing and we see a lot of leaf coverage, which is important with Sweetheart to protect the fruit from the sun and from exposure. But normally, those very same characteristics of a big thick canopy with lots of leaves would mean that mildew would be really happy and going crazy in this block, and you'd have to be really on it. So it is to me, very interesting and very exciting that we're able to accomplish our nice vigor, our big old thick canopy that Sweetheart needs to grow in size without the challenge of mildew at. At this time. So if we get another couple years under our belt, I think we have something really serious that we need to. To look at. So because of the promising results that we've had here with mildew, Lynn Long and David Grannenstein from wsu, they've gotten together and are cooperating with me, and we've submitted a grant to actually study this. Study this effect and look at the quantitative effect of the potential disease suppression that we have with the AEA program and also its effect on yield and fruit size and quality. So we don't know if we have funding for that project yet, but they got together and worked very hard on writing a grant that was submitted and we hope to get that funded and get some, you know, some good numbers to this, what we're seeing here and to replicate it somewhere else as well. Maybe this spot's just lucky, but I doubt it. Something that I want to comment on is if you look at that Luis brought up here, is that if you look at these trees, man, these trees look great. They have nice expansion of the leaves, good shoots growing. Luis didn't say that. I'm saying that. But if you look down at those Regina down there, we still have work to do with our leaf to fruit ratio, which is really important. So those trees are growing now. They don't look like the dead, dead skeletons that they were slowly working to where more and more of the orchard in that particular variety looks better. And we aren't there yet. But I think as we continue to work on this, we're going to bring those trees up that are still looking rough and that we're going to have a good block of Regina down there. So I don't want to leave you with the impression that that's a stellar, absolutely perfect block of Regina. It's not. And no block is perfect. But from where it started to where it is now is really remote.