Podcast Short: Fast Five with John Kempf on the Permaculture Orchard Podcast

Pun intended. Before we dig in anymore, John, we like to do something here that we call the Fast Five. So it's basically 5 different questions all over the place. It's called fast. You don't have to go fast. You can take your time. I would just love to, I guess, start off with question number 1 for you whenever you're ready. So what's one simple foliar tweak you wish every orchardist would try this season?

Add sugar to your foliars.

Okay. And any sugar in particular? We've heard what, molasses? We've heard Pepsi or Coke. We've heard—

yes. Um, certainly different forms of sugar. We've, we've done a lot of experimenting and playing around for years with different applications of dextrose and sorbitol and sucrose and molasses, and they all have different physiological effects. They are all generally beneficial. And it doesn't take much. It takes, um, it takes the equivalent of about a pound to 2 pounds of sugar per acre to make everything else in your foliar spray substantially more effective. I just recently had a podcast interview on our podcast with one of our team members, Jim Dunlop, who works with a lot of tree fruit out in the Pacific Northwest, and they're reporting that as a general rule of thumb, they've been able to cut the application rates of the nutrients they're putting into the spray tank in half by adding sugar to the spray tank.

And then adding the sugar, that basically, I guess, the energy and it wakes everything up?

It, yes, it essentially, it gives the plant extra energy.

Okay.

For a short period of time. So it has its own operational baseline. Let's say it's cruising along at a certain speed, if we use a speed metaphor, cruising along at 20 miles an hour, and all of a sudden you give it a shot of extra fuel and it just accelerates its metabolism for a short period of time. That, that improved metabolism for a short period allows it to absorb those nutrients much more effectively. And also it just, it supercharges the engine for a period of time.

That's, that's a high ROI. 1 pound of sugar, half the inputs, that, that, that changes the needle.

The rocket fuel. Okay, question number 2 for you. What's your favorite underused plant or microbe for building resilience in cold climate orchards?

Uh, it's a right, it's a good question, but it needs reframed. Uh, we shouldn't think about it in terms of one of, one of the foundational failures that has gotten us to where we are is thinking about things in terms of single plants or single microbes. We need to think about them in terms of communities. So One of the things I've learned in the last 3 or 4 years from Christine Jones and kind of the integration of Christine Jones' work and Keith Burns at Green Cover Seed and James White, kind of all this merging around quorum sensing, is preferably— but this is just field experience now, no hard science around this— but our field experience indicates that when you have 8 different plant families, the entire soil microbial community changes dramatically. And they begin— all the plants in an ecosystem begin collaborating with each other instead of competing with each other. So that would be my answer is make sure you have plants from 8 different plant families, not species, but families.

I actually experimented this when I found out about your 7 family things. I thought, hmm, where could I try this? Like the orchard is one, but a very visual one is the green— we have a little greenhouse. And I thought, you know what, instead of doing what I've always done, because that's just the way you do it, and weeding everything out, I thought, what if I integrate that idea of 7 families by letting all the weeds grow, but just clipping them? So I've been going through just with a pair of hand shears, just so I could get really fine detailing. And I've been clipping around every tomato and pepper and every other plant we have in there. And it's kind of like it's not taking away from the plant. In fact, they seem to be doing better, but also they're healthier. There's no disease problems on them. And it's like, is this— they're getting enough water. And now by clipping the other plants, they are getting enough sunlight. So it's not like they're light limiting. And it was like, hmm, this is—

Stefan, do you know if you have 7 different plant families?

Oh, at least, yeah. In all the weeds that are growing there, I mean, everything is kind of coming up. So there's, you know, your smartweed, Polygonaceae. There's the daisy family coming up. There are grasses because there's foxtail coming up. Clovers, hop clover coming up. I was trying to count them one day and I, oh, there's too many. Like we got dill coming up, then the tomato. So your Solanaceae. So it's like, yeah, there's more than 7 families in here. This is just a mix. Lamb's quarter, so Chenopodiaceae. So it's like, yeah, there's all kinds of them and within a root zone of the plant. So it's like, hmm, then I was trying to kind of extrapolating, what if instead of weeding and spraying all these herbicides, if we just mowed, have just simple little robotic or on an arm mowers going down the rows. So we're keeping the weeds down without eliminating them because once the corn or beans get up a certain height, they're gonna shade out. And I thought, wouldn't that be an interesting one? Anyway, I'm always willing to learn and try on my own situation before really applying it anywhere else.

You know, the commercial orchards that we work with out in Washington and Oregon, um, they noticed that— and this was kind of in parallel, or perhaps even before they were implementing an AEA nutritional protocol and nutritional management systems— they noticed that their organic apples had higher quality and better storability than their non-organic apples in terms of fruit quality characteristics. And they attributed that in large part to no longer having an herbicide band underneath the trees. And they had all these plants, mostly grasses, growing underneath the trees and mowing them constantly. And And that changed the physiological expression of the fruit tree.

Hmm. As you say, we just don't know, and we just haven't looked. It's going to be exciting the next 10, 20 years.

I have an interesting project that I'm working on right now as a whole, just in the process of establishing a personal homestead orchard here of, I don't know, roughly an acre, three-quarters of an acre to an acre. And I seeded in I don't have an exact count, between 30 and 40 different species from across, I think, 12 different families of perennials. And many of them relatively low-growing, but the objective was to provide something that is low-growing, grows only 1.5 to 2 feet tall at peak flowering, maybe a little bit taller, and that provides nectar and pollen for insects for the entire season from spring until fall so that we build up a large insect population. So that's a work in progress. I reseeded it for the second time this spring because I seeded it twice last year. The first time it drowned, the second time it dried up because you're planting these tiny little seeds. I mean, I included seeds like thyme, for example, winter thyme, which has 700,000 seeds per pound. And if it doesn't take this time, then the next step is to grow the seedlings in a greenhouse and transplant them out. So it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out.

Well, you got the Goldilocks thing going, so I'm sure the third time is gonna be just right. Um, question number 3, we already went over you read a lot of books, so could you give us one book or mentor insight that still surprises you in its applicability?

Hmm, that's a good one. Yes. And this is very macro kind of life related, more so than specific agronomy related., but it is also connected to agronomy and to how do we care for our plants. This quote was popularized by Otto Scharmer at MIT, who, who developed this concept called Theory U, Leading from the Emerging Future. And it's— the original coursework was around leading people and leading people through, leading people into the future where the future is unknown, leading teams. It was around a corporate environment, but I've found that it is so true in real life. The quote was originally from Bill O'Brien, who was a very, uh, very influential business leader, and the quote is, "The outcome of an intervention has nothing to do with the skills or the knowledge of the intervener. It has everything to do with the place within from which the intervener comes." If you think about that, so many of our interactions with other people are an intervention of varying degrees. I try to change the mind of my 6-year-old daughter about which socks to wear. That's an intervention. And the, and the same. So this is very true for people, but I'm persuaded it's also true for animals. It's also true for plants. Um, the place that we come from within is perceived. It, it influences how we show up. And, um, it's one of— one of my good friends made the comment to me when we were studying this, and I was describing a difficult situation I was dealing with, with some human interactions. He said, if you're coming from the right place within, the words you say don't matter. And I wanted to argue with that, but then I realized that if you come from the right place within, that will determine what words you say. Um, so that, that quote is one that I come back to all the time. Because there are many very brilliant people in the world, and often much of their knowledge doesn't get fully implemented because— for a whole variety of— a whole range of different reasons. But that's— I remember that all the time. The outcome of an intervention has nothing to do with your knowledge or with your skills. It has everything to do with where you come from within.

Yep, saying things with love and saying things with a confrontational— two very different approaches. But it's kind of the old adage for farmers that it's very easy to lead a cow where she wants to go. It's like the cow wants to go there.

There's this— in alignment with this quote, there is this frequently expressed sentiment by commercial farmers who've made the transition from trying to use fewer pesticides They say that, um, I didn't realize how much my internal world would shift when I started changing my thinking from what do I need to kill today, yeah, to how can I manage the situation differently. It's— and so that's where you're coming from within. That's an expression of coming from within. Coming from within of a place of killing something versus nurturing something completely changes your perspective and how you show up in an environment.

Yeah, I always say that one of my sayings is that if you take a step towards nature, nature will take 10 towards you. It's really a demonstration of grace. The more you look at it, the more you realize it's just grace personified. Nature is that. It's like, after all we've done to beat down nature and abuse it and just rape, pillage, and destroy, It still wants to produce. It still wants to give us abundance. It's kind of like, that doesn't make sense. Like, make them starve? No, it's— it's— that's the place from which it comes from.

Well, why is that? If you have a biblical perspective, God transferred dominion and stewardship to us.

Yep.

Like, we are the responsible party. We're the responsible agents. We are responsible for commanding the earth and, um, and for shaping the earth. And my goodness, we've squandered that responsibility. Um, but the, the reality is that is the design of creation. Design of creation is that we are to be the stewards, and creation is designed to respond to that.

Yep. And how often, as you were saying before, the whole point about what we say. And I know because I've done it a few times just to try it. I've killed trees just by speaking to them. It's like, you're not going to produce, then die, because that's enough taking care of you for years and you haven't. And yeah, come back the next year and like it's dried right to the roots. So we absolutely can both be a blessing and a curse to whatever whatever surrounds us in, in, uh, in nature.

The next one we already, I don't know, maybe it's going to be sugar again, but I'd love to know what's one quick win for improving fruit flavor and storage life through nutrition.

Avoid excesses. Avoid nutrient excesses, particularly nitrogen and potassium. Um, most of the problems with fruit quality that most fruit crops experience are self-inflicted by the grower. Too much compost, too much fertilizer, too much manure. If you really care about high-quality, flavorful fruit, do not over-apply potassium and nitrogen. And on most fruit crops in most areas— there are soils that are exceptions, very sandy soils and so forth— but in most soils in most areas, that means none. Zero. Trees are not like vegetable crops. They're not like annuals. They do not need the fertility of those two elements.

Yeah, I love your— for the audience watching or listening, I love your plant pyramid idea with the four levels. And I've seen it in our orchard, how in the first years when we bought it as a conventional orchard, it was 11 years old, full production. But there were some serious past issues. And I thought when I took over, I said, oh, I'm going to do this organic. So I started a 3-year organic transition. And I remember in the first year when in our shed, we still had a bag of 20-0-0. So, and I thought, I don't want to put this out for garbage. I'll, ah, one bag, it can't do any harm. So I spread it on one acre. I thought, ah, that's not a lot. That was just basically walk along and just do a little sprinkling here and there. And in that first year, that was the only place in the whole orchard where I saw aphids. And I thought, huh, aphids are solved in all the other blocks, but this one that I gave the 20 like one bag, 40 pounds or 50 pounds of nitrogen, it showed up with aphids. And so I thought, all right, yeah. And exactly what you're saying about excess. So even that was an excess and it triggered, you know, the pest disease are not the problem. They're pointing to the problem was always Sir Albert Howard's point. And it's like, okay, the problem here was the nitrogen, too much of. And in fact, I saw the same thing with scale. Scale just disappeared after 2 years or 3 years. The same thing with canker. We used to have all kinds of canker and just not putting some of these things. I didn't, in fact, to me, I thought it meant don't do anything, which was the other extreme wrong. So I didn't put anything. But it was interesting to see how problem after problem got resolved just by stopping the regimen of really excess because we're in beach sand soil. So they were pumping on basically hydroponic almost.

Um, yeah, yeah, it takes soils and the trees a few years to recover from that.

Yep, well, that's a good point because, yeah, even like a newbie perspective, it's like, oh, I'm buying this, I'm paying money for it, let me load it up so you get the best quality fruit or product.

But okay, and, and in some soils, uh, I think the one exception to this is One possible exception to this is in the establishment year. If you are planting a new seedling, then yes, you want to push it a little bit to develop a robust root system and to develop a frame. Uh, but that's it. No more after that.

Okay. So another quick little boost of rocket fuel, and then you just, you let nature nature.

John, I want to, we've touched on some of the plants.

Hold on, we're still on question number 5 there. Look at this guy.

Oh, you still have 5.

I got one more for you, John Kempf. If you could ask growers one question to spark better results, what would it be?

If I could ask growers one question to get better results, um, well, often my conversations are with commercial growers, and if it's a crop that I'm unfamiliar with, I will ask the question, what are the value drivers in your crop? Like, what, what is the market really looking for? What are you— or what determines a marketable value? What determines marketable yield? Because particularly in tree fruit, in many cases, the answer is not more bins and bushels. It's not just more. It's not more of what comes off the tree. It's what makes it through the storage process. It's what fits certain sizing characteristics or quality flavor characteristics, firmness characteristics. And it's worth asking ourselves that question as well if we are growing for our home. So in my homestead orchard that I'm establishing, in addition to the one that I already had, what drives value for me? It's very simple. I want peak nutrition and failure— uh, flavor. Peak nutrition and flavor and quality. High brix, um, outstanding flavor. And all the characteristics that go with that high, high phytonutrient density. So, um, all of— I've been proactive with planting perennial cover crops and amending the soil and treating the soil with trace minerals and everything else with the specific intent and purpose of producing the most nutritious and flavorful food possible. My math and my equation is different from commercial grower operations, and that, that is what will lead you to the answers of what it is you need to change in your operation.

That's a good one. I really encourage people to subscribe to your feeds, yours and AEA, just to know what is possible because—

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