433 Dimitri Tsitos - Three years of R&D in intensive almonds: can you really do regen?

Dimitri Tsitos, co-founder of Agrosystemic, left Greece a decade ago, spent years working across European farming systems, and eventually landed in Portugal to run what has become one of the most rigorously monitored regenerative trials in Mediterranean intensive tree crop agriculture. He is the lead on the field research side of the Arbo-Innova project, a multi-farm, multi-consortium research platform focused specifically on the question of whether regenerative practices can be meaningfully integrated into the intensive orchard systems that now cover hundreds of thousands of hectares across the Iberian Peninsula.

A five-hectare plot of intensive almonds at Monta Silveira Farm, in Portugal, fenced against deer, planted at the same density as the conventional neighbours surrounding it on all sides, and now in its third growing season: that is where this conversation takes place. The trees are about two metres tall. The interlines are green with different cover crop mixes. One area is under plastic mulch; another has clovers growing in the tree lines themselves. The data is beginning to come in, and what it is showing — on nitrogen levels inside the tree, on herbicide use, on fungal disease pressure, on water infiltration — is quietly shifting the conversations Dimitri is having with an industry that, until recently, was mostly watching from a distance.

In this walk-and-talk episode, recorded at 8am on a May morning in Portugal, birds audible throughout, with the 8,000 hectares of conventional intensive almonds next door visible at every turn, we get into why cover cropping can fail spectacularly at 70 euros a hectare and why that matters enormously for adoption, what clovers on the tree berm are doing to nitrogen inside the almond tree (and what they’re competing for in return), why the most intellectually honest conventional growers are the ones leaning in first, how the J-curve of regenerative transition can be quantified and eventually financed, and why the real metric of progress might be the moment a farmer asks you to slow down.

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Transcript

Regen Almonds Big Questions

Koen van Seijen 0:00

Pushing the boundaries of what a super destructive industry and a region movement thought was possible. This is a check-in conversation and work with Dimitri while we walk the RD plot of intensive alliance. We talk about what they've learned. Regenerative practices really work. But which ones? And in what order and how to stack them, and how to make them even better, and how many practices at the same time should you apply? Where are the compromises? In between tree clovers, aka living knowledge are great. They bring more nitrogen to the soil and into the trees. But they also compete with water with the small trees in the first years, and they lead to smaller trees. Is it worth it? And do they catch up later on? All dilemmas and interesting research questions in the years to come. But the first data is very clear. Regenerative practices offer massive opportunities to reduce the environmental negative impact of the intensive orchard industry. This requires a lot from the sector and all of us, but it's totally possible. It will create huge wins for the environment and it's actually a profitable transition. So what's not to like? None of this is easy, obviously. So get ready. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food Podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities, and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. 8 a.m. in the morning in Portugal. Welcome Dimitri, welcome back on the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Thank you very much.

Koen van Seijen 1:32

We're gonna do a little walk and talk in a special research, development, innovation plot in uh on the farmer Joao, who the interview might be out around this time, but we also recently walked and talked at set mostly because it was getting very hot and windy. That's why we do this early morning. Apart from all the birds that people are gonna love, because we had a lot of comments when we had Stefan Donggen of the home of the pioneers of our time. We recorded at six in the evening in his forest, and the birds were amazing. People are like, oh, they're one with the birds. So this might be the one with the birds as well because they're nice and active. Where do we walk? So, what should people imagine? This is of course a podcast, audio only. I will take some pictures and some things. I might do some mini shoots as well, so you can have an idea. But to bring people that are maybe driving or people that are maybe running or cooking or walking or pecking eggs, what do we see around us, bring us here visually?

Inside the Arbo Innova project

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Yeah, so right now we are in one of our research plots from the Abinova Project. The Abuinova project in Portugal, for those that don't know, is basically turning into a tree crop, intensive tree crop research hub. So we're basically looking at the issue around the intensification of tree crops, which is increasing a lot in the Mediterranean area with every time more super intensive olives, intensive almonds, and we're basically seeing a big opportunity here to bring in alternative regenerative practices because these systems are very productive, economically viable, but they also are highly dependent on inputs, also cause some serious soil issues. So there's an obviously a big impact or big opportunity here to reduce all these negative effects and all the ecological challenges, but especially there's a huge opportunity to improve the resilience of this industry, of the production of olive oil, of almonds, as we're seeing nowadays with challenges around input prices and input availabilities. So that's what Ahbu Nova is basically working on at the moment.

Koen van Seijen 3:50

And if you want to dive deeper into that, we did a full length episode about a year and a bit ago. Many people outside this industry don't really grasp the scale and the destruction, but also the opportunity because these are real profitable systems in most years. Of course, this year input prices are insane, the almond prices have recovered a bit but have been low as well. But in general, this is a productive, commercially driven. We're surrounded here by about 8,000 hectares of that, which is small. For Portugal standards, imagine long rows of trees they're growing, they have roots in the soil. Underneath, there's not a lot happening. Rain of this winter, you can see clearly, took away a lot of the soil, the sand, etc., and deposited on the roads. That's clear erosion. Quite a lot of gullies. There are not a lot of birds around in those systems. There's a lot of input that's the big fungal diseases now, pressure, like a lot of water needed and not really being absorbed by the trees. But these are mostly, on average, profitable systems, but under stress and with challenges. And you're saying basically, with certain regenerative practices, and we have to figure out which ones and in which dimensions and what scale and what intensity and what complexity, you can reduce a lot of those challenges and actually convert them almost in opportunities. Like there's so much low-hanging fruit, quote unquote, pun intended, obviously, to push these systems, to nudge them, to pull them, whatever. And in these certain circumstances, the industry is interested, it's starting to lean in. Like when we talked last year, it was still really at the beginning. You planted, just planted this like the year before almost. Like this is two, three years old. Yeah. Talk about what we're seeing later so people have an understanding. We see about trees two meters, two meters something just above me, a lot of diversity on the ground around in the tree lines. But these are planted the same intensity as all the others. And but now the industry is leaning in. They're not knocking on your door yet, but you're you're mentioning you have to follow up on a conversation of last year, very different conversations now in the last months, in the last six months, about not just a few crazy hippies that want to do cover crops, but actually, oh, this could be something we could do in our five-hectare plots or in our 50-hectare plots, in our 5,000 hectare plots. Because for people, I think how many hundreds of thousands of hectares are farmed this way in just in the Iberian Peninsula?

SPEAKER_01 6:02

A few hundred thousand hectares. It's big and the Mediterranean is full of tree crops. It's always been almonds, olives, walnuts in some areas. These are just very traditional systems, and gradually they've evolved from these traditional agroforestry systems towards the superintensive systems. But going back to what you were saying earlier on, that's that's what we're seeing now. And I think for crises as we're seeing now with the fertilizer issue and price, for example, which peaked in 2022, recovered, now peaked again, and it's probably gonna sustain the price, they're gonna stay high, availability is gonna stay low for a while due to the crisis happening in Iran. And also in Ukraine, with Russian production going down. These are things that make the conversation every time more pertinent. And this is the whole premise, from at least from my perspective here, and what I'm seeing in this specific industry in this region, the whole premise of region AG is around resilience and adapting to shocks. Right now it's fertilizers, but next year we had a really good winter with lots of rain. But maybe next year or in two years' time, it's gonna be lack of availability of water, like we've been seeing in Spain. It's

Growing Your Own Nitrogen

SPEAKER_01 7:08

risk management. And so when you have the risks popping up, then we were basically monitoring nitrogen on our cover crops, monitoring biomass on the cover crops, different nutrients, also on our interline, on our tree line clovers, which we'll talk a bit more about. And we did some calcul, we ran some calculations here. And in the Normand orchard, we've basically got about 100 to 120 units of nitrogen inside our cover crop. Most of it has been fixed because there's not a lot of available nitrogen in the soil, so the bacteria are really working hard to fix that nitrogen. And of that nitrogen, we've got about 30 to 40 units that is available to the tree this year. All right, the rest of the nitrogen, it basically gets gets some of it gets lost to volatilization during the decomposition process, and others and the rest of it gets stored in the organic matter of the soil, and so it becomes available little by little in the future. It's like a bank account. Yeah, it's basically an investment. But there's 30 to 40 units that are available this year, and we believe that can be a lower estimate. We can go higher.

Koen van Seijen 8:06

30 to 40 units. How much does a tree need?

SPEAKER_01 8:10

A young tree that's two years at the moment, like these olives, these almonds that are here, we're giving them about 40 to 60 units. A mature almond orchard will need that at this is dependent on production on how much leaves, but let's say it's between 120 to 180 units, depending on the yield. In olives we're at around between 90 and 120, so it can represent significant proportion. And when you're looking at the fertilizer prices now, it's really quite interesting, and especially you compound that effect as you're increasing the organic matter, as you're increasing the amount of nitrogen in the system because you're doing this every year, you're just basically activating your nutrient cycle, so you're less dependent on nitrogen that's coming from Russia or from anywhere else that's where prices are high and availability is being compromised. So that's the kind of conversation that we're having at the moment. And what we're talking about is that.

Koen van Seijen 9:17

Because the cover crop and the clover in the between the trees also need they're competing at the beginning a bit with the tree, so you'll see they're slightly lower. There's a balance and a dance here. These are highly productive systems, they need to be as fast, developed as possible, and yielding, and they need to be kept that way. These are like Champions League athletes. They need a lot, they need very specific nutrition, they need very specific, but if you can replace half or a third of that nutrition already in the first two years by growing cover crops, that the seeds are cheaper than the whatever input you buy from far away. And you can start to play with okay, what do we need more to be available? How do we mow it? How do we apply it, etc. etc. And it has all the other benefits. You hear the birds, which means a lot of insects. You the beneficial insects are very important.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

They are just the most multifunctional tool.

Koen van Seijen 10:03

And nobody else is doing it. Like in the normal ones, just to be clear for people that they understand, like there's a mini line in the middle of the trees because they spray close to the trees and far away, which means everything else, herbicides, everything else is killed except for the line in the middle that they just didn't reach. So there's already a lot of optimization there just to reduce that. And uh what's in the mind because it there's a cost.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Basically, why are people not implementing many of these practices and putting on the store health?

Koen van Seijen 10:32

How is that possible? Like it's so obvious now. I'm joking.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

No, it's only for people that have been exposed to it and that have been studying this, and it can make sense. So I understand that for some people that makes less sense, but also let's look at the neighbors here. And when you're managing a thousand hectares, the decision of investing, of putting 60, 70, 80 euros a hectare in a cover crop, it's not an easy one. Because actually, whilst what we're seeing here is that whilst many people may believe in the concept and understand the concept, and that's what we're seeing when we're having conversation with these large-scale growers, they also are not sure how to actually implement the practice without messing up. Because imagine, worst case scenario, you've put in 70 euros a hectare, planted the cover crop, and the cover crop doesn't germinate well because you planted it too deep. You didn't plant it in the right type. And that's a common mistake. Like cover cropping, we say it's in terms it's an easy practice to implement on farms in terms of how it adapts to the system, it's multifunctional, it's really just like a low-hanging fruit in terms of the regenerative practices, it's usually where we start, but it's also easy to make a lot of mistakes to get it right.

Koen van Seijen 11:36

And if you as an operator, because these are farms that are owned by the land is still owned by someone else, they are rented lease long-term to financial to funds, and they're operated by someone else. And if the operator managed to get some budget to do cover crop 60, 70,000 euros to do that, and then it fails, that was probably the last experiment they're gonna run for quite a while. And so we have to be very cautious, I think, of why are not everyone doing it. And that's why it's so important what you're doing here. This is a fenced-off place, this is at a real size, we fenced off because of the deer, because they really loved almond trees, and it's five hectares, which is a normal plot size, and you're doing a lot of different experiments at a real density and at a real relevance to say, okay, which cover crop makes? Because it's easy to say, okay, how does it grow? How does it compete? Doesn't it compete? How do you mow it? How do you deposit it on the tree lines? How do you do all of those things? Because it's not that you can go on the Iberian Peninsula and easily find somebody that does this at a commercial scale to say, okay, show me like the 10 years you've done it so we can learn because you didn't find it, hence you started this project.

SPEAKER_01 12:40

There is some studies on cover cropping in the Iberian Peninsula that shows some of the results, etc. What's unique about this project here is that firstly it's a local example, it's not just a research plot, it's actually, as you said, on real on-farm, and we've got different research plots on different farms, right? So it's basically a real on-farm demonstration site on top of having the data. That's one of the things that that's important here, but also we're trying to we're implementing five or six different mixes implemented across the farms, and so that's helping us to also refine what is the right mix. Some mixes are more focused on legumes, others are more focused on biomass, for example, others are perennial mixes, and we're basically looking at these mixes and their effect on the tree performance over two to three years. So that's where the data there is helping us to optimize the mix for this specific context, which is the intensive tree crops. And it's true that there isn't that much information data on the specific intensive tree crops system. And the objective is to plant it out here, show the data, and show the effect to the people that are basically the neighbors of the project.

Koen van Seijen 13:44

You mentioned now there with these crises in general, but also in general, the sectors under pressure, environmental pressure, price pressure, inputs in general, the trees are struggling around here to absorb enough water. Like there are quite a few challenges in just like any Champions League player. It's always, if you perform at that level, the tiniest thing can throw you off, basically, or like a marathon runner in the Olympics. What is different now than a year ago in terms of like conversations with the industry, with the top players in this space?

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Things have changed quite a bit recently. You're coming into an industry, also as a new company, new project, different people, not always locals, people coming from outside, and it does create a bit of resistance. Who are these people? What are they doing? What do they want? And are they serious? Totally fair enough. I understand all of these things. And after a few years of being here, being showing that we're committed, we're going on the fields frequently, we're we're we've got different projects, we're starting to show data. That's when things changed a lot as well. We recently organized one of the first, let's say, regen-focused days for the almond industry here in Portugal, where we basically were working in collaboration with Junica and with David Doll, who is a person that we work very closely with, and he usually organizes the almond days where he brings different experts to talk about almonds to the almond industry. And this is the first time this year that we had a basic morning dedicated to regenerative practices. And we brought some scientists from UC Davies, we presented some of the work that we've been doing in almonds and in olives, and the day sold out. We had 65 people there from the industry coming. We didn't really know how many people were gonna operate exactly. And in the end, we realized people are really interested to know because everybody's heard about it, and now they want to know okay, what does it actually mean in practice? That was really a strong validation. We're also starting to present data compared to a year and a half ago where we were implementing these practices. Now we still are, but we're starting to get some feedback, quite a lot of feedback operationally, also in terms of plant performance, in terms of our input uses, and also in terms of soil optimization, soil health, microbiology, looking at biodiversity, all of this is starting to come in. And so that also changes the conversation. When you can talk to a farm and say, Well, this is what we've reduced or optimized, or this is the change in costs, for example, suddenly you're getting you're having a very practical conversation, and that's the kind of things that we've been talking about. The industry, just focusing on almonds where we're at right now, the industry is concerned about uh two key things at the moment. The first one is water, in terms of almonds need a lot of water, and even if they're allocating, they're allocated quite significant amounts at the moment, it's not enough to meet, let's say, maximum plant development and performance. And there's something blocking, or there's not enough water. There's not enough water, but also the soils are struggling to absorb that amount of water that they're applying, and we've got a reduced water use efficiency. And the other one is fungal diseases, and so also what we're working on right now, and this is where we need to be smart with these regenerative practices that we're implementing, instead of just implementing a set of practices. Okay, this is my menu of regenerative practices, and I'll implement my cover crops and this and that. And that's not the right approach. So for if you want to really have an impact in an industry and really build some solutions, you need to start with what are the key problems that the industry is facing, just more holistic view of things, the regenerative approach, how can that target these specific issues? We start there and then we'll build up, and then there'll be some other co-benefits that will also be felt by the industry and that they'll appreciate. And so that's why we've been focusing a lot of the practices on water infiltration, on mulching and protecting the area that's irrigated from the sun to reduce the temperature of the water, reduce evaporation of the water from the soil, and also been focusing on how do we optimize plant health. At the moment, they're applying a lot of fungicides and that they're still not managed to control a lot of the fungal issues because the almond tree is very sensitive and it's planted in a country which compared to central Spain is much more humid in key moments such as spring. And so we're also looking at how does microbiology enhancement how can that affect a plant health. There's a connection there that's starting to be talked about by regenerative producers. It's starting to be talked about in the science, hasn't been fully validated. A lot of people are skeptical about it. What we're seeing here is that you've got some growers that are extremely efficient and extremely, let's say, knowledgeable around conventional fungal management techniques.

Koen van Seijen 18:18

It's reaching its are they the ones also leaning in, like the most commercial, the most efficient, the most forward-thinking in that sense, like at spear, the top of the spear of the conventional world, but the top of sphere. Are they the ones to say, okay, how because they've noticed they reached the limit of what they can do with another passage of spraying and with another mix of something?

SPEAKER_01 18:38

The ones that are open and the ones that are intellectually open and honest, and thinking, okay, this is not really working out. What else can I do? Are leaning in, of course. We're having that conversation. And so, where we're at the moment is saying, okay, so how can we then bring in that next layer, the next tool that we have, because these conventional tools are not working, is soil health, the connection between the soil health and the plant health. And so that's so, for example, through a more active microbiology, we have a more active soil, the plant's immune system is stimulated, nutrients are more available, all of these things that we've talked a lot about in the past. So we're trying to see how that link to plant health. And interestingly, right now we're in this organic orchard. So this is our organic test plot. We have a few different test plots, most of them are conventional. This is the one that's organic. And I've been sharing some pictures with some of these growers that we're working with and talking with, and we've only applied three treatments of a product that is basically a bacillus-based product, so it's not a pathetic fungicide, it's a bacterial-based fungicide, not considered to be very strong at all compared to uh a chemical. And we're not seeing a strong presence of fungal diseases. We're in low-lying areas, the neighbors are just there with almonds and they're spraying many times, spraying about 10 times in the season, and we're not seeing fungal diseases. Does that mean that we've won the battle? No. But why are we spraying much less with much weaker products?

Koen van Seijen 20:09

Could it be because they're young? Could it be, or do you anyway seeing young orchards already?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

That has an influence. The fact that sometimes the fact that they're young can make them more sensitive, but also the fact that they're young means that there's more aeration. Could be a factor, but still it's surprising. But we're showing these pictures and we're showing people this, and they're surprised. That's the effect that we want with this project. We want to challenge some of the beliefs and the assumptions that the current agronomy system here is based on. That's our objective.

Koen van Seijen 20:37

And like when we were walking here, we see the trees are again about two meters high, some are lower. You had a lot of deer incidents until you put a fence around. They really loved to enable on certain trees in certain areas. But now the trees are exploding, like some are really going fast, others are getting there as well. We see some of the more control plots as well, having already a nice amount of almonds on it, which is interesting. And it's green, it's green in the interlines, depending on what you've done, but it's buzzing with life compared to yet a neighbor. You can see there, which are mature trees, of course, it's different, but very little life underneath.

Living Mulch Tradeoffs and Costs

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Let's unpack one of the things that you said uh here around the deer and the growth, because I think that's a really good example of how regenerative practices how you need to uh build a compromise. Yeah, yeah. So basically, let's visualize this for the listeners. We've got different trials and different things that are being tested here in this plot because it's a scientific experiment. We're trying to test different techniques, so each technique can be expressed in a different way. Here we've got, for example, underneath the tree line, we've got clovers. Okay, these clovers are planted, so it's a mix of perennial clovers. We've also planted annual clovers as a control test, and we've also got an area where we've basically put a plastic mulch on the line to understand the difference. Obviously, the plastic mulch we could consider it as not ideal. It puts plastic, it does degrade in the sun and create put micro. Plastics into the soil. It's also quite expensive to implement at the start. Something that costs about a thousand euros per hectare to implement.

Koen van Seijen 22:40

Whilst the clovers the soil underneath, sorry to interrupt, become sand, basically cooked, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 22:46

Yeah, so that's the effect on the soil.

Koen van Seijen 22:47

I was gonna weeds have no chance, which is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Weeds have no chance, they don't grow there. And then on the other side, we've got the clovers, and these clovers is basically you can just see the line is green, you've got a they've got lots of flowers on the line. The clovers, we selected them because they're low-lying, they fix nitrogen, they're also perennial, so they're using the irrigation and they're just creating a mat, they're suppressing weeds, sometimes more effectively, sometimes less effectively. But we're seeing in general that we've got a 70 to 80 percent suppression, which is not too bad. And the soil underneath is very active, very well aggregated. You open it up and there's full of insects.

Koen van Seijen 23:23

We were looking at it with a coon yesterday, and you can just see it's it's radically different. Very less warm, it's much darker, it's lighter, it smells nice, etc. But there's a butt.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

We planted these clovers here, and the trees grew slightly slower because of the competition with the clover, whilst under the plastic mulch they grew slightly faster, and we had deer coming into the orchard. This is a region that's become an eco-region, and the deer populations have grown a lot recently, and is becoming a big issue for new plantations in the recent years, which is the case of ours, which was planted two and a half years ago. And basically, the deers firstly, the trees that were faster growing, that faster speeds allowed them to grow above deer browsing height faster, but even more importantly, the deer didn't like the plastic. They didn't like to walk on top of the plastic, whilst, of course, a line which is just clovers and natural, they're very used to. They were scared of the plastic and they took time to get used to the plastic. And after two years, they got used to the plastic. And so, what happened is that the trees that were in the regenerative era were slightly slower and were affected by the deers, and deer browsing in a regular basis. Basically, they come a few times in the season, they nibble the tips. That affected the growth. So we had to install a fence around it because it was affecting the results of the experiment. And since then, uh, that was done last year, and now the trees are finally being able to grow and we're seeing their real potential being expressed, let's say.

Koen van Seijen 24:45

Which is interesting because it has nothing to do with your gender practices, except that there was no plastic which cared of the deer.

SPEAKER_01 24:50

It's interesting, but it's a factor that is also a part of the reality. So it's interesting to understand how it works. That said, I'm gonna go back to the competition thing. It's really interesting to see that when we have the clovers where we're doing tissue analyses, when we have the clovers on the berm, we have much higher nitrogen levels inside the tree, and the clovers are furnishing a significant amount of nitrogen. So that's really interesting in terms of the nutrition side. But we are observing, and we're doing this on different farms, we are seeing an indication of competition happening, especially around the water, and so the trees are going slightly slower. And what our project's trying to do, we're trying to find answers for the industry and trying to give them basically clarity, operational clarity, economic clarity, we're trying to measure the cost and the benefit. That's how much it costs, that's how you do it. That's how the mistakes that you shouldn't make that we've made during the implementation, and those are the results, and that's what you can expect in terms of reduced yield or reduced vigor, or even what we're trying to see here is do we have a reduced yield in the early years? But later on, because the soil under the plastic mulch is really degrading, and we're seeing it already in our soil analysis, the carbon is going down, whilst the carbon in our tree on the mulch area is going up, and the living mulch in the clover mulch is going up. Well, at some point, that compromised soil start to flip that thing. We may have had better growth at the start, but then in the future, our trees with the clovers will be healthier. This is why these things need to be tested for multiple years. You can't just understand it in two years.

Koen van Seijen 26:17

And then does it suggest? I mean, we talked about it before as well, that would you then do another plot? If let's say you do another plot and you say, Okay, I will start with the plastic, not only because of the deer, because of course you fix that with a fence if you're in a deer area, but also just to give them a kickstart, they go faster, they don't have that competition with the cover crop in the tree line, not in between, but in, and then at some point, okay, how do we wean them off the plastic? And what's the optimum moment to say, okay, we're gonna actually plant in between the trees to give them more because the roots are deeper enough anyway, and the competition is less because we want to keep the soil carbon, etc. Because if we go too deep and we're too low with that, it's gonna hurt the trees as well. There's a almost a dance to, but maybe that's too expensive because anyway the plastic costs a thousand. There's an interesting optimum there somewhere to kickstart them faster and still have the same growth as a conventional orchard, but transition them at some point and have the living mulch coming in at year one and a half or year two or something.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

Well, I wanted just to get back to what you were saying. Here, our objective is also to test some extremes here. It's to understand the limits of the system. If we were to, and obviously, what we're doing here on five hectares is something that the objective is to help the work of a thousand hectares, and that's also what we're doing through our work with Agro Systemic at the moment and our different consulting and with our clients, and we're not going to extremes to say, hey, from year two, put some clovers on the berm and let's go. So there's lots of compromises that can be done, and that's what we're gonna do here actually. In our area where we've got the plastic mulch, we've had it for two years, it's established a beautiful tree.

Koen van Seijen 27:51

Okay, the tree is objectively, they are full of almonds, they are yeah, they've got some almonds exactly, they're doing well.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

The weed competition helped a lot. It also slightly reduced the water use under the trees. So now what we're gonna do is one out of two lines, we are going to remove the plastic mulch and we're gonna plant the clovers to test exactly what you were saying, which is hey, we put a biodegradable plastic or some plastic, or even we can also use tillage as a tool to reduce the weeds. So we can see people drop their coffees necessary.

Koen van Seijen 28:23

You set it, you set them, Jackie.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

That's exactly the compromises that we need to make it work. Regenerative agriculture will only work if these practices will only be really like taken seriously if we're getting a tree crop, which is our focus now, an almond, that's thriving. If the almonds not thriving, but the cover crops looking beautiful, for example, we're not selling cover crops.

Koen van Seijen 28:45

It's a great ecosystem outcome, but you're not selling cover crops, you're selling almonds, and you need to sell a lot of them because these are again Champions League marathon runners that that perform like these systems around us.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

It's a commodity here. That's commodity. That's the thing. We're not this is not a, for example, the systems that are our neighbors here that we're trying to we're having discussions with and we're trying, we're building solutions for, these are people here that they don't have their own brand selling organic for the premium that they could get in this kind of situation, which is absolutely fine. People that are doing it, but there's a huge industry out there of people that are either too big for this or this commercial strategy is not adapted to the way that their business is set up, and and there's not enough even space in the market to absorb all of that at the moment. There is like a whole conversation to have around the long-term way the food system is structured, and there's amazing projects that you've interviewed that are doing amazing work on that right now. That's true, but right now we've got an industry that is commoditized, and we need to be building some solutions for that industry right now. It's a bit of a short to medium-term fix, long-term system kind of overhaul. Taking that into account, we need to have trees that are highly productive because when you're working with commodities, you can have years where the prices are high, as we've got with olives at the moment. But four years ago, five years ago, the prices were at two and a half, three, and you're borderline. You really need to optimize on your costs.

Koen van Seijen 30:05

And now they are just for people to give two and a half, three. What are the prices now in olives?

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Around six, seven, eight, and more. And now they're going back down, they're around four. And if we've got a good harvest this year in Spain, they're gonna go down to two and a half, three again. So the conversation can change from two to two years.

Koen van Seijen 30:20

Yeah, but it's like in any commodity, you're not definitely not a price maker, you're a price taker, which means you need to build as much resilience in your because you're a natural system and control your costs as much as you can. And the quantity, there's that optimum of, and you can say, yeah, but get a premium, but you can't. There's no maybe the organic premium, but anything else is commoditized, which means you need to be, especially now with crazy input prices, be very conscious of your costs. So, can we talk about costs? Yes. All right, let's do it. These are expensive systems, these are like again, like a lot goes in to make these trees, like the neighbors, etc. Like everything costs money, every passage they do, every input they do, every plastic row, etc. They calculate that, which is really good because it's a very commercial industry, which means they can show. So now currently Dimitri is leaning in, and we're looking at the plastic layer, which you might have heard. And there's some weeds around because the plastic is broken.

SPEAKER_01 31:17

So the plastic is breaking in places and degrading. You can see it's got there's lots of microplastic or microplastic, nobody likes it. It's a bit of a trauma of our current society right now and our generation. It doesn't look elegant, but it's very practical. And look at the tree that's above it, it's got almonds on it, and it grew faster. So, as you going back to what you were saying earlier on, sorry, we're jumping back and forth, but we're also walking through the field and picking up information as we see it. What I'm seeing here is that okay, we put this plastic mulch right now. As you said, if we're working with the neighbors over there, could there be an alternative? Would tillage be a more elegant solution? I believe it would it give the same results, not sure. Could we use a biodegradable mulch that lasts two years is cheaper than this material as well to implement? And from the moment you have a tree that's established in this way, that's the objective. The objective is fast establishment in the start. That's what everybody complains about in organic systems as well. It's like the struggle to establish the trees. A lot of people start conventional and then shift to organic, and they say that it's easier. So that's what we've seen here in this area is that actually with this plastic mulch, we're able to bypass that. We don't need to start conventional.

Koen van Seijen 32:23

So meaning

Plastic Mulch Fast Start

Koen van Seijen 32:24

conventional in that case is the conventional herbicides. The inputs, etc.

SPEAKER_01 32:28

Herbicides fertilizer, and then they shift towards they wait three years and they switch.

Koen van Seijen 32:32

And it says you're actually showing with a simple layer of plastic and the biological inputs, etc., and the passages you do, you actually establish a tree because they look amazing, as fast as other places.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

Yeah, here the trees that are here after two years, what's cool? They're they're organic, but they're following the conventional speed speed. Last year, because of the plastic mulch and issues that we had with the frigidation system producer.

Koen van Seijen 32:57

What's the frigidation?

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Basically, it's the system where we're this is all irrigated orchards, of course. These we're talking about irrigated intensive systems, even if it's an organic irrigated intensive system. And what you do fruitigation, you're injecting fertilizers and other products like occulents, biostimulants, through fertilization systems. So it's a very efficient way to distribute inputs. We had issues with that last year, and we weren't able to fertilize last year. So these trees are not weren't fertilized last year. I think they only took 10-20 units when whilst the others could have taken 40-50. That's what they needed. And so the results that we're getting here is with very little fertility, and it shows here the importance of the water. Basically, what you're seeing here with the berm is the main thing that it affects is water competition.

Water Competition And Trials

Koen van Seijen 33:38

So that's the competition you're talking about. It's the cover crop competes. At the beginning, when the roots are not so deep yet.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

Not the cover crop, the tree row living mulch. The cover crop can compete with the tree, but the way that it's managed, it's a very low risk. It does not compete with the tree because it's on the interline, it's away from the trees. Basically, you're destroying it. On the tree line, yeah, we have these clovers, that's the living mulch or the permanent living cover, perennial clovers on the tree line that increases the nutrition of the tree, but it takes away the water. So the key here is around the water, and there's a big discussion around water and all and almonds. So now this is the fascinating kind of aspects that we're uncovering here little by little. It's like those nuances there.

Koen van Seijen 34:35

But I imagine people like seeing this level of tree growth and establishment will take notice. Start taking notice of the plastic.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

So here in these lines that we are here, you have basically a regenerative area, but with the plastic mulch. Okay.

Koen van Seijen 34:49

And now you're gonna remove one and one, like every other one of the plastic you're gonna remove. What you're gonna put in between the clovers.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Yeah, we're gonna remove that, and then we're gonna plant some clovers there to test a two-year establishment with a plastic. And this is a landscape fabric, so you can put a lighter plastic in that case if it's only gonna be there for two years, and then see that effect on the tree performance.

Koen van Seijen 35:10

And see the carbon in the soil, which is basically.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

We're measuring also microbiology, see if the microbiology recovers. And see if the tree doesn't start stalling exactly in terms of the yield. And we're also doing this on conventional plots, which are in the in uh further south from here. And in the conventional plots, we're also seeing a slight reduction in the biomass, in the amount of, let's say, tree vigor, tree development. You know what? What is the question I want to answer here with this? The question is if somebody comes, because you have to think about it from again going back to our neighbors. It's always that we're picking on the neighbors. Yeah, it's always the neighbors are funds, okay? And that's what we're getting more and more of nowadays in the agricultural space. Funds or even larger family farms. You have family farms at 200, 300, 500 hectares nowadays. They they used to have, for example, 500 hectares of broadacre crops, which isn't crazy. And irrigation, they put super intensive olives.

Koen van Seijen 36:02

Big dams, so suddenly they can irrigate at a scale that wasn't there before, and it just makes much more commercial sense to put in these uh intensive olives or almonds. The other option is probably on that kind of money is to do solar panels or something. Like that's the kind of because it's it makes it very profitable on the five hectare, 500 hectares, etc. And those are the neighbors, those are the units we're talking about. 5,000, 500.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

The representative of the let's say the agricultural space in central and southern Portugal right now. Okay, so there's a lot of people that have from 100 to 2,000 hectares of these olives and olive and almond systems. They're not they don't have a brand, they're commoditized. Okay, but they're also what we want to understand here is what happens when we have a client that comes to them and says, I want to have glyphosate-free almonds. That's something that's starting a conversation that's starting to be had at the supply chain level. How do we have uh lower water

Economics Of Transition

SPEAKER_01 36:52

uh consumption almonds, a big one? How do we have lower pesticides, zero residue? There's all of these conversations are just gonna be increasing in the future. As your consumers wake up around this and the brands are starting to also find an edge around this, and they want to differentiate themselves and they want to provide to the consumer something that's interesting. Okay, so what we want to do now with this technique is to say if you want to do a glyphosate-free system, this is how much it's gonna cost to do in terms of the implementation and the effect on productivity. You're gonna get a 5% reduction or 10% or 20%. We're trying to understand that number percent in productivity, so that then if you want, you're gonna need to get a price premium for this work, and you're not just gonna get glyphosate-free ormans for zero, the farmers gonna get paid for it, or we'll need to in this case, and we're gonna understand how much they will need to be compensated for that practice. One thing that's important to understand for everybody that's listening, or more on the technical level, it's very difficult to till in these systems because we've got berms. We're installing the berms because here, for example, it was flooded in the winter, and the only thing that was standing out was the tree berms. So the tree berms in Portugal, where we have very a lot of rainfall in the winter, is a way to protect the trees from excessive humidity in the winter. So it really limits the tilling option. So if you're not putting glyphosate or plastic, one of the last things to do is to be mowing. Yeah, and either you mow it and you let it with natural vegetation, which has lots of nutrients more competitive, or you install a vegetation that is less competitive and that provides more ergonomic services to the trees. And so far we've worked on clover, but I think there's opportunities to work on other plants as well.

Koen van Seijen 38:26

And that almost sounds like if we come to almost the real estate sector, retrofitting, like it's a okay, how do I transition my 500 hectares intensive almonds that use all the conventional practices, etc. And now if a client that says zero residue, a buyer that wants to reduce water, etc. etc., and you're trying to find recipes and protocols, okay. If you in these systems, in this context, we feel confident to say these are the five practices the first year, this is the there are costs associated with that. This is what you likely are gonna see response from the tree, response from the soil. If we measure nitrogen in the tree leaves at this moment, we think is gonna be around this, which means you can reduce that. If it's not around that, you can actually should apply a bit more because the tree hasn't responded yet, as we hoped, etc. etc. Like those kind of guidance services, transition servers almost, with enough scientific rigor and enough real experience that you can actually make proper recommendations to whatever they want to, and of course, that significantly reduces input costs with the cost of the transition, because none of this is free. None of the passages, none of the cover crop mixes, none of the mowing, none of the interventions are free. But they lead to a stronger, more resilient system over time, which means it should need less and less, never zero. And these are very intensive systems, they will always need stuff to produce, but significantly less. Like it's safe to say 30, 40, 50 percent of most things can be at some point over time.

SPEAKER_01 39:55

It depends where you're starting. We'll get there. One of the things I want to say that just responds to what you're saying earlier on, we're getting really good results in retrofitting, as you're saying. But basically, for we're retrofitting to clarify, means starting with a conventional orchard and creating a transition of that conventional orchard. At the beginning, when we started with the superintensive olives, people were telling us, Can you really do regenerative in superintensive olives? And that was me three years ago. I was receiving this question. I saw this system and I was like, we need to do something about this, we need to get into this. This is firstly fascinating how productive it is. Yeah, and on top of that, it's crazy how much inputs they are using and the challenges of it. So let's work on it. And the the people were asking me, Can you really do it? Inside of me, I was thinking, I think we can do this. That was my even my gut. It wasn't based on like five years of experience looking at these systems and working on these systems, no data. There's very little data of any of these regenerative practices on super intensive olives, for example. I'm using the olives example because it's the most radical, it's like really tight rows, very dense, it looks radical.

Koen van Seijen 40:56

And the machine that drives over it, and it's very important.

SPEAKER_01 41:01

It's just very intensive. But nowadays, if you were to ask me that question again, and people do ask me, I don't question that anymore. Because we're starting to get the results coming in. We've had our three years' experience working in this system, and I'm telling you, it's possible to really progress with regenerative practices in these systems. We can have a big effect on, as you're saying, input use, interline health, organic matter, biodiversity. We can see it in these systems. I'm going to be sharing some more pictures and etc. And I suggest everybody who's interested in this to be following. We've got a website, www.abuinova.com with a dash in the middle.

Koen van Seijen 41:36

We'll put everything in the show. Yeah, you put it in in the show. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

That's really abo dash inova.com.

Koen van Seijen 41:46

But the interesting piece is like from a systems change perspective, these practices, there's no reason why in the next 10 years the majority of orchards run, because these are commercially driven orchards, obviously. And if you can show resilience and financial results, there's a good case to be made that they will switch just as they've been installed because of commercial results. This is not because of some romantic idea that people put these systems in, they do because they make money. And if you can show they make more money or less risk, etc., with there's a good argument to make that the current capitalistic system we're in, and people are gonna cringe now, will take over some of these practices, start rolling them out on quite a large scale, which means that's good for all of us, and quite a huge reduction in a lot of chemical uses that we don't want in the countryside, nor in your food, nor on the farmer and the farm workers, and quite a lot of very heavy fossil fuel-based stuff that we don't want in the atmosphere. And we're talking now about food resilience in Europe.

SPEAKER_01 42:44

Now it's the right time, and you mentioned it again here to talk about the economics and to talk about the costs and etc. Because it's what I said just before is quite inspiring in terms of we see that it's possible, but also there's a certain cost there involved. And it depends, and also it depends where you're starting, and that's what I was saying earlier on. A lot of times, if we're able to break even with regenerative from early on, it's because we're starting with a very inefficient system, overapplying a lot of inputs because that's very common in agriculture at the moment. People, farmers, farm companies, they tend to overapply because they're trying to manage risk as best as possible. And the way that people have managed risk before is apply one extra insecticide, apply it in more nitrogen just to make sure you have that vigor that you need. Yeah, because we're seeing here we've got vigorous trees, and on the side we have a few less vigorous trees, and you're seeing how vigorous trees just looks more economically viable, and so that's what they're striving for. It's totally understandable, and we can't demonize this at all. That's what their starting point. When you have this situation, you can in the first year the lowest hanging fruit is efficiency optimization. Cut back on costs, and that extra cash that you freed because you've gone from 140 units to 110 units of nitrogen, because you've gone from five sprays to six sprays.

Koen van Seijen 43:52

The other way around.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

Sorry, yeah, six sprays to five sprays.

Koen van Seijen 43:57

You just spend your nitrogen budget on the spray, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:59

Yeah, you save on nitrogen, but just spray more. When you save, then you free up some cash that you can invest in regenerative practice. But if you're starting with a system that is already efficient, and this is what what what even what we're seeing here in our case, you tend to have this J-curve. Yeah. Because you have to invest in the soil in the start, the plant the cover crop, put in the organic matter amendments, even put in the mineral amendments that many times are being ignored here and are super important for the soil health. The investment in the soil health is something that happens now, but the yields are in a return on investment after one, two, three, four years. So it depends on where you're how you're starting. And that's when you start to see the benefits that unlock the capacity to reduce input uses more, or in some cases, improve yield. So it there is that J-curve that's present, and we're seeing it here. But if we can quantify that J-curve. Then we can finance it. Then we can have a conversation with people around how much it costs. That's what we want to do. We want to be able to come to these companies, and that's what we're doing at the moment. It comes to these companies and have that conversation around this is how much it costs to do that. And so then they can look at their work with their finance team and see how do they actually.

Koen van Seijen 45:08

But then it becomes a financial coming back to real estate. Okay, this is the old office building we bought, and we want to make it super energy efficient and very light again. So people actually want to work here, we want to rent it out. We know there's a cost involved. Nobody asks a question around that. Banks finance that all the time. We put the solar panels, the insulation, the heat pump, we take out the gas.

SPEAKER_01 45:29

Why do they not question it there? Because they question it here.

Koen van Seijen 45:31

Because we figured it out 20, 30 years ago and we have the numbers. Exactly. That's it. That's exactly. And if you can all of these people are partly financed by banks, don't worry. We're not ready yet to get banks involved to easily finance a transition. But I don't think it's that far out because if you can show, okay, we take a super conventional orchard that actually is struggling with fungi, with yield, etc., and with high input costs, and we have a transition plan. That's a finance question. It's also an agronomy question, obviously, because none of that is easy. But just as we figured it out in real estate, we can figure it out here. And to get better over time. But the system will kick in at some point.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

And Kun, this is exactly what I'm seeing with all of my conversations that I'm having with the industry. They're asking for visibility, they're asking for economic data, they're asking for operational visibility and knowledge. They want to know how do I do this actually in the field in practice? Absolutely messing up. What does it translate to in terms of accuracy?

Koen van Seijen 46:35

Because as you mentioned, if you plant your cover crop a bit too deep, as we said 70, 80k disappeared in an afternoon. Yeah, no, not an afternoon, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

So that's what we're trying to do here, and that's what we're starting to do with the data coming in now, and it's gonna be coming in even more in the future. You know these practices, they're already validated. We're not testing soil amendments, we're applying them, but we're not testing soil amendments on their own, one area with, one area without. It's been validated. It's been tested. There's so many studies on the importance of balancing your calcium to magnesium ratio in the soil as an example. So we don't need to go there. There's so many studies that are showing the importance of boron and zinc for tree performance. It's not about testing that, that's just for us where we consider basic agronomy. We're implementing them here. They're not always implemented in the industry, which is a really interesting way to optimize, but these are the things that we don't need to be testing. I want to mention a bit around some of the kind of messages that we receive or the things that we hear from people around data. Because we say right now, listen, we need data for people to make confident decisions. Okay. And what we're saying here is that okay, we're creating a project that is producing data, stacking all the different practices and understanding the real potential of stacked regenerative practices, stacked soil health practices on tree performance.

Koen van Seijen 47:54

Because that's a big point, uh, like in the because if you would do this in a university, sorry to interrupt, yeah, you might do one.

SPEAKER_01 47:58

You're like, no, but there's exactly there's a multiplier effect.

Koen van Seijen 48:02

One plus one is maybe five or two if you do it wrong. There's a exact exactly, it's very well said. So you need to, and what is this thing? Because none of these, as in a complex system, are individual things, they do interact. Like the clover, amazing for nitrogen, but might compete on the water or not. No, the middle of a row actually does because it's really nice for pollinators. So you need to stack them, see how the different mixes, have the different cocktails work of practices, and understand okay, where's the balance, where's the compromise? But look at them individually, apart from the fact you can never isolate one practice in a living world, but that's irrelevant for a sector that applies anyway 30 practices already. Like it's a stacked enterprise, it's a stacked system, so you can't, so you need to build another stack basically.

SPEAKER_01 48:46

This is exactly it, and also it does require a bit of a system change. When I'm saying the retrofitting thing that we talked about earlier on, it does require changes in the system to be able to basically absorb these different practices and also maximize their effects. We're talking about a different approach here, we're talking about a different system, and so it inevitably means different layers. Sometimes we're to have a good interline, you need to optimize pruning, for example. Okay, because what we're seeing with with the superintensive systems is that the shade is really affecting the interline, and so we have to optimize pruning, slightly lower the size of the canopy, but still remaining within maximum production range to be able to free up some light for the interline to be able to have the cover crop grow well in order for us to have a cover crop that produces biomass, fixes nitrogen, and then can provide the agronomic services to the tree. And it's the kind of things that you need to think of it as a system. You can't just plant a cover crop and walk away.

Koen van Seijen 49:42

And a mindset shift like of the operators' living system is different than like the killing approach, which is absolutely fair because we designed a system like that. But now this is almost stepping into a slightly different role as an operator because you're dealing with messy fields and with like things that we don't normally like to see in agriculture. Rats, and because they love the clover and they love so there's and there's uh and weeds that still get through, but that's okay as long as they're under a certain percentage. Uh-huh. Exactly. How does that mindset shift have been working? Have you seen that?

SPEAKER_01 50:18

There's resistance at the start, of course, because of these things. There's so many, you know, yes, but yes, but what happens is that when it starts to make sense agronomically,

Scaling Change And Wrap Up

SPEAKER_01 50:28

when the data starts to come in, then people are starting to be like, okay, maybe I can absorb that problem. I find that people here in the industry that we're working, they're really rational. At some point, there'll be something cultural holding them back around we've done this for so many years, this is the way it is, there is that resistance. But then when you start to go into the numbers and into the fields, I find that people open up quite a lot. It took us like two years also to two years of conversations with certain people for them to open up, but I don't think that's crazy in the agricultural space when you think we've got only one harvest a year. Two years in the agricultural space is six months in the tech space or less.

Koen van Seijen 51:05

And interestingly enough, I think this is a young industry.

SPEAKER_01 51:07

Like most of the systems in Portugal are only 10 years old.

Koen van Seijen 51:10

So nobody can say I've done this for generations, and my grandfather and this and that, which is nonsense. So like there, I don't know if that helps as well. It's not, oh, I remember how we managed the animals when my great-grandfather was around. No, this is a system that put in 10 years ago, and it might be there's a big hypothesis, more open to ah yeah, we've done it like that, but that doesn't mean it's optimal because yeah, the Spanish told us, but as you said before, this is a different, like even humidity is different, like it's different geography, etc. Maybe there are other ways. I don't know. And maybe people that because they put them in very rationally as well. They made the calculation we have 500 hectares of row crops, and actually, this kind of intensive system makes more sense. They've looked at the spreadsheet, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this, or they rented out the land to an operator that looked at the spreadsheet. Doesn't mean it's perfect because people promised certain tonnage per hectare and they're not really hitting that as well. But I don't know, it seems like a different, maybe less emotional connection to these systems than other agriculture systems are, which makes them maybe, and there's another hypothesis or another question, more receptive to change quicker because they've done a very big change in the last 10 years because it didn't look like this, and they might be able to do another big change in the next 10 years. Who knows with shadow, who knows with underlying, who knows with an amount of biodiversity that can come back in because it responds quickly, like the system, so it'll respond.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

I don't know the exact answer to that question, but what I can tell you, linking back to what we were talking about earlier on, is that the conversations with the industry that we've been having for the past two years are evolving fast. Things are going really forward, and the more data we show, the more the more people are paying attention and conversations are being had, and people are open, and that's the first step. And of course, on the side with our with agro systemic, we've got we're working with our clients, and that they've gone beyond the first step of understanding. They're actually working with people to actually implement these practices at scale. So, you know, it's a lot of people.

Koen van Seijen 53:03

I remember the story of the olives. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, where last year you said that one of the control plots wanted to replicate it, wanted to basically roll it out over his full farm. And you were like, Oh, yeah, but we need a control plot, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 53:17

Yeah, that's the problem with the with the Abuinova farmer that we have who's called Bernardo Marujo, who's uh an incredible person and Lance Stewart's farmer. We work with him now for three years, and it's been a really cool process. We started our Habuinova plot of superintensive olives, and he's got 100 hectares now of superintensive olives, and we started in three hectares there. And we had a control plot on the side, which was conventionally managed according to the standard local practices here. Really productive olive trees, basically. And the problem is that nowadays he's applying regenerative practices on his 100 hectares. And so we've the problem we have now is that the control plot is basically starting to have a regenerative transition activated, so it's affecting our data, which is a good problem to have, but from a scientific perspective, it's a problem, it's not ideal.

Koen van Seijen 54:03

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:04

And with Bernardo, we're basically planting a 30 hectares new orchard following regenerative practices. He's got so it's really cool seeing that grow because the farmer seeing what's happening there, and what happened with Bernardo? He saw what we were doing and he was like, this makes a lot of sense. He didn't think, okay, I'm gonna wait till I start to see the results, and that's something I wanted to uh talk about earlier on. He's seeing it and he says, wait, you're measuring soil, you're measuring tree performance, you're making calculations which weren't necessarily being done before. There's a whole rational system around this based on many times just best practices in agronomy. Many times it's not regenerative. We could say regenerative, but it's like just applying the right fertilizer at the right place, at the right rate, at the right time, is you can go on California University best practices for fertilization, and you'll see that it's like the three or four R rules. I can't remember exactly which one of the two. So that makes a big difference because if you do that well and you're applying the right nitrogen on a very high pH soil and at the right timing, and you're distributing your potassium throughout the season according to the uptake of the plant, and you're putting in the micronutrient in the right form at the right place, that is the first step to having a healthier system which starts to move the conversation forward. And one of the things I wanted to mention earlier on is around one of the resistances that we hear a lot is hey, there's not enough data to do this yet. It can seem contradictory with what we're saying earlier on of saying we there's not enough data, and so we're creating a project to produce the data to show how these things work. What's important to know in this regen kind of transition is that there's already a lot of data on cover cropping if on the soil health. There's a lot of data on compost effects on soil health, on organic amendment effects on soil health. We talked about other amendments earlier on, on the micros, on there's a lot of data on this. So individual practices have been studied a lot, and we should rely on this data to already start moving forward with, and that's what we're doing with our clients, to already start moving forward with implementing these practices. Starting with often cover cropping, we see it in many contexts, it's a limiting factor. There's a lot of erosion in these intensive crops because practice passed 20 times in the year, 15 to 20 times in this interline. There's a lot of interlines because these trees are very packed together, and so basically and it's on slopey land, so lots of erosion. Here, what's the difference with the Abuinova is that we're really pushing the logic as far as possible. We're stacking all of these practices like pretty much from the start, and we're trying to see what is the potential, how far can we go with this? That's the difference. It doesn't mean we we shouldn't get started now. We have enough experience, we have enough data, we have enough science, and already get started. But we're gonna start with safer, easier practices because it's always a transition. You don't expose more risk to farmers, they're exposed to enough risk. So it's a kind of a balance of pushing them hard enough, but not too much. So you're gonna move forward step by step. It's also a lot of psychology behind it, it's a huge human part. You've got to start slow, start safe, start small, and then little by little, at some point, and this is we're experiencing with some farmers. At some point, people are asking us, so what else can I do? And we have to tell them slow down. We're having these conversations from time to time, and when you have them, it feels really good because you feel like we're doing like cultural progress.

Koen van Seijen 57:26

You're at the absolute edge of the spear, and farmers, if farmers are pushing, I want to do more, and you're like, let's wait a year, it's because we need to see results on this and it is. Because that sort of also activates then the innovation hunger, the curiosity. Let me do a few lines like that just to try. 100%. Just to try. Let's see. Shall we do that, Dimitri? Come on, let's do it. We can motivated by this. Let's do a few other trees. Let's 100%. Let's push. Yeah, yeah. And that's that makes it probably also much more fun for them.

SPEAKER_01 57:55

Yeah, we're seeing that it's not all farmers that fall into that, but some of the farmers that we work with a lot of family farmers, they're quite small farmers, they're very passionate about what they're doing. It's not like an agronomist in working for a fund, which can't they're really professional. Yeah, but the family farmers, it's more emotional the way they're farm. And when they get into it, they can get really into it. And then it's really nice to see them. It feels like they're taking a lot of pleasure in going to the field and understanding their soil. I think, especially in this industry, which is not easy for farmers, and we know all know the story of farmer psychological health, etc. It feels like it's one step in the right there to get them more interested and passionate for their soil.

Koen van Seijen 58:31

You think it's a perfect one to wrap up?

SPEAKER_01 58:33

Yeah, that's nice.

Koen van Seijen 58:34

Thank you so much. Let's finish there. Basically, it's farmer psychology help we're doing here.

unknown 58:39

Yeah.

Koen van Seijen 58:39

No, thank you so much for a morning walk and a lot of interesting insights. Can't wait to see more experiments, more data coming out, more stacking. How these trees are responding to hopefully a mild summer, but uh not too hot summer, and how they look next year, and how because they really seem to have left the station and and they are exploding, which is uh very exciting to see and see what this five hectares leads to. And the other plots you have, obviously, not the conventionally managed, but pushed far in terms of regenerative in other places to make sure it's not just an anomaly because you're in a special valley or something here. No, you need to make sure you you have different plots, but it's five hectares, people, it's a lot, it's a normal industry size.

SPEAKER_01 59:19

But it starts like this it starts on five hectares and then little by little it spreads out. And this is our research area. This is where we get our data and inspiration, and where we learn the most, and then we from here we pick out things everybody does. Everybody that's involved in the project, it's not just us, it's a big consortium of experts and etc. They pick up from here knowledge and experience and data and apply it around. Cool. Thanks a lot.

Koen van Seijen 59:45

Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. I'm very curious what you thought of this episode. I was really taken by how much you can already see after a couple of years, like two and a half years in how much you can see at scale. Five hectares is nothing and a lot at the same time. How the industry is starting to lean in and starting to question, which is interesting. Like it's only three years that the project exists, early two and a half or something. The trees are underground, and already they're starting to have very concrete conversations with leading people in the industry. And it probably shows the challenges of the current industry. It shows it's relatively young, so maybe less what we also thought about in the episode. They're less preconceived or things we've always done it like this for the last 120 years, blah blah blah, which is of course not the case. And yeah, the current let's say input crisis crisis doesn't help either. Maybe it helps actually. And so very curious, we desperately needed we walk there in a previous heat wave for now, right? In the middle of another one, we walk there surrounded by 8,000 hectares of intensive elements, which are suffering definitely a lot of low-hanging fruits. I'm really curious how quick this transition will happen, and if it happens, and what is needed, how much data is needed for people to start packing. 500 hectares, differently, how much data is needed on man hours, FTEs, how much that changes, how many passes you have to do. So, a lot of open questions, a lot of excitement. And so thank you so much for being with us here today. Uh share it with a friend, and catch you at the next one. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website, investinginregenerativeagriculture.com slash posts. If you like this episode, why not share it with a friend? And get in touch with us on social media, our website, or via the Spotify app. And tell us what you like most. And give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player that really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.