Realistic Steps to Boost Fruit Quality | Regenerative Apple Grower Steven Bierlink | Monument Apples

Our next speaker is Stephen Berlink, an apple grower located in Quincy, Washington. When he returned home from college with a business degree, he was driven to solve issues that commonly cause bitter pit, cork spot and lenticle decay. I hope I got that right, Stephen. You can tell me if I didn't. He also. I meant to ask you that beforehand. Make sure I say that appropriately.

Okay.

He also sought out management practices that could renew the health and productivity of their orchard and employees. Today, Steven abides by meticulous observation in his management practices that have brought many exciting successes, most notably on his honeycrisp blocks, which have produced as much as 160 bins per acre. Steven is owner and manager of Monument Apples, a small detail intensive orchard in Central Washington. There they focus on maximum net dollars rather than cost savings. By changing perspectives from what should I be doing? To what else can I do? Many new things have been accomplished. Today, Steve will be discussing steps to improve fruit quality. So welcome, Steve.

Thank you. Yeah, high yields are definitely possible. It's important to believe that anybody else could do it too. This is what 160 bins an acre looks like. That's absolutely realistic. It doesn't look completely out of reach. And it's something that anybody could do. There's. Everybody's seen this in certain areas in their orchards too. So if you can just happen to create this in enough areas, you'll be able to get that too. So if it happens once, it means it can happen again. And that's really important. We don't really know what the upside for potential production is anymore. So that makes things pretty exciting. Right now let's get into some things that you could do to get there. Bringing the party. We heard from Dennis and Steve earlier at tinyo, and I was talking to him a while back about how he chooses which beneficial bacterias or microbes. How do you figure out what goes into these mixes? And he said, let's say you have 200 people that you want to come to a party. Which 20 people are you going to invite to make sure that happens? And that kind of created a light bulb for, for me, when it was like, oh, okay, so how do we get these things together? But that was a simple way to say we gotta group new ideas and different things together so that they have a synergistic effect. They bring each other up. And if we can do that, that's bringing the party. So the side effect of something like this is gonna be cost savings. We don't wanna prioritize cost savings because it could be a detriment to our potential. But if we allow side side effects to like, like cost savings to just be there in the background, then they'll just happen on their own. So I've heard this a couple times today already, but a very productive mindset can be what else can I do rather than what should I be doing? Or what maybe have I missed? So starting at the beginning of the season, crop load, we start with pruning in the winter. So there's a huge difference in terms of what we can do with pruning. There's different styles of trellis, there's different varieties, there's different plant spacings, all sorts of stuff. So you may have permanent branches, semi permanent branches, no permanent branches. There's, there's so many different things you can do. And so when you're pruning, it's really important to count and not use a feel. If you use your feel, you're letting your own judgment, which you should trust, but you're allowing that to kind of take the place of good decision making. You can have calculated decision making if you count. So by counting, we can get a whole lot better. And if you count a few trees a week or a few trees every other day or something like that, you're going to have a better idea of where you need to be. Numbers don't lie. So if we know what the counts are, then we know how to adjust and that's very productive. We don't want to become complacent in, in these ways because you might count once and then stop. People kind of change things as they're moving through blocks, the trees change. So it's good to pay attention, be out there, be counting, and if you can't, make sure you have somebody else do it so that you're at least getting the numbers reported back to you. Excess branches cause problems, and we know that it's just going to cause shade, it's going to hurt color, that's going to make fruit quality go down. So we, we need to make sure that we, we cut too much at the beginning on purpose. And most of the time what you'd find after doing that is when you do your counts after cutting what you think is too hard, the numbers are probably really close or you might be still needing to cut a lot harder. Even if you're 10 to 20% over your final count that you want, that's enough to cover a whole lot of what if scenarios. So that should make it a whole lot better. The idea of getting to the correct crop load early is key, and it starts with pruning. If you're concerned about what's fruit and what's not, I have a couple of pictures here. There's ways, there's ways to do this that really aren't that difficult. You can Google it, you can talk to your consultants, you can send cuttings off to get them tested for you so that you can figure out what's where. And that'll increase your ability to have high quality pruning done. Spraying spray applications are huge to fruit quality. Sometimes we're spraying the fruit and sometimes we're spraying the leaves. And it's important to know which applications, divide those two so that you can hit your desired target area. Everything we do in spraying is about making sure we get the product in the target area. So the number one rule for me is to ensure good coverage, the gallonage needs to be completely based on ensuring good coverage. And if you were to ask yourself, do these trees know what spacing they're on? Well, no, they don't. So if you know that you're getting good coverage, then you create that situation first. However the gallons per acre works out, that's just what it is. And sometimes it's 50 gallons an acre and sometimes it's 200. So it just depends. Because of that concept, almost all of my spray mixes are based on a parts per million rate or just a concentration. Because once you have your per acre label rates that you're supposed to be at, those are based off of the concentration. So if you just say, well, I'm going to keep that same concentration, guarantee good coverage, and the gallonage is the gallonage rate controlled. Tower sprayers are the absolute single best way to do this. You can get things to the target area effectively. And with the rate controller, you know that your gallonage is going to be correct. And you can always calculate that and it's easy to change. So that's, that's something that a lot of people wouldn't say, well, I don't want to invest in that. Okay. But when you're spraying from the bottom up and you have to get through that entire canopy to get to the top of the tree, the fact is you're not going to get good coverage in all areas. With the tower sprayer you can. So one of these can, I think, replace two regular airblast sprayers. So that's another person. That's more fuel, that's more tractor, it's everything. So even though it's an investment, again, the side effect is Cost savings. And these are all things directly related to fruit quality. If we're applying the things that we want into the target area, then we're increasing quality. I was going to talk a fair amount about biological amendments, but after listening to people who are much smarter than I am on this issue, I thought I would take some away. So the basic concepts for me this is completely over simplistic is I think of it like supercharging the plant's natural ability. There's NFL players on the sideline with oxygen masks on. That's what we're doing. We're just making what's there better. And that's a. Giving the tree the ability to do what it wants to do naturally is huge. And we can do that with biological amendments or we can at least aid that whole process. One of the things I wanted to touch on too is I think it's really important that when you put these populations out there that you feed it with something. If you give them a food source, let's say you put these amendments down and they don't quite have exactly what they need. It might be a soil type or the scenario that you're in, it's too hot, too cold, it didn't get watered in, who knows. But if you can help that process by giving them a food source when you apply it, I think that can really help in making sure those populations thrive. And that's really the key to getting, getting good aeration in the soil. We saw some other pictures of dirty tree rows or what we would call dirty tree rows. And I really like the comment what's a weed? If it's doing what you want it to do, it's not a weed. And so having life in there, even if it's something that you'd rather not have, can really help the whole process. So we can create healthier soil by doing some things like this. And we're not here to have a pretty tree row. We're here to get good fruit. That's what makes money. It's got to be quality fruit, it's got to be storable fruit. So biologicals play a huge role in that. Thinning. Thinning is a very long process sometimes because it's stressful. There's no such thing as a one and done for pruning. I wish there was, but yeah, every year's different. The weather's different, the crop loads different varieties are different. You have annual versus biennial bearing varieties that can make things pretty difficult in terms of what to do. There's a. There's a lot of panic moments during chemical thinning. Maybe not so much hand thing, but chemical thinning anyway. So effective thinning gets us to our desired crop load quickly. And we already did the first step of that with pruning. And that's very important because that's the first and biggest step. Um, getting to our desired crop load earlier gets us a much better scenario for cell division. So we're going to have, we're going to have more nutrient dense fruit because there's not all these other competing fruitlets trying to take some of the potential away. And by doing that early, we can get a higher crop load overall because the tree isn't quite so stressed. Trying to grow five apples that are little on every spur and instead only one. So that's a big advantage. If we have that nutrient density, we're going to see a huge correlation in fruit quality. Even in term, like economically, just in fruit storability and the firmness, the color will be better because we'll have better anthocyanin production. So that whole thing all comes together the faster we can get down to our final desired crop load. The effectiveness of these sprays is difficult because it's almost entirely dependent on weather. So the timing needs to be as good as it possibly can be. If it's very cold weather, we can't be using these things. Pretty much everybody in the apple industry is using the same products. We start with lime sulfur, and for me, I would say 50 to 70% full bloom is when we're starting that and that first one. Actually, both lime sulfur sprays that I do, they're more about stressing the tree. I don't really believe there's a. There's an effective and usable way to apply this and have it burn the flower to the point where it falls off instead. What I've seen in the past is that you can stress the tree enough with it so that it will. The tree will choose to abort those unneeded fruit by itself. So I think we're using lime sulfur sprays as a setup process to get into the next one, which is carbaryl or seven NAA and nad. Those are, those are the common ones that, that people use. So we've got seven NAA is what people call. Commonly refer to it as. And sometimes depending on the variety, you'd have ethephone in there too. So you'd have naphthenic acid. That's naa and naphthalene acetamide. Nad. NAD is just a slower acting thing or A slower acting product that you might use on something like Honeycrisp or Fuji, depending on how you've done things in the past. I think it's really, really important. With thinning. I'm not going to talk about rates and the reason I'm not going to talk about rates is because it doesn't matter. Whatever I do is entirely different from what my neighbor does. And the guy two miles down the road is entirely different again. So the way they do it, the way I do it, the way you do it, everybody's different. So it's really important to what I would call write your book. You've got to come up with your plan, follow your plan. Well, to develop that, you're going to need some history. And so your site history is going to be important. Your varieties, your plant spacing, trellis or non trellised rootstocks, all sorts of things. And the weather in your area. There's a ton of different aspects that affect this whole thing. And so having good records is going to be a key factor in being able to replicate what you've done on a successful year. One of the things in general with that last spray, I would call it like the knockout punch, the 7 NAA one. You've got to be over 70 degrees the day you spray and for at least two days after. If you're not there, it's just not going to work very good. And I think too many people get caught up in the idea that this spray needs to be applied at 5 millimeter size fruit or you have to do it before 13 millimeter or it won't work. Well, if I had to spray at 16 millimeter knowing that it was going to be warm rather than 12 millimeter at 65 degrees, I would choose to spray at 16 millimeters and warmer. It'll do a lot better job. So the weather being warm enough is absolutely crucial for hand thinning. It's really important if you're using a product like nad, actually NAA too. NAA works more quickly. So you've probably got a week if it's warm, to three weeks if it's cool. But before you really know the effects of what happened, something like nad, if it's really warm, you might start seeing effects in two weeks, but it's not going to be over with until sometimes four to five weeks after. So if that's the case, you really got to be careful not to get in there and hand thin too early. I've been there myself where I went in and started doing things and realized After I got in there and certain rows, certain areas of blocks were already completed. Oh no, these things are falling off and now they're singles. Well, now you've got nothing left. So I, I've seen 35 millimeter fruit drop and it wasn't because of crazy heat in June. It's what, it wasn't a June drop scenario, but that's what it would appear to be. It's just that nad takes so long to work. You've got to make sure you know what the chemical did before you get in there to hand thin. When you're hand thinning, we talked about counting four for pruning. We're trying to make sure that we get to our desired crop load. We should count for thinning too, because if we don't count for thinning, how do we really know when the fruit's very small? Not as small as in this picture, but when the fruit's very small, you will tend to think there's not enough. And so it's difficult to count. Sometimes you have to kind of put your hands all over the whole branch and see what's there and squeeze lightly and figure it out. That takes time, but you can again remove emotion from decision making by having calculated decision making. So when you go out there and you feel this, you know what's actually there. That'll enable you to know where your counts are for sure and make that decision more confidently with whether you need to leave more or take off more. So that's a very important thing. If we counted at the beginning, we should count now. This is kind of our last chance to get anything done. Once that fruit hits three weeks post petal fall, when it, when it gets to that 8 to 10 millimeter size, you kind of don't really have anything else you can do to affect the final size. So, so you need to get in there early. A lot of times people will say, well, we don't want to get in there yet because we can't really see the fruit very well. Well, yes, that's true, but you're depriving the, the, the potential outcome of what the fruit size could be or, and, or the nutrient density. So both of those things are very important. That's why it's important to thin early with loppers thinnerly with chemical thinners and do it effectively. Don't go super light on the rates. That being said, I don't think any drastic changes should be made in chemical thinning processes on a year to year basis. There's too much at stake. And there's too many things that could go wrong. So again, write your book. Do slow changes, methodical changes, track the changes and then, then you'll be able to more confidently decide what needs to happen. PGRs, plant growth regulators. I suppose I should just say it like that summer pruning I'm going to include in here because I suppose while it's not actually a growth regulator, we could consider it some, you know, mechanical type of growth regulation. So the two products I use generally for, for this are Apogee and Kudos. There may be other ones out there. Apogee and Kudos are the same thing, by the way. The whole, the whole idea with it is that we're, we're inhibiting the biosynthesis of gibberlins. So we're inhibiting the production of gibberellins. And gibberlins are what causes terminal growth to happen. So you can see in this picture on the right, that's what we would call terminal growth. It'd be a new shoot growth. That's not something we want, we want to eliminate that. Unless you're trying to grow a tree and get the canopy full. We're assuming in this case you're using a PGR to, because you've already filled your space and now you're trying to keep it open so that light can get in and have good fruit quality, good coloring scenarios, things like that. So my first application happens at pink, but the reason I do it at pink is because I think it's more effective to start, stop the growth before it starts. So I think it's really important to do that. Successive applications, you could go every seven days. That's, that's what I would do. The top down application method is also crucial. You can see in the tower sprayer that I have here, it's going from the top down. It takes a lot of time to change your sprayer configuration for individual sprays. But when you do and you make sure that the target area is covered again, ensure good coverage in the target area. When you can do that, you're going to have way better effectiveness of the chemicals in this scenario. Specifically, terminal growth is going to tend to go up. So it seems to make sense to spray from the top down. And again, if you don't have a tower sprayer, I am not even entirely sure that you'd be getting any effectiveness out of something like Apogee because it's just not hitting enough of that terminal tip to really help for summer pruning. Summer pruning promotes light distribution and bud development. We know that the timing, I think, is something that's pretty misunderstood. I think that summer pruning needs to be completely finished before the second week of June. And the reason I think this is because the tree is actively in the process of deciding what next year's crop is going to be in early June, you know, shortly after cell division is over, with the trees kind of working out, what, what do we have for next year? And you can influence that, prop that process up until that time, that second week of June. Once that time passes, the trees already made the decision, and now you'll have no influence over where next year's crop is. So in some scenarios, you might want some new fruit to be on terminal growth or at the bottom end of terminal growth. And you can create that in certain scenarios by cutting some of that off and making sure that the hormone flow that needs to go into those developing buds gets there, there. The, the four or five leaves that are surrounding a potential fruit bud are absolutely crucial to feed that bud. So we want to make sure those get as much light as they can. So, so summer pruning not only helps light distribution so that we can get better color, but I would say the much higher priority should instead be making sure that we take care of next year's crop. And again, the side effect will be color. For this year, a lot of people will summer prune four to six weeks before harvest. And it's not that there's a problem with that. You can do that if your sole objective is color. But I think it's much more effective if you can, to get it done much earlier. And in that way, you'll be able to get more bud development in the places that you want. And if you're going to have to cut it off anyway, you might as well do it early. This might seem counterintuitive in a way because it's like, wait, if I'm using something like apogee, why do I need a summer prune? You're not going to hit every growing tip. And even if you do, it's not going to shut every one of them down. So you're still going to have terminal growth. You're still going to need to summer prune to get the crop load where you want it for the next season. I think it's also really important to think about the idea that we have a very small amount of time in a season to affect these things. And everything is so time sensitive. We need to make sure that our timing, whether it be for pruning or thinning or chemical thinning, growth regulators, whatever it is, we need to make sure that our timing is as correct as it can be because it's a very short period of time and the better we can make those decisions on time. Again, that's going to increase our fruit quality and that's the end goal here. Analysis is another section that somebody else will cover in much, much better detail than I will. So I'll just touch on a few things here. The basic idea, in case anyone doesn't know, is two tests. We're comparing young leaves to old leaves, and in that way we can, we can see a metric, maybe you would say, of accessible for use. There's lots of other tests out there that you could take, you know, petioles, dry leaf analysis, whatever it is, and the results that we'd see in those can give us a number, but that doesn't mean that number says it's accessible for use. So that's where SAP really goes a lot farther and a lot deeper and gives us much more useful information on what we need to be doing. So the products that we have that we use on a regular basis, most of them are really expensive. And so being able to get these SAP tests and see what's actually available, we're going to be able to fine tune what we're doing a lot better to make sure we're putting on the things that we should be putting on and only in the amounts that are necessary. Again, the side effect is cost savings. So SAP tests aren't cheap, but they're so much more effective than other types of testing because we can, we can see things long before other tests would show it. And that's, that's a really big deal. If we wait until we see a problem. Visually, we've waited way too long. Other types of tests may, may have given us some insight into what could go wrong a week or two before we see it. SAP is going to give it to us earlier than that, so it can really help us not have visual problems. And then your perspective on what a healthy tree looks like really changes because you can see the effects of what those SAP tests are doing for you. Even if it takes a longer amount of time to get the test results. Some, some types of tests, you can get results back the next day. You're certainly not going to get these the next day. But the information that you get is so much earlier. You have so much more time to react to the results that you get. It's much more effective. And terms of testing Again, we're dealing with one crop, one season, it's very time sensitive. Again, with something like this, we can gain a bunch of time back by knowing that we have the right results at the right time and we can correct deficiencies if and when they happen. However long it takes to create a mistake, especially during the season, it, it's going to take at least as much time as it took to occur to correct. So if you're two or three weeks behind on, on what nutrients are actually available, it's going to take two or three more weeks to correct that. So that's a six week screw up. And six weeks is a long time for a short season. Moving to the next thing. Fruit nutrient testing. I'm a huge fan of SAP analysis, huge fan of SAP analysis. It gives us an awesome amount of insight into the health of the tree. But we need to make sure we align that goal with what needs to be in the fruit. Because SAP doesn't paint a full picture of how good our efforts have been in terms of the fruit. We need to know what's inside there. So the goal here is to produce high quality fruit. Yes, we want a healthy tree and that's great. And a healthy tree plays a huge role in its ability to produce good fruit. But again, the fruit is priority number one. So if, if we're testing for SAP, we should also be testing the nutrient values in the fruit. That just seems to make sense. It's really possible to have a healthy tree and you could have everything on SAP look great and you could also have low quality, low, low sorbility fruit. So by doing both of these types of testing, you'll be able to more effectively see what you need to do. Sometimes it's a comparison of the two where you say, well, I know that my nitrogen in my SAP says it's low, but in the fruit analysis it says it's high. Well, if you keep adding nitrogen foliarly, you may antagonize your own idea of health by making the fruit poorer quality. So by having both these things together, we can get a better idea of what's going on. I would say to start at golf ball size, so we're like a month past pedal fall, 30 millimeter an inch, you know, however you want to look at it. And if you're going to be pulling SAP analysis, let's say every week, every two weeks, every three weeks, you should be doing fruit analysis testing on that same schedule. It's important to make sure you can digest the information you're getting. So you could take a test for SAP or fruit analysis every day, but that's such an abundance of information, you may not be able to process it. So it's really important to make sure that you. You don't overwhelm yourself with information. Because if you can't crunch the numbers and if you can't really look at the data and figure out what's happening, you're not really doing yourself any favors. You can have all the information in the world, but if you don't know how to digest it, it's useless. Analyzing these results is difficult. With something like SAP. AEA is obviously fully capable of interpreting the results and giving you ideas of where you could be going forward with that fruit analysis. Depends on which warehouse you bring your fruit to. Some consultants know about that and they know it pretty well and some don't. There's lots of labs that do these things. Most labs will have their own recommendations for how things should go. So again, ask questions. You know, ask whichever consultant it is about the nutrient analysis, where the labs are, if they're familiar with any of them. Sometimes it's a. Sometimes it's a warehouse, sometimes it's a chemical company. Depends on who's doing it. But if you ask the questions, you can find these things out. Once you do get the results, it's important to study the numbers. You should know where you're at and where you should be. So if you just allow somebody else to interpret everything for you all the time, you're probably not going to really get a good grasp on it yourself. So it's a good idea to know the numbers, ask questions, figure out where you need to be, know where you need to be, then you have some goals for that later on. That's going to give you a lot of insight to how, how much, how much of anything you need to be doing so that again, the information earlier is better. Harvest testing, starch and pressure. We've got. Most people probably do this. Lots of times warehouses do it for you, but no one knows your farm like you do. So I think it's really important that everybody needs to be doing their own starch and pressure tests. You'll be able to get a representative sample better than anybody else, so you might as well be the one to do it. And consultants are there to help us make decisions. They're not there to make decisions for us. They're not babysitters, and we shouldn't ask them to be. We should be learning these things ourselves and doing these things ourselves. There's starch Charts, you can get them all over the Internet that tell you which levels, what varieties are at. You gotta have those. It doesn't matter what scale you use. It's just so that you know where you're at. A lot of times in a test too, you may take a test and see a single or two outliers in the whole test, and that could freak you out, but it'd be. It's really important not to make a decision based on those outliers. You might make a poor decision because you're trying to save 5% of the fruit and then in the process end up negatively affecting the other 95%. So we don't want to be tripping over dollars to save dimes. That's not. Again, we don't want to let emotion dictate our decision making for something like this. That's just depriving ourselves of potential. Harvest management. It's really important when we're dealing with people to trust competent people. We got to know how to delegate properly. If people know how to do something, let them do it. We don't need to be looking over people's shoulders all the time. Delegating is huge in terms of harvest management. It's a stressful time, so we need to make sure we do this properly. Feel versus real. Again, removing emotion from decision making. You're already doing sampling, you're doing testing, you're doing all these applications for different things. Those things are all directly related to the quality of the fruit and your success. So harvest is stressful, but we've got to see it through now. And that way, complacency is a killer. If you allow yourself to ratchet back or you feel like you're getting burned out, you got to push through because that's the end. That's the end. It's like the fourth quarter. We're almost in overtime now. So you got to see it through all the way to the end. And how much time you have for harvest is critical. Doing a lot of these tests yourself will give you a lot more insight into how much time overall that you have. If it's shorter than you think it should be, your crew size should be sized to deal with that. And if you say, well, I can't get people, then there's a very simple idea. You pay more. I know it's hard, but if we don't pay more, and I've been in that scenario too, almost panicked. If you don't pay more now, you're looking at not being able to get your crop off. On time. That's going to cost a whole lot more than just paying a few extra bucks to get things picked on time. Employees. I suppose we could say that this is a, this is an idea where we, we can and we should let emotion dictate our decision making. Everybody's experienced negative people and that's not a fun scenario to be in. It takes an unproductive amount of energy to be negative and it takes very little energy to be positive. So we want to work towards a positive work environment for everybody. And we can't be in this mindset that it should be a certain way because that's how it always has been, that no, we got to allow ourselves to be malleable, to learn new things. And being positive around people will feed into their positivity. So it's again the synergistic effect. If more people are positive, it's just going to make other people positive around them. We need to make sure that workers performance feels valued, that what they're doing, if they're doing a good job, that's important. We need to make sure that we feed that, say thank you, understand that mistakes are going to happen and, and that it's okay, things are going to break. It's no problem. If we're going to make corrections, we want to be fast about it. We don't want to drag it out looking over people's shoulders. We don't want to be dictators, we want to be directors. We want to be the leaders. That's how we should be. We don't want to overwork people because quality of their performance is going to go down. That will again directly affect their performance and we don't want that either. So take time off when you can. Whatever your people enjoy, try to feed into that. If they want to have barbecues, buy them food for barbecues and hang out. If you pay for it especially you can, you can be on a more peer to peer level during that time and that's really gonna, that's gonna increase their feeling of the value that you hold of them. So be social as ask questions. Employees again are a very effective way to increase fruit quality. The happier they are about their job, the better they're going to do. So that's going to, if they do a better job, it's going to be better quality fruit, less bruises, they're going to be working more smoothly, they're not going to break as many spurs. So we need to really understand the value of our employees in this. So I think we need to understand too that humans are very social by nature and as bosses, sometimes it's easy to forget that. So being able to have that connection with your people is going to be a very effective way to help yourself out too and lighten the mood. And I've said this before, but yeah, the number one goal out here is be happy. Try to make money while you're at it. But we got to be happy, so that's what we should strive for. That's all I've got for you guys today, and I hope you've been able to learn something from what I had to say.

Thanks so much, Steven. That was great. I love that list of not just farming lessons, but life lessons. We think we can apply those everywhere probably. We have a very long list of questions for you. I don't think we'll get to all of them now, but we might get them later on in the Q and A. So I'm going to jump right into them. So the first is what kind of substances or products do you spray?

Boy, there's a long list. So it depends on if we're talking about chemicals or nutrients or all sorts of stuff. So I'm a conventional farmer, but I'm a huge fan of the idea that we should use whatever's best for the crop. And if that happens to be organic, then we're using it. There's some scenarios that we can't get out of and we'll use conventional products for those. So it's, it's all over the board. I use herbicides, I use insecticides, I use all types of fertilizers, organic and conventional. Whatever I feel like is best for the crop. And basically anything, anything that you've heard of, I very likely have tried. Good.

You gotta try a lot of things.

Yeah.

And I'm sure folks can follow up with you directly if they want. That, that very, very long list you have.

Yeah, right.

Are you finding you've been needing less applied inputs over time?

Yes, and I think most of that is. There's two things actually. Number one is going to be the biologicals because we're, we're giving the plant, you know, we're supercharging the plant's natural abilities and so it just needs less, it's breathing better, so it's, it's able to do what it needs better and it's grabbing everything, most of what it needs from the soil anyway. So on top of that, the tower sprayers issue, you're using less product in general because you can get quality coverage with less gallons per Acre.

Great. And at what point do you start foliar nutrition?

Before bud break. So it would be bark sprays actually at that point and all the way through. All the way through the end. I'm doing foliars at least, I would say minimum three days a week, at least until the end of June.

Okay, are you doing. I'm just going to power through these. By the way. Are you doing root. Root dips for new plantings?

Yes, absolutely. And AEA has great mixes for those and tiny old products are in there. And both of those, I think are absolutely crucial to giving the plant a good head start. So yes, root dips all the way.

Super. And I think I should have asked this one right before that. But how important are post harvest foliar sprays to you?

Before a few years ago, I would have said I don't know. But there is a huge amount to do with what you can do after harvest. So the plant is sucking things in as it goes into dormancy. And we have a very good opportunity during that time to give it some things not just for, you know, the end of the season, but when it first comes out next year, we have a good opportunity to give it what it needs when it first comes out.

Great. Do you look at water quality in.

Your tank mixes in terms of pH? Yes. TDS, total dissolved solids, not so much. And if you are worried about something like that, a pound per hundred of ammonium sulfate can take care of a lot of things. Or like a chelated calcium can can work well too. Any sort of like water softener type agent can help with that.

All right, what should we be looking at in terms of water quality for foliar applications?

Ph is going. PH is probably going to be the most important thing with that. So when the label recommends a certain pH, we just want to make sure we are there. And you can buy PH monitors from Amazon. They're like 10 bucks. It's worth it to have one.

Good to know. Okay, and with what you know, has your approach to new blocks plantings changed a lot?

Yes, absolutely it has. There's been a pretty big shift in how we think labor availability is going to change. And so in terms of moving from a tall trellis orchard to pedestrian, in terms of everything's on the ground, no tractors, no ladders type thing, that's been a big shift. Tree density. I mean, geez, how long ago was it that we were planting 400 trees an acre? And now my latest block, there's over 4,000 trees an acre. So things have shifted A lot.

Jeez, thank you for that. How are you keeping the vegetation under the tree under control if you're letting it grow?

Good question. So if we're trying to restrict the use of certain herbicides so that we don't have an antagonistic effect with the soil microbe population, then we've got to be careful what we use. If things get out of hand again, you've got to find a way to prioritize the fruit. And so if in some scenarios the other things need to suffer a little bit, sometimes I would use like a lighter rate of Roundup just to kind of hold everything down a little bit. Maybe not to kill it, but to hold it down. I really don't like using Roundup in the orchard. There have been a few scenarios where I've had to burn down agents are much better things like Gramoxone. But we're also very likely going to lose Gramoxone for regulation soon. So the main thing I use now is ammonium glute. And the trade names for things like that would be Lifeline or Reckon. So you can look those up and find out what those are. And those do a really good job at just, just burning down the foliar aspect of things.

What you're doing a good job powering through these, by the way. See regenerative farmers. Oh, these are being typed while I did. What is the alternative to PGRs and are the other approach and what. Sorry, are there other approaches to this stage?

Yeah, I mean, you could go through with little hand pruners and just keep snipping them off and you got about three weeks before a terminal tip decides to take off again. So if you're in an organic scenario, you might have to go through and summer prune twice. But if you have the little tiny loppers for just your hands, like a little rose pruner or something, you can get through pretty quick. I wouldn't go so far as to say people should have two, one in each hand. That's not going to be good, but you can definitely get that done. Realistically, there's not going to be a way to affect that. And if you try to nutritionally, you're going to end up hurting so many other things in the tree that it won't be worth it. So realistically, it's just the pruners, that's all you've got. Okay.

And how do you get calcium into the crop?

That is a question for an entire day of discussion. It's difficult. So we don't want to use. We Want to use things that are quickly absorbable. And so soil is our first and best bet to do that. But it's not going to provide everything we need for the tree. So we got to do foliars and changing what you use. Different products. So I don't like calcium chloride really because it's just not that great of a product. There's a million different types of chelated calcium out there. Different chelated things. I don't like EDTA as the chelating agent. But aside from that, there's a whole bunch of different products you can use. There's probably 50 and each of them is going to do a little bit different thing. And they all have different concentrations. So don't get sold on the idea that the concentration is what makes it valuable. It's the uptake that's going to make it valuable. So rotating between those calciums is going to be the best way to get the most calcium into your fruit. You're also doing a few things with calcium. You're applying it to the leaf surface so that you can get good uptake there. And you also want to get it on the skin of the fruit because you're going to get some uptake there too.

Great. And I think we have time for one more question. What was your approach to reducing bitter pit and honeycrisp calcium?

You've got to get calcium in the fruit. That's huge. So when, if we have a really healthy tree, sometimes you'll notice that, that the fruit will become almost more barrel like rather than this dome, almost like a heart shape. And so basically the, the power source is coming from the stem. We can see that not as much energy is getting down to the calyx end of the fruit, the bottom end of the fruit. And so it's smaller. There's less cells down there and there's less nutrients down there. And that's why most bitter pit occurs on the calyx end of the fruit. So applying foliarly is huge. Doing the SAP analysis with foliage fruit analysis, doing lots of calcium sprays early. You got to do the calcium sprays early. If you're doing it after cell divisions over for your first application, you just killed your whole opportunity to get it in there. So you've got to be doing calcium as often as you can afford to on the front side.

Awesome. Well, thank you. I think you hold the record today of answering the most questions in the least amount of time. So good work. I think one just thank you for that presentation. That was fascinating. And then we will see you right back here in just a little bit for the entire group. Q and A with speakers, I believe.

Sounds great.