Cherry grower Mike Omeg transformed his family orchard through nutrient management
How many growers can say that they’ve been able to virtually eliminate the two most significant disease threats on their operation? Through the use of cover crops, mulches, and intensive, precise nutrient management—enabled through sap analysis—Mike Omeg has been able to do just that.
Mike is a fifth-generation cherry grower from The Dalles, Oregon. His family has farmed the same land for over one hundred years.
Mike was awarded the Good Fruit Grower Award in 2017 by Good Fruit Grower magazine. He has been a champion of a number of innovative orchard practices and has been actively involved in research trials and in sharing his success with other growers.
Editor’s note: this is a shortened version of John Kempf’s interview with Mike Omeg on the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast.
John: Mike, you’ve been a leader and an innovator in the fruit production world for some time. What was it that drove you to constantly try new practices? And how has your orchard evolved and shifted over the last decade?
Mike: One of the things that motivates me to always try new things is that I am never satisfied with the status quo. I think that I have a natural tendency to question whether we are doing things the best that we can. Is there a better way? Never get comfortable and think that we have everything figured out. Just as life changes at every moment, we need to be changing in our business.
I follow a few principles, and one of them was said nicely by a chemistry professor of mine in college. She said to question everything. So that’s what I do. It’s been something that my family ― my grandparents and my parents before me ― have done as we’ve managed our land. That means trying and failing and succeeding.
John: I think that’s very important. That’s actually a recurring theme from other farmers that I’ve spoken with ― they constantly question everything. What are some of the questions and answers that have been surprising on your operation?
Mike: I think one of the important periods of questions was right before I actually met you, John. I’d been looking at our conventional production practices here on my farm and was seeing an ever-diminishing return on our investment of time, capital, and labor. It was getting harder and harder for us to eke out that premium return that we wanted for our fruit. We were having a harder time generating that difference between wholesale cherries and what we consider a premium market cherry.
I looked at our production system and realized that we were only focusing on the top of the tree ― the parts of the cherry tree that you could see with the naked eye. We’d gotten really good at growing that part of the tree. It wasn’t ever perfect, but I was running out of good ideas ― the creative tank was running low on things we could do to better manage the visible part of the tree.
I began to think about the parts of the tree I couldn’t see. That led me to a great exploration of the soils and roots and the often-forgotten part of orchards in conventional farming logic, which is the ground.
All farmers know that the soil is important. When we buy a new piece of land or look at planting a new orchard, the first thing we look at is the quality of the soil. But after that, the way I was farming ― in a conventional manner ― we quit paying attention to the quality of our soil and started focusing on those things I mentioned ― the top of the tree. How can we prune it? How can we add varieties? How can we use training systems and irrigation system design and those sorts of things ― everything you could see. But we paid no attention to what was underground.
I think that was probably one of the most exciting things for me personally and professionally ― when I opened up a whole new set of challenges with how we could improve our soils and improve our tree health. Looking below the soil surface really got me charged up about farming again. Not to say that I wasn’t already excited about farming, but it really was one of those things that was exciting and new, and that brought me a lot of satisfaction.
John: When you started looking at soils and thinking about managing the invisible part of the tree, how did that affect your farming operation in terms of practical management? Did you end up making any management changes? How did that change your farming operation?
Mike: Over time, we made a lot of changes to how we farm. This isn’t to say that we did a lot of corrective actions because we were farming conventionally, but orchards are fortunate in that we don’t do a lot of tillage ― we don’t do a lot of the mechanical things that are harmful to the soil like with other crops. We had a permanent crop in place, and our renewal cycle on the orchard is typically between twenty-five and thirty-five years. That gave us opportunities to do things that other growers may not have the luxury of being able to do.
We did add a lot of layers to our management of the orchard, though. We began additional activities that were focused on that invisible part of the tree and the soil. We tried a lot of different things. Some of them were successful, and some of them were not. But over a period of years of exploring new management techniques, we did settle upon some that we thought worked quite nicely.
John: Can you tell us about some of the things you tried that perhaps didn’t work so well and then what you eventually ended up doing?
Mike: There are a lot of things I tried that didn’t work out well. We all like to talk about the successes, but oftentimes, we can learn a great deal from failures. It was a mixed bag. Like anything that is worthwhile, this was a complex project.
We started learning how we could enhance our soils and things we could do to boost our plants. One of the challenges that we had was how to scale that up ― how to go from techniques that worked in, say, a small market garden ― where the grower is selling directly to consumers and maybe only working part time ― and scaling that up to the size of operation we have, which is 350 acres of fruit and 1,800 tons of fruit produced every year.
We started out with things that we thought would be simple and easy. One of those was putting compost on all acres that we have under management. We set a time frame because we couldn’t apply compost on all of those acres. What we found was that the logistical expense of moving thousands and thousands of yards of compost was huge. We had to go to the Portland metropolitan area, which is about eighty miles away, to get the volume of compost we needed. Getting that compost here, paying for the trucking, paying for an area where you can load that much material, buying or renting equipment that was out of our norm ― bucket loaders and that sort of thing ― became a real challenge for us. It was a really massive operation. It was a lot of diesel and a lot of steel, and that is not where I wanted to go with biointensive management of my farm.
I think that the compost did work for us. But if I were to do it again, I would have taken that capital that I invested in the compost and put it into other materials that we produce here on the farm or from other techniques. I think we could have probably had an equal or better return on our investment with a lot less giant equipment rolling up and down the roads and our orchard rows.
John: If you were to do it over again, where would you prioritize? Where would you focus based on what you’ve observed?
Mike: I think that if I were to start at day zero again, in this process, I would focus a majority of my energy on mulches. What we learned over time was that the primary benefit we received from the compost was getting the soil underneath the tree covered with an organic material.
It didn’t matter as much what material was on top of the soil. We put pine chips on top of our soils. We put straw on top of our soils ― wheat straw and grass-seed straw. What I found over time was that the compost was of course contributing nutrients. I love compost ― but in my flower pots, not on an orchard scale.
The material we were applying wasn’t great compost. It wasn’t a super powerful compost with those humic components that we needed. It was really serving as a mulch. It protected the soil from the sun and from irrigation ― the physical damage that irrigation causes.
In our orchard systems, we maintain a permanent side alleyway in between the tree rows. For generations, our family has been mowing that alleyway ― like many other growers ― and leaving the clippings sitting in the alleyway. What I arrived at was that if we could move that grass that we cut and windrow it right in the tree row and cover the soil in the tree row, we could accomplish similar results to the compost with a fraction of the land, labor, and capital investment of the compost with a practice we were already doing ― mowing our alleyway rows.
If I were to pick one thing that we landed on that improved upon the compost, it would be to mow and blow. During the growing season, we throw our grass clippings right onto the tree row. With cherries and other tree fruits, pruning is a very, very important process. We do it during the winter, during a dormant period of the orchard, and we generate a huge amount of carbon in the form of cut branches that we stack in the alleyway. And just like the grass, we used to mow that down and just leave it there.
But with mow-and-blow, we’re able to shred those prunings and move that carbon source over into the tree row. That’s a technique that really pushed us forward ― getting the soil covered. I think that it allowed us to then put some very focused and very fine-tuned applications of nutrients and biological stimulants onto the soil ― onto that mulch ― and get a very rapid response without the big earth-moving equipment that the compost required.
A valuable compost in our system is a very intentionally made, refined compost that can go on at a fraction of the amount that we applied when we used to buy thousands and thousands of yards of municipal compost. Instead, what we started doing was making a very small amount here on our farm ― a nutrient-focused compost that incorporates nutrients we know we need. We put that material on in small amounts and get a lot more bang for our buck because that compost is really a nutrient input instead of a mulch.
John: You’ve identified mow-and-blow as being foundational to building a soil cover within the tree row. What are the possibilities of using cover crops and producing even more biomass for that mow-and-blow operation in addition to the grass that you’re growing?
Mike: We have begun to utilize cover crops in our alleyways. We maintain an alleyway between the trees that we can drive up and down. You need to have some kind of crop that’s growing there to hold the soil in place so that it doesn’t erode ― to keep your orchard from turning into a dust bowl. We don’t want to have thousands of small dirt roads going up and down our alleyways because that creates a giant dust plume that is bad for everybody, especially the soil and our trees.
We have maintained sod ― a perennial ryegrass with creeping red fescue. There are orchardgrass sods. Many growers have their own favorites. That sod does its job ― it holds the soil in place and keeps the dust down. But it does not contribute a whole lot to the trees. After we landed on the mow-and-blow technique, we started blowing what we already had in the alleyways over into the tree line. But I began to wonder if that was the best way to do it.
We eventually began to explore cover crops in order to generate more biomass in the alleyway and to transfer that biomass using our mowers over into the tree row to act as a mulch. We started cover-cropping on fallow fields that were waiting to be planted. We would maintain cover crops there, and we had various mixes of plant species that we utilized. We just took the plants that worked in our fallow fields and started putting them in the alleyways.
We had some successes and some failures with that because a big, open field with no trees growing above it is a very different environment for sun-loving cover crops than the shade of an orchard canopy in an alleyway. We have found a series of plants that we really like to put into our alleyways that generate a lot of biomass during the dormant season ― basically from fall until spring. We don’t have a lot of equipment passing over our alleyways during that time, so the cover crops have an opportunity to grow.
Then in the spring, before we start our orchard management activities, when the alleyways are quite busy with equipment, we take that cover crop that grew over the winter and that generated a lot of biomass, and we blow it into the tree row, and it generates a good start to our growing season for the cherries when the soil is starting to warm up. It gets this very nice coating of a diverse-species mix of mulch on top of it.
John: Mike, when you grow these cover crops during the winter months, doesn’t it have the effect of then choking out the sod? How do you manage that? Do you still have a sod for the following year?
Mike: We maintain two crops in our alleyways each year. We have an overwintering cover crop, and then we plant a fast-growing temporary sod. I don’t know if it would be proper to call the cover crop that grows during the warm season in our rows a true sod, but we maintain a green crop there. But it’s not grown as a cover crop because it’s very difficult to generate a whole lot of biomass when you have so many equipment passes going up and down the rows from May through August.
We were never able to find a warm season crop that we could plant and grow as a cover crop that would generate a lot of biomass. We just have too many different-sized pieces of equipment. By the time you take all those tire tracks and draw them out going down the alleyway, we really only end up with about twenty-four inches right in the very center of the alley, where anything has an opportunity to grow. And keep in mind that it can’t grow that tall because the crown of the plant is constantly getting batted down by equipment passing over the top of it.
John: What you’re describing, if I’m understanding it correctly, is that you actually plant two crops ― you plant what you’re considering a cover crop in the fall to produce biomass during the winter months, and then you’re planting a soil cover, or a ground cover, in the spring. Is that right?
Mike: Yes, that’s exactly what we do.
John: Can you tell us a little bit about the cover crops that you ended up selecting, particularly for winter cover? What was the rationale for those?
Mike: It was really difficult because when I began my research, I quickly found that there was a giant laundry list of species that are available to us as growers. Keep in mind that our focus has been on what works ― if it will sprout and grow and accomplish our goals.
It was very difficult to find anybody in orchards who was doing what we were. There was nobody I knew of that I could call and talk to and have an in-depth conversation about what species they were planting. There were people that were planting cover crops in fallow fields, but there wasn’t anyone who was planting them in the alleyway.
I took the species that grew the best in the fallow fields and tried them in the alleyways. I found that not every species did well; in fact, most species didn’t do well. But the species that we landed on, that did do a good job in the alleyways, really do a good job.
The mix we like in our alleyways is a mix of annual rye ― all the row crop growers are maybe cringing when I say that, but it’s not a problem for us in our perennial system ― with triticale and then a mustard species, a hybrid forage kale, and a tillage radish. Those species work really well for us.
You might notice that I didn’t name a legume in that mix. That’s because we had difficulty finding a legume that would work in this application. We tried lots and lots of different ones, but we were never able to find one that worked for us. When we were evaluating legumes in our fallow fields and in our alleyways, voles and gophers would become a real issue for us. They were very attracted to the legumes. I avoided those because we didn’t find one that worked well, and the vole and gopher problem they generated was a big deal to us.
John: When you say that you didn’t find a legume that worked well for you, what were the parameters and characteristics you were looking for? Was it just because of slippery slopes? What were the constraints on the legumes, other than the gophers and the voles?
Mike: We evaluated a lot of different clover species. We found that they just didn’t establish well for us, consistently. When we talk about having a return on our investment, we need to have every seed that goes into that mix work ― it needs to earn us a return. We just did not have consistent stands of clovers become established.
We did find that vetch could work for us. It would establish and it would grow, and it would be a benefit. But here’s the catch: it’s just not very well behaved at staying in the alleyway. It would take advantage of that nice open space underneath the tree, where it didn’t have competition from its companions in the alleyway. It would grow into the tree row, which would be fine until it would encounter a micro sprinkler. We irrigate almost all of our acres by drip or micro-sprinkler irrigation. When that vetch vine would encounter the micro sprinkler, it would whip up around it, and it would make the micro sprinkler ineffective because it would cover the sprinkler. Because I couldn’t make vetch behave, I was forced to eliminate it from our mix.
John: Have you considered growing any cover crops in the tree row? Is that a possibility?
Mike: That’s something I would love to have happen for us. It seems so incredibly simple to say. Why can’t we just grow something in the tree row? Yet it is incredibly, incredibly complicated to find something that works.
I have tried countless species and countless mixes to grow underneath our trees in the tree row, and I am yet to find one that works really well. I’m sure people are wondering, “My gosh, what do you mean? Just look at all those species that you could plant.” But it is very difficult to find a plant that stays low enough to not interfere with our microsprinkler irrigation and that can grow well.
There are areas of the tree row that are in full, blazing sun all day, and yet that species also needs to be able to grow right up to the trunk of the tree, which may be in full shade for almost the entire duration of the day. Most importantly, it has to compete with weeds that grow in a tree row ― weeds that we unfortunately can’t allow to be there because of the microsprinkler irrigation.
John: And it has to survive being buried underneath the mow-and-blow mulch and still emerge and remain short while doing all those things.
Mike: Yes, and handle foot traffic. There’s not a lot of foot traffic in the tree row except during harvest. Then several hundred people enter a small block, and those people have to trample around the tree to get the fruit picked. That tramples a lot of cover crops.
I have not yet found the plant that accomplishes everything. There are things that grow beautifully underneath young trees ― trees that don’t have a big canopy and aren’t in production. But as soon as those trees get up and start to shade ― as soon as we start having pruning activity ― we would trample those cover crops down. The mow-and-blow brings a whole new dynamic because there’s nothing I have found that will not interfere with the micro sprinklers and that can take that mulch getting put on top.
I’m open to any ideas. There are a couple of species that do okay. But to plant hundreds of acres of them is impossible. They may be a tuber, or they may be a bulb, or we may need to start them as a small potted plant. That’s practical under a few trees or in a backyard scenario or maybe a smaller orchard. But when you talk about hundreds or thousands of acres, you could be talking about millions of plants, and you can’t find a horticultural nursery that could produce them for you economically. It’s a real challenge.
I found some species that I thought were great. But after we got a foot of snow on the ground, the gophers also thought they were great, and they were gone come spring.
John: It’s an interesting set of challenging conditions. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the species that you experimented with that were tubers or potted plants?
Mike: I can. Three of them did a good job, but we just weren’t able to scale them effectively. One of them was ajuga ― Ajuga reptans. We planted not the variegated types or anything ― the fancy ones ― just the wild type. The second plant is moneywort ― Lysimachia nummularia. It worked quite well. Again, it was just something that was impossible for us to scale. And then the third species is a nonhybrid comfrey ― Symphytum officinale var. patens ― that we found worked very nicely.
John: You mentioned that once you had established a mulch, you then also began putting nutrient applications and biological inoculants and biostimulants into the tree row. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the things you’ve been using ― new tools that you’ve adopted and the results that you’ve observed?
Mike: I started the process of focusing on the soil. Many folks have done the same thing, but I started to put on every biological stimulant and inoculant that was available to see what worked. As one would expect, there are some products that work better than others.
What I really learned was that hindsight is indeed twenty-twenty. I found that spraying inoculants onto the bare soil just didn’t make sense without having material there to protect everything that you’re putting on ― to feed everything that you’re putting on. It didn’t make sense. I began to put on material before and after my mulch because there are some things I wanted to be covered by the mulch and in contact with the soil, and there are other things that I wanted to have on top of the mulch to add some biological horsepower to the natural processes and to kickstart the natural processes of breaking down that mulch and having it go to work for us in the soil.
One of the things that I began doing was using a lot of fish products. I landed upon a product that I really liked that’s made with salmon and crab. It really pushed forward our soil enhancement efforts, and we saw direct benefit in the crop. We were still a conventionally managed orchard, but we applied this fish product onto the soil and onto the foliage of the trees, and we saw a big return on our investment.
We tried lots of other fish products. As you know, many are available in the market. Some of them work better than others. But the ones we found that were made with salmon and crab here on the West Coast really pushed us forward in our efforts. They’re one of the base components to all my nutrition programs.
John: What other nutritional applications are you using today, and how have they shifted over the last decade or so since you started experimenting?
Mike: We use nutrition as it’s necessary now. We’re able to do that because we utilize a technique to monitor what’s going on in our orchard in real time throughout the entire season, and that technique is sap analysis.
For many years, in about January or February, I would sit down and I would look at all of the returns that we had for the orchard. I would then look at maybe a couple of leaf samples that we had pulled during the growing season and maybe a soil sample. And I would write down everything I was going to do the following season, and we would follow that recipe. We would make minor tweaks, depending on the size of the crop ― if we were going to have a light yield or an average yield or a heavy yield. Maybe we would have a disease problem that started developing, so we would boost a nutrient or two. But we essentially would just follow what was written down on the back of the envelope in the winter. Eight months from when something had been written down, we were doing it.
But an orchard ― or any farm ― is not a static system. There are all kinds of in-season changes that require us to change our approach in nutrition. But there was no technology that I had confidence in that could tell me what was going on at any moment in my orchard.
Sap analysis changed that. Every two weeks, we take a sample ― from the time the first leaves are expanded until right before leaf drop. The entire growing season of our orchard, we’re sampling, and we’re sending those samples off, and we’re getting the results back, and we’re calibrating every nutrient application we put on based on those samples because we have a real-time picture of what our trees have need for or what they have excess of. Every nutrient in every tank we spray is there because the sap analysis has indicated it needs to be there.
It’s very difficult for me to give generalities about what nutrients we apply. I would love to do that ― I’d love to say that our nutrient program is based on X, Y, and Z. But I honestly can only say that fish is something that is in virtually every application. The other nutrients depend upon the results of the sap analysis.
John: How similar are your current types of nutrient applications to what they might have been before you were using sap analysis? Are there still general similarities? Were you applying similar trace minerals? Perhaps a different way of asking the question would be, what were the changes that sap analysis indicated that really surprised you or that were unexpected?
Mike: That’s a great question. I’ll give you some examples.
Before I started doing sap analysis, I would put on semiloads of triple-twenty foliar fertilizer. I would put on large amounts of zinc in the spring, thinking that the trees needed zinc in order to generate bigger leaves because we all know that bigger leaves on the tree mean more carbohydrates being generated for the tree to size those cherries, and that’s what our goal was.
I’d put on lots of triple-twenty and lots of zinc. What I found was that I was shooting myself in the foot because my trees did not need zinc; they did not need triple-twenty. The potassium I was applying in that triple-twenty was pushing calcium out of my trees. When we started doing sap analysis, I found myself putting on oodles and oodles of calcium, and no triple-twenty, because the trees had become deficient in calcium.
Over time, I was putting on more calcium than I ever could have imagined. I was putting on no potassium and very little, if any, zinc. That was a big surprise to me because our baseline program was actually harming our genetic potential of the trees to generate the returns we wanted. I never would have known that I was actually taking away from the potential of the tree unless I had done sap analysis. So that was a big surprise.
I think it was Bill Gates who said something like, “People generally overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten.” I love that saying because as we’ve gone through time, we see things happening in the sap analysis that are surprising.
For example, like I said, we applied lots and lots of calcium when we first started this process years ago. What we see now is actually that our calcium levels are quite good. I never thought I would have said that, given how much calcium we put on. But through the various activities we’ve been doing ― focusing on our soil and our foliar nutrition based on sap analysis ― we’ve gotten our calcium levels up to where I’m comfortable with them.
Believe it or not ― I never thought I would say this in a million years ― we actually had a difficult time keeping our nitrogen levels up in the last growing season. I found myself actually putting on a large amount of nitrogen, relative to what we’d done in the past, because our nitrogen levels weren’t high. We needed them to be higher. That was a big surprise.
I never would have done the right thing and put on nitrogen and backed off on our calcium applications had I not had sap analysis right there in front of me, showing me the trends in those two nutrients and allowing me to take action to correct them.
John: We’ve certainly observed that adopting sap analysis is one of the hallmarks of really exceptional growers. Because if you’re not testing and if you’re not measuring, then you’re just guessing. There are many growers who have historically been comfortable with guessing, and that’s rapidly shifting and changing.
Mike: It sure is. There are probably growers out there who are so in-tune with their crop that they might be able to look and be lucky. Then they tell themselves that they’re never wrong. And boy, that’s a mistake.
I think that sap analysis has been foundational in allowing me to efficiently use the biologically intensive techniques I’ve been using on my farm and to have a return on investment. I don’t sell my fruit direct to consumer ― I sell my fruit into the wholesale market. I don’t have the luxury of my own brand ― my face on the package, so to speak. My fruit is anonymous in the marketplace. The only thing that my fruit has to speak for itself in the marketplace is the size and quality of the fruit.
Because of that competitiveness in the market, I have to make sure I am very efficiently managing my inputs because I don’t receive a brand premium. I get a premium price because my quality is above average, generally. Nobody’s perfect, and it’s not always that way, but the quality of my fruit is above average. And it needs to be if I want to compete in the wholesale market.
The use of biointensive practices has to be done in a way that ensures a return on investment because these expenses are added expenses versus the conventional fruit that I’m competing against in the marketplace. They often require higher levels of management and labor ― which, of course, are two of the more expensive things for a business.
But by doing sap analysis, I am able to make sure that I’m hitting the mark with these techniques to the best of my ability. That adds a very important boost to the return on investment because we’re targeting them perfectly. The efficacy of that investment becomes quite high when, instead of just guessing with something that’s an expensive input, you’re putting an expensive input right where it needs to be at the right time in the right amount. The return on investment is quite substantial when you start doing that.
John: We started this conversation talking about the opportunities to have capital return on management, and you describe some of the challenges that you’ve had in the orchard industry in competing with the mainstream. You mentioned that the foundational place where you would start is with keeping the soil covered ― with mow-and-blow, with mulches, etc. You also mentioned nutrient applications. But you haven’t spoken about the return on investment and the return on capital management, etc., for foliar applications and these nutrient applications that you’re describing. How do those compare with the use of soil covers?
Mike: I think that there’s a synergistic effect between mulches and the foliar applications that we’re doing on our crop. The lands that I farm have been in my family for over a hundred years, and they’ve been farmed for well over a hundred years. They are not native, undisturbed soils. They are heavily utilized soils that have had tons of crops taken off them over time. A lot of activities have occurred on them that, in hindsight, may have been harmful to the soil.
We’re in a restorative process in our system. If I had virgin, perfect soil to begin with, the foliar program that I need to apply now might not be necessary because the soil might potentially be able to provide everything the plant needs. But I have tired, old soils that we need to restore. If I were to do that only with mulches and covering the soil up and mow-and-blowing our cover crop ― as patient a person as I am, and I do view this as a long game ― I’m not that patient. I don’t know if, in my working lifetime, we would be able to accomplish what I want to accomplish and have the economic return that I want to have just by mowing and blowing mulches onto the soils.
One of the fastest ways for us to improve our soils is by having the crop that’s growing do the improvement for us. I view the tree as the conduit for putting carbon into our soils at a much higher rate than I can with mow-and-blow. As for applying mulches, even if I were to truck hundreds and thousands of yards worth of mulch ― wood mulch or compost mulch ― onto my soil, I really couldn’t accomplish as much as that tree does.
I view the nutrient applications as twofold. One is that nutrient applications, calibrated based on sap analysis, allow me to get as close as I can to the maximum genetic potential of the cherry in the given climate that it’s growing in for that season. I’m able to do that by growing as big of leaves and as big of a canopy on my tree as possible. The engine for sizing fruit is the canopy of the tree, and that means big leaves with lots of surface area. That can be accomplished much quicker with foliar applications. I can only mow-and-blow a few times a year. However, I can apply nutrients through foliar spraying or through fertigation every couple of days, which is what we actually do in the case of fertigation. I’m able to size those leaves up big.
The other thing that big canopy does besides growing this year’s crop is that it invests in future crops by contributing carbon and other nutrients into the rhizosphere to build up the soil. The tree is simultaneously generating the crop that’s going to pay the bills and put food on the table and the money that’s in the college fund for my kids. The tree is building my future with the crop I’m going to harvest, and it’s also building its own future by boosting nutrients in the soil.
I think that foliar applications and fertigation applications need to be viewed as both near-term and long-term investments. We continue to do foliar and fertigation onto our trees even after the crop has been picked because we’re growing next year’s crop.
John: Mike, you’ve been talking about the returns in very abstract terminology of return on investment, etc. Tell us about results. What has changed with your trees? We started this conversation by mentioning a desire to develop the root systems. What has changed with your root systems? What has changed with tree health? What have you actually observed in the field?
Mike: I have some anecdotes, and then I have some actual data to share. Let’s start with the anecdotes.
In November of 2014, we had one of those once-in-a-lifetime historic freezes. The lowest the temperature had been was forty-three degrees. Our trees generally go into dormancy in November, but it had been a very warm fall, and the trees were still actively growing. We hadn’t had any acclimation to the cold. Then we had an arctic front come down, and we went from lows in the forties to below zero in one day, and it stayed below zero. Here at my house we had negative four degrees Fahrenheit.
The leaves on the trees just turned black. Just like a dahlia plant looks after the first frost, the leaves turned black, and they just hung on the trees. Several hundred acres of trees in our area died. We had blocks where all the buds were frozen on the trees.
At that time, I was doing some comparison and analysis between mulch and intensive bionutrient applications and conventional applications for management of the orchard. I had two orchards that were sitting within a quarter mile of each other at the same elevation. One was on one side of a small canyon and one was on the other. They were the same age and variety of tree and had the same irrigation. The only difference between them was the nutrition management. One had received compost mulch and biointensive nutrition, and the other orchard was just a standard conventional orchard.
After that freeze, all the trees in the conventional orchard were dead. They froze and the entire canopy was killed. We could have regrown them from the roots, but the trees were dead down to the soil. The entire orchard was smoked. There wasn’t one tree left. When you went and cut bark, it was black underneath instead of bright green. I had to remove that orchard the following spring.
The orchard where we’d been following these biointensive practices, believe it or not, had 110 percent of a normal crop that year. We actually picked 10 percent more fruit out of that orchard than we did the previous year. That truly amazed me. That difference was only due to the nutrition management and these other activities that we were doing. There was no other difference.
The other thing that we’ve observed over time is a marked reduction in two pathogens that are problems for us with cherries. One of them is bacterial canker. Bacterial canker causes cherry trees to eventually die. They create a lot of gum. The trees get a canker that has a swelling of sap under the bark, and then these cankers burst, almost like a blister, and sap oozes out of them. That disease is a particular challenge with certain varieties and certain rootstocks of trees. If it doesn’t wipe the orchard out, it takes enough trees out that you lose the value of that block as an economic unit.
The consultants I work with started to tell me that we should try to take on bacterial canker by focusing on nutrition. Over time we had an amazing transformation in a block that had significant amounts of bacterial canker—enough that I was going to take the block out. But I left it there because I didn’t have anything to lose.
Bacterial canker was actually eliminated from that block. It wasn’t just reduced—it was actually eliminated. Virtually all of the trees in that block had one or more canker sights on them. Some were far worse than others, but almost every tree had at least one canker on it. By the third or fourth year, we could not find bacterial canker in that block. I had neighbors coming to the block. I had extension staff and research pathologists from Oregon State coming to that block, and they could not believe the change.
The second disease that is more problematic in cherries is powdery mildew. That disease affects the foliage and fruit. It’s a real challenge. Powdery mildew is the disease that is targeted by almost all the fungicide applications that are applied in conventional and organic production of cherries. What we’ve seen is that highly susceptible varieties normally would require extra powdery mildew applications. But we’ve been able to reduce our applications by half, and maybe I could reduce them by more—I’m just a bit nervous about reducing them by more. But we have been able to apply half the number of fungicides to those trees, and we have no mildew there.
This is another thing that neighbors couldn’t believe, so we actually had a walking tour through that block. One of them was hosted by extension. I made a bet with the neighbors—I said, “Find any mildew in this block, and I’ll buy you a steak dinner.” I’ve never had to buy a steak dinner because folks can’t find mildew in that orchard. A typical orchard with that variety in it would have lots of mildew because even with fungicide applications, we are not able to control it.
Those are two things that that we’ve observed that I honestly thought would never happen. Through nutrition, we’re able to manage our diseases—in this case, with bacterial canker and with powdery mildew. It speaks to the long-term value to the orchard of providing the nutrition that the tree needs. Do that and the tree will take care of itself.
