Remember, your last name is Alan, correct?
Henry, Peter Henry.
Henry.
Yes.
Alan would be cool, though.
I wonder where I got that from.
Hi, friends. This is John.
Welcome back to the Regenerative
Agriculture Podcast, where we have all
kinds of fun conversations related to
improving our soil health and our plants'
health and ultimately our health by the
cultivation and production of very high
quality food.
Thank you all for being here, for tuning
in, and for listening.
I'm here today with Peter.
Henry from Puerto Rico, who is someone
I've been looking forward to chatting with
for quite a while.
Peter, I've heard about the awesome things
that you're doing on your operation from
our team here at AEA.
Tell us a bit about your personal journey
and story and your farming context and
what you have going on.
Cool. So it looks extremely excited to be
on the podcast. It's kind of surreal
hearing the intro.
Generally, I'm listening to the podcast on
our way to drop food off or like pick up
products and things like that.
So, amazing to be here.
I guess, like, super, super high level,
I've been more or less full time
farming for about six years now.
I would say we've had this farm for six
years. We purchased it in the pandemic.
And I've been like really living off of
farming for around three years now, where
it's a full time job that's supports our
family and the entire workforce.
I guess, like, super quick, I don't come
from a farming background.
I mean, I grew up between the United
States, Puerto Rico, spent some time in
other places like Venezuela, Mexico,
Colombia.
So I would say, like, farming has always
kind of been around me in the sense that
in most of those countries, and even in
the United States, there's always farms
like in Florida, California, you always
see farming around you.
You hear about farmers kind of see what
they're going through.
You consume their products.
But I never thought that this
would be what I do for
a living until maybe three years
ago. So, I mean, like, I was pretty big on
baseball most of my life.
Like, I was, I guess, like good enough to
play in college out of D1 school.
I wasn't good enough really to make it to
the pros or maybe like my mental worry
about some of the baseball games weren't
necessarily where they need to be to kind
of handle the ups and downs of like having
a three strikeout game and trying to
bounce back from that.
So when baseball was done, my most typical
pathway was well, I need to make some
money, so let me get into tech and I'm
bilingual, so I could work in sales or
something within Latin America.
And that's pretty much what I did.
And I was able to kind of get pretty high
up into like the VP level of a couple
different startups and start my own
startup, mainly in like digital identity
fintech space.
But I always kind of had an idea
that I wanted to live somewhere tropical,
maybe Puerto Rico, maybe Mexico, and have
my farm.
I just didn't know when that would be.
And so basically, that happened in the
pandemic where everything went remote.
So we just took a trip, my wife and I, to
the Dominican Republic, stayed there for
couple months and then I just was like how
much would a small, you know, abandoned
coffee farm or something, how much would
that cost? And it turned out to be not too
much.
So we ended up purchasing a farm of
about like seven hectares of land.
I'm not sure what that is in acres, but it
was purely 15 to 20.
It was 27 times. Yeah, around 20.
Yeah. So it was an abandoned farm.
Like the guy who had it before actually
worked for like one of the entities that
does stuff for like reforestation.
So he reforested with a bunch of like non
endemic pine trees and maybe some other
things like that, but it was kind of just
like abandoned. There's a little shack
there, so we just set up a couple solar
panels so I could work remotely and kind
of like do farming on the weekend or after
the work day was done.
But at that point in like 2020, it really
wasn't something that I was thinking about
doing full time.
And I guess like a little bit of
background into how we got to this part
was probably in high school, I started
roasting coffee.
So, like, buying beans from Sweet Maria's
and roasting it. And I think that that's
really what got me into farming because I
started seeing, like, oh, like there's
these different varietal types and these
different flavor profiles and stuff like
that. So, at first, it was kind of like,
you know, specialty coffee is really cool.
How do I, you know, roast my own beans?
Maybe I'll open up my own roastery, but
that's quickly turned into actually
wanting to grow the The trees myself and
kind of all that, the entire process of
coffee.
So, when we bought the farm, the actually
the idea around me working on the farm was
to turn it into kind of a specialty coffee
farm, the whole thing, shade growing, all
that kind of stuff.
I didn't really know much, too much about
farming, row cropping, all that kind of
stuff, but that's how we kind of got here.
And we actually did plant some coffee.
We planted the entire farm in coffee, but
I guess like when you do something, the
first time and you're kind of like a
newbie to it, you don't necessarily
understand the complexities about
varieties or the importance of like good
seed genetics, good nurseries, and stuff
like that. So we went through pretty much,
we did all the mistakes that you're
probably gonna make.
We quickly, oh, the pain, the pain of
learning from experience.
Oh, yeah. So we quickly got rid of the
coffee. We still have some, like a couple
thousand plants, but we, We really flipped
that into actually a passion fruit
operation.
And from the passion fruit operation We
got to where we are today, where we're
mainly focusing on a niche market in the
United States and Canada, where our buyers
are generally supermarkets and direct to
consumers in the African diaspora, mainly
from Nigeria, who are looking for their
heirloom type vegetables and tubers to be
able to cook their traditional foods.
And currently, right now In the market,
they have to adapt to substitutes, which
don't necessarily have the same flavor
profiles or the quality that they're
looking for.
So that's kind of how we got into that.
I'm happy to jump into how we got to that
niche market as well, as it's a pretty
interesting story.
Yeah, I'd love to get that story.
And then for you to elaborate a little bit
on many of our listeners, I'm sure, are
not familiar with what the production of
passion food or some of these more
tropical plants looks like.
So tell us a little bit about the actual.
Process and the management of the farming
operation as well.
Of course. Yep. Passion fruit, we're
actually going to be going back to it.
I just picked up a new variety of
a passion fruit called Gulupa, which is
from Huila in Colombia.
So it's, I guess, pretty similar to what
you guys have in the United States, where
it's a smaller red passion fruit.
In Colombia, Brazil, Dominican Republic,
Puerto Rico, Mexico, you generally will
find the larger yellow one.
In the US, you probably won't find the
Larger yellow passion fruits because
they're actually banned from import.
I think there's only like two countries
that can import passion fruits.
And generally, the consumers and the
buyers want the red passion fruit.
So you generally won't find that unless
you go out of the country.
So the variety that we were growing before
was a Brazilian variety where it's like a
giant passion fruit.
It's a variety called Sol, it's from
Brazil. And each passion fruit weighs
about 450 to 600 grams.
They're just
these massive
fruits. But the ones that are
better for export are generally red and
smaller, weighing about 100, 110 grams.
In terms of a passion fruit orchard, I
guess, an just excuse me if some of my
terms might sound weird in English because
I literally only know most terms of
farming in Spanish.
So I'm going to try to get them going.
But essentially, a passion fruit orchard
is more or less set up like a
wine vineyard.
It's a semi perennial plant.
So you could generally push it to maybe
three or four years before you have to
replant.
Maybe it could possibly go.
A little bit longer, but if you want
optimal production per tree and per
hectare, generally replanting is going to
be important.
And I would say in passion fruit, a lot of
people have issues because it is quite
susceptible to a bunch of disease.
So you generally have atracnose, which is
a big one. You have a lot of like
PTM, fusarium, damping off, rice octonia,
all those good guys.
But really, Fusarium is a pretty big one
that attacks the root zone in most
plantations. And then a lot of like leaf
blight. So you'll have a lot of issues
with alternaria, which is the big one,
which is pretty dangerous to the passion
fruit because it will dry up the plant if
you don't catch it soon enough.
And what really affects the quality of
the fruit, really, is the atrachnos and
the septoria type blight.
You might have some bacterial diseases,
but generally these are the things that
make it so. A lot of passion fruit growers
have a lot of issues and have to use
a ton of chemicals.
And so I always say if you are going to
any of these countries, beware of the
passion fruit that you're buying because
it's probably pretty high on the residual
chemical level because they're using
everything from carbonazine to all your
triosols to Rita Mill, like all those
types of things on a constant basis.
And because they're not going for export,
a lot of times they're spraying today
harvesting tomorrow and it's just got to
be careful. And I think a lot of that
has to do with possibly genetics, with the
seeds. A lot of these diseases actually
come from the nurseries, which has been a
big challenge for us across the board with
all of our vegetables.
We generally have our own nursery right
now on the farm that we built out to avoid
those issues.
But I would say, at least in the Dominican
Republic, Colombia, and Mexico, I have
experienced. Or I have experience in that,
most of these horticultural crops bring
disease into the fields and they cause,
they have a lot of economic losses for
growers. So in our case, we actually had
to deal with all of those diseases plus a
virus. And the problem with the virus,
which is, I'm not sure what the variety of
the virus was, it could have been a tomato
virus or it could have been a tobacco
virus, but One of those varieties actually
lives within the seeds.
So it's really hard to know until you're
seven months in and then you start seeing
issues with the virus.
And so, like, the virus will generally
create, like, kind of like a shriveled
fruit that looks really weird and, like,
make the leaves look pretty blotchy.
So, those are a bunch of things that you
have to figure out.
But in terms of, like, the way you
can grow passion fruit, generally, you
grow it like a grapevine.
Like a more or less like a grapevine, but
you just need to have a taller trellis
system.
We generally put it around in feet, maybe
seven feet high from the ground with a 12
gauge wire and generally bamboo stakes.
And then generally, you're planting
traditionally, you would plant about 25
meters by three meters.
What I figured out is actually when you do
a bunch of different cutting.
Or trimmings on the plant, you could
actually increase the density a lot more.
So, I'm actually Planting around 65
centimeters by about three meters.
So, I'm increasing that a lot more,
but it takes a lot of prunings
to be able to get the plant
to fruit and be productive during its
life cycle.
And yeah, I think the other cool thing
about passion fruit, and if you have a
vine at home, is if you want good
production, the number one thing you could
really do besides giving a good nutrition
with calcium and moly and boron is the
manual of public Molly and Boron is the
manual pollinization.
So you have to pollinate it by hand every
single day.
Wow.
If you don't pollinate it by hand, you'll
have a very poor production.
The fruit might look like it's full, but
it will be empty.
And there's only one bee that pollinates
it. It's like a sila copa, it's a big
bumblebee type thing.
But the regular bees love the pollen, but
they won't do anything but rob the pollen
from your tree. So if you're not getting
out there around 12 in the afternoon to
pollinate it by hand, good production.
Like bees will be happy, but your
pocketbook will probably be suffering.
Wow.
All right. So I want to dig deeper into
you mentioned the number one thing is good
nutrition management.
And I know based on, I'm not really
familiar with your operation, but people
have been highly recommending that I speak
with you.
And that is indicated to me that you're
doing something different from the
mainstream. So, what's I'd like to
understand how are you managing diseases
and how are you managing nutrition?
And how does that compare with either what
you've been doing historically or what
contemporary practices are?
Yeah, for sure. I think so.
My kind of journey to the regen ag space,
if you will, kind of like don't like the
labels of regen. And all these other
things because I think it's just like
they're great for dividing people.
Yeah, that's what it's always like us
versus them or stuff like that.
I feel like there's a couple of things.
Like for me, I live on the farm.
We have workers here that also live on the
farm, and our house is quite close to the
crops. So just from like my own health
standpoint, I don't necessarily feel
comfortable mixing up a bunch of different
mixtures with.
Bunch of different molecules and spray
those just from a, I guess, an
egotistical, selfish standpoint.
I don't think that that's a great idea.
Second off, if you're looking to actually
export to Europe or the US, you have to be
very careful about what molecules you put
on because you have the pre harvest
interval timeframe.
And so it actually limits the amount of
chemicals you can use.
And I would say the last part, though, is
actually from a standpoint of what I see
works and what doesn't work.
And I've just seen that chemicals don't
necessarily do much.
I think they're good tools in the sense
that if you have an issue and it's going
to cause an economic issue for you down
the line and you could understand how to
use a chemical in the right way, that's
great. But if you don't correct the
underlying issues of nutrition and biology
after which or before from a preventative
manner, You're going to be basically a
slave to using chemical after chemical.
And as these things, like, for example,
aphids that basically can morph, like one
aphid can turn into millions of aphids in
a blink of an eye, there's no way that
those chemicals are going to penetrate all
of those guys at one time.
And you could just cause resistance and
issues. So basically, how I've
been approaching nutrition is
one, trying to understand.
What the plants need in terms of nutrition
to prevent or to cure any type of issues
or ailments that come onto the farm.
And then see how I can incorporate
more biology and more carbon into the
system to allow me to stop using
completely any type of chemical input or
even like a copper fungicide type thing.
So, in terms of new nutrition management I
think like my main thing came from when we
started the passion fruit crop.
We had a bunch of issues with these, with
a couple of diseases.
And so, me kind of being a newbie into
both passion fruit and kind of into
farming, it was like my second year and
kind of my first year actually doing like
a real agricultural setup as you know,
with coffee, it's fairly easy.
They're perennial trees, you don't have so
many like nutritional requirements as you
would with a horticultural crop.
And so, I kind of followed for
the first few months the traditional way
of doing it. Um, I had a couple of
colleagues and friends in Colombia that do
big production, I kind of just like follow
their plan. So, you know, Rito Mill, mix
it with some carbendazine, maybe come
through with some other type of molecule.
Um, maybe you know, you need a Neonicotine
insecticide. And kind of like
you're throwing these things on
preventatively.
And then you're not necessarily focusing
on the nutrition. So while there was
nutrition in, like the products that they
were recommending were like chelated with
EDTA and some other things that I kind of
wasn't necessarily convinced.
As I started questioning what they were
telling me and seeing The results that I
was getting, and that the disease never
went away.
That's when I started to really
dive into plant nutrition, understand the
whole context between mineral deficiencies
and mineral excess, and why certain
things happen at certain timeframes within
the crop's life cycle.
And that kind of drove me into solving
issues from a more nutritional aspect than
from a more chemical aspect.
So, I quickly got out of that and started
trying to find a way where I could reduce
that chemical load and be able to, you
know, have a healthy crop and have
something that produces money, but also
doesn't kill me in the process and kills
other people eating it in the process and
killing all the bees and everything like
that.
So, that's kind of how I got into that
time frame, into that mindset.
So, bring us just maybe flash forward
to today. Well, you could also talk about
the transition, but what does your
nutrition management look like today?
Yeah.
So today, we mainly focus on foliar
feeding.
And we also do a couple soil drenches
right now.
And I also focus on
a pretty aggressive pre planting
soil amendment plan.
So generally, what I do is before planting
or anything like that, I'm taking a
complete melic with your molly, with your
total carbon to nitrogen, with your
nitrates and your ammonium.
And then I'm also taking a haney.
And then from there,
I'll take a soil
test per irrigation sector.
So, our farm is pretty mountainous terrain
and we have a river that goes through it.
So on one side of the river, the
slope like super red and very high
manganese and low iron.
Well, relatively low iron to manganese.
Like, put in perspective, we're about 208
parts per million in manganese and about
80 parts per million in iron on this side
of the river. And on the other side of the
river, we're about 108 parts per million
iron and about 60 to 50 parts per million
manganese on that side of the river.
We're talking about Generally red sandy
loam soils, pretty acidic.
Before liming, you're looking at like a 49
to 52 Ouch.
Yeah, it's pretty gnarly.
And generally, we have like two
seasons, like a rainy season and
a dry season. Right now, it's just kind
of. I was just about to ask, what do the
rainfall patterns and the quantity of
rainfall look like?
Yeah, so generally, I mean, you're
supposed To have from around November to
now, it should be dry.
And then in May, the rain
should start picking up and roll
through the entire monsoon season into
November again.
What that's kind of looked like in the
last three years has really been
unpredictable, where, for example, last
year it rained until April, stopped
raining in May, and then it rained again
until November, and then it just rained
every single day. From November into about
two weeks ago.
And then the rains have stopped.
So, really, like May, which used to be the
rainy season in most of the subtropics, at
least in this part of the world, has
turned into more like a dry season.
So, May, June, July, August, September,
October are pretty dry, which makes things
actually a lot easier for us to manage.
Luckily, we have water and we're able to
irrigate.
And then in the season when it's a little
bit colder, it also Is now raining a lot
more because a lot of the cold fronts push
down and pass a lot of rain into the
system.
So I would say, from a management
standpoint, one of our biggest hurdles,
besides the highly acidic and minerally
complex and the complexity on the mineral
side of things on the soil, is the rain.
Because when you're looking at those types
of soils, when the soil gets saturated and
reduced, you're looking at Issues, maybe
not from a. I haven't ever seen, we were
talking about this a little bit earlier,
but like I haven't seen like manganese or
iron toxicities, but I have seen that
those things do cause deficiencies or
issues with other nutrients.
So for example, like generally phosphorus,
potassium is something that is generally
down, calcium is also something that is
generally an issue, and boron.
And molybdenum are generally an issue.
So, when we pulled out the soil test, I
mean, some of the biggest limiting
factors, besides the excess of manganese
and iron, have been kind of like the
absence of molybdenum.
I think it's like 001 parts per million
across the entire farm.
So, it's essentially the detection
threshold.
Yeah. So, there's basically like no
molybdenum. And then we're at like 20 to
30 parts per million in nitrates and
around like six or seven in ammonium.
So, obviously, there's going to be some
issues with disease and bugs there because
if I don't have molybdenum, then how am I
going to convert those nitrates into
something useful for the plant?
On the high manganese side of things, just
to add more complexity to it, we have 60
parts per million in sulfur.
Intriguing.
That's interesting.
Like, I guess that's you have an igneous
soil.
It's uncommon to have that combination of
high sulfur with the high rainfall pattern
that you have, unless you have an igneous
soil. Yeah, it's fascinating.
And that's on just one side of the river
because as soon as I cross the other side
of the river, I'm at 10 to 11 parts per
million.
So that's been quite interesting.
And on the side where there's high sulfur,
I generally have most of the disease
pressure because, I mean, with the sulfur,
from what I understand, that's going to be
blocking out the calcium that I have.
It's going to be acidifying the soil as it
gets kind of like saturated and might
create a more, a less oxygenated
environment and creates all sorts of
issues there. So, in a sense, from a soil
type or a soil mineral profile, it's
almost like you're farming two different
farms.
Essentially, two different farms.
And I have four irrigation sectors on the
four different sides of things.
And so, generally, what I'm trying to do
to keep kind of like you Sanity and costs
down, I'm trying to have a semi omni
approach. But I do have different
varieties growing on different sections so
that if I do need to do a foliar, you
know, for the side with the high sulfur
that I don't want to add more sulfur to
the system or something like that, I can,
you know, do that one day and then I could
go to the other side and do another
application the next day.
So if you have irrigation available Why
did you choose to primarily focus on
foliar applications?
So, the complexity, and I'll talk a little
bit about the irrigation system because I
think one of my biggest challenges here,
especially running horticulture stuff.
So, with passion fruit, it was a little
bit easier to run irrigation.
We did micro aspirators, one per tree, but
you're talking about, you know, 60
centimeters, like on a about 60
centimeters on a line of plants, you're
talking about a plant between 60 to maybe
two meters between trees, and you have
three meters in an alleyway of space.
So there's less irrigation, there's less
materials that you need to irrigate from
that. But I think the biggest limiting
factor for me in terms of irrigation and
why I'm not necessarily fertigating with
drip line is I actually physically can't
do that because we have the mountainous
terrain that we've terraced out.
So we have everything terraced on kind of
like what you would see in maybe some of
the farms in Asia where they terrace them
out.
We've done that by hand with a pick and
hammer, me and the crew, which is like
four other people.
And we created like our own A frame.
So we terraced everything out.
And so we have everything with contour
lines. And so they do sell like a
drip line where it is a it's kind of
like a hose where it might be able to,
you know, follow the curve.
But the cost of that is extremely
elevated.
And so what I actually did was I, because
I'm pretty, I would say I've become an
expert at creating like a trellis system
from the passion fruit.
So we just created a trellis system in the
entire farm.
And then I took the irrigation lines and
I, instead of crossing them, Perpendicular
to the slope. I actually went with the
slope and just sent the irrigation lines
down with micro aspirators or micro
sprinklers. And so I have that
connected to a ventry system
and an injector. And so I actually can
do foliage from that system when I don't
have to have a backpack sprayer.
So, in that sense, I could wet everything,
I could get everything irrigated fairly
quickly. So, where a drip system, I would
need to run the drip line for maybe an
hour on a section or maybe 30 minutes.
I could pretty much get the water that.
The plants need in maybe five minutes.
So, you mentioned that you are primarily
doing foliar applications, but that
doesn't mean that you're using a sprayer,
you're sending it out through the micro
sprinkler system essentially.
Yes, I would say in last year, 100 of
all the applications were sent through the
sprayer for the irrigation system sprayer,
just essentially like a pivot.
I would say, like, I basically designed my
own pivot right now to hone down the new
nutrition a little bit better, it's kind
of like a mix. So I'm doing 50 backpack
sprayer and 50 sending it through the
system.
And what I've kind of done with the system
is the things I send through the system
are generally your humix and your biology.
And some stuff like
molybdenum. So far, like the humix, we're
using humicarp. That goes in, holofaust
goes in.
We'll use a spectrum PSB.
That will go in, white sugar will go
into the mix as well, and maybe sometimes
Bioco Gold.
Maybe I'm the only one using it like that,
but spraying it out.
Like I think that there's, I mean, there
should be microbes on the leaves and on
the floor and everything.
So just trying to broadcast that as best
as I can.
There are indeed.
And so like from there, what we'll do is
if I need to be more precise on some sort
of application, like for example with
pinion I'll go through with a backpack
sprayer. Or if I really want to get
potassium into the fruit, and I know that
we have a harvest coming up in like four
or five days, or maybe 10 days, then we'll
go with the backpack sprayer and we'll
probably maybe do like halo ka with some
rebal molly and some boron in there and
spray that out. But it really just depends
on kind of like the workload as well with
what we're doing.
Because for me to go with a backpack
sprayer, if I'm Spraying myself and I have
two other backpacks, then I need to have
two people or three people carrying jugs
of the liquid up the mountain, this and
that. And so I kind of lose a couple hours
of work time that we could be using to
weed or trellis or stuff like that.
So it's kind of just trying to figure out
what works best at that moment and just
understanding the best way to do it.
But I mean, the system.
That we created is really great because
I could essentially do a foliar across
like three hectares right now in like
an hour and 20 minutes.
Just me. Like I prepped the tank, like
pulled the diesel pump, and then I just
have to go run to the other side
of the river and switch out the key
valves and do that.
But I could get through that just myself
pretty easily.
So I think it just really depends on what
you're trying to do or how much product
you're trying to use.
Because you will, in this system, I have
to use probably three or 4X the amount of
product that I would be using on a
backpack sprayer just because of the
dilution from the pass through.
So we got to this conversation about
nutrition management and how you're
managing nutrition from a discussion on
disease pressure, disease susceptibility.
We're describing the quite intense disease
pressure that. This crop has generally.
How have You, how has that disease
pressure shifted with your different
approach to nutrition management?
Correct. So, yeah, I think like just to
follow back on that, because I think I got
a little bit off topic on the irrigation
system. So, essentially, how we manage the
nutrition is first and foremost, the soil
test is extremely important to have that
data point to understand what you want to
apply, what products you need, and what
diseases might come.
And so, generally what we do to control
pH is liming, and we'll mix that lime
to add a little bit more calcium to
the profile with gypsum, but only on the
side with low sulfur.
On the side where we have lots of sulfur,
the gypsum doesn't go in there.
And then we might even add
in some SOP, some potassium sulfate,
as well to some of those
minerals. And there's a pretty good
quality granular humic available here.
So I generally will mix everything with a
granular humic as we kind of like
broadcast that onto the growing lines.
So once we do that, then
my main focus in terms of
nutrition from a disease prevention
standpoint is focusing on.
The minerals that I know are going to be
difficult for the plant to get.
So, generally, I'm focusing on
calcium, I'm focusing on boron,
I'm focusing on molybdenum, zinc,
copper, and actually iron, just
given the antagonism with the
high manganese. So, those are generally
the main stacks that I try to focus on.
And I would also add phosphorus, is
something that, just from an observational
standpoint I've seen that the plants
really respond well to phosphorus
applications. So, really, no
nitrogen at all.
How common is that for passion fruit
production? I'm not familiar with common
nitrogen applications.
So, for passion fruit, for the growers
that know about passion fruit, they
generally don't use nitrogen too much.
A lot of them will use the maybe
like a calcium nitrate, maybe a ammonium
sulfate in the beginning stages.
But for passion fruit, if you use a lot of
nitrogen, especially in the early cycle of
the plant, you'll have a non reproductive
plant. You'll have a very vegetative
plant.
And it's really hard to reverse that.
So I guess it would be interesting if more
crops had that problem.
Oh, and I mean, that's from the
passion fruit into our peppers into our
African yams, okra, all of those crops,
African eggplant, there's very little, if
not any, nitrogen.
The only nitrogen that might get into the
system would be like an organic nitrogen,
for example, from macro pack or maybe
what's in seashield or an amino acid.
Both of which are very, very small
concentrations. Yeah.
They're small amounts.
And I mean, I have to check the, I don't
know the exact numbers on the soil test,
but I mean, we have per acre around like
28 to 30 pounds of nitrate and maybe nine
to 10 pounds of ammonium.
So if I were to ever need to use
some sort of nitrogen, probably the only
one I would really use would be maybe a
small foliar with a MAP or MAP, and
obviously complex that with a folic and a
Rebell Molly.
But I generally don't need to, I haven't
had the need to do that.
And on some areas where I've just played
around with and I've put like a 12, 24, 12
or like a 15, 6, 25 granular application,
within two weeks, that plant's going to
get some sort of disease pressure from an
insect and it will get some sort of issue
with like bacterial blight or some fungi
will get it. So I
try to. Really stay away
from the nitrogen and really focus on kind
of like the key nutrients that we need.
I think from a nutritional standpoint,
where I'd like to get at would be to start
doing sap tests.
We have just logistically, for me, it's
been a little bit difficult for me to get
those out, just given where we're based.
And I kind of like need to,
maybe it's my ADHD type personality, but
I kind of like, I want to
get that decision.
I want to be able to basically take the
sap in the field and understand what I
have right now so that the next day I
can put on a foliar application.
Just given in the horticulture crops like
pepper, eggplant, okra, you kind of need
to make that decision right away.
And so, waiting maybe a week or even two
weeks for a result.
You pass that time frame when you really
need to make a decision on if I have a
molybdenum or a potassium deficiency and I
get sprayed tomorrow on potassium, for
example, foliar, then maybe I can get rid
of aphids or some sort of white fly.
So we need to get on that.
But I would say from how I've been
managing that is just kind of like knowing
my soil really well and understanding what
is going to be more or less deficient from
visual signs. So one thing that has
actually worked out really.
For us is this year on our pepper crops,
I decided to intercrop it with sweet corn
because I had the grand idea that the corn
would inject carbon into the system and
consume the excess nitrogen, but it would
also serve as living stakes for me to tie
the peppers up.
So, we have a ton of bamboo on our
property. I planted like hundreds of trees
of bamboo, but it takes a lot of time and
effort to go pick the bamboo, cut it, put
in the stakes. So, preemptively, we did
that. And what I didn't notice because
those sweet corn got almost zero
nutrition, they just were kind of like
left to do their thing.
And basically, the main nutritional
deficiency that I saw visually on the
sweet corn was potassium.
No nitrogen issues, nothing with
phosphorus, nothing with any of the
microbes no magnesium or anything like
that. It was mainly potassium, which kind
of gave me the clue that if it's deficient
in corn while it's a C4 and it's not
a pepper, it's probably going to have the
same issue on the pepper, even if it's not
showing that, which allows me to know that
maybe we should be adding a little bit
more potassium to our foliar program.
So, yeah, that's kind of like how we've
been doing it.
Right now, but I think adding insight sap
would be super helpful.
So, you still haven't answered my question
about diseases. What does disease pressure
look like today?
Okay, so today, disease pressure
actually varies per soil and
variety.
So, right now, we have two
varieties of peppers on this side
of the river, which is called
the high manganese side of the
river and high sulfur side of
the river, we have a capsicum
annum variety.
It's an heirloom Nigerian bell pepper, if
you will.
So it behaves a lot like a bell
pepper, but the fruits are a little bit
smaller and they're spicy, like almost
like a jalapeno type spice.
On the capsicum annum Those guys, I
don't know if it's a genetic thing
from the seed or if it's just
more propensed to disease, but generally
those have a lot of issues with
the bacterial leaf spotting.
And they do have some issues with
sometimes rhizoctonia, phytophthora,
fusarium, all of the root issues.
That you would get in
a pepper, especially during the
rainy season.
On the capsicum chinenses, we have two
different sub varieties of those.
One's called ensuka and one's called
atorodo. So, an ensuka pepper and an
atorodo pepper are basically African
heirloom descendants of a Scotch bonnet
that were probably brought over in that
transatlantic slave trade or something,
and they kind of became endemic in
Nigeria.
And those have peppers don't have any
issues. There's no leaf spot,
there's no root issues.
I'm almost convinced that I don't even
need to fertilize them, or maybe I
could cut the fertilizer on them by
half the rate.
So it's a pretty interesting dynamic right
now on our farm because I have one side.
Which unfortunately is the side that's
closest to the house, and I have to see it
every single morning and every single
night. It's kind of like the side affected
by some of these diseases.
Now, on the other side,
it looks just amazing.
We also have tobacco, which also, two
varieties of tobacco, which have no
disease pressure at all, no bugs, no
mold, no bacteria.
They don't even get any fertilization.
And so it's been actually really
interesting to see the kind of like the
relationship between the soil types and
the varieties. And I think in terms
of us managing these Tatashi peppers,
which are the Nigerian bell peppers, we've
been doing a lot of things that have
definitely helped.
And we've successfully, after the last
month of using pinion, we've successfully
gotten rid of all bacterial leaf spot
and any of the issues on the
stem, which you know.
Hey, I didn't even know you were using
pinion.
Yeah, yeah, we've been using pinion for
the last six weeks.
I've been doing a trial, and
that's almost day and night on
the side of the peppers that
have that bacterial leaf spotting.
It's gotten that fixed.
It's taken a couple pass throughs, but
within every single foliar we do, we add
in pinion and we do some just like only
pinion foliars with that.
But that has really been the night and day
correction on that side.
And I also think that it also coincides,
I don't know, but it also coincides with
me finally getting my hands on rebound
copper and adding that into the mix.
So it could be that those plants were
crying out for a nice, healthy dose of
copper with the molly and with the pinion
to get that dried up.
Particularly with your high presence of
manganese and iron, them possibly needing
some copper would not be a surprise.
Yes. And you get a significant greening
effect from copper applications,
especially the chelated ones.
Yeah.
So I think like the So, I think, I think
like the, I mean, the opinion definitely
works for the leaf spots and things like
that. So, now that's not an issue.
What's been our biggest issue right now,
currently, that we're dealing with is on
these peppers. So, it was raining all the
entire growing season, raining, raining,
raining, pretty cold weather.
Like, we were dropping at night into like
10 degrees Celsius every night.
And then one day it just decided not to
rain and become and get really hot and,
and dried up. And within two days, I
started seeing some wilt on some of those
same peppers. So, we finally corrected
like the leaf spot, and then I'm starting
to see some wilt. Um, so first, I kind
of didn't know what it was, I was thinking
that it might be um, like Ralstonia, which
would have been terrible.
Um, so I pulled out some of those affected
plants and cut them open and used both
field lark and AI to kind of like
understand what it was and like put them
in a water jar and see if there's like
some. Milky substance coming out.
It wasn't that. So we kind of like were
able to break it down to a couple things.
It's possibly like a mixture of like
Phytophthora, it could be some
Rhizactonia, it could be some Pitium.
It's probably a mixture of some of those,
plus maybe some Fusarium because they're
there in the soil, anyways.
But also just root stress from the heavy
rains when it was washing away some of the
soil around the root zone.
Then it got hot, so it oxidized.
And then, since the plants are quite big
and filling up and trying to fill in 10 or
15 fruit at a time and constantly
flowering, those are the first ones that
kind of get affected.
So, I have a question for you, Peter.
Going back to your copper comment with
your high manganese and iron soil and the
responses that you got from copper, have
you experimented with cobalt at all?
I haven't. The only cobalt we've used is
what's in micro pack.
Okay, there's a bit there, there's enough
there to make a difference.
But I don't know if maybe that
would be interesting too, because I think
from that perspective, and I actually
wanted to talk to you about that
not just cobalt, but I was doing
some research on silver and thinking about
maybe it might be interesting to add
a small. Tiny quantity of silver into this
part of the system that test out if that
might help with these kind of like crown
root diseases on these more susceptible
peppers. Because I think, in terms of the
annum type peppers, your bell peppers,
your Fresno chilies, your jalapenos, their
root structure is quite superficial and
it's not very strong and they are filling
big peppers. Whereas your habanero types,
your chinenses fill small peppers and have
massive roots and they kind of look like a
coffee tree, like they're really robust.
Yeah. So, yeah, pass.
Yeah. So, yeah, possibly cobalt would be
interesting.
I was thinking maybe some sort of
small, tiny amount of silver that might
be able to boost some sort of
immune defense in the plant could be
something.
Where I've seen a couple tools that I've
been using, apart from your guys'
products, that have worked across all of
the crop. The crops that we've run
from peppers to passion fruits to
yams have been phosphites.
And so I think one of my
goals for the future will be how
do I stop being reliant on phosphites?
Yeah. But I have seen that phosphites
haven't been able to help, like a
potassium or a calcium phosphite has been
able to help us reduce disease pressure
without having to succumb to some sort of
chemical spray.
So, I'm thinking like, you know, pinion is
probably one way to do that.
Maybe what you're talking about with
cobalt could be another way to do that.
Possibly small amounts of like a
chelated silver could help us well
to reduce. The reliance on phosphine.
Chelated silver is worth paying
attention to. Iodine is worth paying
attention to. Selenium is worth paying
attention to once you start getting into
those. But for those trace elements, and
I'm sure you're already doing this, you
really want to pay attention to where the
Goldilocks zone is in the soil profile
from a PHEH perspective, because you have
some, from what you're describing, you
have some, I'd maybe use the term
volatility. You have soils that can
fluctuate quite rapidly, and that can
spell the difference between optimal
applications and toxic applications quite
quickly with some of those trace elements.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I
think volatility is a
great way to describe
the soils. They're definitely difficult
to work with.
But what I think
ultimately the issues.