Regenerative Ag advocate & grower Tim Parton discusses the importance of balanced plant nutrition

Hi, friends, this is John and this is the Regenerative Agriculture podcast where we talk about the agronomic sciences and the cultural management practices that regenerate plant health, soil health and farms financial health, as well as ultimately public health. We can have conversations about growing really healthy food. My guest for this episode is Tim Parton, who is a farmer in the uk. Tim has been on a really interesting journey for some time adopting regenerative agriculture practices and principles. Tim, thank you for being here with us today. I'm really excited to learn more about your story and the journey that you've been on. Can you tell us a little bit about your farming context? What's the climate like? What crops are you growing, and what has your journey been like on your operation over the last decade or so?

Thanks, John. Well, it's a pleasure. It's always nice to spread the word. My journey probably started in 2009, but I'd always had an interest in soil really prior to that, and I could never understand how farmers could abuse the one attribute that they relied on the most. And yet it was always left to last in quite often the cases. So from 2009 I started to go down the strip till route and my soils jumped. Worm numbers came forward and things started to work. By 2015, I realized I was still moving too much soil. In my mind. I'd got very interested in biology by this time. I started playing around with using biology in 2012 and I'd have some fantastic results. So in 2015 I made the jump just to direct drilling. And the big thing for me there was being able to get biology down next to the seed. So I adapted the drill straight away to be able to do that. These days I farm pretty much without fungicides. I'm a total believer if we get the nutrition rights, the plant won't get ill. If that plant's balanced, the disease pests just won't look at it. If they do, I will still use biology to take control of disease coming into that plant. But the biology is really as a result that I've got it wrong. All the climate's been against me. I grow quite a variation of crops here, so I'm about 50, 50 winter, autumn sort of drilling and spring cropping. So on the spring cropping, I'm always getting cover crops in there with as much variation as I can because I'm a real big believer. The more variation I've got above ground, the more variation I've got below ground. We're going to be feeding different microbes and really getting that soil moving again. The rotation here, I'll be as varied as I possibly can. So I'll have winter wheat, which is 4 million for bread making. I'll have winter oilseed rape or canola, as you would probably know more as I'll grow spring barley for malting to make beer, are grow spring beans which are on a seed contract. I grow spring lupins again, which are on a seed contract. But I'm a big fan of the lupin. It just does so much for soil. I haven't found a crop quite like lupines, other than grass, that improves soil so much more. And I think a lot of farmers in the UK should be growing protein because it seems madness in poor protein halfway around the world when we could be growing a good lot of air and reducing that carbon footprint. I'll grow spring oats and as I say, I've also got grass in the rotation, which are you making for haylage for horses, because we're quite close to Wolverhampton, Birmingham, so there's a big horse population around here and that grass gets rotated around the farm. So it's a real good carbon sequencer and a real good way of improving that soil.

What does your climate look like and what parts of the US might that compare with in terms of temperature and rainfall?

I don't know what we'd compare with rainfall. I normally average 27 to 30 inches. The last couple of winters we've been a bit higher and summer temperatures would typically be around that 23. This year we hit 30, but it was some very hot days here. We sort of broke some of the records for those temperatures, but that would be sort of around the norm. We're quite wet because we're in the west of the country, so we're wetter than what the east of the UK would be this year. I've missed out on a lot of the rain. I was like a desert. There was rain all around me and it just didn't want to come anywhere near me. But that's a different story.

You mentioned that you are not using any herbicides anymore and you also hinted at not using any fungicides and insecticides. I'm really intrigued by what that transition looked like.

I'm still using some herbicides, John. I've reduced it. I don't use any pre emergent herbicides since moving to this system and I've improved my soils. I don't really get the grass weeds. I had a little bit of brome coming this spring because we were so dry and cold. Crops didn't get going, the soil was left open. So mother nature decided to put something there for me. But other than that, you know, instead of sort of like doing pre emergence and probably another autumn herbicide, I'm now down just a spring herbicide on wheat, which is a massive saving from where I used to be. I haven't used insecticides for six years now. And that to me was a real breakthrough. I mean, once you get your natural predators working and you get that plant balanced, there just isn't the need to use insecticides. I mean, my canola, to put it in your term of what you call it, I drilled it this year, probably two weeks ago, three weeks ago, the field was absolutely crawling with flea beetle. They were everywhere. They were in the barley as we combine the crop. The grain store was full of flea beetle. They were just everywhere. And the student helping me said, you can't possibly put oilseed rape into that condition. And I said, well, as long as the plant's balanced, they're not going to be able to feed on it because the sugars are just going to be too thick, they're just going to collapse and they just, they're just going to have indigestion, they're going to leave. And sure enough, yes, you can see where one or two have tasted it, but it's just not for them. And they've left. And I've got a good crop of canola coming forward. It's keeping that plant balanced and understanding why that pest is there. And in my experience, nine times out of 10, that pest is there because we've caused it to be there. We've created a problem that Mother Nature knows is a problem and so she's reacting to it to save that problem getting any worse. That's how I always look at things.

So this is fascinating. You're offering a really fascinating example of flea beetle presence in a field. I mean, it's this common perception that getting canola seedlings off to a healthy start without strong flea beetle pressure is unheard of. There's no way of managing that or controlling that without using neonicotinoids as seen treatments. What are the tools or the management practices that you have used to accomplish that outcome? What do you attribute your success to in producing flea beetle resistant seedlings?

Because I've got the liquid applicator on the drill, which I put on. A guy called Trevor Tapping engineering helped me build it, or he designed the bulk of it. We work together a lot. I'll give him problems and he gives me the solution.

And it works really well.

So once I got bit, was able to do that, John Then when I'm drilling, I'll put diatomaceous earth down there, which obviously gets converted into monosilic acid. So that's already making that cell wall stronger, so it's making it more difficult. I'll then put a balance of nutrition down which we normally sulfur, molybdenum and boron magnesium down there, just to help that plant and give it the ingredients it wants to start and process the sugars. And then I'll also use a lot of humic acid, because that plant sucks that humic acid in, it will just be able to convert those sugars into more complex sugars so that it's just not going to be a problem. Those flea beetles just aren't going to be able to cope with that plant growing. And this year has really proved it. Even though I thought, oh, I might be pushing it this year with the amount we got. But they just left wasn't suitable, it wasn't the right food and they've moved on.

Wow, that is incredible. So how close is your liquid application to the seed? And when you think about a seed being planted and germinating, it's often thought that the majority of the nutrition comes from the seed itself for the first week or two. So how quickly are these young seedlings tapping into the nutrients that you're applying?

I've always had the same philosophy that, you know, that seed has got everything it needs to start off, and I don't disagree with that. But as it's going to be moving forward, I want to make sure it's balanced from day one with having the applicator. I drop it right on top of the seed in the seed drench, so it's. It's coated around it. If I've brewed up biology and put down there as well, the biology has already made contact with that seed. And so it's all starting to work from day one in my mind. And as this year, it's just proved my theory right and the results are fantastic. In my mind, that's with that. I've always had great successes. I've never stopped growing canola. A lot of farmers over here have stopped growing canola because flea beetle was so bad, I'd never stopped. And I've had various comments that, oh, it's because you're further west, you haven't got as big a flea beetle or they haven't found or you've been lucky. But this year there was no doubt. I was swamped out with flea beetle. They were everywhere. And I haven't lost a plant to flea beetle at all.

That's pretty incredible. What about insect control and other crops? If you haven't used insecticides in six years, what have been your major pests that you have overcome on some of your other crops?

The other big one really is bydv. And again, I don't put the same nutrition down there. I do put humic acid down. I put a little bit of nutrition down with spring cropping because it's moving so forward and I think it's important to have that nutrition there. Winter cropping, I don't tend to bother. I put humic acid down and I will brew up a little biology. So I normally brew up some phosphorus releasing bacteria, sometimes some nitrogen fixing bacteria and some trichoderma. Just so as I'm putting a balance down there. I'm probably at the stage now where I don't need to do that because the soils have moved on that far and they're functioning, they're very healthy. I do extract compost as well. I'm playing around with that one because the more variation I think we can get back into that soil because we've been killing everything for the last 70 years. And I think it's important just to be able to introduce the microbes back because we don't know what we've killed and we still don't know what there is there. So compost, to me, a good healthy compost has probably got more answers than just brewing up laboratory rude microbes, if that makes sense.

For those of our listeners who are not familiar with the acronym of bydv. Can you tell us what that is?

Yeah, it's barley yellow dwarf virus and aphids carry it round with them. So not all aphids, but some aphids do. So as they start to feed on the plant, they infect the plant with the virus and then the plant becomes very stunted and especially in the spring, it'll look like a big elephant has just walked across the field and there's just big holes everywhere of crop if you've got it. There's always a worry when you first leave the insecticide out. Because I've been brought up that, oh, while you're going through, chuck the insecticide in, you don't want to get by dv. They're always working on that fear factor. So when you step out from that sort of set of being safe in the flock and doing the same as everybody else, it's always A little bit nerve wracking. So I do walk my crops probably more than ever because I'm always looking. I'm more relaxed these days because I know I haven't got a problem. I just recently combined my lupins and I was just cleaning the combine off as I came out the field and I look back and the field was just a mass of cobwebs. But those spiders are there, they're working for me 247 and because I haven't been killing everything off, they're just getting stronger and stronger. So in the autumn, you walk out in the morning when you walk through a crop, you'll come out the field and your shoes are just white with cobwebs because they're there. My defense system, my guards are on duty and they're far better than any insecticide in my mind.

Yeah, when you see those fields covered with cobwebs in the fall, it really raises the question of what is the biomass, what is the volume of insects required to sustain that population? Because it's a pretty extraordinary population. I've seen it. So those are pretty awesome photos.

Exactly. And that's why, you know, I like to see one or two aphids about because everything's got to eat. It's just being in balance with nature. We haven't got to create this imbalance. Everything was functioning perfect until we started to balls it all up, for want of a better word, as human beings. It's 4 million years, you know, 300 million years. This has all been evolving and then along comes a human being and saying, it's all right, we'll take it from now, we know what we're doing and we didn't have a clue. And it's only now where we're starting to repair, some of us are starting to repair that damage that has been done for so long. And we, we've done so much damage in such a small time in my mind.

Your comment reminds me of an experience that we had on a high tunnel tomato operation in eastern Pennsylvania where when we first got there, this farmer had been doing a lot of work with biological management and introducing beneficials. His tomato leaves were covered with beneficials, as in, we counted on some leaves as much as 50 to 70 beneficial insects per leaf. It was quite remarkable. And after working with him for a year or two on nutrition management, I think it was the second year that we were working with him on managing his nutrition, all of a sudden the beneficial population dropped dramatically. It didn't disappear entirely, but it dropped dramatically because there Were no longer aphids and spider mites present. There was no longer enough of a food source there to sustain the really large population that had been there historically. So it was really intriguing to observe how those population dynamics shifted and changed with quantity of the beneficial and the predators present based on the presence or absence of their food source.

Totally agree. I think that's what's happened here. You know, I still get slugs, for instance, but because the plant is more balanced now, there isn't the polyamides there, so the slugs aren't coming in. It's. Yes, I see the odd one, but I like the odd one about. Because those carobid beetles have got to have something to feed on. It's. You've just got to sustain everything, but it's keeping everything balanced. Balance is key to my operation, as I do here. I totally agree. Once you've got that plant balanced, there isn't the need for all those insects to be coming in to take advantage of that weak plant, as I call it, because that plant isn't healthy. So nature's trying to get rid of that plant because it knows it's not healthy and we're trying to keep it alive, so we're killing everything. So we're all the while trying to stop that process happening when really it's us that's caused the whole problem in the first place.

You mentioned you're doing cover crops. I guess my question is what, in addition to the overall management practices, what do you credit your success to? Managing the aphids in the barley?

In the barley again, it's putting a little bit of nutrition down so it's balanced. The other big thing that I've done is I'm constantly bringing nitrogen down. And I think once you start to bring that nitrogen down, you haven't got those weak cells, so you're not attracting everything. Anyway, so this year I've grown spring barley and I was down to 36 kilos of N and that was near enough apart from 20 kilos, all foliar applied, because I love foliar applied end because it's far more efficient. The plant, it's 90% available to the plant and the plant is using that up. It's different to soil applied where I'm probably only using 40 or 50%, which is all getting leached out, going down the drains, getting into our oceans and creating all these dead zones. And the argument people always give me, well, we've got to feed a growing population, well, we can feed a growing population and still regenerate our soils. I've proved that and other farmers have proved that. But we can't keep killing the planet. 70 to 90% of our oxygen is coming from marine photosynthesis. What are we going to do? Wait for everybody just to starve there and then do something? We've got to act now. We've had enough of killing the planet. There is no Planet B. And every inhabitant of this planet has got to stand up and be counted and demand food produced in a regenerative system. Because it's those buyers, those consumers, that have got the most power. And if they start to demand it, supermarkets will react, governments will react, and that's how we're going to make the real massive changes needed in my mind to the agricultural system of the world. Because that's what we're working on. And it's farmers that can do the greatest good to repair this world and to repair the damage that's being done. You know, and we all should be standing up and cheering and shouting about what we can achieve.

Yeah. There is so much opportunity for improving the outcomes and reducing the negatives of our mainstream farming practices. And the point that you make is, one that I very much agree with, is that we don't need a lot of new knowledge or new information or new technology. There's always room for improvement, of course, but we already know enough. We already have enough farmers amongst us who have implemented these systems on scale successfully that we can learn from. We already have enough knowledge that we can go out and implement it on scale. And of course, accomplishing that requires mind shift and stepping out and being willing to be a bit different at this stage of the game. Although hopefully that changes in the future. You mentioned your nitrogen applications and your foliar applications. That brings a couple of questions to mind. Can you tell us a little bit about your foliar application system? How frequently are you putting on foliar applications on your various crops? What types of nutrients and how are you managing all of that? What does that look like?

I'm sort of starting off with a little bit of a soil application. So I use a little bit of ammonium nitrate just because I'm all the while, really, John, trying to get the soil to produce its own end. That's my end goal is the area, 78% end. There's enough up there for what we need to use. It's just getting that nitrogen fixing bacteria to actually work. And that's what I'm always striving to get. But I have to stay profitable as a business to get there. So it's slowly, slowly in little steps. So I'll start off with the soil applied, and then as the temperatures start to warm and that crop is actively growing, I will start and come in with a foliar. And it will all depend really on temperature of how much n I apply. In the first application, it might only be a little bit because it's cold. The plant isn't really. The stomates aren't really open, so they're not really sucking all that foliar nitrogen in there. So it could only be a little bit, just for those couple of hours warm, where I have got some growth and it will take it in. You know, we're moving forward after that. Once we do get on a good cycle, it'll be every two weeks I'll do a foliar feed and I'll balance that out with some potassium and magnesium along the way and all the other nutrients that I'm short of, some sulfur. So the plant is always balanced. So I'm never creating an imbalance to bring disease in. So as I've got a problem, it's always balanced. And then I'll be doing SAP tests along the way every 10 to 14 days, probably more. 10 to make sure that plant is balanced. So if I need to correct an imbalance, I can. As you always say, it's test, test, test. We've got to be testing to see what's going on in that plant. Because the one thing I've found with biology, it's a fickle thing. If it's too dry, too cold, it will start to stop working. And the main thing, as farmers, we have got to stop in business. We can't do any environmental work if we're not making money. We've got to be able to generate that income to be able to do the real good work that we need to do to keep moving forward. So I'll always be testing and say if it is a dry time, we've had two dry springs here where I've had to step in and do a bit more folio feed than what I normally would, because biology hasn't been working and the plants have started to suffer. So it's just monitoring and reacting to what's going on. And that's where it needs to be tested on a regular basis because everything's changing all the while. You know, you could do a test today and then all of a sudden it warms up. In two days it's a different test result. That's where we need to Be there on the ball, testing and just seeing what's going on. It's just I always class it as, you know, it's like a world class athlete and we're just trying to make it the nutrition perfect to get the best out of that athlete. And that's, that's how I see my plants.

You mentioned the critical importance of needing to be profitable, needing to be economically viable in order to be able to do environmental work. And I find that interesting in the context of our conversation of foliar applications. It's very common to look at foliar applications from the perspective of what is this going to cost rather than what are the potential rewards. So what are the economic impacts of foliar applications for you and what is your frequency of application? Are you putting on applications once or twice a season, Half a dozen times a season? What does that look like?

Well, there's a few questions there, John, but on the financial one, compared to where I used to be, where I'd probably be 240 kilos to 270 kilos of n, I'm now sort of standard practice would be 120 to 150 and obviously I'm bringing it low and I'm doing trials every year. So at the 240 it works out a lot cheaper to do it. Foliar applications, at the 120 work last year it worked out a little bit cheaper. It might have been 10 pound a hectare cheaper to do foliar. It was certainly still cheaper than and not, you know, it wasn't more expensive. But the results are far better in my mind because obviously we're not polluting, we're not throwing on all this nitrogen needlessly, which is burning the carbon out of our soil. So it's definitely the right way to be going in my mind. I use a company, Flex fertilizer, which is, it's avertilized over here, but it's actually from Denmark where it was produced. And in Denmark there nitrogen restrictions are very high, so that's why they develop flex. So it's an amide and it's a little bit further down the line than urea. So that's what makes it so readily available. This year I've had very good results. The yields were pretty much on par with the rest of the farm, but I hadn't thrown all that nitrogen on there.

You talked about the reduced cost of being about £10 an acre less. Is that just for material costs? Because when you consider full year applications and more frequent trips across the field, you obviously have higher application costs as well.

The application cost, I suppose it isn't really. It would be compared to my old conventional system, but because I'm quite often going through the COP to keep it balanced now, because I'm not spending the money on fungicides, so I'm not doing that application of fungicides. I'm probably not doing any more applications with the sprayer. It might be one, if it was a real hard time or two, but I see that as cheap. The sprayer sat there, it's my own sprayer, the tractor sat there. So it's only really my time and a little bit of diesel to nip through. And if that's going to give me a healthy crop, then it's time well spent in my mind. So that one, I suppose if you was on a real big system and you know, it took you a week to get through the crop, might be something you had to look at. But I still think the financial thing, savings you're having from not using fungicides and not using all that nitrogen, you can almost buy two outfits and have two people going through the crop to speed the job up. The end game has still got to be to have that healthy plant and get the full potential from that plant. So it doesn't really concern me if I did an extra application to what I normally do. But it's not, I'm not going through that many more times. I normally, three or four times a season I go through. If it was a real rough season, it'd probably be six.

But, you know, there is this perception that adopting regenerative agriculture practices and managing nutrition more intensively is more expensive. And that has occasionally in some situations been true in the past, although it's certainly not universally true. But that has changed for us in our experience. In the last particular last year or so, as commodity fertilizer prices have increased, it is now less expensive, in many cases significantly less expensive to manage nutrition in this regenerative approach and only apply what the crop needs rather than all the extra NPK that many growers are familiar with applying.

I think I'd agree with that. You know, I haven't applied P and K fertilizers for 10 years now. So that's, that's a massive saving on this farm. You know, that'd be 25, 30,000 straight away. I'm not buying as much nitrogen. I'm not spending £100 a hectare on fungicides. You know, I'm not spending the money on herbicide. So the little bit I spend on nutrition is still far, far less than what I was spending on all these synthetic horrible products that are just killing everything. You know, we've got herbicides, we've got fungicides, we've got insecticides, and to me, all the free thing they've got in common is suicide to us as a society.

I like that. So I want to come back and talk about the fungicide applications and how you're managing diseases. But before we go there, let's talk a little bit more about your fertilizer applications. You mentioned that you haven't applied any P and K for a decade. How are you able to get away with that? Are you tapping into historical soil reserves of applied materials? Do you believe that's going to be sustainable for the future? What does that look like for you?

I totally believe it's going to be sustainable for the future. I mean, potassium, for example, as you well know, John, is just continually cycling. It's just continually cycling. And if anything, I've got, going back to the. The old sort of soil tests that we have to do for government purposes, you know, my indices are far higher now than what they ever were. If anything, potassium is more readily available, which it is, because it's just totally cycling. The whole process is cycling. The whole ecosystem has come alive. And the same with phosphorus. As a phosphorus, again, my indices are just high, which I don't take much regard to soil tests, if I'm totally honest. But the plant is just putting out those exudates and calling for phosphorus and it's only taking what it needs. In my mind, yes, I might put some potassium on as a foliar when we're in a real growing period because the plant isn't taking enough in and it's just growing so fast. And I'll. I'll address that imbalance if I have to. But phosphorus and potassium, they say phosphorus, it's just cycling the bacteria, releasing it just on enough. We've got so many rocks and everything still in the soil here that I can't see generations to come ever having a problem. It's just totally working in harmony, just as it was meant to. And if I went out there and threw some phosphorus, you're only too aware of the damage I do to all the fungi that I've got. I'd just wipe everything out. Nature never intended for us to have to keep throwing all these elements on. It was always supposed to be a naturally recycling system and it's us that have stepped in and caused the problem. And once we step in and stop that cycling process, then you've just created a drug addict that you've got to keep feeding it all the while because you've stopped nature doing her job.

Because we know better, we've got it.

Figured out and generations to come, they'll look back at what we did last century and they'll just put their hands over their head because it's just they'll never understand why we were so stupid. I don't think to have to have done system that was working perfectly well and here we come along and we just interrupt it all and it costs us a whole lot of money for a problem that never existed.

Oh, but we were able to increase yields.

Yeah. Hasn't that one been used a lot in the past? Throw more on.

You know, it's interesting that we, you and I say that as a joke and we laugh about it, but for many people and even many farmers today still don't recognize and don't realize that the idea that the marketing slogan of being able to increase yields is just a fallacy, that you can actually produce equivalent or higher yields using these regenerative practices than what the mainstream is today. And we know it because we've seen it, observed it and experienced it. But most people have not.

No. And I think that's why I try and shout and use social media such a lot just to show people what I am achieving. Because I always say, John, but if I can leave this planet and I've made the slightest bit of difference to that planet health and helping it recover, then it's my time, it's the best reward I could have. Financial gain isn't exactly the same as that knowing that you've made a difference to the planet. And that's where I always help farmers and that's where I will always shout about what I'm achieving. Because it's so important that people here, and as I said earlier, it's the consumer we really need to educate. Because once the consumer knows what we can achieve as regeneration farmers, they're going to demand that food. And that's got to be all of our goal really is to educate the consumer. Because once they know that food can be produced and we can be healing the planet at the same time and moving everything forward. I mean, the wildlife that's come back here, I have a bird ringing group come on the farm and we've got kestrels back on the farm and we've reared 14 chicks in the last three years, four years, we've got skylarks, which are red Data species and they're just abundant here. But the only reason they're abundant is because I've stopped using insecticides. There's food here for them. When we have the, the blue tits and the great tits in the spring and we go around the nesting boxes, there'll be eight to ten chicks in those boxes. And the only reason the clutches are so big is because there's so much food here.

Wow.

And it just attracts everything. Everything comes back. It's just the same as the soil. Once you start to get the food, food source there, the worms come back, everything starts working. Nature is so forgiving of the mistakes and the damage we've done. If we just let her heal, she'll heal, but we just got to work in harmony with her. If we work together with nature, it's just like trying to paddle a canoe up river. You can paddle and you can be as fit as a fiddle, but eventually that river is going to beat you. And that's the track I think we've been on for the last 50, 60 years is we're paddling up river and nature's always going to beat us. Far easier just to go with the.

Flow and a paddle down river instead of up river.

Yeah.

Wow. Thank you, Tim. It is a really enjoyable and really incredible to see how ecology can recover and not just. Not just the ecology that we study and pay a lot of attention to for crop production purposes like mycorrhizal fungi and earthworms and so forth, but also the macroecology, the bird populations and the honeybee populations and so forth in the, in the local areas. So that is really powerful.

But they all exist and feed off each other. But the whole system is working here now. It's, it's just a pleasure to walk around the farm and to see everything in abundance. I grow a lot of flower margins and the like around the farm, so there's always late pollinators. I've still got flowers going now, so the pollinators are always got some food source. And those pollinators are so important to us as farmers. We need to look after them. We say again, we've abuse them for so long thinking we didn't need to rely on them. Without pollinators, we're all doomed. Insects are so important to us.

So we mentioned the yield improvements that are possible with regenerative agriculture practices. What has your personal experience been in your history on your farm over your transition period? How have yields shifted?

I've never had a yield dip. When I first started out, it was always Said that, oh, in year three you'll have a massive yield dip. I never had that. Yields have always been sustainable. As long as I get the water, I can get some very good yields. This year, my X days wheat, which is just a variety of a group 2A biscuit wheat, I put 120 kilos of nitrogen on there. It didn't have any fungicides, no insecticides, no seed treatments and that was yielding 11 to 11 and a half tons to the, to the hectare. And that's a conservative figure. It's probably a little bit higher but I never like to do pub figures. As we talk over here, you know, I'm not one for boasting, I'm just say what can be achieved. And that to me just proves the point that if you keep everything in balance, the yields that can be achieved. And it's not all about nitrogen. Nitrogen is just a part of it and it's just utilizing it properly to get the best out of it rather than just throw more on, throw more on and just destroy everything that we're trying to achieve, really.

Circling the conversation back to nitrogen on wheat reminds me that I never got an answer to the question on foliar frequency. How many trips through the field did you used to make with a sprayer with insecticide fungicide applications? And how does that compare with what you're doing today with nutrition management on a fungicide?

I'd have done a T naught as we call it here, T1, T2, T3 and a T4. I now call them FS1 and FS Naughts. It's foliar spray because I'd like to get away from that chemical sort of mentality. So I'd still be going on a similar basis with a nutrition based or on a biology based. It wouldn't be much different. It will just be. John. If I've done a SAP test and I can see an imbalance then I'll slip one in between those two. But that's just money well spent in my mind because I want the best out of that plant. If I keep that plant healthy, it's not going to get diseased, it's not going to lose yield potential. So to me that little bit of expense of going through again is just well worth it. It's. Why would you not want to do that? What is not to like about gaining the full potential of that plant? It's. I can't see why anybody could argue with having to make another pass. It's just not worth, you know, the Time to spray so quick you can cover many, many hundreds, thousands of acres quickly. It's the benefit to say it's. I wouldn't even enter my mentality of having to do an extra spray because it's so worthwhile to see the difference in two or three days when you address that imbalance and how the plant just picks up again. And then I'll be getting fantastic brics readings and I know everything's right. Why would you not want to do that? That's just. Just being bothered to put the effort in, in my mind.

Tell us about your Brix readings and your evaluations. I know in previous conversations that you and I have had, you talked about the very high Brix readings that you're achieving, which is a struggle for many people to achieve, even some people who are using SAP analysis, that when they start out using SAP analysis and their soil biology hasn't fully recovered yet, achieving higher Brix readings is a struggle. So where are you?

As a general rule, if I've got the moisture, I mean, if it's low moisture, I can be up in the 20s, I could be 22, 23. But when I've had the moisture, because it always changes when I get rain. So I always expect to be somewhere around the 17, 18. That's my norm. And if we're in a drier period and it's warm, I will be up to 20 to 23 and I'll do a PH reading at the same time. So I'm always monitoring crops. It's. I think my management time is a lot higher than ever it was in the conventional system because my crops, my babies, all the while, because that's how I treat crops. They've got to have the attention. They're like my children running around and I've got to be out there and look after them and do the best as a parent to get that to full potential. It's just, just the way I look at it. So it's. They're my stock, for want of a better word in farmer terms. It's. I don't see looking after crops as any different to looking after stock. If you want the best out of them, you've got to be out there and paying them the attention. It' I'm a big believer, you know, of life is the more you can put into life, the more you get out. And it's the same philosophy to me.

I'm certain that those elevator bricks readings are, of course, they are an expression of the nutritional balance that is contributing to your disease resistance. And your insect resistance. So how have things changed? You used to put on multiple fungicide applications and you're not doing those anymore.

No.

What management, what management practices are you using to replace the fungicide applications?

I do rely on silica an awful lot. So we use potassium silicate and we use diatomaceous earth. So silica is a big one for me just to keep that cell wall strong. I work closely with a guy called Nick Woodjack. Nick is a very much a biological agronomist. So he comes in and helps me and we have some good discussions, but we're always trying to do it with nutrition and biology. Chemicals would be a really, really last resort for us. We would both feel we failed if we had to. I mean, obviously if, you know, if we thought there was no other way, I would. But I can't really see me ever being in that situation now because the nutrition, we've got it wrong if we, if we have to get to that sort of stage. The one thing I noticed when I first stopped using fungicides, if I chopped a field of straw, that straw would just break down so quickly, within a couple of weeks it's gone. Whereas when you've used a fungicide, it's still stiff, it's brittle because you've put a barrier there for fungi not to be able to do their job. So why would it go quickly? Because I put a barrier there to stop it. That was a real eye opener to me was the fact how straw breaks down and how quickly the biology utilized that decay matter than if it had a fungicide there. And it's the same when we've done trials with seed treatments because it's not too bad now. But a couple of years ago it was very difficult here to buy new seed that didn't have a seed treatment on. I'd ask for it not to be treated. Sure enough, it would roll up on farm and it had been seed treated. So I'd grow it in a separate part, the field and it would be drilled at the same seeds per square meter on the same day at the same depth with the same machine. The untreated seed would be up 10 days earlier than the treated seed because I've got that wow connection. And things were growing and it would be up here and the treaty would be just poking out the ground. And you've got to keep doing trials. Everybody should be doing trials on their own farm because every farm is different. And if we all shared the data, we can just move this thing so much quicker. Being the old cloak and dagger of oh I'm not telling you what I've done because it's worked and you just come on let's share it's bigger than all of us as farmers to take this forward you know we've got a planet at state here we've got to push it forward. It's what it's all about. There's enough money out there for all of us to make a good profit out of it we don't have to be cloak and dagger and not share information information is key King you know.

I've observed that it is those growers who share the information the most freely who also get shared the most information from other growers it creates this reciprocity effect where the more you share with others the more you learn that benefits you and your operation and it just it accelerates the overall system and those growers who attempt to hold things close to their vest because they believe they're the best they're doing a really great job they end up getting.