A Pesticide Scientist Approaches Research on Regenerative Citrus Farming with Herb Young

In this episode of the Whole Farm Podcast brought to you by CHONEX, host Michael Piscotta sits down with regenerative citrus grower Herb Young for a deep, practical conversation on soil biology, organic citrus production, microbial inoculants, cover crops, and nutrient density.

Herb shares his unique journey from a 38-year career in the pesticide industry to becoming a certified organic and certified regenerative citrus grower in South Georgia. What began as an economic experiment in organic citrus turned into a full transformation in how Herb views farming, soil life, plant health, and food quality.

Throughout the episode, Herb walks through real-world observations and research from his own grove, including replicated trials comparing conventional, organic, and regenerative systems. He discusses soil DNA testing, Haney soil health testing, microbial respiration, cover crop diversity, mycorrhizal fungi, freeze resilience, foliar nutrition, and the surprising nutrient-density differences he found in his regeneratively grown fruit.

Herb’s story is a powerful example of what happens when a grower combines curiosity, research discipline, biological thinking, and real-world measurement. His work in regenerative citrus shows that soil health is not just a philosophy. It can be observed, tested, compared, and connected to tree resilience, fruit quality, and long-term farm performance.

To learn more about CHONEX, explore additional resources, and receive future episodes to your inbox, visit chonex.ag. If you found this episode valuable, subscribe to the podcast and share it with someone in your network.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Whole Farm Podcast brought to you by Chonix, where we explore soil health, nutrient management, and the systems that help crops and farms perform better over time. Each episode features conversations with growers and industry experts focused on practical insights you can apply in the field. Whether you're managing nutrients, building healthier soils, or looking for data-driven ways to improve outcomes, this podcast is built to support real decisions and real results.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Welcome to another episode of the Whole Farm Podcast brought to you by Chone X. I am so, so thankful that I have a longtime friend, a mentor in lots of ways, and uh somebody that I've looked up to for a long time joining us today. And that's Herb Young. And a lot of you know Herb Young as a regenerative citrus grower. A lot of you know Herb's story, but I think it's gonna be really important for us to have some extra visuals today to kind of help a lot of uh maybe growers that are watching that might be curious about what this has really looked like, and let kind of Herb go into what he's doing. You know, there's gonna be a pretty big comparison, I think, of what people might be trying to do versus what they want to do versus where they are right now. And so, Herb, I'm so glad you joined us today. And I'm gonna let you kind of take it away for a little bit to do some show and tell if that's okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:35

Thanks, Michael. Yeah, no, listen, I really appreciate having the chance to uh tell tell my story. Um I guess before I'll jump into the some of the visuals, my my background is so different. I uh I spent my whole career in the pesticide industry. Uh 25 years of that was doing field research. And getting close to retirement, I thought, you know, I I've really enjoyed citrus that as moving to South Georgia, finding out that you know it's uh it's exploding here. And uh I thought, you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna plant citrus in my retirement, and thought, I bet organically I can do better economically. It was, I mean, I hate to admit it, purely a selfish reason. And then I started doing the research and dug into it, and unbelievable that this new information on regenerative farming uh just to me exploded. It was a self-realization, and that I had missed this for 38 years in the ag industry, and um I just call it the best kept secret. So I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in and show you maybe some pictures of uh of of my farm. So this first shot of my grove is uh it's actually a year ago. So the the cover crop is is is beautiful. I'm standing in the middle of some grapefruit. This is the strategy that I'm that I'm using. Cover crops, completely organic fertility. I felt like one of the things I needed to do to be able to market was to be a certified grower. So huge effort, but uh takes three years. I got USDA organic certification and then certified regenerative by a greener world. And then I'm also a part of the Real Organic Project. That's another certification. I wanted to define what is regenerative to me, and it's you know, unfortunately, it's meaning a lot of different different things to people, but cover crops are a huge part of that. So regenerative is bringing the life back to the ecosystem in the soil. That's that's how I define it. Um, so cover crops are a big part of that. Every cover crop is has exudates. It's putting at least 40% of its uh nutrition, sugars, enzymes, proteins back into the soil, feeding specific microbes. So you have to have a diverse cover crop to pull out all this diversity of microbes in the soil. I supplement that by inoculating with night microbes. I've tried a lot of different um different commercial inoculants, and then I do my own compost tea, I do compost extract, so all of these have the objective of adding microbes. Um my soil is absolutely transformed. The grove was uh was just a commercial cotton peanut rotation, which is kind of standard field here in the southeast. Um pretty good soil tape, sandy loam, uh desirable ag soil, but it has completely changed over the past five years. My grove is now five years old. Um, so my goal is for them eventually for the microbes to be feeding the tree. And I absolutely believe that that has started to happen. Uh one of the big measurements, the easiest thing for me to look at is the flush, leaf flush, which you can see on this picture coming out the top and everywhere on a tree. Um genetically, citrus can flush five times a year. It's incredible. And it's they don't lose their leaves. So they just the tree just grows and grows. Now, a commercial grower, I don't know, he's getting maybe two or three leaf flushes. I was in a in a grove day before yesterday, and I was surprised he didn't have any leaf flush. My my grove right now is a complete explosion of new leaves, probably gosh, 40%, 50% absolutely new canopy on my five-year-old trees. So the other measurement that shows that it's productive is the trees don't have any disease. And really, I don't know much insect pressure to speak of, except for a terrible citrus leaf miner, which is an invasive pest. There's no natural enemies. So uh it's it's a challenge. Um, and then ultimately, what I've been trying to strive to get this whole time is nutrient-dense fruit, which I believe, in my opinion, is the most important conclusion of regenerative agriculture. People talk about all kinds of things, carbon sequestration and um you know environmental impact, and but the human impact is is what has become my passion, the nutrient density in the fruit. This picture, so three years into it, I had my first harvest, and uh strange experience, university said, Hey, we've got a grant, can you uh compare your fruit to conventional growth? And I said, Well, sure. So I lined up a lab and some other groves, two other groves, conventional, exact same kind of fruit, and I harvested my fruit same day, so at the same growth stage, juiced it and froze it, and then the university grant fell through. So uh I spent a good chunk of money and had my fruit analyzed in comparison with two commercial groves, and you can visually see a difference. Uh, these are both page mandarins picked the same day. Uh my trees came from a nursery uh at that, at that farm where I got this fruit. So, same genetics. And I was optimistic. I hoped, well, I knew I'd get 50% more nutrition, maybe a hundred, and it came back. 26 things they analyzed flavonoids, carotenoids, and vitamins. And my fruit was 800%, eight times more, more nutrient dense. These are some of the key things that they analyzed. The exciting ones, some of these flavonoids, where I put an X on this, was those flavonoids were completely missing in the conventional fruit. Out of nine flavonoids, four of them were absent in the conventional growth. And these are important things. They're all antioxidants, uh, anti-inflammatory, but a lot of them prevent cancer. Uh, one that's on here, Naringen. I found out since this analysis, it's it's been documented to treat uh 14 different types of cancer. But, you know, a pharmaceutical company can't patent it. So, I mean, it's naturally occurring. So they don't talk about it. Uh unbelievable that we could be getting this from a produce, especially from um, especially from regeneratively grown produce. Some of these things, hisperitine, it's blood flow. Um, it's actually been documented to uh increase bread flow to the brain, cognition, even memory. And mine was 39 times higher than conventionally grown. So uh we all know about uh lycopene is for prostate. I've been taking lycopene supplement and found out that my fruit uh already had it at high levels, beta-carotene for eyesight, and then the vitamins that uh we all know about. Ripe riboflavin, big boost, four times more riboflavin than conventional growths. So some of the changes that that I've observed, um so I started right from the beginning when the trees went in the ground, they had microbes down in the oil in the hole transplant. I actually went to the nursery before my before picking up my trees several months earlier and inoculated them in the nursery. So they came uh with microbes and they've been uh treated, uh fed ever since then. So uh I consciously feed the microbes in the soil uh pretty much every month, all year long, if not longer than that. I mean, they uh sugars, molasses, which is long-chain sugar, fish hydrolysate, seaweed, kelp, um, humic acid, folvic acid, uh, those are what are helping them to thrive. One of the quickest measurements is this penetrometer, which I've got in my hand. It's just a pressure gauge on top. You put 200 pounds of pressure onto it in the middle of an alleyway between rows, not where there's a tractor track, but there are cover crops. You put 200 pounds of pressure, it goes in three inches. As soon as I get close to my tree, which every citrus tree has a microjet sprinkler under it. So I inoculate my microbes through the microjet. It goes six foot diameter around the tree. That's what we have to have for freeze protection. And uh so that's where the microbes are. Um, it's where the tree roots are, cover crop roots, but really more importantly, the the microbes, that ground has actually gotten spongy. When you walk across the tree row, it's it's raised up two inches, it's spongy under your feet, and that penetrometer goes usually right up to the handles, just boom, with less than that 200 pounds of pressure. The organic matter in that zone around the tree has doubled from 1% to up over 2%. Uh, and then I did this interesting trial, which was uh from day one, and this is all my research background. Uh, after spending 25 years in the in the field for chemical companies doing research, I knew you had to prove everything you were going to talk about. So I do replicated trials. So when I planted my trees, I did a trial with conventional, row of conventional, row of regenerative, with full inoculation, and then I did a row of just organic to see if my native population of microbes would come to life just by being fed. So there's three treatments, and then I replicated it three times. So each one is a whole row. I could control it by turning on and off the irrigation that the uh all the nutrition was going through, and or with a sprayer, um, not spray those rows. And so it's a big trial, it's 135 trees, it's nine rows uh out in my grove. And the results were pretty pretty startling. So um I also at the same time got a grant from one of the soil DNA companies that's just taken off uh biomakers. And so for four years I was able to analyze my three different treatments. I I did soil DNA before I planted the trees, and then at the end of the first season, seven months later, and then mid-summer every year after that, for three more years. And the first thing that jumped out was um the number of species, so the total species, bacteria and fungi, in my regenerative jump from 670 up to 1100, very first year. And then this graph shows the fungal species, which actually, when you're doing bare ground, the conventional treatment, which is Roundup, you know, three foot on each side of the tree, just bare ground, fungal species dies out. So the graph is the number of hits, so the detects in the sample, uh greatly dropped off. The kind of indigenous, the organic one called transitional is a slight increase, but the regenerative big jump. And the number of species is a key here. Uh went it was double in the regenerative. And I'm not adding fungal species, but the ideal soil conditions are allowing it to uh them to emerge and come out. Maybe they were in a spore form previously. And then about the third season, um, this is the these round circles are the the visual representation that you get on the dashboard of biomakers. And um every circle is one species, and so you can you can toggle between bacteria, archaea, which are the extreme bacteria, and uh mycorrhizal fungi is one of their toggles, and this is a toggle for fungi. Every circle on the left is a species of fungi, and as we saw in the first slide, there's about 500 of them there. So some of them so small they don't show up, but the size of the circle represents the the number of detects. Whereas in the conventional, by the third season, so it's now been bare ground for three years, maintained bare ground all year long, just like they do in a commercial grove. And during that third season, um, I put out a nematicide, which was kind of a uh standard treatment on citrus, but it also had fungicidal activity. And it wiped out my diversity, which is really the key. And it allowed one species, this essentially worthless, a dwarf puffball. 89% of all the fungal uh quantity in that soil was now a puffball, which was just below ground, wasn't even visible above ground. But then I didn't use that soil fungicide treatment. The fourth season, and I'm gonna, and I these are two images of just the conventional, and it shows you what soil's capacity to rebound is. It's quite unbelievable. So even with the conventional, so I stopped doing conventional treatment that third season. I wanted to convert those 45 conventional trees to organic so I could sell the produce. Now, the trees grow incredibly fast, twice as fast in the conventional treatment. Just synthetic fertilizer, um, a citrus blend that also had the micro uh nutrients that the trees needed, um, all the pesticides, so kind of a sterile environment is is what I'll call it. So after season three, I allowed the cover crops to go into the convention. I'm so they're now in transition, is what it would be called. And allowing, I went to full organic fertility, which unfortunately was a shock to the tree. But you can see how the soil, boom, it bounces back. Um the image on the right, the little red circle is that dwarf puffball. So it's gone from 89% in one season, the the fungi are coming back, and we've now got we're regaining diversity. It's still not as uniform as in the regenerative, but it's it's suppressing this lycoproton, which is a dwarf puff ball, down to less than one percent from 89%. So incredible, incredible change. This trial, so this is in season four. I'm now um the trees are now fully five years old, but I wanted to show this picture of how much quicker conventional grows. And to be honest, this was kind of discouraging to me. Um, the trees they bloom and they fruit a whole year earlier. I had a year four, had a nice harvest off of the conventional. The trial was done on Shironui, which are a real demanding tree nutritionally. All the California growers, California is called a sumo. Uh, it's a trademark name we can't use. But on the left are my regenerative trees. And trying to bring them back, I even put down some ground cloth, which wasn't on the other row. So this is a full row, is one of the plots, and then every everyone is replicated uh three times. So you see the size of the conventional trees, they're yielding, and then this is fourth season. After this, the winter between season four and five. Uh we had just two freezes. And I'm gonna toggle to the taking the picture from that same place. This is what happened. Unbelievable. Those conventional trees are unfit. They don't have the integrity, the cellular structure. I mean, it could be it could be the density of what's in the cytoplasm within a cell is not sufficient. And uh and so they freeze, but it was two freeze events, not that extreme, one went to 26 degrees, one just down to 30, but both of them lasted for nine hours. Conventional trees defoliated. Um 40 all the way up to 80 percent. I'm afraid I'm even gonna lose some of those trees. The regenerative trees, they're fine, they're beautiful today. They've all leafed back out. They're a really nice bright green. And the conventionals are uh they've been getting organic nutrition for a year and a half, but and maybe my transition was too abrupt that the tree couldn't handle it. It'd been trained just for straight nitrate, uh, and they don't get it anymore. Now they were getting uh fish hydrolysate primarily. And this is a picture of a different rep. And this is just three days after the freeze. So this is what happens. Uh regenerative on the right, and the conventional this time, it's a different replication. They just uh uh the leaves just could not handle the the first freeze, and then it froze again. Uh so this one is three days after that uh 23 degree freeze event. And then when to shift gears, that's uh some of the realizations that I've had. I've done all kinds of replicated trial work, uh mowing study, uh, leaf miner study. I've tested chlorella vulgaris, uh, an algae which is was incredibly effective in my grove, uh, sold as end soil. And then on these conventional, I was really wondered if it's the fish hydrolysate that was uh not being helping the uh regenerative trees to grow. My other trees in the growth were fine with it, but not these uh difficult to grow Shira Nui trees. So I did a larger replicated trial. University of Florida was helping up with this and uh has a grad student working on it who's gonna present it. But I tested four different kinds of organic nitrogen, and I have to be careful, everything has to be certified organic. So the fish hydrolysate is what I'd always used. And then I tried chile and nitrate, corn steep powder, and soy hydrolysate. These are all different products supplied by different manufacturers, and then we combined soy and chilai, and it was a lot of nitrogen. Uh, but each one had to have a full complement of the other nutrients, and they all did it, a program from each of those manufacturers. Um and then I used a different inoculant in each one, and the fish hydrolysate had um one of the uh inoculate, it's called the Chilean nitrate had chonex, which is a sponsor of this podcast, and uh cornstead powder had a new one from the soy hydrolysate, had one from but after the three treatments last year, which were the midsummer uh fertility treatments, the next leaf flush I measured the change, and the fish hydrolysate actually had a negative uh response, meaning the leaf flush wasn't as much as it was prior, and uh the others all had a positive response with the Chilean nitrate chonex combination being the best. And I was searching what why why could that be? And so we did a Haney test. This is the microbial respiration slide. Um the Haney test showed a lot of interesting things, but the Chilean nitrate chonex combination treatment jumped out ahead with soil respiration. It was the only one that that really stood out, and that's not a it's not a nitrogen impact. It's this time I felt like we were really looking at the inoculants, um, which it uh it stood out ahead of the other uh inoculants that were in the trial. There were a couple other things that jumped way ahead in that treatment. One was potassium, uh, same kind of response, about a 40% increase with the Chilean nitrate and chonex on potassium availability, uh which interesting effect, it also had the highest total nitrogen. Which nitrate would be more available in this form where it's more of the amino acids or peptides in the other uh in the other treatments, especially in the fish hydrolysate, which may be all the way not even as much broken down, it might still be in a protein form. And then uh in the defoliation. Now, this is a separate set of data. This is 300 trees being evaluated for defoliation after that after that freeze. And um again, the fish hydrolysate, those trees uh were just not as strong when it came to freeze protection. So this really changed my attitude and my my whole uh thought process about uh which nitrogen source I'm gonna provide to my trees, but also trying to search for the strongest uh microbial inoculant, which I use pretty regularly and keep adding and then keep keep supplementing. So um Michael wanted to maybe open it back up to you and see if there's any uh discussion points from that that you'd like to focus on.

SPEAKER_01 28:38

Wow. Uh that was that was pretty incredible. Uh Herb, thank you for sharing that. You know, let's let's go into some of these practical things. You know, first of all, in the last episode we had links in our show notes to refractometers. I think we're going to be linking some penetrometers to our show notes now, a lot of people. And, you know, within these new set of soil health regs that are coming down from USDA NRCS, part of this is, you know, really aggregate stability. And especially when it comes to just normal field condition aggregate stability. You know, had you used a penetrometer before you started farming, or was this something that was kind of new to you?

SPEAKER_03 29:27

It was completely new to me. I went to uh a pharmaconference and uh and a grower had a little video of himself using a penetrometer, and he was putting out compost extract. And in a season, he was showing this penetrometer and it went all the way to the handles instead of instead of three or four inches. And I thought, man, the visual from that is so dramatic. And it was compelling. And so, yeah, it's it's a wonderful instrument, you know, 170 bucks, I think, is what they what they sell for, but it's an immediate um measurement about what's going on in your soil. Uh, microbial or porosity, uh, it's a it's a great, great measurement.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Yeah, I'm I'm really I'm really thankful for that measurement. And you know, a lot of people might say, well, I'm just gonna be checking on the fly. You know, maybe I have a couple of different things I'm trying. And so, you know, the penetrometer is real time. You know, it's going out there, checking, seeing how things are different for row metals if you're in, you know, a perennial cropping system, or even in strips for folks that are doing broad acre, you know, kind of strip tillage or minimal tillage. So I think that's really important.

SPEAKER_03 30:55

Um one of the ultimate is always leave a check plot, leave leave off a row or a pass, or you know, turn off that the sprayer or the inoculant, or you know, cut off a drip line and and come back and see. That's where they'll they'll see huge difference. Uh everything else the same, fertility, but in that penetrometer, show them immediately what's what's going on in the soil.

SPEAKER_01 31:26

That's that's great advice. Yeah, definitely do that. You know, a lot of a lot of growers are gonna get really focused, I think, on what the forward arc of these kind of maybe they want to jump in or put a part of their farm in the regenerative ag pilot program from USDA. And a lot of growers are gonna have a really forward mindset, but it is important, just like you had conventional next to regenerative, it is conventional to leave checks out there because I think some folks will say, well, look at all my numbers and it become a real hard numbers push forward game. And I do worry about that a little bit because, you know, growers should be able to see, okay, if I did things the way I was doing, what would that look like today? You know, and so that's really, really good advice. I wanted to also talk about this uh soil microbial respiration conversation really quick from a tactical standpoint. We saw differences in the Chonex and the Chilean nitrate combination, but if we're just looking at general soil microbial respiration, what what do you what do you as a grower see in that you know CO2 C score? Um, and when do you take that every year? Do you take it multiple times a year? How what's your thought process around testing something like a Haney soil health test?

SPEAKER_03 32:51

Yeah, there's so much information in that Haney soil test, and I have found that that's the most valuable piece. So apparently they dry the soil and then they re-moisten it, and then in a little chamber, they measure how much CO2, so how much breathing is going on, and those microbes are respiring, are breathing out. And so it's a it's an immediate measurement of of how much microbial life you have in that soil. Um, I've used it and seen some amazing things. Um dramatically, um, I put out blue-green algae, this end soil product one time, again, a replicated trial, and the Haney showed me that when I put it into the soil, and it's it's full of endophytes, the algae is charged with all these other bacteria inside it. Well, the soil respiration jumped up, and the Haney also shows what's going on with um with minerals in the organic form. And in that treatment, again, this was replicated, um, nitrate disappeared. It went from a good level to zero, and ammonia cut more than half. And so all of a sudden I'm realizing wait a minute, the microbes are highly active, and the nitrogen is being converted to something. Well, it's being converted to protein, and simultaneously, one of the varieties in that trial leafed out. There was a leaf flush five weeks earlier than the other treatments. So you got looking at those three things together, I got microbial activity from an algae being put out, which is loaded with bacteria. Nitrogen is being metabolized into, you know, it goes into peptides and then amino acids and then protein, and the tree is exploding in growth. So you can combine the information uh that's that's in a haney. So I think the ideal time is when you're when you're looking for something. So you know, uh midsummer, how did my spring treatments do? Um did is there an area that I was treating differently? Compare that to maybe the conventional part of my growth. It's just like anything else. You gotta take good samples, gotta take eight or 10, or I take 15 probes. I do a lot, and then I blend it for 10 minutes uh before I send it in, and they get a really good reading from it. But the Haney is a it's a pretty inexpensive, um, highly active. You get about there's almost 30 different evaluations, all the different minerals in their organic form, pH, organic matter, and then all these soil, uh, these microbial, and it even tells you what the what the microbial food level is in this in the soil. Takes a little while to figure out how to interpret it, but man, it's a lot of information.

SPEAKER_01 36:22

And that is that is terrific. I, you know, a lot of growers have come to me and they have this kind of soil health question of where do we start? And my first thing is, hey, are you pulling regular soil samples? And a lot of them will obviously say yes. And I will ask, who do they send it to? And I would first of all say, hey, pick up the phone, call your soil lab, and ask what kind of soil health testing they have. You know, yesterday I was talking to somebody from Waypoint. Waypoint, arguably one of the largest soil labs in the United States. They're partnered with some other folks that are offering Haney soil test now. And I was really, uh I was really excited to hear that just because I know so many growers have waypoint accounts, so many ag retailers have waypoint accounts. And the last thing that I want is for folks to say, oh, this was a hurdle. You know, like I couldn't jump this hurdle. And so I just stopped. You know, I just didn't do anything. And doing nothing is not an option on this conversation, especially when you want to pursue something, pursue change, pursue some sort of new growing tactic. You know, it I know there's some economic benefits to this, but also I do think a lot of folks are gonna look at some of these uh more, you know, uh more practical farm benefits. You know, uh you hit on you hit on the the macorazal kind of fungi or the soil fungi population. You know, I mean I feel like we have a lot of really short-term viewpoints in traditional agriculture, uh, or we'll say the modern recent history of agriculture. Tell me about just how that kind of hit you with your background as far as looking at the dwarf puffball. That's pretty stark, that's pretty strong, 89% of what was out there. So tell me about that.

SPEAKER_03 38:22

Yeah. So, you know, probably that was one of my biggest realizations, transformational kind of experiences, was coming to an understanding that that there's that there's a symphony of things going on in the soil under us. And I sensed at the end of my career, I knew, I realized that fumigation was probably the worst enemy of agriculture. And I mean, I was I was in the nematode business. I mean, I was I launched a nematicide, and it was more of uh uh ecologically friendly, it just took out the nematodes. And so that was my realization that you sterilize the soil, you kill everything, then all the bad guys, you just open opportunity for the bad guys to come in instead of the literally thousands of different species that are in balance. And and then to find out all this mycorrhizal fungi now being researched for the past 30 or 40 years, no pine tree is planted in in America without inoculation with mycorrhizal fungi. It it goes into the roots, it amplifies the root system, it brings in uh nutrients that the tree wouldn't have access to. It transports bacteria. Uh so in a tree crop, that's our ultimate measurement or ultimate desire would be to have mycorrhizal fungi. So I've tried a lot of different inoculants. I'm now using an orchard inoculant. And I actually, how do you get something into the soil if you're not tilling? Well, I inoculate my cover crop seeds. I started doing it yesterday, so I've got a I used uh five different kinds of inoculant. I'm not no stone unturned. Inoculate the cover crop seed, they carry the microbes, establish them in the soil, and then they're interacting with the tree roots. So um that's that's such a key thing. And you um brought up a great point about soil testing. Um, I think that this is one of the big confusions. People think and ask how many times have you tested your soil? Well, the standard lab process, if you give it, I give it to extension, and they send back basically the same result to almost everybody. You get, you know, add 300 pounds of lime, 150 pounds of ammonia nitrate. That's all they're gonna tell me. I want to know the real things that are going on in my soil. So these labs now are incredibly effective at doing better, even organic, um, non-destructive soil testing. There's an entirely new science behind it. And then the step beyond that is the DNA testing, which you know is is a lot more expensive, but to do it to do it one year and then do it the following year to see your progress, wow, what a what a realization to use one of these powerful companies that uh that can do soil DNA testing.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

Yeah, that's I I'm glad you brought that up because I was going to ask you about that. The you know, folks like biomakers, you know, I've been familiar with them a long time just because, you know, similar to some of your background, I was doing a lot of technical support agronomy, and I really wanted to know from a microbial perspective, you know, how how my products, a lot of biostimulant products, how they were working? How did they impact those soil microbial uh communities? But from your from your perspective of why you started and wanted to go in that direction, or what what was your initial thought process and how you know how have you kind of justified keeping it going, I guess?

SPEAKER_03 42:41

So to me, it's always proof. Um, and that's my that's this crazy industry training that you don't stand up and talk about something unless you can prove it, unless you got the data behind you. So I can't believe that I've I started farming and actually run my whole farm like a research farm. I've got I've got four big trials going on right now, and I probably have every year different ones uh for you know constantly. So I wanted proof from the beginning. I felt like I was hearing about this regenerative, restoring this ecosystem, all this life in the soil. And um I I believed it, but at the same time, I saw that the big gap was uh they weren't proving it. And if I was gonna believe in it, um, and even even talk about it and and share what I was finding, I wanted to have some proof. And so I started my initial thought was well, there's brand new DNA technology. And uh so I applied for a for a grant and Um got it, and that just absolutely changed my thought process to see this transformation in my soil, very first season. And then now there's even a uh in the visual presentations that you get from biomakers is spectacular. They have seven or eight different ways of looking at it and graphing it. Uh, but there's a new company called Rhizebio that actually examines the rhizosphere, the little zone around the root. So when they get a sample, they pull out all the citrus roots and they examine on the outside and the inside of the citrus root. So now I'm actually getting an incredible number of species. I'm up to, from their evaluation, 3,300 species in my soil, and they're detecting mycorrhizal fungi really well. So I'm trying to do the same thing, repeat it again, comparing my grove to a conventional grove that's you know been sterilized and see where this life's coming from. And I absolutely believe it's the life in the soil providing the nutrient density in the fruit. I didn't touch on that enough, but those groves that I sampled that were that I was eight times more nutrient dense, they had better fertility programs than I have. They had plenty of minerals in the soil. They were real aggressive at their fertility programs. My aggression was in my microbe program, and then my fruit was nutrient-dense. That's where it's coming from. That's the value, and that's what we've lost. That's what uh why our produce and what we're eating. I think that's the reason for the health crisis in America. Basically, we're eating food that's no longer nutritious or highly processed. So that's kind of become my passion and converting what I'm doing to to proving that a little bit more.

SPEAKER_01 46:06

Yeah, I I know sometimes we get into some areas like that. You know, we called it the whole farm podcast, but really it's kind of like the whole food podcast in certain ways, because all these things are connected. And so uh you kind of hit on this point a second ago when we were talking about inoculating cover crop seeds. And I know a lot of growers, they they know they're supposed to be using some different, we'll just call them microbial tools. Maybe they say, hey, I know I need to go out this, you know, go out with the glomus kind of mycorrhizal fungi product. I've heard bacillus is my heavy hitter. I want a five-strain consortium of bacillus, maybe lactobacillus, you know, standard inoculant stuff. But they might look at me and they say, Hey, Michael, you're an agronomist, right? And I'm, yeah, I'm I'm I'm learning every day. Uh and they say, are my is my microbials, are they gonna have negative interactions? Like, is one gonna like fight and kill the other one? And so I I wanted to get your take on that point because I get that question. So it sounds to me like you're aggressively going in the other direction. Or tell me about what your thought is and how you view this landscape.

SPEAKER_03 47:27

Absolutely, they don't fight with each other, they balance each other. Um, it's we're finding out amazing things. The research now is is so incredible. Two of the, I mean, I spent my career developing fungicides mostly. I mean, both fusarium and alternaria, which are two of the things, I mean, I've launched products and done research against those. I and guess what? Unless the plant is weak, those two can be beneficial fungi. And only when they encounter a weak plant do they become a pathogen. So we're talking about a balance in the soil. People say, oh, you've got 500 species of fungi in your soil. Yeah. They are doing they are doing incredible positive things. Their interaction with each other. I mean, there's whole new sciences that I don't even begin to understand. Uh, gene transfer from one species of bacteria to another. Um, when they get signals that there's a deficiency, a group can compensate for that. They can extract the minerals that are needed. That's the exudates that the plants are putting into the soil. There's a there's a whole frontier of information that we are absolutely just discovering. And I think the I put it this way, God's creation that was there and existed just fine without mankind for millennia, um, I mean, look at the trees out in the forest. They don't need us to come in and fertilize them. They are just fine. All the interactions, you know, they've discovered now that a um that when a tree drops an acorn or a seed and a daughter tree is growing, if there is a drought, that that mother tree is hyphyly connected to that daughter tree. That's probably mycorrhizal fungi. And she can either send that tree selectively send it nutrients or moisture, whatever it needs. And the other species of trees around that daughter tree, she doesn't feed them. It's I don't understand it. It's it's amazing. It's uh the created world around us is things that that we don't yet understand. It's like the human gut, you know. We are now discovering that there are more cells that are non-human within our body, in our gut microbe, than uh than we have human cells. So I mean think about that. That's DNA, that's interactions, that's populations that we don't even understand. And it's just that complicated again in the soil under our feet.

SPEAKER_01 50:45

I'm really glad you brought up that point uh around fusarium alternaria. You know, a lot of these, you know, kind of a recurring thing that's been discussed is that a lot of these pests and pathogens, they're opportunistic. And our bodies are the same way. You know, if we have weak bodies, then we're gonna be more susceptible to lots of obviously you could say inflammation generally, but you could say sickness, general health concerns, sleep problems, all kinds of other things. And, you know, it's you got to get at some of the root of these issues and uh food uh and soil microbial interactions. You know, I do think that there's a lot of parallel uh conversations around those. And so that's really that's really interesting. Let me ask you this. We've discussed some aggressive soil type conversations, and clearly the things that we're measuring, this SEMA 216 soil health testing, they're they're soil things. But let's talk about foliar conversations just for a moment. Obviously, citrus, you know, you got to have a pretty good strategy as far as these leaves, maybe taking care of these leaves, or maybe we're missing something. So, what has been your foliar kind of approach? And I and I say those things out of a conventional mindset. You know, if we were going out and we were saying, okay, maybe we don't have all the knowledge, but we say, okay, we're short on some micronutrients in the soil, our basic soil testing, you know, our classic Melic soil testing says, hey, we're low on boron. You know, we know it leeches, we're gonna put out some foliar boron or something of that nature. What has been your approach around that with all the different changes that you've done?

SPEAKER_03 52:37

So it's an interesting question because it's my thought process is actually evolving. I know that there's a microbial layer on the leaf called a sphylosphere, just like, but I think it's probably less well understood than what's in the soil, even though we're just discovering the soil. Um, but you know, we as uh as farmers and all that career I spent as a researcher probably failed to recognize that man, the leaf has the capacity to take up so much. I mean, I've heard numbers of stomates, you know, little openings in the leaf that's in the you know, thousands per square inch. So um I'm set to go out and make a make a foliar nutrition spray, which I consider foliar for the tree, soil for the microbes. And then the tree also benefits from the soil fertility. And I'm probably I'm probably out there every two weeks or more, foliar soil, foliar soil. And um, you know, we know some things like uh do it early in the morning, do it late in the evening when the stomates are going to be open, whether it's whether it's microbes that we're putting out, or whether it's you know, whether it's minerals, organically chelated nutrition is what I'm putting out. Um and had some recent discoveries of okay, if my my trees right now they've had an unbelievable leaf flush, but they're not dark green yet. They're still when they first come out, they're kind of a yellow tint. And uh I know I need to get some organic nitrogen to them. I'm moved away from the fish hydrolysate, and it's quick and easy to do it to the soil, just inject with irrigation, but that might inhibit my soil um nitrogen fixation. I've got incredible archaea, that's a whole nother subject. In the soil, it's a newly discovered kind of bacteria, and they all fix nitrogen. I've got huge populations of them, but I don't want to inhibit that. So I now know that if I do some nitrogen as a foliar spray, it's gonna go straight to the leaf, do its job, and the tree's actually gonna, it's not gonna go to the ground and inhibit the natural nitrogen fixation. So um it's a little more time consuming and complicated doing an air blast sprayer and putting it out, but that's that's what I'm about to do because I'm now trying to balance. But I also I've got a uh compost tea brew going on. It's gonna be some bunch of microbes that I'm I'm blowing up in 24 hours, and I'm gonna put a batch of that in my in my foliar spray. So that'll be diluted out, and so I'll add some microbes, add a little bit of food there for them, and then put out my my tree nutrition. So uh yeah, foliar folial applications are really evolving too. Uh I'm learning stuff constantly.

SPEAKER_01 56:19

Man, I I think that's that's really I'm glad you said it that way and brought up the phylosphere. You know, I guess the first frontier was us talking about the rhizosphere, you know, rhizobio. Obviously, you can put things on a seed. They're trying to measure this, you know, interface. A lot of folks are talking about the spermosphere, which is the seed coating microbes that live on the seed coating. We have the phylosphere. And I didn't hear about any of these terms other than the rhizosphere up to three or four years ago. I mean, all this is really new. So if you're listening or watching, and this is the first time you've heard about the phylosphere, don't feel left out. There's lots of time. And that's kind of what I wanted to kind of close. This will be our last real question, Herb. And that is if you're a farmer, maybe you've come from a conventional background and you're interested in maybe starting to section off part of what you're doing. You know, there's lots of ways that you might take a risk or a strategy that you're gonna develop part of your farm as a regenerative part of your farm, or maybe enroll it in this USDA in RCS program. So somebody that's got 10 to 15 years ahead of them, you know, what kind of advice would you give them based on what you've experienced over the last couple of years?

SPEAKER_03 57:43

To me, the bottom line is is just realize that your soil is alive. I mean, every farmer is passionate about life and their crop. Just realize that your soil is alive too. Okay, so what does that mean to you? How are you going to treat it? Um think about not killing it, the three things that wipe out the life in the soil tillage, synthetic fertilizer, which is just salts put together, and and pesticides. So think about alternatives to those. And then the quickest and easiest thing is these cover crops. Um, they keep the soil covered, they keep the temperature down, the moisture in, they protect the microbes, uh, and then they feed the microbes. That's the beauty of it. And it's not just ryegrass cover that we use to keep the wind from blowing it away. Every species is adding something different to the soil, every cover crop species. So I do 10, 10 different species in the spring and 10 in the fall, and that's building up all different kinds of microbes. And I think probably that's where a lot of the success of my grove and the nutrient density came from, is my aggressive approach to to cover cropping, um, which hopefully you've seen in some of these some of these visuals. So to be honest, that's an easy start. They're not taking away from the nutrition in your crop. They're they're probably adding to it, um, even moisture-wise. They're they're not like the way we think about weeds um that are stealing moisture. They've actually proven that that they can cooperate and that the in a drought, plants will do better with a cover crop. Um so there's some those are simple first steps that uh any grower can make, any way that they can begin to think about the soil, protect it and and maybe, maybe nourish it. Uh once in a while, I just put straight sugar in my irrigation. And uh it's it it's feeding microbes. It's a simple and expensive way. And some of these inoculants, they are not overly expensive. It's a slow process. Build it up and transition your your farm to something that's more regenerative.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:24

That is so good. That's a great way to close this podcast. Mr. Herb, I've known you for a long time. Sometimes I have to pinch myself because I see you all over. I see you on so many different podcasts. Um, you know, I've you brought up so many good tools, uh, you know, not just from soil tests, but we we discuss microalgae, we discuss general soil inoculants, macorazal fungi, you know, growers. What I want to say to growers is I know it might seem like overload right now, but there's a reason that these things are being talked about in such a, you know, like the conversations buzzing around some of them. But you cannot take where we've been and where we might be going in the same kind of bite. You know, this this could this bite could look different, and that's pretty scary. But, you know, as you start thinking about these different tools that we mentioned, Chonex obviously, and obviously, Herb, I want to say thank you on behalf of Chonex for for using the product, for working with Chonex. Um, it's been really great to see what you're doing and how you're measuring it on the farm and bring some real data uh with your presentation today. So I just want to uh impart to growers, you know, Herb's a real farmer, he's really out there, like there's no smoke and mirrors, like this is some sort of hobby thing. It's way evolved past that. And growers might say, well, citrus is different than corn, or citrus is different than peanuts. But I want to tell you, these practices do overlap. And so, you know, find a good agronomist that is trying to learn kind of both sides, or might be in the field, or might have seen some different things, ask them questions. You know, what is a strategy for if I want to do this, if I want to get to this outcome? I think that was something you mentioned, Herb, was, you know, really wanted to know what you wanted to get out of this. And so, you know, have a focal point. A lot of these USDA plans will have things drawn up of saying, hey, what are you targeting? What are you going to do about it? How are you going to measure that? And so I just want to say thank you again on behalf of Chonex. Thank you for all the work you're doing and being a great communicator of a lot of these topics, Herb.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:46

Thank you, Michael. Thanks for the chance to uh to share some of the things that we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:55

Thanks for listening to the Whole Farm Podcast by Chonex. If you found this episode helpful, be sure to subscribe and share it with someone in your network. For resources or to learn more about Chonex, visit Chonex.ag. Thanks again for joining us, and we'll see you next time.