Episode 43 - Why is regenerative coffee farming the future? A conversation with Lalo Perez from Biofilia

[Music] Welcome everyone to another episode of the Tim Madlow Coffee Podcast. Today I'm sitting in Finkatama in Colombia, very close to my own farm, Finkai Suello. We have had some tour of the farm today because we are starting a new project in our farm, together with Don Elias on his farm Tamana, and also together with Diego Barona in El Salvador. Ben Hamin Pass in Honduras, Hobnil, Caceres that we buy from Nasi Mento in Honduras, Marissa Vela Moisés Caballero. And the idea is to start some trials where we are testing conventional farming techniques, the ones that they have always been doing, against what we call biological farming techniques, which means we activate biology in the soil. We work with nature, we try to reduce as much as we can, fertiliser, use pesticides, fungicides, in order to improve the quality of the coffee, and also the health of the trees, the health of the soils, and also bring back a better ecosystem on the farms. And I know I've been talking about that on my podcast before. A lot of people don't believe that it's real and that it can be done, but today I have proof. I have with me a guest, Colalo from Mexico, and he is here to help us design the projects, the tests, and also advises on how to do them, and you have a lot of experience. So welcome, Lalo. Gracias, Tim. Maybe you can start by introducing yourself a little bit about your background, how you ended up doing what you do, and then we can start talking a little about the trials and how agriculture works, and we'll dig into it. Perfect, Bill. It's always the hardest question for me to describe what I do. Because by nature, I try to do as much as possible. It's the best way I have learned to learn about how natural ecosystems work. They aren't one thing, but rather a plethora of things. But anyway, to get into it, I think of myself as a farmer first, and a business person second. The biggest passion in life is coffee, and followed closely with cooking, and those passions have led most of my life, and most of the decisions in my life. I started a business in 2012 in Mexico. I got the opportunity to work in coffee bars in the United States in the early, or mid-2000s. I was upset that everybody said that there was no good Mexican coffee. I took it upon myself to travel to Mexico, my home country, where I grew up, and realized that there was a lot of opportunity there. We started a company there. Of course, when we started a company, we couldn't call an importer for coffee. It was quite evident that we needed to find the coffees ourselves. From my life before that, I already had some ties to agriculture. I was very interested in agriculture, and I saw the opportunity to search for coffees as the opportunity to relate to farmers. That's really where my journey in coffee agriculture started, in trying to search for farmers and understand what they were doing, what they were facing as challenges, what they were inspired by, and that was back in 2012. Ever since we developed that business, it's a roaster in Mexico. We have some coffee shops in the city. Through that coffee shop, we also built a very strong relationship with Lamar Soco, and we represent them in Mexico. Over time, in working with a farmer in Mexico, we had this really cool experience early on. We started the company right around the time when the Roya crisis was really hard. There was a lot of devastated coffee hectares in Mexico. I remember going to, with my then business partner, who was a biologist, to a region in Beirard Cruz. All we could see was sticks. Like sticks. It was quite severe. There was a lot of frustration by the farmers, they didn't know what to do. The idea, even now, but especially then, is that Roya was very contagious. We found this tiny plot in the middle of all these sticks, of a coffee farm that was perfect. And we thought, "What? How?" Isn't the whole point that it's contagious and. Yeah, it's like crazy. Yeah, what's going on? We had an opportunity to talk to them. He was a medical doctor, and he had his farm as a passion project on a side. He was never really pressed for money from his farm, and so he had the opportunity to plant avocados and mangoes. He had 100 herbs, and he grew his food there. And it was clear to us, without understanding quite how, that that diversity was really helping the health of his coffee. Because he didn't have resistant varieties, he didn't have any special management. He was not using any fertilizers, or at least any chemical fertilizers. And really low input system, but his coffee was healthy. And that kind of planted the seed for me, I think, observing that. Because it started to undo a lot of the assumptions I had about how Roya operated. So that led us to kind of dig deeper into organic agriculture. And when you're a cook, and you relate to food, you want your food to be as good as possible. Most of the times, yes. Yeah, you're right. Most of the time, yes. When you're a cook like me and your curious cook comes. You really, you care about where your food comes from and how it tastes like. And so we really found in this farm like inspiration. So we started a process to learn more about that forms of agriculture. We learned a lot about organic agriculture by a dynamic agriculture permaculture. And also of the negative side effects of abusing the conventional system. It was clear to us that neither that we had to find a path rather for farmers to be able to farm responsibly. Both because that's the way to have a sustainable business. But also because that's what yielded the best coffee. Our company slogan is Cafe Rico. And which means yummy coffee. And we always said that our coffee tasted the best because it came not because of any process of variety, but because it came from this healthy soil. And it's crazy to say because we don't have metrics yet or I think sensible enough tools to measure it. At least we didn't then. But we really could taste it. We could taste our coffees on a table and say this came from one of our farmers and this is a conventional coffee. And so that motivated us even more to continue this path of learning. So really that's kind of the origin. So we should forward to today. We started a consultancy five years ago called the Ophelia. My hope was to work with coffee as much as possible, but it was a tough, you know, not a lot of people. Coffee farmers don't have money. That's right. And that's nothing to laugh of, but that's because coffee rosters aren't paying good enough for the coffees. 100%. I will support and endorse that message because it's true. And really the only coffee farmers that I know that make money are the mechanized conventional farmers that have large extensions. And that are playing a gambling game, which is a commodity's markets. But the people that we've learned to celebrate and appreciate in the coffee world as producers, smallholder farmers or even medium farmers. We're having a very tough time making money because as an industry, I agree. We haven't learned to really value the work that goes into coffee. And today, today, which is an exception where the sea market prices are really high. I just went on a trip to Central America. And most of those kind of gains are lost because the pickers want more paying. The fertilizers are more expensive. Sometimes you need more security to protect your coffee from being stolen. And it's one year of gain that there are how many years of accumulated losses. Like 50 years. So yeah, so for better or for worse, are the lack of money in coffee farming industry took us to work with other crops. And so we've been working with sugar cane with corn, with vegetables, with wine makers. And that has really yielded another perspective and quite a lot of learning actually because you learn of the different challenges that everybody's facing. Whether it's at a massive scale of a monoculture like sugar cane, where we work with, you know, over 60,000 hectares, just in one place of one crop. Or wine makers who are terribly concerned with the quality of their own products. Yeah. And so. we see every single time is that the conventional system that has become the main system to grow the food on a planet has a lot of how to say this in the right way. It has a lot of reason, it has a lot of research, but there is a huge portion that it's forgetting to see. And perhaps that huge portion that it's forgetting to see as a management system is the most important part. It's a part where we miss what food is for and food is for feeding us who in turn feed the earth where the food comes from. When we forget that relationship and that purpose, when we forget that food is yes it has to be a business because we live in the world that we live in in a capital system, but it's not first a business, it's first our nurture and it's a relationship to the earth that we live in. And I think it's that's been forgotten. We've over simplified nature, we think we can control it. And anyway, before I get deeper into that, we're going to get deep into it. Thankfully, through you and through other people that we've met, we've been able to come back to coffee, which is our passion. And we're very, very, very excited to be working with the farmers that you've been developing. We're very excited about the work you've been doing. I don't know that I know many people that have committed the time, you know, it's over a decade's worth of effort and consistency and understanding. And so we're very excited to work with the farmers in coffee and in bringing this new perspective of on how to manage farming in a way that produces the best results. Yeah, I think from my approach, I have kind of committed to a lifetime of partnership with the farmers that I buy from. And it's not something that I have to do, but it's something that I want to do because I find that when you work long term, you really see a return on the investment by paying a good price to them. They invest in their farms. We get better quality coffee. It makes our job much easier to roast the coffee, to serve the coffee. And also the supply chain is very stable. It doesn't fluctuate a lot. Yeah, you can have a bad air one there, but still the coffee will be pretty good. So for me, it's always been about securing my supply and having a quality control from the very beginning. And one of the things that I've seen with all these farms and a lot of people ask me, "Why don't you buy organic coffee?" And the short answer is because the farmers can't afford to do it. And the second answer is they don't know how to do it. And the reason why they don't know is because nobody in this area where we're sitting are taught in a good way how to do organic coffee. So if yeah, there are some farms that try to do it here. Normally they always complain they lose their yields. It's more expensive. They don't have a market for it. So they give up. And especially as soon as the trees are attacked by leaf rust or roya, then they start doing the fungicide again. So for me, when I see all the troubles we have on the farm, with leaf rust, the coffee communities seem to think that the solution is to find new genetics in the trees, developing new resistant varieties. I've seen over a decade that that doesn't work because they do become attacked sooner or later. They get leaf rust as well. So when I started my own farm in 2015 and started learning about soil biology, I understood that the root of the cause of the leaf rust is the way we farm the coffee. Not the plants. The plants are perfect. But the system we put them in is not perfect at all. So I also have seen the effects of climate change. I think I've seen, I believe that I've seen more leaf rust outbreaks in areas where they never had it before. I've also seen a declining quality in some of the coffees that are by over time. Then for me, it was a no-brainer that we need to change. I've been trying to push them to grow shade trees for many years. They say yes and they don't do it. Like Elias, for instance, because they never have time. They also say when they plant it, when they start to cut the weeds, they also cut the shade trees because they're so small. So we had a symposium just to give some context to this situation. We had a symposium in November in 2024 in Marcala at the Caberos Farms where we gathered all the farmers we buy from in Central America and Colombia. I basically told them that you need to start planting shade. I gave them a lot of arguments why. One of them being climate is getting hotter. A way to mitigate heat is by lowering the temperature with shade. You can pretty much elevate your farm by a couple of hundred meters just by planting shade. So we don't need to move the farms. We just plant shade. Also, it provide nutrients, microorganisms, moisture in dry periods, all these benefits, less weeds. Also, I said, the year before we went to Guatemala together and I told them like in 10 years, we want to only buy biologically farmed or regeneratively farmed coffee. We don't want to buy conventional coffee anymore. Either you are with us or without. Back then, I didn't really know how to start because not only is it the farmers that don't know what to do when it comes to organic, but also me. I don't really know how to do it. I've been trying it on my farm for 10 years. It hasn't been working that well. That's where you come in. I forgot to really what we're talking about. The idea for me is you mentioned, you worked with wineries and they're concerned about the quality. That's really what I'm concerned about here as well. I don't see a future of coffee farming if you don't change. Also, I've seen a declining quality over time and I believe it's because the way we farm the coffee is the coffee don't get enough nutrients. One example that I very often use is we buy some coffee from Ethiopia, from a farm where the coffee grows inside a forest. They have never fertilized, they have never sprayed. The only thing that we use to cut the weeds, that coffee is so easy to extract. It's so much higher in TDS when we brew with the same grind setting as all the other herbs. It's almost like we have to hold back and dilute it afterwards because it gets too strong. The coffee is incredible. The trees produce, okay, you know? I truly believe that we can elevate the quality by treating the trees and making the plants healthier for me. That makes sense. That's how the wineries, the best wineries are working. No one in coffee is working like this for some reason. It's all about the yields and varieties and that's it. We were talking earlier today about what quality means even and how I think we do a good job in the industry of having a common language for defining what cup quality means and that's really important. But I was telling you that when I've competed in the past and this was many years ago, I always had last place almost to prove a point, almost to say cup quality to me isn't accomplishing these rules. Cup quality to me is the quality of the livelihood of the farmer, the quality of the soil, the quality of the ecosystem and all of these things that oftentimes we describe as intangible but we are quite tangible. Right, like the health of an ecosystem if you travel to coffee farms is quite tangible even though it seems abstract, it isn't. I know. There's a way so you can measure actually the quality of the farm and we can carbon footprint and exactly and there's, you know, we like humans like absolutes, they like white and black and so of course we should measure that but also it just takes visiting a place to see lushness and bigger and health and to see death. It's not that hard when you're standing there. So I agree I think quality decreases in the cup when the quality that's around it also decrease. And so, you know, I don't know that most people understand the conventional system but in essence we use two categories of products. Please explain. So this is how I understand the conventional system. It's based mostly on trying to understand soil chemistry which is very important that I'll get back to that. It's not that soil chemistry isn't important it is and it's a great tool that came from the research of conventional agriculture and I think all farmers no matter what style you use should understand soil chemistry because it's very important that we do. But soil chemistry is only one component of soil fertility and when you focus only on that you become a myopic farmer and so when we see we to put an example we take a soil analysis of what we call soluble nutrients and then based on the soluble nutrients we say this and that is missing so let's add through fertilizer those things that are missing. It seems to be reasonable at first thoughts you know so when you say it to people you know you measure what you're missing you add what you measure what you're missing and you add what you're missing yeah seems reasonable. Unfortunately it's It's just not that simple. And so oftentimes it's different what's in the soil, even if it's soluble, than what a plant can eat. And what a plant can eat isn't mediated only by what's in the soil. It's mostly mediated by a very complex system of biology, specifically of a relationship between the plant, the soil, and the microbiology in the soil. And of course the climate that surrounds all of this, because that's a huge effect on how all of this works. And so we really need to understand it as a system, as a complex system, unless as a linear chemical process that is designed really by people who have an interest in selling new things. And it's not that these things are inherently bad or intrinsically bad, in essence, they're nutrients. They're like, think of them as supplements, like the magnesium, supplements, or the calcium supplements that you take as a human. They're the same thing. But if you abuse them and you abuse them pervasively, if you abuse them every single year, then you really start to generate some negative side effects. And the metabolism of both the plants and metabolism of the soil ecosystem change. And they don't change for better, unfortunately. And so when you over fertilize or when you over the liver on anything, then quality suffers, right? Because this seems contradictory, but the plant is starving at the same time that you're giving it too much nutrients to the soil. And it's a little bit what happens with metabolic syndrome in humans, you know? You have this condition where the organs of the body are starving for nutrients, but we have obesity, right? And it's like too many calories. But at the same time, the nutrition or not proper nutrition. Because you're only eating french fries and eating diets go, right? Because your nutrition is in balance. And so if your nutrition is in balance, then you're going to cause this very crazy problem. It's a modern problem. It's a problem of excess. And so what's very clear is that we have exceeded in this need to extract money out of the land. We've exceeded our capacity to demand on the ecosystem. That's not to say, and this is important for me to precise, that's not to say that the conventional system can't be done responsibly. It absolutely can. In fact, the best conventional farmers are quite responsible in their use. Unfortunately, because of the way that the world agricultural food system works, those best conventional farmers are very, very few and far between. Most people using these products were never trained to use these products. And it's a little bit like letting anybody prescribe drugs, you know? It's a little bit like every single medication being over the counter. There's a reason why they don't allow us to buy some medications. And so you let someone, a lot of farmers, especially in coffee, don't have access to education. They don't have access to information or to quality information. And they've been given access to the pharmacy and they say, and they depend on, you know, the recommendations of their colleagues, their neighbors. And then they go and they apply what they think is best. It's not that they have an intention of making it bad, you know, or of intoxicating, per say, but they don't really understand the side effects consequences because they're long term. And that's the other tricky situation is that when you apply nitrogen, for example, as a fertilizer, yeah, your plants will turn green. But yeah, it's a little bit like thinking that someone who is thin is healthy. Well, not necessarily. Yeah. You can have a chronic disease that's, and that's often the case with plants. The reason why they show symptoms like roya is because they're already unhealthy. Yeah. Roya is just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Roya is leaf rust for those who don't understand Spanish, but correct. So leaf rust is just the tip of the iceberg. It's a symptom of a dying plant. In fact, my favorite way of thinking about that is that fungus in nature, they don't eat living things. They eat dying things. Yeah, they decompose dying things. They decompose dying things. Like if you see a tree that's fallen over in a forest, it's full of fungus. Correct. But never a live one and never a healthy one. And so whenever we see roya on a coffee tree, my instinct isn't to think, oh shit, roya, let's kill the roya. My instinct is to say, how did this tree get sick in the first place? And how can we cure that sickness? And that sickness is often a cause of malnutrition. So anyway, the conventional system is based on these fertilizers first and then second, on other molecules that are used to cure the side effects of the excess nutrition. So we exceed ourselves in the nutrition, cause side effects, side effects, for example, like the roya. And then we need a molecule like a fungus side, which is an antibiotic, to be sprayed on the field to cure the side effects. So it's very clear that it's a vicious cycle, because you're not curing the root cause. You'll continue to cause the excess of nutrients, more problems like higher populations of insects. So now you use insecticides, higher populations of weeds, which really are trying to help your soil get better. Yeah. And now you use herbicides. And it becomes this very, very toxic management system. That's kind of like when you put herbicides, you remove the weeds, the soil becomes bare. And the nature's way of fixing bare soil is to grow weeds. That's correct. You just get more and more weeds every time you apply. Correct. You lose nitrogen, nitrogen, what do you call it? Nutrient cycling. You lose organic material, cause people just, no, we don't want weeds. Weeds is good. We don't want to control it. And without realizing, we're causing the same problem we see in medicine where the amazing technology that antibiotics are, are losing their efficacy because of our abuse of them. And so the same thing happens, right? I remember when the Royal epidemic started, everyone was desperate for a fundicide that would work, you know, because the losses were severe. Finally, systemic fundicides that worked with Royal came out and everybody started using them preventively. Without even any presence of Royal, we started spraying fundicides. We can't really observe because it's hard to see that that fundicide then leaks onto the soil and it kills all of the fungi, the beneficial ones. Yeah, all of the many, many, many, you know, Royal is one fungus. Imagine the hundreds of species of fungus that are in the soil cycling nutrients and distributing nutrients to plants. And so we've kind of put ourselves in this hole. And so that is in essence, the conventional system poorly used and there are many ways to do it a different way. I wouldn't say there's one way, there are many ways. But it requires technical understanding and perhaps this is where I think we've gotten a little bit lost with the best intentions. I think a lot of people in the alternative movement have the best intentions of stopping this toxicity. But they don't really have the technical training to be able to execute some of these nutritional protocols. And you really need to do both. And this takes me back to the origin of this conventional system, which is the soil chemistry. It's through understanding soil fertility, soil chemistry, soil structure, nutrient uptake in crops, nutrient distribution, phenological stages, really agronomy or what should be agronomy. Because now agronomy has become, you know, what fertilizer or fungi side or herbicide to recommend. So chemistry lab. Yes, more or less. But really it should be a biology lab. Absolutely, right? It should also be a biology lab. And yes, you should be taught to be used these chemical tools so that in the worst case scenario you have tools. And in the case that you can't access certain nutrients, you have these fertilizers. But we are abusing them at a rate. I don't know that people realize the rates of this abuse. It's very heavy. We're over applying a lot of chemical impulse. And when you say chemical, that's just like normally I try to use the word mineral fertilizer because everything is chemistry even by chemistry. Yeah. But so fungicides can be for sure chemical can also just be copper sulfate mineral fertilizer MPK. The reason why I'm really against using that in the first place is because it's a salt-based mineral fertilizer that you put on your soil. It's really kill microbiology, dry salt fungus and kind of provides the tree maybe with things it doesn't need. And also some research like I study a lot of Elaine Ingham's teachings not to say that she is always right. But some research she has mentioned is that the tree really shuts down. It's the hormones that it sends out to the microbiology that it needs to feed itself. Because it already has all the available stuff that it needs, not all of it, but some of it. Yeah, it's a great point and this is exactly where, and I'm sorry if this gets a little technical, but really it's the only way to talk about this is. Just do it. I'm Arles and I love geeking out, so I think at least I do. Perfect. Yeah, really the only way of understanding this phenomenon is an understanding that it is a technical world or it has become at least a technical world. I'll start by saying that there is this idea in the alternative movement in agriculture, including all of the schools, that we should go back to the way it used to be. You know, like our ancestors knew how to do agriculture. And I fundamentally disagree with that. Not because our ancestors didn't or did. In fact, there's a lot to learn from the past, from people who had a relationship with nature. But it has become quite a technical and modern enterprise to do agriculture in a responsible way. And it requires all of the knowledge we have from chemistry, all of the knowledge we have from biology. Of course, all of the non-scientific schools of teaching, like the way we relate to nature and our responsibility towards it. So it's really, I perceive the agriculture that we have to do to be a modern thing. We have to move into a new form of agriculture. So after saying that, the technical part is that chemicals is really the wrong word. You're right. Because every single, you know, if you ask a chemist what is a chemical, he would probably argue that our compost is as chemical based as our mineral fertilizer. Right? Because they're all formed from the same molecules. However, two things are different. One, and you're right, is these chemical fertilizers, or these mineral fertilizers, as you call them. And mineral is also a tricky word. Yeah, it's not a tricky word. It's a tricky word. Salt fertilizers. Yeah, so the salt fertilizers is a good term. And a salt, you know, people think of salt as a table salt, as sodium chloride. However, salt is really a chemical term referring to a precipitate, right? Like a solid form of something that's falling out of solution. And so we've created these fertilizers. Think of nitrogen, right? Like nitrogen is the most abundant molecule, or not molecule element in our atmosphere. It's completely abundant, but it's in a form that is very stable. Because when nitrogen becomes not stable, it is explosive, right? And so we've had to extract it from the atmosphere and precipitate it, make a salt of it, to pour it into a pellet that we can then use to feed our plants. And just to aside note that the carbon footprint of doing that, the harbor, what's it called? The harbor bar. The harbor bar process uses a lot of energy, which is normally petroleum. Yes. To make it, and sometimes it's made in Norway, and then we ship it on huge diesel-driven boats to Colombia, where it would deplete the soil. The fungus in the soil is killed. The carbon that the fungus is made of, because it's not just a mushroom with all the mycelium, it makes it in the soil. It evaporates into the atmosphere and creates CO2. And then we ship the coffee back with more diesel. So it's like the carbon footprint of that is crazy. Do you think about it? It is absolutely crazy, and it's even crazier when you realize it's not necessary. So, yeah, sorry for the side note, but it's a great side note, because it kind of, it demonstrates how crazy the system has become. But in essence, we take this nitrogen from the atmosphere, which is an essential nutrient that plants need. And conventional agronomists will say, well, but Mr. Farmer, you cannot grow crops without nitrogen. Everyone says that. And to me, on my biological farming technique, it needs nitrogen. That's all I hear. And what I like to say is it absolutely needs nitrogen. Plants cannot grow without nitrogen, or at least not that we know of yet. They absolutely need nitrogen. What they don't necessarily need is nitrogen that comes in a pellet, because nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere. So how do all of the plants that don't get fertilized in the world get their nitrogen? Well, they get it from the atmosphere, and they require a translator in the soil, which is a microbiological ecosystem. It's not a bacteria. People say, well, bacteria have oxygen. Well yes, but for those bacteria to do their jobs, they really need to be in a well-arrated, well-watered, fully diverse, functional ecosystem of a soil to be able to fix nitrogen with purpose. They are very smart, well, all living things are have intelligence. The bacteria have this form of intelligence called quorum sensing, where they can detect if the other bacteria that will utilize their secondary metabolites are present. And if they're not present, they become lazy. Why do the work of fixing nitrogen, which is very energetically expensive, if it's not going to be utilized? So it really requires a functional ecosystem, right? If that's present, then the bacteria will fix the nitrogen and deliver it to plants. And that nitrogen, by the way, is free. It's completely abundant over every single plant in any part of the world. It's not dependent on the way we think about soil fertility. Like, oh, is your soil good? We say, is your soil fertile? Well, really, nitrogen is above all of the soils of every part of the world. So really, nitrogen, I consider it not to be an issue. The issue is we've lost the translator, right? We've lost the catalyst that allows plants to absorb atmospheric nitrogen. And basically, it's the same exact thing for every other nutrient that plants need through different mechanisms and through different paths. But plants eat what they eat because it is widely available in the world's ecosystem. They don't eat it because some laboratory creates it. They eat it because it's abundant in ecosystems, right? And so these fertilizers, these NPK fertilizers, are really adding more of what's already there. They're just selling it to you. Can they be functional? Absolutely. Use responsibly. They can be functional. They are mostly not needed when you work well. And what I mean by well is when you're managing the ecosystem and soil chemistry and health well. And we understand the balance between the nutrient demands, your productivity goals, and how to make functional soil deliver those nutrients to your crop. And so that's really our job as farmers. I consider that to be the new modern challenge of a farmer is to understand these technicalities. So what's tough isn't really the technology to do it. I think we have the technology to do it. It's not end-to-know-how, more and more. More and more we have. Yeah, and part of that technology is the new, how it's the practical applications of how to do it. I don't think that that's what's missing. And oftentimes this problem is faced as if only we knew what to do. I don't think that that's the problem. The problem is really how to teach farmers all around the world in so many different languages, in so many different contexts, through so many different cultures that have so many different interests, how to apply these to so many different crops. And so that's really the challenge and that is no small challenge. I don't want to underestimate it. This is part of also why I own my farm. In the beginning it was kind of a childish dream just to be able to grow some coffee, to do some experiments, to try to increase the quality of the coffee. When I bought the farm just a couple of months later I took Elaine Ingham's classes and learned about soil biology. I was absolutely flabbergasted. I've been trying now for 10 years to do her techniques without success, somewhat success, but not very. I'm not a very productive producer and that's also because I'm not here and I don't necessarily have enough know how to do it and that's where you come into the picture. And I have to say like one of my goals in life is to change coffee. Change the world of coffee. That's kind of a big goal that I have and it's not very specified. But I hope that if we succeed with this because we have a voice in the coffee industry that other farmers will adapt and embrace these techniques because they can really change their farming. I believe. We'll see in three years the trials are three years but yeah. Anyway, continue please. It's very inspiring to you say that because I, if you ask the people that know me intimately they'll know that this is what I do when I sleep and when I shower and when I breathe is think of this problem. I am very motivated by this problem. So it's very nice to work with and meet people who are motivated by this problem as well. It is important I think that and for those of you who are listening, those are the conversations we've been having, Tim and I have been having is what is specifically the goal because to inspire people, to inspire farmers to set a model, set a standard, we really have to be clear about what we're trying to accomplish and some things are inherently clear. Productivity has to be enough to maintain a productive business, an economically active business as farming. The quality has, especially in our case because speaking about the project that we're doing, we really are working with specialty coffee and what a year to be talking about specialty coffee. Right. In a time where the prices being paid for conventional coffee are higher than what a lot of the specialty prices were being paid even last year. And so, yeah, in defining what it means to be successful. this project, I think there's a lot of wealth of information that can come out of those conversations. But I'm also motivated by setting an example that it can be done. And like you, I myself have got to where I am by mostly failing, by trying to apply everything I learned in the biodynamic schools and the permaculture schools and the organic schools and failing. And refusing to believe that what I was learning wasn't true. Because I see it every single day that I stand in a forest. I see it every single day. I stand in an ocean. And so how can it not be true? It's impossible for me to deny that ecosystem health is the way that soils function and that diversity causes health and that a forest can fertilize itself without intervention. It's impossible for me today to believe that that's not the way that plants grow. But also my personal experience is that when I try to grow plants with what I learned from the organic school, I wasn't very successful. I had more disease in my crops. I had less productivity. So how does that match? You know? And I think that's what we're here to discover with your farm is how can we make those things match? And to make that match, this is where the technical know how comes in. And this is where we really have to bridge the gap between all of the alternative schools of agriculture. And also the scientific and rigor of the conventional industry. Because there's a lot to learn from all of them and they all have great tools. And for a specific crop in this case, coffee, how can we use those tools to have success? How can we lower the inputs that are used? How can the inputs that are applied actually be functional? How can we measure their function? Because again, we apply these NPK mixes thinking that they view the results. Or it's very easy to believe that the productivity that you have is because of the fertilizer. Because when you remove it, you see deficiencies. But immediately almost correct. But that's a trick, right? It's a trick. There's more happening there. And so how can we cause that level of health when we don't depend on this large base of imported energy dependent and carbon-emitting substances? And so for me, that's the project, while also maintaining that because we're in a specialty market and because we care about quality, quality means, as we said, all of the intangibles, but tangibly speaking, a very nutritious well cared for bean. Yeah, dense beans. dense beans. And dense is really the best word, right? Because it's dense and nutrition. And that is objectively measured. Yeah, you can measure. I think I'm very much inspired by a wine, of course. Most of the good wine producers spend most of their times in their fields, making sure their grapes are the best quality possible. They spend much less time in the cellar. When you go to a conventional winery, it's the opposite. They just mechanically harvest everything. And then spend a lot of time in the cellar trying to ferment the wine with different yeast and blah, blah, blah to make it taste the way they want. And for me, that's not great quality, you know? And I think it's the same with coffee. And I truly believe that the reason why a lot of people, or most farmers, don't work like this is because they don't have to know how, of course, maybe, and then not the money. Like, there's no incentive to work like that. It takes a long time. And if a coffee buyer comes and they want to have a 90-point coffee and the farm doesn't, it's not at that potential because they're using conventional systems. The only way to change the coffee is by doing some funky processing, whatever. And that gives you immediate result. You can taste it the day after almost, you know? I think that's why a lot of the roasters also just think, you know, in order to have good coffee, you have, you just plant geisha and you do some strange process. And then you have a 90-point coffee where you can win a competition. For me, that's the complete opposite of what I want. Yeah, I can plant all varieties. I prefer that. But in order for them to thrive, they need shade, they need a good ecosystem. And then when you have good quality trees, good quality beans, you can do low intervention processing, as I call it, where the flavor or process is not the primary flavor in the cup. And then you will have a beautiful coffee. Maybe it won't be the most expressive, but you will have a beautiful coffee, for sure. It's interesting for me to hear you talk about a farmer, you know, you're working with now who you have seen his quality decrease over time. And he's using conventional methods. And I think this is happening across all of foods, right? Like the quality of our food has really lost nutrition and density and flavor. And a lot of people in the world have spectacular projects working on reversing that. But I have to say that I'm with you in really understanding and precisely what quality is because quality can't just be 90-point coffees. And that's not that we don't want 90-point. Of course, we want 100-point coffees, which by the way I've never tasted. I would love to taste. We want 90-point coffees that are caused. And right now I think we have 90-point coffees that are locked, that are selected for. And it's one thing to get a big pile of coffee from everywhere, process a bunch of experiments and then see, oh, this was 90 points. And say, wow, this whatever process we did and whatever variety we chose. Because it seems like it's the variety in the process that caused the coffee. And yet everyone has had experiences with using Gacha variety with average cobscores. And that same process with average cobscores. So it's not really causing those results. It's a little bit of stroke of luck. What I would like to see is a little bit what you described from the wine industry. Where they're really knowing how to manage their vineyard and in correlating the wine making and the vineyard and the agricultural management to cause quality. I think we've been able to do that with processing, you know, I think in the last 20-25 years there's been a huge push in making processing such that we can really make coffee better through better processing. I don't see that yet in coffee farming. I think there's concepts. I think we say, well, coffee ecosystem and regenerative and organic and we say those words. But I don't know of a single farmer that says because of the way that I farm every year, these are the qualities of my coffees. And that's what we really need, right, is to understand that we're causing these coffees. So the other thing is how to explain this. This concept sometimes eludes me in how to put them into words because they're complicated. But anyway, yeah, to. We can take some examples. Okay, we walked around the farm. Maybe we'll start very basically. We talked a little bit about conventional farming with the salt fertilizers. Maybe you can explain why it doesn't need work properly and what is the good alternative that you're working with. How does that work? So a plant requires certain nutrients, right? The famous ones and PK nitrogen phosphorus and potassium. But also a lot of micro elements that are a little bit like vitamins are for us. They're catalysts in metabolic processes. They're essential, right? If you have deficiencies of those micro elements, then the metabolic process won't work. So traditionally, we measure the soil. We add whatever is missing from that soil analysis. That's it's very tough to know what a plant needs unless you're measuring it actively. And a soil analysis is a frame of a film. It's like trying to a critic to be a critic of a movie when you only saw one frame. Yeah. It's very hard to know the health of a soil with a soil analysis. It's an important tool, but it's not a complete view. The people are, I'm calling them the people wrongly, but the beings who really are in contact with plants in direct contact in physical and biochemical contact with plants are fungi and bacteria who are in the soil, right? A fungi has a symbiotic relationship with a plant. It colonizes its roots. They become indistinguishable tissue, the mycelium and the root, and they communicate with each other. It's a trade. It's a symbiotic trade. The plant provides carbohydrates sap that it exudes from its roots. And in turn, the fungi will go search in the ecosystem. It can dissolve minerals. These minerals that are usually otherwise applied as fertilizer. It can find them in the soil, dissolve them, absorb them, and distribute them at the rates that they're needed, at the times that they're needed. And think about it. That is literally what we would think of designing if we were AI engineers. It's just have a tube into your arm and it will provide you everything you need all the time. Correct. You have a multitude of tools of many different species and another huge population of bacteria that are doing all of these active mechanisms to fix nitrogen, to solubilize phosphorus, to killate different micro-mootions that can then be absorbed into this mycelial network and this contributed to crops. So also, it's important to note that these systems aren't mutually exclusive. If you abuse the fertilizer, you destroy the microbiology. Too much salt simply put, dissolves the organic matter that feeds the microbiology. - That's why you use salt to preserve food. It kills the microbes. - That's correct. So if you exceed your fertilizer, you're in essence, killing off the food source that the microbiology needs. It's not that the necessarily that the fertilizer kills the bugs, it's indirect, but it's caused, right? Like if you abuse, if you every year you over apply fertilizer, you reduce the presence of a microbiology that's needed. And so you're killing the system that's feeding your plants while at the same time, trying to guess what nutrients your plant needs. So it's very dumb to think that we can calculate what in the case of coffee, 5,000 plants need in one hectare. And if you're a coffee farmer and you have two or five or 10 hectares, those are thousands of plants. We can't adequately guess what they need through one soil analysis. It's impossible, right? So our solution or the systems that we work with is in encouraging, well, the first part, and I'll say this because it's important, is in reaching a sense of humility, is in recognizing that we do not control that system. - Yeah. - It is perhaps the most important part. It's in realizing I cannot always know what my plants need. - So our job is really to encourage the system. - That's correct. It's to push the natural system and to guide it, to work with it, but to control it, it's a tubeless, right? We cannot control the natural system. And so you can choose to think so and sterilize it with antibiotics. But really it always wins, right? Like Roya, it doesn't matter how many billions of dollars of research going to developing a recitent variety, Roya will reach that variety. - Yeah, yeah, for sure. - Sooner or later. - So, for sure. - And everybody has seen that who, we just saw today, resistant varieties like Pregnod Roya. So our system is based on producing very simple, very cheap, very effective and functional inoculants that we can spread on soil to reestablish the microbiology that would be present in an old growth forest. And so that helps the soil really mobilize the nutrients and it connects every single one of those plants into a community with a soil. And then nutrients can be effectively distributed. I was saying that the systems aren't mutually exclusive. If you have a system like that and intelligent microbiological system that connects to your crop, then the right dose of mineral fertilizer can actually be more effective. But the right dose ends up being almost not necessary, right? Because of microbiological, in the case of fertilizers, the nitrogen you need is mostly being fixed by the bacteria. And any deficiencies can be corrected through polar sprays. And so that's another pillar of our work. In agronomy there's this belief that plants don't eat through their leaves, but only through their roots. But actually I think it's almost the opposite. It's, if we think about the plant as an organism, its brain is its roots. That's where it's connected to everything else that informs it, right? It's, ideally its brain is its roots. Conventional agriculture, its roots is a coma, toast brain. It's not connected to anything. But ideally, its roots is its brain and its leaves and its structure is its limbs. And through it, through our skin like us, we can eat through our skin, even though most of our calories come from our mouth. There's a lot of things that we can absorb through our skin. Leaves are the exact same way. And so these very small amounts of micronutrients can be measured and distributed to plants through polar sprays. And we like to work more with stimulating plants. So instead of only doing the linear thing, the linear thing would be to measure a folio analysis or a sap analysis and then to distribute boron, if it's missing boron, for example, that's the linear thoughts. The stimulant pillar is that we use different organic substances, like humic substances, like seaweed extracts, like amino acids, different substances that have been proven with profound research to stimulate the plant's own capacity to go search for those nutrients itself. Because they're almost always present in soils. So you stimulate the by spraying the leaves and then the roots will start searching for the nutrients that it needs. Yeah, the roots will send information to the biology in the soil to go searching for those nutrients. With hormones and. Right, yeah. Phytohoramones and also, you know, think about the fungi that's colonizing the root, that's being fed sugar, but it's not white sugar, it's sugar filled with information. Right, it's sap filled with information. And that information is demands, it's saying, if you want to live off of me, then for me to be healthy and do this for you, I need zinc. So it's kind of like, since you're Mexican, the roots are exuding tequila and the fungi starts searching for salt and lime. That's exactly right. For the salsa, for the taco, that's exactly right. And so, in essence, that's our system. In essence, our system is based on making the soil functional again through microbiological inoculation, stimulating the crop to work well with that system, covering up deficiencies through foliar sprays. So that, and the reason why we particularly use foliar sprays is because when you throw something onto the soil, that's a sea of chaos. You don't know what's happening there. It can easily not get absorbed and inputs are expensive. And our goal is to reduce the amount of inputs possible. Every ton of fertilizer emits three tons of carbon. And so, the more inputs that we apply, the more carbon we emit, and that's a critical problem, not only because of the environmental crisis, but because energetically, that is just reverse, right? We need to be using the sun's energy to capture it through the plant technology, the solar panels of plants, and then export energy, not import energy into agriculture. And so when the energy calculus is off, something is not right with your agriculture. So that's why we don't like to spread stuff in the ground because it's too inefficient. Doing it foliarly is a little bit like an IV, an intravenous substance. So it's more effective. And lastly, and I don't want to overstate this, but it's understanding the technicalities, right? The soil chemistry, the soil fertility, we have to use that tool too. Because, think, yeah, again, this becomes quite technical, but the pH and the cat ion exchange capacity, all of those things are very relevant. Oftentimes organic farmers will never measure that in their intention and deep belief that nature is smart, we forget to use the tools that science has given us. And so for us, it's a combination of things. We are not, we don't like to prohibit things. We believe all tools, including the fund resides to be amazing technologies that are just unfortunately abused. We don't believe in organic certification because of many reasons, but speaking about the technical prohibitions, when you prohibit the fund decide or an herbicide or fertilizer. Number one, you don't really clear the area of its presence because now those chemicals are completely distributed through our water cycle and they basically reigns glyphosate everywhere in the world. So there is no real place where that isn't present. But more importantly, because it doesn't recognize what farmers face. Farmers are facing the biggest risk that any businessman faces anywhere in the world. And we don't know yet. In fact, the best way I know how to think of this is insurers will no longer ensure homes in places where wildfires are too common. Right? They know how to measure that risk. We will not ensure you. However, we ask farmers, we say, hey, farmers, we are facing the same risk of that wildfire. In same risk, we don't know if it will reign. We don't know if it will be too hot. We don't know if there will be a flood. We don't know this insane risk. And we're also saying, and by the way, if you use this piece of technology that can save your farm, you are no longer organic. That's too severe for me. Should that mean that we open the flood gates and allow everyone to spray everything? Well, for one, everybody's already doing that. So let's recognize that for a second. But also, no, no, we should not allow that. Not because it is for us to allow or not, but because it doesn't work, it doesn't fix the problems. And so again, I believe we're facing an information problem, not a technology problem. Our job is, and this is why I am so willing to do with podcasts is because our job is to change how people think about this problem. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'm not encouraging the farmers, the farmers we buy from are, this is why I, okay, let me start over. When customers ask me why we don't have organic coffee, this is one of the issues. Like if they have. have a severe outbreak of leaf rust in their area. They're only way to save their farm and it's just praise on the fungicide. And that works for them. And not to say that we will continue doing that forever, but at the moment that's the technology we have. Maybe if the trees were more healthy, which they're not at the moment, the trees would not be, well, they will still get leaf rust, but they wouldn't be as affected by it. And also if you have a good ecosystem, we know that there are all the fungi that attack the leaf rust. So I think until we get there, of course we cannot deny them from using fungicides that are not allowed in organic farming. And that's why a lot of the coffees we buy are not organic certified, because I personally don't have to know how to change the farms immediately. We have asked all of them to stop using herbicides many years ago. Some of them have stopped recently. Some of them stopped many years ago. And that seemed to work pretty well, but then you need more labor, which can be a positive side effect in areas where you have a lot of people only have worked during harvest and not throughout the year, like Moisez and Marisa Bell. They're able to employ more people throughout the year by cutting herbs by hand. So it can be like a beneficial thing too. But anyway, I agree with you that I'm not necessarily doing this to get them organic certified. It's more the, I believe that if you have healthy soil, healthy plants, you will have less problems. And there is some research we can maybe mention. We went on a tour of Elias's farm and he has a problem with the little kind of insect that starts attacking the new leaves on the plants. And it kind of spread some kind of virus in it. Can you maybe explain if you have a healthy plant, you also suspect that this will not happen? - Yeah, healthy plants will strengthen their blood, which in the case of plants is sap. And a simple way to measure plant health is to measure sap bricks, which is the concentration of all things that are dissolved in the sap, not just sugar, but nutrients and minerals and everything that's dissolved in the sap. And when it is clearly demonstrated by many entomologist research that plant bricks above 12, makes a plant immune to past pressure, to insect pressure. In essence, what happens is that insects suck on plants. Again, a lot like fungi, insects are trying to kill the plants that humans shouldn't eat, right? - They're trying to find food for themselves. - Absolutely, right. And the food they can eat isn't the healthiest food. There are another order of organism. And so in terms of complexity, right? Of metabolic complexity. And so when you have a sucking insect that's trying to suck on a leaf that is very healthy, first, healthy plants will develop a lipid layer, a waxy cover on the leaf, that the insect can't suck through. And even if it did suck through and could get through that layer, the sap has become too thick, almost like a kin to us eating wood, right? Wood is plant, but it's not the plants that we eat. It's too complex of carbohydrates. - Unable to digest it. So you could actually die if you ate wood, right? We would puncture your GI tract. And so the same thing happens to insects. And so the best way to protect plants from insects isn't by spraying insecticides. It's through really making sure that the nutrition of the plant is such that the health can be so high that it can perform all of the active responses that it has to be able to protect itself from diseases and pests. - And for example, have you mentioned the brakes on a conventional farm versus one of your own farms? - Oh, many times. We use that metric often to show the way that our trials are set up, please, when we come to a farmer. We never, unfortunately for us, were a little bit late to the game. And so a lot of people like me have come before and promised solutions. And so the way that we have figured out how to be given an opportunity after all of the people that have come before us is to compare ourselves our proposed management to a commercial witness. And so we always say, pit aside by side, set up a plot where you do exactly what you're doing right now and let us do exactly what we want to do. - Which is what we're doing on all the farms now for three years. - Correct. - And we'll be reporting on those results. - Yeah. - But that's a beautiful way to do it because the farmer can really observe, oh wow, this is the difference, right? And many things come from those trials. And the SAP brakes we measure. And when you measure in just one short year of being treated with biology and which, and actually accomplishing proper and balanced nutrition in the treatment, you can see that the SAP brakes starts to rise in grapes. We continually measure the witness and the witness never exceeded six, which is not very high. That is about the state of all conventional crops around six bricks for the SAP. Our wine ended up being around 12, or not the wine, but the wine grapes. And the plant sap from the wine grapes. And that is almost double bricks, right? Same variety, same soil, the only thing different is the management. That wine went on to be harvested as separate lots, fermented in the exact same equipment, in the exact same way, using the exact same method. You could not believe the difference in flavor in the two wines. Two, blind, blind tasted, two different wines. And in all respects, the quality of the biologically grown wine was much higher. Why? Is it because there's no chemicals? Well, no, because as we said, what's a chemical? It's more because of what actually creates the sensorial effects. So anti-sion in the different antioxidants that concentrate in things that we eat, from anything, from vegetables, but of course, to grapes and coffee. And we're seeing a lot of this information coming out of the novel processes, where fermentation in the tanks met secondary metabolites from bacteria that come from fermentation in the tanks, actually transfer to the seed. And that's why processing can affect the flavor of coffee. The same thing happens in the soil when you have a highly active microbiological ecosystem that is exuding secondary metabolites that can be absorbed by the plants. And the nutrition of that plant on the concentration, the density, to use your word of that fruit really changes. And therefore, the wine changes. Very interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating. And so this kind of takes me back to the origin of-- when we started to taste that cafe rico, right? The coffees that we were developing that-- you know, they were almost the same cup score, but they tasted better. I don't know how to describe it. Like we're missing something on our cuping form, where we can say, well, the acidity is such. But this coffee I prefer it. Yeah. I know what I mean. I kind of know what you mean. I sometimes just call it vibrance, like vitality. Yeah, vitality, yeah. One of our-- I've tasted a few coffees that have been like different level without being more aromatic or anything, just textural and everything is just better, for sure. They normally come from high-grown places, but maybe just to give another example that I found very fascinating. We went on a tour on my farm today, and we saw some yellow trees with some leaves that were curling up. And I found that to be a very fascinating example, because if I brought traditional agronomists here, they would most likely say that it's deficient in, let's say, nitrogen. And so you need to add nitrogen. You had a completely different take on it. Can you explain a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So let's start by recognizing what coffee is, and coffee is an understory plant. It is naturally from the understory. It is a custom to shade. In what that means is that it's very effective at using little sunlight to photosynthesize a lot. And if anybody has seen a coffee tree carry-- a productive coffee tree carry cherries or fruits, there are many, many cherries on a coffee tree that is productive. And that just speaks to the amount of energy that a coffee tree can convert from the sun with very little light. When you put a coffee tree in a lot of light, that's a little bit like-- it's actually quite literally like spraying nitrogen into a gasoline racing car. Right? Right, just oxide or whatever it is. Right. And all two, right? And so it turbocharges the car. When you put a coffee plant in full sun, it can really take use of all of the sunlight that is now available to it. Almost to the point where to be able to use all of that energy, it demands more gasoline, more nutrients. And those nutrients, specifically relating to photosynthesis, are nitrogen, but not only nitrogen, right? Because as soon as you start using more nitrogen, then you start using more phosphorus, more potassium, more calcium, more magnesium, more borum, more zinc, more molybdenum, everything down the chain. because he's metabolic processes. are not linear and they're not, they're not singular to one nutrient. They're complex processes that use a little bit like moly, right? They need a little bit of everything. And so when you put a coffee plant in full sun, the same, and we saw this quite a few times today, that the same coffee plant next to a coffee plant that was under even light shade, the coffee plant under light shade was the leaf seemed relaxed, the leaves seemed opened, and there was no apparent deficiencies. And the light, the plant in full sun was, the leaf had folded itself to protect itself from all of the radiation. You could see a very distinct yellow edge on the edge of the leaf that was very, very yellow, signifying a calcium deficiency. And a lot of the new growth had some chlorosis, some nitrogen deficiencies. So when an agronomy sees these, you know, we're trained, it's kind of a beautiful art. You're trained to see these deficiencies in the plant and then you say, ah, perfect like a doctor, you say, you have this symptom, then the cure is this medicine. But exactly like doctors, a lot of the medicines don't cure the root cause. And the root cause in this case isn't a nitrogen deficiency. It's an imbalance between the energy being applied to the crop and the nutritional program being applied to the crop. So there's two ways to fix that. You can either apply more nitrogen to this full sun plant or you can calibrate the shade and or the energy and nutrition that's being fed to the to the plant. Many producers have this belief that if they shade their coffee system, they will lose productivity. But productivity doesn't only come from sunlight. Yes, sunlight is important. But as we said, coffee is actually very, very effective in capturing sunlight under shade. So you can rather the opposite is true with shade, you can reduce the excess fertilizer that you need to apply to compensate for the burning of energy that happens when the plant is in full sun. So putting a coffee plant in full sun can work. Yes, can you tailor nutritional programs to it? Yes, absolutely. Will it produce higher productivity? No, not necessarily. You can absolutely produce the same productivity, high productivity under a shaded system, which by the way has many other benefits. Right. Like more stable climates, less temperature shocks, root extrudation, nitrogen flixation of certain species of trees, another ecosystem for other insects for birds, right? Like ecosystem health. Nutrient cycling, nutrient cycling. So these, again, these problems aren't simple. They require some technical understanding. But it is true that we oversimplify these problems to the point where we want to fix everything with medicines, right? We want to fix deficiencies with fertilizers. It takes understanding how the plant operates in the context of its ecosystem to be able to really create a system that works well. I find it fascinating that when you look at farms, I've been traveling with a guy that has been filming a little bit for us. And when he sees, for instance, a field from Tamala, only coffee trees, he says, "Oh, this is beautiful." And I say, "Well, this is, for me, the opposite of beautiful, it's like monoculture. I'm trying to get really diversify." And it seems like we have gotten to a point where we think that any other plant and coffee tree in our field will compete with the coffee in terms of nutrients and everything. Well, the answer is actually. And so you have to apply a lot of nutrients. The answer is the opposite. You need a lot of plants in your field to be able to feed the coffee tree because it provides an ecosystem, as you say, in the soil of microbiology and also nutrient cycling. Also, I remember Hillbatto told me when I started planting bananas and trees in the field and I was like, "Be careful because they take all the water from the coffee." I'm like, "No, it actually does the opposite. It provides water and mulch and everything." So, my says says always, just referring to all the farmers I've been buying from, but says the future of coffee is in the past of the coffee. The old days people grew coffee on the shade, even here in Colombia. Once they removed the shades, started technifying the farms as they call it. So, I think, 4,500 trees per hectare only with coffee. That's when the roya appeared. Totally true. Yes, it's. So, let's say this thing where there's these beliefs in coffee or in all of agriculture, if you let the weeds grow, the weeds will lead to fertilizer that we're applying. Well, yes, that's true because if you have an IV, which is soluble fertilizer, you know, and there's two patients sharing the IV, well, the patient that has the closest contact to the needle or actually has a needle in them will eat it. And in the case of herbs, they have very shallow roots, they have. They're very effective, they're annual plants. And so, they will consume the soluble fertilizer that you're distributing. So, in the case of a system that's dependent on high inputs in the form of fertilizer, yes, weeds are a competition for coffee. So, let's kill them and how should we kill them with herbicide and because it's cheaper than cutting them by hand. But then if you keep thinking that way, you can see where it takes you, right? It takes you to ecosystem decimation. You will destroy. We have destroyed the ecosystems, which is why eventually roya, right? Or loss of productivity. Or, I don't know what happened is that I lost. You know, I'll cut my prune, my coffee trees and they won't grow back again. So those are all ecosystem effects or side effects. On the other hand, you could use biology, have your crops connected to an underground technology that is much smarter than any robot or chip that we can design today. And then all of the herbs, they will capture sunlight and distribute carbohydrates to these bugs and participate in the cycle of feeding your coffee, right? So both can be true. Weeds can be good for your coffee. Weeds can be bad for the nutrition of your coffee. It depends on the route that you choose to take. If we continue to choose the route of soluble fertility, chasing this illusion of productivity, because I would argue that it hasn't been stable, right? These productivity gains haven't been stable. They go down every year now. Now they're at the point where everybody complains about fertilizers. Before fertilizer, great technology. Now fertilizer, what a cost, they're too expensive. They cause all of these carbon emissions. And so now we're realizing the side effects. It takes us a while to recognize the side effects. Or we can use what's already there in a technified way, you know? Yes, microbiology, but not just microbiology as a concept. No, technical microbiology, functional microbiology. And really work with the ecosystem to do what it wants to do. Because those weeds don't grow. Imagine how energetically intense it is for a hectare of land to grow weeds. It takes a lot of energy. It doesn't do it because it's lazy. It doesn't because it's necessary, right? And so again, to start with a humility that we have to follow nature and cause and accompany it in its process and take some measurements and participate as little as possible, which is where I love your concept of lazy farming, of minimal intervention. And that again, that's not to say that you cannot use fertilizer, sure, use them, but use them only because you know that what you will apply will be utilized by the crop in a form and time and manner and formulation that will be effective for your crop. Because right now we're just dumping toxicity, really. So yes, I, it's what has to change is that we have to recognize that it's not simple. You know, I think of advertising today. I advertise if you look at ads of the 1940s, they were like three paragraphs of text. And in our ticked, tockified minds, we can't even tolerate a paragraph. You know, it has to be two words, right? And so we've driven advertising to be so simple. I know it has to be simpler, simpler. Okay, we have to recognize that it comes at a cost. And in agriculture, we want to oversimplify everything and that has come at a cost. So my favorite phrase for our consultancy is, listen, it's really simple. It's not. Okay. It's just not simple. And that to me is an opportunity. It's an invitation. It's let's learn together, let's train together, let's work together. And what we're doing with a group of producers that are all of the farmers that have been working with you for a long time is quite spectacular, right? Because the group gets to learn from each other. We have trials in different soils in different countries, in different ecosystems, different varieties. But the concept is the same. And to me, that's very powerful, right? Because then there's collective learning. It's a collective consciousness of how we can really generate these results. So I'm excited to see what happens, right? Like, I'm excited to cup these coffees. I mean, sometimes I wish I didn't take the path of patience because it takes so much time, you know? But I can't wait until two to three years. Yeah. we can start tasting the coffees and start seeing the results. I think this is a perfect way to round up because we are for sure gonna talk more about this project, but I was thinking of like, portioning it out over the three years now. So we can kind of follow the project. We call it a TW Organic project, is our group name on WhatsApp. But I'm not sure why it chose that name. It was a working title and that's what it's called now. - Yeah. - But we were for sure to talk about it and see the progression. Just to our listeners, your company name is Biofilia, you're located in Mexico. You work around the world? - Almost. - Almost. - Any crop? - Yes, we work in any crops right now. We're working mostly all throughout the American continent and in Europe. We do not work in Asia or Africa yet, but we would love that. And yes, we work with many crops. The system applies to all crops. - Yeah, I think so too. - It's just maybe a little bit different microbiology for different crops, but nature takes care of that. I think you're right. - That's right. (laughing) - Great. I think we will end it up there, Lalo. And hopefully we'll be back here in August where we have already done some work. Hopefully we're working on trying to kind of find the person that can help us manage the project here because it takes a lot of work in the starting phase, at least on my farm where we're gonna plant more plants and do some kind of experiments with some new systems while also kind of developing what we already have. So hopefully we will be able to talk about that then. Also meeting the other farmers. We're all gonna meet here. So thank you, Lalo, for joining the podcasts. And to the listeners, I really hope you enjoyed listening to this. If this was way above your head, and wanna learn more about microbiology in soil, I can't recommend enough to search Dr. Elaine Ingham on YouTube or Vimeo, listen to some of our lectures, and listen, be, take a cup of coffee and be alert because it's very, very dense, but it's also very simple to understand. Once you understand it, it's very, very simple to understand. And the principles Lalo is working with is very much based on what her knowledge is about. The soil food web, it's normally called. But of course, there are different paths to take and working in the tropics is not necessarily the same as working in North America or in Norway for that sake. So there are many kind of, I would say, hybrids of this, but the principles are the same. We work with biology and the biology work with the plant. That's it. - Yeah, thanks for the time. I'm excited to cup those coffees, see the results, and yeah, if any of the listeners want to continue this conversation, we're happy to do so. Fantastic. Thank you, Lalo. (upbeat music)