Episode 183: Overcoming the Ammonium Death Spiral with Jim Dunlop

Hi friends, welcome to the Regional Agriculture Podcast. This is John and today I'm here with one of my good friends who I haven't talked to in way too long. Jim Dunlop. Jim, thanks for being here. Thanks for joining me. You've been having a lot of fun that's growing season for those who aren't familiar with Jim's name. We've, he's been on our social media a little bit, but Jim is one of our team members here at AEA and he's done all kinds of interesting stuff. Actually, Jim, I was about to jump in to ask you the question of what you've been working on this year and the fun things you've been having, but I think your your experience and the work you've done in the field is an interesting part of your story. Tell us a little bit about your background and the full scope of all the fun things you stick your fingers into that got you here. Oh gosh, let's see. Well, I was in the Marine Corps and when I got out, I had the GI Bill and so I used the GI Bill to put myself through college and I was living in California at the time. And so I went to CSU Stanislaus and I was studying biology with a botany emphasis and a chemistry minor. And so while I was doing that, I started a little farm there. This was in the foothills of Yosemite. And yeah, I started to see a say, started growing vegetables, chickens, things like that. Didn't really know what I was doing. And that really blew up into a bigger business and I started working with Tom Willie and his farm down in Madera. And I didn't know that. I didn't know that. No, I'm going to go way back and also fill foster. Oh, they're really full foster. Oh, my. Yeah, way back in the day. Gosh, this would have been like in the late 90s, early 2000s. And yeah, so that's CSA really blew up when I was able to get access to vegetables from those guys. And I lived in the foothills and that soil wasn't very good. So it was really difficult to grow vegetables. And then I moved to the central coast and I started another operation there. And that was mostly chickens and pigs. So I raised thousands of chickens on pasture for me. And then a lot of thousands of layer heads, all in a movable pasture system. And I don't know. I had a couple like 20 sows and a couple bores. And we produced pigs and sold them as halves and holes and sold at the farmers markets. I was in all the South Bay farmers markets back then. And then let's see. We kind of had the economic downturn 2008, 2010 time period. And then I just traveled for a year in RV and visited farms all over the country with my family at the time. And that was a fun thing. I would just show up and go through this scrap yard and build a pig house or how all the vegetables. And it was really fun to do it when you didn't have to work. And then the rest of the time I was trail running or riding my mountain bike or something like that. And then we ended up in the Hood River area, which is where I am now. I live in Mosier in between the Dows and Hood River on the Columbia Gorge in Oregon, just right across the river from Washington. And I started working at a compost facility here. And that's where I met Kevin Tully. And Kevin went down to California and Mike O'Megg kind of robbed me away from the compost facility. I went to work for Mike. I had been spreading compost working for the compost facility on Mike's orchards. And that's how we met. And so I came to work for Mike O'Megg. This would have been like 2013, 2014. And that's how I met you and the team from AYA. Michael is using gas. You guys for consulting and for products. And I just saw so many amazing things working for Mike. And you know, Mike was my mentor and orcharding back then. And I learned a ton from him. You know, I work with tons of orchardists. And you know, Mike O'Megg is one of the best, if not the best. You know, there's something about that obsessive management. Obsessive management. Yeah. And Mike's all in this really pushed me. I mean, some of the things that I know now and the things that I'm into now, it's always because Mike's like, what's the next thing? What's the next thing? And then, yeah, so then what we had that bad year, we had that freeze in 2015. And the 2016 crop wasn't so great. And then 2017, all the trees really overproduced. And Mike was really saved, or his farmer saved because he had 10 real fruit because they had been working with AYA. And nobody else had 10 real fruit. 10 real was kind of like an average size fruit. But everybody else had 11 and 12 road fruit, which is way smaller and hard to hard to sell. So Mike was able to get into all these packing houses ahead of their growers because we had good fruit out there. And then, you know, there was so much trouble with the market and things. That's when Mike decided to join forces with orchard view. And so I had an opportunity to go work for orchard view. But I was a single parent and it was really tough for me to work in the orchards. And that's when I hooked up with AYA. And it was really, you know, I was never like a salesperson or anything like that or didn't consider myself that. But I had seen so many good things with, you know, AYA programs and products that it was really easy for me to join the team. And so the interesting thing was I worked for a year for AYA. And then Kevin, who I had met at the compost facility, he came back from California where he was managing a bunch of wood waste facilities down there. And then Kevin and I really built the business here. I was kind of more on the farming side and the ideas about farming in Kevin. Is it really systems minded person? And we worked together to kind of build our, build our business out here. And yeah. And then what is the scope of your work today? The scope of my work today? Yeah. Well, I'm a senior agronomist here at AYA and I work on a lot of apples and cherries and blueberries, conventional and organic. I work on a lot of onions and potatoes and now a lot of dairy pasture and beef cattle pasture. A bunch of other stuff. But those are the main things. Yeah. That's, that's the textbook answer. So I'm going to ask you a different question now. What do you have fun working on today? I really love learning and figuring things out and just trying to understand a lot of times like why the thing that I'm doing isn't working. And the thing that really struck me was last year I was working on corn and potatoes in Idaho and just, you know, they've got a lot of sodium and a lot of chloride, especially chloride. And you see that in the sap, you know, thousands of parts per million of chloride. And I was talking to those farmers and they had really high nitrate in their sap. And I said, you know, we're going to put some molybdenum out there and you know, those numbers are going to come down from, you know, high hundreds and thousands down to, you know, 50 or something like that. And we're going to process nitrate. And it didn't work. And this was right about the time I had started using AI. And, you know, I had like 15 years worth of questions built up at least, you know, working with sap analysis. And every once in a while, one of them will break loose in my brain. And a lot of what I do know is trying to think of questions to, or just trying to understand what I don't know and use AI to figure it out. And so what I realized was the crops that I was working on over there were low sugar. And that really got me into asking the question of what does the plant do with his sugars? And how does it prioritize the use of its sugars? And then I went down this whole, you know, all these rabbit holes about that. But I went back and looked at all this historical sap, you know, we have this huge database of sap. And I noticed that most of the crops that we work on were very low in sugar. And I started seeing a pattern that's pretty typical out here, especially people don't have too much nitrogen. When you have too much nitrogen, it's a different story. But like, especially in organics, I'll see this where you have low sugar, low pH, high ammonium, and then flat nitrate. And then that all kind of leads to the inability to uptake calcium and then the new leaf. So we'll know the calcium's there because we see it in the old leaf, but we can't get it into the new leaf. And the inability to reduce iron and make it usable, the inability to move potassium into the fruit or into the grain. So just a cascade of effects coming from the fact that we don't have good sugars. You know, the plant wants to hang on a second. Yeah, go ahead. That the way you ended that, where you talk about all those nitrogen interactions, and then you went back and described that as the source of that problem being that you don't have enough sugars. Yeah, that was just that was your tag on. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, elaborate on that a little bit more. How does a lack of sugars lead to all those outcomes? So especially in this work that I was doing in Idaho, where it was most severe, you know, the plant has to prioritize staying alive first. And so it's going to use its sugars to reduce stress, move things around in the plant, and you know, do all kinds of stuff to reduce stress. But then the next thing it's going to do is process nitrogen and make carbon skeletons for ammonium assimilation. And that's where farmers really shoot themselves in the foot is because they put out so much nitrogen that they suck down their sugars. And then you get the low pH and the low pH is just an indicator of something else that's going on in the plant, the low pH and high ammonium. And so the background questions behind this is, why do you have low sugars in the first place? I know that historically we've often addressed that by focusing on magnesium and trace minerals and so forth, the increased photosynthesis. But what's actually happening in these scenarios with the high chlorides and so forth, it seems you're not able to solve that with just adding more nutrients alone. Yeah, and it's a combination of things, right? Because the plant has a lot of stress, so it's using sugars for that. And then it's using sugars for all this this big slug of nitrogen, out there, especially the ammonium, and then there's not a lot left for everything else. There's not even enough for the ammonium processing. So the plant is constantly in this state of low sugar, and then it's made worse because the plant has the photorespire to deal with the effects of having all this ammonium in this app. I call it the ammonium death spiral because you have too much ammonium already, and then a byproduct of photorespiration is more ammonium. So what have, as you've been playing around with this this last year, I started by asking the question of what have you been working on that's been fun or that you've been enjoying? What are the results that you're observing as you're playing with this? Yes, we actually got a chance to mess around on cherries down in Chile over the winter, and we kind of started midway through the season, and we started with a pound and then moved up to two pounds, I think it was organic cane sugar. And we didn't change the sugar levels, but we did process the ammonium and kind of normalize the nitrogen where the nitrate and the ammonium seemed really balanced and raised the pH. If I didn't say that, raise the pH, yeah. All right, let's connect the dots for people who might be trying to follow along. How does changing the ammonium result in increasing the pH? Yep, so you have to think about the two forms of nitrogen in this app. You have nitrate, which is alkaline and oxidized and ammonium, which is acidic and reduced. And we kind of want to we do want a balance of that. And a lot of times we'll have so much ammonium that we have excess ATP and reducing energy that we need to use up. And so the plant uses it up by photorespirating. And so our photorespiring, I should say. And so when the plant is photorespiring, if people don't understand this, basically it's grabbing onto oxygen instead of CO2, and it's just kind of spinning its wheels in that machinery to get rid of this excess reducing energy. And then the byproduct is ammonium, but you're using up sugars and kind of going backwards when you photorespire versus photosynthesis when you're making sugars and moving forward. This is fascinating, Jim, because one of the things that I've talked about is how nitrogen, excess nitrogen actually creates a yield drag effect. But often when I was explaining it and talking about it, publicly to people, I would describe it largely in terms of nitrate and the additional water use requirement and the carbohydrate requirement. And I've never really gone into a lot of detail about ammonium and I don't think I've ever connected the dots in quite the way that you're connecting them. Now I'm sure I have at times, but not into a piece of whole. Yeah, no, it's really interesting, John. And I go back and I've listened to some of the older talks that you've done on webinars and everything. I used to feel the same way about nitrate because I was mostly learning from you. But now I see it more as like a balance. I look at nitrate in the sap when it's a good level as showing us that we have good root health and good uptake of nitrogen. I look at the ammonium in the sap as some of it coming from nitrate reduction. So we're going from nitrate to nitrate to ammonium. So that's just normal. You're going to have some in the sap. But then a lot of it is from stress. So a lot of it is from photo respiration. So I see that a lot where we just have so much ammonium and we've reduced the pH of the sap. But as I said, we're starting to say earlier, the pH of the sap is just an indicator of the oxidation reduction status of the sap. And so when we have tons of ammonium, the sap is very reduced. That's one of the things. I've changed my perspective on nitrate over the years as well. There was a point, let's say five or six years ago, if you asked me what the optimal levels of nitrate were on sap and also on most crops, I would have said that the answer is zero. But I don't think that's true anymore. I still think it needs to be low, lower than it is on most crops for most fertilization practices. But I've actually started thinking about nitrate more as a plant hormone than as a nutrient. It has a very pronounced hormonal effect where it has such strong synergy with oxygen, drives vegetative growth so much. And it's, I think it's foundational for us if we want large leaf size and fruit size and so forth from an optimal plant health and performance perspective. Yeah, nitrate should be, shouldn't be zero, should be low, but it shouldn't be zero. Yeah, and one of the interesting things about nitrate is it's the strongest electron acceptor in the plant. And so when we have high amounts of ammonium, and I haven't done this, but theoretically, what you can do is add small amounts of nitrate in order to balance that. And by small amounts, I mean like half a pound of nitrogen, very low amounts in like a foliar. But nitrate is the pull on photosynthesis. This is how I look at it because nitrate is the acceptor of the things that photosynthesis makes. Right? And so I don't know if this is true, but my understanding what I'm kind of digging into is can nitrate pull photosynthesis and keep photosynthesis strong because there's this immediate place where it can put its photosynthesis versus piling up electrons and ATP and not having a place to put it. You know, what is fascinating to me, I, it'll be interesting to go back and redo some of this research that Don Huber was a part of 50 something years ago. He describes how they were evaluating the nitrogen profile of corn of the forms of nitrogen that corn was absorbing for peak productivity. And of course, at this point in the research, well, they weren't paying a whole lot of attention to various organic forms of nitrogen. They weren't measuring amino acids and amino sugars and proteins and bacteria on all these various things. They were looking exclusively at mineral nitrogen and they, they described, I don't know if this was, I think it was published. I think this was a PhD thesis of one of Don students, but they described that the highest corn yields consistently clustered around a nitrogen profile that was 80% ammonium and 20% nitrate. Mm-hmm. Yep, I think I just listened to that recently. I love listening to that stuff, John, because it really gets me thinking, the first thing to think about when people talk about anything to do with nitrogen is what is the status of the other nutrients in the plant? You know, did we have good sugars in those plants? Did we have moly? Did we have iron? Did we have boron? You know, all the things that we need to process nitrogen. And I hear universities, you know, talk about their studies and things and they'll say, we use this much nitrogen and this much nitrogen and this much nitrogen and here's the results. Like, how do we know, you know, one field had moly or good iron or so without looking at those things, it's really hard to know, I think. Here's an interesting thing I've been thinking about corn, John. And I want to try this. I'm trying to get Bo to do it with me this year. But, you know, as the corn plant gets older and the roots get older during the season, they become kind of sloppy and less selective and the plant wants to balance its anions and cations and cations. And so a lot of times it's going to pick up chloride as an easy anion to balance its sap. And I wonder if you can't go out there with a small shot of nitrate because we all see the nitrates. There's almost zero in the sap later in the season. There's tons of ammonium. And I wonder if you can go out there with some nitrate and apply that and then recreate or just, I don't know how you want to say it, but like get that pool going and get on photosynthesis and get the plant to perform better later in the season. That seems a viable theory because plants would absorb nitrate as readily as they do chloride if not more so. I love that idea. Yeah, and we see in hazelnuts where the same thing happens where they just have so much ammonium and not enough nitrate. And one of the things they do in hazelnuts is they'll apply urea. And you'll see this a lot. Guys apply urea late in the season, but they have no idea what the sugar status is. And that's why you'll have people say like sometimes we'll apply urea in the fall and it seems to work and then sometimes we'll apply urea in the fall and it just doesn't really seem to work. And I think a lot of it has to do with the carbon status. We can call it, you know, I'm saying sugar, but we're talking about carbon, the carbon status. And you know, John, so many people think about the soil and carbon in the soil and I think about carbon in the plant. And I think about redox in the plant, like those are the important things to me. So let's let's let's dig into that a little bit. You've been using the phrase sugar, but how are you thinking about carbon and redox in the plant? You know, this is maybe a bit of a sidebar question, but I want to get it out of my head before I forget it. Yeah. Earlier, you also mentioned people describing the use of these various nitrogen studies, nitrogen application rates, but not taking into consideration the trace minerals status of the plant. And I think that's one of the things that I found so intriguing is you, once you get past a baseline level of performance. Like we all know that I'm just making up a number here. There is this somewhat linear increase in yield on, let's say, a corn crop. As you add more nitrogen, up to 100 pounds per acre. And from that point forward, it becomes nonlinear. You don't get, and you reach a threshold, you reach a point where you don't get continued increasing yields. And it is at those levels, it's when you cross that threshold from a linear yield response to a nonlinear yield response, where all of a sudden trace minerals start having this disproportionate effect. Where earlier, when the crop doesn't have enough nitrogen, you might not get a large yield effect from a molybdenum application or a cobalt application. But once you get to that point, all of a sudden it seems your yield responses to the trace minerals can be substantial. And there aren't always, but sometimes they're very substantial. I'd love to just have it clearly formally to the question in there, but I'd like to get your reaction or your reflection on that. I don't know that I've actually seen that exactly, John. But what I have seen for sure is spreading out your nitrogen, using less nitrogen, using foliar nitrogen, seems to work way better. Working with Bo, I've seen a lot of this stuff, where we're applying 20 pounds in the furrow and then another 20 pounds foliarly and getting 300 bushels. And there's a lot of manure in the background there, but still it's only 40 pounds of applied nitrogen. And a lot of people try to reduce their nitrogen, but they're not thinking about the trace minerals. And so there's nitrogen management, the form you're using, the time you're putting it out and all these things. But people don't focus on, is that nitrogen processing in the plant? And usually it's not. We usually see huge imbalances. And you know, John, I think the reason why you got hung up on the nitrate thing or really interested in it and thinking that that was really important was because when you see that you work on a lot of like corn and you see corn out there where the guys are putting so much nitrogen on there that we do have that. We have high nitrate and high nitrate toxicity or nitrate excesses of prevailing problem. And the growers that I worked with absolutely. Yep. And so I don't deal with that as much and I work with more organic producers and their problem is not enough nitrate. And I see that all the time in organic farming where you have too much ammonium and not enough nitrate. And especially when you front loaded organic nitrogen, we see a big spike of ammonium as the soil warms up and very very little nitrate. And so now we've got all this ammonium and we need immediate sugar to deal with it to process it. And the practical application solution for that is putting on a foliar application of sugar. Yes. And so we haven't changed everything we're doing but we've just kind of added sugar. So we're still focusing on all the photosynthetic nutrients. We're still focusing on manganese and iron. But adding a pound or two of sugar or some type of sugar, you know, there's dextrose, there's sorbitol. We're playing around sorbitol in cherry trees because that's the way they move their sugars anyway. And what has the crop response been to that? I don't know that I could say that there's necessarily yield response yet. Although we did do really well out there at orchard view this year. I don't know whether we can attribute that to the sugar or not. But we've definitely seen the sugar come up, especially starting early in the cherries. The sugars come up to to kind of normal levels or what we call optimum levels. The pH comes up and then the ammonium processes. And then when the ammonium processes, that allows the nitrate to kind of move along too. So the nitrate doesn't start piling up. And what's the other thing? We are seeing some better movement of calcium into the new leaf. That's it. I was just about to go there and I was about to say when based on what you just describe, I mean, for people who aren't familiar with sap analysis and who might not be following along with what these various nutritional changes mean, when you say that the plant is able to metabolize ammonium, that's a different way of saying that all of a sudden the plant has a lot less stress. And you described it earlier as this, was it the phrase that you used an ammonium tail spin? Yeah, like a death spiral. Yeah. I think it was good. But you've essentially, you've taken it out of that cycle and now you've just greatly reduced the amount of stress that that plant is going to experience going forward. It's not just a one day response, but it has this long term consequences. And now all of that energy that previously was being depleted to try to tolerate the stress is being used to serve useful purposes. So the net effect is a plant that has a lot more energy. Yep, that's right. And so then you can move calcium into the new leaf. And we see this all the time where guys will have tons of calcium in the old leaf and it'll look great. And then the new leaf only has a few hundred parts per million. And the typical thing people want to do is put on more and more calcium, but that's not the answer. And it doesn't work. It just costs a lot of money in fully your calcium. And really what they need to be doing is looking at their sugar and their boron and making sure that those are good. Now I'm curious. You've just started looking at this and playing around with it, but one of the things that we know, we know that we have these handful of varieties of apples that don't do a good job of moving calcium. And it's also it occurs in some environmental conditions and grapes and so forth. And historically we've managed that or tried to manage it somewhat with potassium and manganese relationships and boron relationships, which has had some degree of success. Have you observed any additional degrees of success with managing sugar levels above and beyond that? Josh, I'm trying to think I don't know that I've seen it in apples so much, but it would make sense that it would work. I know that Steven tried some, Steven Barely, he tried some dextrose last year or maybe he tried sorbitol, but he didn't do it. He did. I think you can do two high rates and not get the effect that you're looking for. You can overdo it. And Steven would never be the guy who overdo it. Yeah, yeah, right. But gosh, I don't want to say that I've seen it in apples yet. I think it's too early to tell. Yeah, but in cherries for sure. And then the other thing that we expect to see, and I think we're seeing it some in cherries is the ability to reduce nitrogen or sorry to reduce iron and be able to uptake iron. That's a big deal. Yeah, the same thing happens with iron, right? Where you just throw tons and tons of iron at it and you really don't see the levels come up. And we need to reduce, you know, with broadleaf plants anyway, we need to reduce iron down in the roots. So we need to send sugars down there and make ATP and any DPH in order to take in FE2+. You know what's fascinating to me about this conversation, Jim, is I'm always intrigued by these plants ability to take a relatively minute amount of an input. And it completely changes what can happen in an entire field. And I've I've talked about this phenomenon in regards to putting on a few grams per acre of a trace mineral like molybdenum or slinium or something like that or cobalt. But when you think about the total quantity of sugar that a crop produces, in a given day, say a cherry crop. And I've done the math on this. It's been a while since I've looked at these numbers closely. But let's just say an acre of cherry trees produces some in the neighborhood of, I don't know, 20 to 25 pounds of sugar is a day. It's probably more than that. But let's use that as a as a starting point for the conversation. And then you're putting on a foliar spray that is a fraction of that. It's a pound or two pounds an acre. And you ask yourself a question, well, what difference can that make? But it actually, it makes a tremendous difference because it's enough to push it across a threshold. It's a threshold change is like a step change instead of just a linear increase. Yeah, that's right. And so now I look at how I'm making my foliar and it's less about putting giant slugs of super certain nutrients and more about making sure the sugars are right. And then, you know, obviously we're using ocean materials and things. But then just kind of like trying to signal or prime the plant a little bit with these nutrients instead of saying like, I'm going to supply all the molybdenum that this plant needs kind of thing. Well, my guess would be, you know, I've I've had these experiences a number of times over the years where I'm sure that you have as well. Sometimes you it has seen that you just hit on magical combination or something away. The response that you got was entirely disproportionate to what you applied. I still remember, this is probably now close to 20 years ago, this one tomato greenhouse that had serious issues with spider bites that were jolly alpha. grape tomatoes, which are long since obsolete, but they were very spider mites susceptible. They had major polylis spider mites. And this particular greenhouse had very depressed levels of metals across the board, just zinc, manganese, copper, iron, everything was just in the tank. And they put on a foliar application of sea stem and cobalt. And I think there were some other things in there. I forget what the total combination was, but it was the sea stem and the cobalt that were really carrying the weight, I think, because they did other applications without those and didn't get the response. But what happened is we had previously made lots of applications to the soil and to foliar applications and not seen real significant responses on the trace minerals. But we put on that application and zinc manganese iron, copper, everything that came up in sap by not small amounts. It doubled and tripled. In some cases, it increased 4x and we had them apply to a single gram. Wow. And so what you're describing sounds to me like one more dimension and one more facet to consider where you make those types of responses. You can get those types of responses more consistently and they're not just occasional outliers that you wish you could replicate. Yeah, yeah, that's right. The way I look at sap now, John, is less about looking at the levels of individual nutrients and how we might bring those up and looking at sap to get an idea of how the plant's metabolism is functioning. And so it's really, it's a little embarrassing from you to say, even just all this stuff, like I just feel like, God, I should have thought of this a long time ago. But sometimes it takes a long time to put things together. Sometimes you're so deep in the weeds, you forget to see the forest for the trees. Yep, yep. I lost my dream to thought where I was going with that. Well, you started talking about how you're using sap analysis differently today and you're looking at it. Oh, yeah. Plant metabolism perspective. Yeah, right, right, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, we used to really not pay attention as much to the first three things on the first three measurements on sap analysis, which are, you know, your sugars, your pH, and your EC. And now those are some of the most important things on the sap to me. Like, that's what I really care about. And what, what, what, what's that analysis? What I use it for now really is finding the metabolic bottlenecks in the plant and looking at the plant at the foundational level of getting things right with the metabolism. And so I'm talking about making sugar and making proteins or making glutamate, you know, as our simple kind of currency on the protein side of things. And when you get those right, then other things in the plant can be right. But, you know, when those aren't right and you're like, oh, any more calcium or any more phosphorus, I don't really even think about phosphorus. Phosphorus, to me, is like something that usually just comes along with everything else is right. Well, essentially what you're saying is if those foundational things aren't right, trying to fix nutrient imbalance, it's like trying to roll a heavy rock up a hill. And it's just difficult. It's, it just, it doesn't work. You're constantly struggling. And if you get those things right, then the system starts to flow. Yep. Get sure to flow. You get nutrient flow. You get movement much more easily. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. Well, this is exciting, Jim. You know what's, it's like, yeah, we look back and say, well, why didn't I think of that a long time ago? But the reality is that's learning and growing and we're constantly all doing it. And just think about how many people aren't thinking about these things yet at all. Right. And thinking about what we were thinking five years ago or 10 years ago. Yep. What's interesting is an agriculture, we're applying nitrogen, we're thinking so much about nitrogen. And then we're just expecting the plant to take care of everything on the sugar side. And I think what a lot of people don't understand is we need sugars to make carbon skeletons. This is a critical thing in order to process ammonium. And when we have so much nitrogen out there, we just use up all our sugars. And then we just use up all our sugars to make carbon skeletons. I don't ever talk about nitrogen now, unless I'm talking about adding sugar with nitrogen. And what about for soil applications specifically for producing corn, side rest planting. Yeah. Well, that's in there. I don't know yet, John, although I did see something really interesting recently, putting sugar through the pivot. And it worked really, really well. So I can't imagine that was just from the water hitting the leaves and the sugar, changing things on the leaves. I had to have done something in the soil. You know what I see all the time, like on a young wheat spring wheat or winter wheat coming out of the winter. There's no nitrate and there's ammonia through the roof and there's no sugar. And I see that all the time. It causes lots of that. I mean, that's the foundation of all the health problems that winter wheat is coming out of the winter. Yeah. And so people plant their spring wheat with molasses a lot of times. And I think that the thing to plant with might be dextrose because we're not talking about feeding the microbiology. We're talking about feeding the plant. And with molasses, we all have all these ends in that steps that we have to do. And so that's just the plan. I had an important question for you. I need to at some point. Once we have more data, I need to have Jordan Longberg on here to talk about some of their some of the data that they're seeing where. They are they're very clearly observing as they are using sugars and not just sugars, but overall nutrition management. They're seeing these clear fluctuations in soil microbial respiration from foliar applications of nutrients. Putting on a foliar application. And three to five days later, there is this. If I'm if my members serves me correctly, there's this tremendous spike in surge of carbon dioxide released from the soil. And increase carbon dioxide absorption by the plant. So and that is there they're including if I'm not mistaken, they're including sugars with their foliar applications in those regards and those that they're seeing very positive responses from that. And so this is. Some of the successes that we've observed is we're seeing these soil microbial responses in response to foliar applications when we address the carbon status of the plant. Yeah, make sense because you know, root exidates are way down on the list of what the plant is going to use it sugars for. And so if it doesn't have enough sugars to do the most important things staying alive and processing nitrogen. It's not going to send anything down to the roots or not very much and all this stuff is dynamic like we're working at a snapshot, you know, in the morning that we pulled on this app. So, you know, you might have low sugars at that point, but maybe later in the day you have higher sugar better sugars. Although if it's going to be hot, you know, it's going to be 100 degrees, then you're not going to be making sugar. And I think these are places where we can really help the plant out. You have these high stress situations, whether it's drought or clouds or out here we have wildfire smoke sometimes that's all going to limit your photosynthesis. So we have started. I think at some point in the conversation I asked you about the crop responses that you've observed you say it's it's kind of premature you haven't observed a lot of yield responses yet, but you are seeing these. Metabolic changes, which lead to better nutrient absorption. So it seems to me that it's going to be somewhat inevitable that at some point you're going to see quality improvements in yield response responses. I think so. Yeah. You know, I was talking to our friend Keith mortar and he was telling me how he had a friend with winter wheat and the and it would came up all yellow and you know, I think it had snowed on top of it and everything else and it just didn't look great. And you know, a lot of guys will go out there and put nitrogen on. That's the first thing they're going to do. And the plant is already swamped with ammonium and then you go out there and put nitrogen on it and just make it worse and Keith advising this guy this I was talking to Keith about the sugar thing and he was telling me how he had done some of it, but he had used molasses and dextrose might have been a better option here, but he had used he told his friend to put a molasses out there. I think a court per acre and it totally turned it around. So we've seen it work, you know, yeah, but in terms of like. And the story, a court per acre that's like that's nothing. It's crazy, right? Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, wow, a lot of it is just, you know, the plant is stuck and we're trying to unstick it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a trigger. Yeah. This is awesome, Jim. I'm enjoying this conversation. What else have you been having fun with? Oh gosh. What else have I been having with my wife? Um, well, you've seen the cherries out there at Mike's. Yeah, I saw some of those social posts like that is, oh, this is incredible. Oh, my gosh. It's nuts. We actually, we had one friend of mine on social media, respond. He said, well, what kind of cherries are these are these sour cherries? Like mom, Rancis, because sweet cherries don't, they don't cluster up like that. It's like, oh, yeah, these are sweet cherries. Yeah. Well, Mike told me he was going to slip my throat or anybody's throat that mentioned what variety it is. You know, Mike, Mike had the trial, the OSU trial out as the cemetery block forever. So he got to see what worked the best, what trees did the best out there. But they're newer varieties. There's newer varieties that are really precocious, you know, they're going to give you a good crop. Year three, year four. I think those trees are five years old. And even last year we got. There's 10 tons out there. And, you know, we kind of did the same thing last year, but this year is arguably better. You know, it's not what's not in branches out there. Yeah, you told me last year was the was the cherry crop of a lifetime. Yep, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm lucky in that I work with some of the best farmers and you know, working for A.E.A. We kind of attract those type of people. So, you know, I can't take all the credit or, you know, even a large portion of it. But what we do with Mike is component. Yeah, it's huge. It's huge. And, you know, he's even got a, you know, heavy air out there that does such a good job pruning. You know, and Michael talked about how, you know, there's a three-legged stool with pruning and irrigation and nutrition that kind of produces a good crop. And we've done, you know, pretty minor things compared to what we did in the past because we're doing these blends now. And the blends appear to perform better than the products themselves. So we can use low, smaller amounts of nutrients and get the same effect as we would if we use twice as much. All right. What are you talking about this a bit because there's lots of people that we work with as customers who aren't using blends for logistical reasons and so forth. So, when you describe using blends, what are you talking about exactly? How is it different from just tank mixing the combination? You know, we use a bubble trailer, you know, like a ball tank and we pump that stuff around and it just mixes really well. Pulse out any solids that are in there and just cleans up the product and then we'll put some sugar in there with it and blend it all up. And it just must be that effect of just mixing it all up together. I wonder if it's the combination effect of mixing it all up together plus giving it a little bit of time. Yep, that could be. But for some reason it appears to be different than tank mixing because there's there's how much of a time delay is there from the time that you're mixing it until it gets applied. I'm sure there could be a short as like it could be a short as two days, but it could be up to a week, you know. And can you elaborate a little bit more on what are the what are the effects that you're seeing compared to just putting a tank mix together on farm. We just, you know, in the past we would use court rates of almost everything except for maybe Mollipdinum and Cobalt we would use, you know, pine rates of that. And we would do foliar's that were probably, you know, 50, 60 bucks and they would work well and they'd move the sap. We'd see that we'd see a cup, you know, the levels come up on the sap. But now we do quite a bit less foliar's that are less than $25 and we see the same kind of movement that we used to with higher rates. And you're tributing a lot of that. It's just the blending and the pre mixing. I think so. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know, but honestly, yeah, in the sugars in the sugars, but we were blending without sugars and it was working last year. So it's not just the sugars. It couldn't have happened at a better time for us because, you know, farmers are struggling. It's tough out there. And for us to be able to lower our prices to get the same effect has been pretty huge. It's kept us a lot of acreage. Yeah, substantial. Yeah, this is. We can stop yet. I got another one if you're ready. Yeah, let's go. Well, so we're doing the opinion trial out there at mics. And, you know, it's too early to say, you know, Mike's not claiming victory yet because we haven't harvested that block. But it's been really going to be what a week or two away at this point, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, within a week. And so, gosh, what have we seen over the course of the season, we've, you know, looked at it every single week and one week the control might look a little bit better. And this is a heavy fungicide, you know, situation where, you know, it's getting fungicides every two weeks. You have a highly susceptible variety. Super super susceptible and a susceptible area in a susceptible year. We got pounded by a half an inch of rain during harvest during Shaland harvest. And no, it's been a perfect year from powdery mildew. And so it's been kind of back and forth where, you know, the opinion side a little bit better or the control side a little bit better. But honestly, there hasn't been a huge amount of difference. The thing that we noticed is that on the opinion side. The mildew appears to be less active. It appears to be kind of like dead, like it just looks gray or brown and flat instead of white and fluffy. And on the control side, I think we found a little bit more white and fluffy stuff. And so really it's all a race. It's a race to harvest the crop before powdery mildew gets into the fruit and rooms the fruit. And so this season, how gosh, what's happened out there? There's been some challenges. Getting the fruit harvested on time. And so the fruit's hanging for a long time. And we're starting to get powdery mildew into the fruit. And so there's a little bit of powdery mildew in the fruit on the opinion side. And there's a little bit on the control side. There might be more on the control side. And the stuff that we're seeing on the opinion side isn't isn't fluffy and white. It doesn't appear to be to be moving. And just to be clear, the control side is a fungicide control, right? It's a fungicide control. Yeah. And you know, powdery mildew is such a problem in cherries. I work on thousands and thousands of acres of organic apples, thousands of acres of organic blueberries. And I think we work on like three acres of organic cherries. And we work on thousands of acres of conventional cherries. And there hasn't been a good price premium, but it's also so challenging to grow cherries in this area organically because of powdery mildew. And so if you had told me that we could stop powdery mildew, opinion, I would have told you you're out of your mind. And every week that I go in there, except now, you know, I keep on seeing it. But you know, for the first week, so I was like, this isn't going to work. It's amazing, John. And you know, I don't want to sound like I'm going off the rails here and being hyperbolic, but it's one of the biggest things in agriculture right now. It's one of the, it's one of the hugeest things I've ever seen in agriculture. You're referring specifically to powdery mildew, the cross all types of crops. Yep. Yep. And then we don't even know what else pinion will work on. And now my understanding is we're seeing crop health response as well. So that's pretty interesting. Well, I was intrigued at first. People were responding. Insect pressure disappearing in response to opinion applications. And I was like, yeah, well, what's that all about? Yeah, how does that work? And it didn't make sense to me, but it started showing up as a pattern so consistently that I shouldn't say a consistent pattern. But we definitely, we got enough phone calls about it enough responses from it that I started digging into some of the mechanisms of why and how that might be happening. And yeah, it's don't have enough experience with it yet to be able to offer any types of predictions or forecasting, but it definitely is a thing. Yep. I want to see how it works on things like cherry leaf spot fire blade white mold and potatoes and things. I've got a lot of people that want to try it even in conventional act. Yeah. On the on this this pinion testing that you've been doing on the cherry is what have the application rates been? Everything's going out at 200 gallons, so it would be two gallons to make it 2% and it's happening every two weeks. And so that sorry, the two gallons at 200 would make a 1%. Yeah, sorry, thank you. Yeah, 1%. Yeah, messing up on math. She is simple math. Come on guy. 1% yeah, and I think that's what we've been recommending for people to do. Yeah, and that's going out John with that gallon of blend that we make and and you're real. And I think Mike would tell you that the key to a lot of his success is the combination of firdication and foliar together. Those two things and we saw it this year with with Mike's neighbor, Stacy Cooper. Stacy had a block of skin I think they were and they weren't really growing the fruit was exposed the fruit was small and there was lots of it. And Mike convinced her to do some firdication along with her foliar and I just couldn't believe the response. I mean over the course of a couple of few weeks. She had three foot shoots all the fruit was shaded and it was big. It all sized up. You know, 910 row fruit. Wow. So when you say firdications in in combination with foliar, are you referring specifically to timing sequence that they should be timed together or you just referring to using them in conjunction with each other. I'm not sure. I think that's a timing thing. I think there's something there. And I'm pretty sure Mike does that. You have to have Mon here again soon and pick his brain, but I think I think that's part of this plan is the timing of it, but I don't know exactly what it is. Yeah, I'm supposed to talk to Mike in a couple hours. So, oh really cool. Nice. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, so what have you been, are you running trials on opinion anywhere else other than the cherries? I think that's all we're doing out here. It's not registered in Washington yet. And that's where a lot of our work was the or is we have people, even old customers that we don't necessarily work a lot with now calling and asking about it. So we have a lot of places to sell it in Washington and Idaho once it becomes a once it's registered. Yeah. You know, I'm really I'm really excited about opinion in part for the success that it's having and the consistency of success, but also in part because I'm looking forward to people realizing the consequences of results a year or two down the road when there are less funders that applications on this oil. Right. Because I've seen that now in a couple of operations where there's all of a sudden soil biology comes alive and plant nutrient absorb from the soil just again, it's like it crosses a threshold and it becomes completely different once you no longer have that continual hammering a fundus application on the soil. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what that looks like because that's going to be another layer of improved performance. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that too. Yeah, who knows what we're going to see. Yeah, we just don't even know we don't even know what the effects or can't quantify the effects of using fungicides over and over again every year. Yeah. Awesome. This has been fun, Jim. What have we missed? Oh gosh, probably missed. That's notes here. Yeah, let me take a peek here. Oh gosh, we could go into all kinds of stuff, you know, Apple's and people applying potassium and they should be applying calcium. We've talked about that a little bit, you know, I have some, I have my rules out here, but one of my rules is almost never apply potassium to this oil. We can avoid it maybe in litigation during during the crop season, but that's specific in apples or that's more generally. All treat fruit that I can think of, you know, especially when we want early calcium, if we're applying potassium to the soil, I call it the gift that keeps on giving because next season will be competing against that. It's just give though. It's right. Yeah, we keep on taking the gift that keeps on taking. Yeah, I mean, we're going to eat with that next year when we're trying to update calcium that potassium a lot of it's still there. You know, and there's typically tons of potassium in the soil, we're just not accessing it and potassium foliar works so well. And we often don't even need them. You know, sometimes we'll do a potassium foliar just to be sure, you know, like a quarter of holocae in the foliar during fruit fill or something like that or to color a little bit. You know what the one story about potassium that I have these data points memorized and that was the first year that Mike did his experiments with his foliar applications of triple 20 and five applications of triple 20 14 days apart. That's a pound of potassium per acre five times five pounds of potash per acre resulted in potassium levels instead of being at 32 and 35 hundred per million, they were seven in the 7000 range 7000 plus or 176 hundred. So you doubled the potassium content of the leaf from the 3000 to 7000 per million range with five pounds of potassium per acre. So what we're talking about sugar is this disproportionate response or relatively what seems like a relatively small quantity produces this oversized effect. Oh, so we've talked about this before John, but you know, say it for the podcast is up here in the PNW people applied tons of came ag to the soil, you know, sometimes like upwards of half a million dollars a year on a like a thousand acre orchard. And people did that year after year after year and so if you look at an orchard, you look at the sap from an orchard where they didn't do that. A normal thing to see would be on the first step you would see 5,000 parts per million potassium and a thousand to 1500 parts per million calcium like really good calcium. It can tons of cells, you know, but if you've applied came ag for years and years that early potassium could be 8000 to 10,000 and your calcium might be 7 to 800. So now you got like a 10 to 1 ratio versus a 5 to 1 or a 4 to 1. Just so much potassium. And what's the result of that? Bittersweet. Typically, and poor storage. Poor storage is the main thing. You know, you're trying to store apples and you're looking at potassium to calcium ratios and nitrogen to calcium ratios. And people factor in magnesium, but I'm not convinced that's as big of an issue. The potassium flows into the plant like, you know, candy and two kids and calcium is one of the hardest things to uptake. You know, people will say, I've got all this calcium in my soil. Why would I want to apply calcium? Well, it's all tied up and you're not going to you're not going to uptake it. But also, but what is interesting, this is what I loved about the beginning part of our conversation is what changes when you change the carbon status of the plant. The point where the plant has an abundance of carbohydrates and more root exitates and all of a sudden you are getting calcium absorption from that quote unquote tied up and complex calcium. And when we're talking about sugars, we're usually having sea stem too. And we're doing it as, you know, kind of a sugar as well, you know, carbohydrate carbon source. But then it comes along with all the other good things, you know, stress relief and, you know, resilient to disease and everything else reproductive energy. Yeah, that's, that's an important note because one of the things that I'm intrigued by is, see stem the way that it's because it's not alkali extracted. It contains all of these, the name of the compound is a compound group is escaping right now. Asmotic regulators, yeah, regulators that allow the plant to maintain water in cells much more readily and reduce drought stress and heat stress because they have better water regulation. And I think that's, that's an actually important conjunction with a sugar application. Yeah, yeah, I agree. You know, this entire conversation reminds me of one of the things that, um, Arden Anderson talked about back in the 80s, he described nonlinear effects that when when you apply a small amount of, of a certain product, let's say, cobalt or sugar or something like that in a biological system, it has this ripple effect, this domino effect of these unintended consequences. And it's nonlinear. You put on, you put on a few ounces of malibinum or a pound of sugar and all of a sudden you get increased absorption of calcium that represents an additional 20 pounds of calcium per acre. It's like, it isn't, it's this nonlinear effect that's manifested by biological systems. Yeah, no, I love that. A lot of it is just bottlenecks right there's some kind of bottleneck that isn't right and you apply just the right thing and the plant is relieved of that bottleneck and can process again. Yeah. Well, Jim, this has been a fun conversation. Yes, I'm here a lot. I smell a lot. Thanks for being here and thanks for being a part of our team for all the work that you do. We're to appreciate you. Of course. Thank you, John. The team at AEA and I are dedicated to bringing this show to you because we believe that knowledge and information is the foundation of successful regenerative systems. At AEA, we believe that growing better quality food and making more money from your crops is possible. And since 2006, we've worked with leading professional growers to help them do just that. At AEA, we don't guess we test, we analyze and we provide recommendations based on scientific data knowledge and experience. We've developed products that are uniquely positioned to help growers make more money with regenerative agriculture. If you are a professional grower who believes in testing instead of guessing someone who believes in a better, more regenerative way to grow. Visit advancing egoag.com and contact us to see if AEA is right for you. for you.