Building a Regenerative Almond Orchard: The O'Crowley Farm Story

0:00 Well thanks everyone for joining our Soil Changing Farmers webinar series. This will be a four-part series and each of the panelists are from four very different areas. Today our guests are from Merced, California and just gonna share a little bit about their regenerative story.

0:25 We often talk within this movement what is regenerative—that's a phrase that we like to use. But there's a lot of questions around what that actually means. I would suggest that the Owes Orchard is one of the best pictures that I can really picture of what a regenerative farm looks like. They're going to talk about the many practices they have, but I would like to emphasize that it's not any certain practice that makes them a regenerative farm. It's the compilation of all of it and how it fits together holistically.

1:02 This picture behind me is actually from my first time going out and meeting the Owes. I was on a trip to learn more about orchard and vineyard production within California, and another friend of ours told us about the Owes that morning. The next morning at 6:00 a.m. they were willing to accommodate me and show me around the orchard. They had actually been using some of our seed at that point, but yeah it was great to get to meet them in person. So picture us having this conversation in their orchard behind me. So we're gonna get started with just Zach and Monica sharing a little bit about their story—how they got to what they're doing now and how they're changing their soil.

1:53 Well thanks Davis and Jonathan. So I'm gonna share my screen here. Right, okay. So just a little background on us to start with—I grew up ranching and studied economics in college and ended up in walnut and almond processing, so kind of in a management job. I didn't do a lot on the farm, but Monica and I always wanted to go back to the farm. So this is kind of our dream. We've been saving up for quite a few years to do this, and it was a big step for us—one that we've been looking forward to for a long time.

2:31 I also grew up on a cattle ranch. My family did breeding stock. So agriculture wasn't our thing—almond farming was not necessarily. But yeah, I actually studied and got a Bachelor of Fine Arts and do, and I'm an artist as such. But it's kind of I went from being a cowgirl to artist and then all of a sudden we're farming here. California was in our plans originally, but it's where he landed with his jobs. He's got a degree in economics, he loves numbers, and it's a language for him. But he also has a degree, part of his degree is in mechanical engineering, so he was like a natural fit for the processing world. So he's done an awful lot with almonds previously. When we got the opportunity to buy this farm, we lived right next to it for two years and we were excited, but we knew that it had a lot of problems and we had never heard of regenerative farming. I just wasn't thrilled with how almonds were farmed.

3:49 Kind to give you a reference point, when we bought the farm it had been farmed conventionally for 40 to 50 years. When you farm almonds, one of the key concepts is you keep the ground completely bare because during harvest the almonds get shaken onto the ground and then they're dried there, they're swept into windrows and picked up. Anytime you have vegetation, what it does is hinder that sweeping and collecting process. So orchards are mowed or chemically sprayed to where there's no ground cover. Our orchard was one of those that had absolutely no ground cover—it's completely bare, no topsoil. This is actually a picture of our neighbors; we didn't have a picture of ours or we lost the picture we had of ours, but this is exactly what ours looked like in 2020. The subsoil was extremely hard, there was no topsoil, and it was a rough start.

4:42 We actually started out thinking we're going to farm it conventionally and then decided that after a little bit we're going to change. The first pesticide that showed up at our house, my wife was like, wow, this is not what we want. We're not doing this. I reminded her that I had a full-time job off the farm, and we had a long discussion. What finally ended up happening was we started looking into organic practices. In our search for organic practices, I was watching YouTube videos and I was a little bit disappointed in organic practices. All it felt to me like was that the orchard was basically the same thing—we just switched which chemicals we use. It just didn't feel like a healthy situation. It just didn't feel like we were putting in what would come out as healthy.

5:37 People buy almonds because they're a healthy element, and it was problematic to me that we had so much bare ground. This ground should be doing more. We're watering the ground—why don't we let what wants to grow? But because we're in the almond world, we completely understand that it's a requirement that we have to keep the bare ground at least once a year, and everybody told us.

6:00 If you go organic you have to make sure to keep the ground bare because your organic herbicides aren't as strong as what you can use that are not organic and so don't let anything grow. That was the keyword—don't let anything grow if you're going to go organic or you'll never get on top of it again.

6:16 In a lot of the research I was doing I was looking at what we could use and then one day I was watching YouTube videos and came across a video by Gabe Brown. They talked about the principles, not the practice, but the principles of regenerative agriculture and all of a sudden the lights came on. All these practices that I've been studying fell into place and we kind of took off from there. I walked out of that room and I said Monica, 'you know, I figured out what we are.' She was like, 'what are you talking about? What are we?' She didn't have any context for what he was talking about. I said, 'we're regenerative. That's what we want to do and these are the practices that these guys are doing.' So we immediately begin to implement some of those practices.

6:53 This is January 2021, so this is about nine months after we started farming this orchard. You can see that we let the weeds grow. We actually did plant a fall cover crop that year, but the ground was so bad that it wouldn't grow. Actually, we planted the cover crop in the spring. Before we'd ever heard what regenerative was, we thought, 'well, let's dive in, let's put some ground cover in here.' We didn't understand the principle or all the soil benefits of that, but the feeling was right. More than that though, we had talked to people and we were trying to solve our water infiltration problem. Our water infiltration was probably our number one biggest problem. Everybody else that bid against us to buy this orchard was going to tear it out because the trees were stunted—they weren't growing. The water wouldn't infiltrate, it would drown the trees. We knew we couldn't afford to tear the trees out but we thought we could find a solution somehow.

7:54 So many guys came and looked at the orchard and gave their opinion. We even had somebody tell us to go get one of those big deep tractors, a ripper, and just use it with one shank down five feet to rip the drive so that they could get the water to drain down off the trees so they wouldn't drown through the compacted soil. Somebody else said, 'well no, go in with the drill. You could just put drills periodically throughout the orchard like drill holes that go down through the hardpan and then the water could drain off of that.' It just seems so counterintuitive like we're watering the trees and we want the water to drain off. I thought we're all worried about losing water but that was a solution.

8:34 Anyway, lots of suggestions. Our agronomist was like, 'oh, you got to put in one of those big tanks that puts acid in the soil that'll force the soil to open up.' I was like, 'well, that kills a lot of soil life.' Whatever we want there—we knew we wanted that but we didn't know to what extent it could be done. Then we talked to a gentleman that did fish fertilizer. I had grown up using it. My dad had used it on our ranch growing up and I'd always respected him. We'd use it on our gardens and we love to see the results. So I called him and said, 'hey, you know, could you tell us what these are? Here's our problems. We'd love to use your product. Tell us about how this would fit.' He couldn't sell it to us in California, but he was kind enough to spend a couple hours on the phone explaining soil exudates and all of these things and micro fungi and things that were just totally new terms to us.

9:24 In the end he said, 'I can't send you my product, but in the scriptures in the Bible God told the people that if they would allow whatever the earth on the seventh year to let the earth put forth whatever it wanted to, that was a principle.' He suggested that for us. Now we were just a little bit stressed by that thought because the weeds that wanted to come were not pretty and that wasn't the biggest issue, but they were pretty, I mean they were ugly. But I was very nervous because of harvest obviously, being able to harvest with all the weeds was a major problem—getting rid of them before harvest. But we did end up doing it. We ended up letting it grow and we actually tried to plant cover crops like I mentioned earlier, but at the beginning most of them wouldn't grow. But what did grow was weeds.

10:07 In the picture on the right you can see there's actually an orchard in there, mostly you can see the weeds, but there's an orchard in there. Some of the weeds were actually taller than the trees. It looked like you were in the Amazon jungle when you went to our orchard for a while there. But after that initial, we had to laugh because guys at Zach's work—he works in the almond industry—they would kind of go, 'hey, drove by your orchard the other day,' and they're like, 'you need some help.' Anyway, it had its moments. Still it did. But after that initial crazy growth of all the annual weeds that were just trying to grow, they began to change. You saw the soil start to change, you saw the infiltration rates improve. Then this is another picture a year later in April 2022. You can see there's a lot of grass in that picture and a lot less weeds. You can see that there's much more grass.

11:04 Started to grow and a lot of the cover crops we planted after that really took hold and started doing a good job. Once we got regenerative language, we understood that we were dealing with early succession plants. Those early succession plants just came in in a flurry and they grew like I've never seen. I mean, we grew up with mallow, all of us hated it in the garden, right? That big old long root that grows on it. We had mallow that was taller than the tree. We've got pictures of it two feet taller than Zach's head and he's over six foot. We're looking at big weeds I've never seen weeds grow like that before. So anyway, that was impressive. They grew really big, that's all I'm going to say.

11:43 This was a year after we had started. I think the first carbon crop we planted that actually did a good job of germinating and taking off. And you can see we still have full coverage. You can see kind of down the center there that we have a little bit of bare ground, but it really started to take off and grow and do better. That bare ground we call it the snake here at the farm. You can see that it kind of rolls and scrolls through the orchard, and it's because the sprinklers are round, of course, and so it leaves this serpentine line that runs down the middle of the orchard. It doesn't get any water. Even in the wintertime, you know, it wouldn't cross over. In the first year, it just stayed bare. It was so hard baked, it was so dead that it just maintains itself, and it even looked like we'd hedged it for a year. Once that cover crop got bigger, it was just a super hard line that we designed into it. But we did try to grow as much as we could that first year. Not all of it came up, like I said, that we wanted to, but a lot of it did come up eventually.

12:46 The other thing we did the first year is adding livestock. We live in more of an urban area. There's an airport nearby and there's a golf course on one side of us that borders us. So we needed to have really good control of our animals if we're going to do animals. We put a perimeter fence around our orchard. It was a little over two miles of fence. They put it in the fall of 2020, and that's my wife and our daughter there unrolling the fence. We were all part of the fence crew. Then we integrated the sheep. The sheep was also integrated in the fall of 2020. You can see the picture on the right: sheep, weeds. Yeah, it wasn't pretty at all, but it got the job done. We learned a lot those first few months of dealing with sheep. We both grew up with livestock. Actually, livestock was easier to deal with than the trees from our perspective, but still challenging in that environment.

13:34 What was hard too, though, is that we called so many people. I just talked to people from one end of the valley to the other and all over the country, searching for: has anybody done this? Has anybody used sheep in the orchard? What's that like? What does this look like? We did find that there were some people that did use sheep, but they used them as a kill step. What they would do is they would bring them in at the end of summer, or like in the spring after they'd mowed or whatever else, and they would use those sheep to come in and graze down hard and kill plants so that then it was more prepared for harvest. It wasn't really for manure. It mostly was a kill step. So that wasn't what we wanted. We knew that we wanted it more like pasture. Of course, we learned from Gabe Brown. We knew exactly what we wanted. We wanted it to be grazing.

14:26 But that was interesting. We searched. This was another element of part of our journey. We searched. We went all over the country to find the right sheep. That was probably my background with genetics and animals. We chose the Katahdin because they're a hair sheep. Wool sheep tend to be more prone to chew on the trees. They're browsers. But the Katahdin, you know, it was going to shut off. It was one less job we had to do. But it also has a natural parasite resistance. For those not as familiar with sheep as we are now—but we weren't then—parasites are a huge killer in sheep and they use a lot of parasiticides for sheep. We didn't want that in our soil. So we chose sheep, and we continue to select hard for sheep that show the parasite-resistant genes and genetics so that we don't have that. If a sheep has parasites, that's how it gets culled. That is an element that was big for us.

15:29 I would say that the challenges we had starting off were the water infiltration. We talked about this earlier with the really compacted ground. But the second one was how do we make or enable ourselves to grow this cover crop here and around? Because during the summertime when you have to clean out the orchard floor, it becomes bare. So we began to research harvest for harvest. We began to research how can we harvest without letting the nuts touch the ground? My brother, as an engineer, we began to design a machine together. But after a while, we found a machine that we were able to retrofit that would catch the almonds in an apron and not let them hit the ground. So we now are able to harvest without touching the ground, which means we're able to grow cover crop year-round and graze year-round. And so that to us was one of the biggest challenges to overcome in the almond industry because that's not done by anyone else in the almond industry. Most people that are doing almonds hire a harvesting company to—

16:29 Come in, you know, sweep and shake and do all that kind of stuff. And so this was kind of not—it's not normal. I just say that it's not normal. So in 2021 we to mow everything off. In 2020 we mowed everything off. That was our first year of harvest, and we didn't have our system in place yet. And so it was a really challenging harvest.

16:56 This is actually 2022, but 2021 was high vegetation as well. So this is what our orchard looked like last year during harvest. You can see my wife there and some of that—that's the green cover seed cover crop right there. And some of that vegetation is, you know, 8 feet tall. And that was awesome because our best growing season is the summer, which is also, again, in almond and dry, the time when you make it bare. So able for us being able to allow that vegetation to grow and allow the cover crops to grow was the best way we can capture sunlight and carbon and build our organic matter. So we felt like we had arrived when we finally got the harvester and were able to harvest above the ground without having to take off the cover crop. It was a game changer.

17:39 So we're going to jump over now. So we told you a little bit of our story. We're gonna jump over now some of the data. And what was nice is right when we started off, ECIS contacted us—Jonathan Lungren for those of you who are familiar with him—and asked us to be part of a study. And what they did was they took, I think, 30 or 40 almond orchards, and each year they go and they take samples from the orchard and they analyze organic matter levels, the percent living ground cover, water infiltration rate, and there's a few other variables as well that they analyze. So we wanted to share with you some of the results of that over the last three years.

18:14 To start off with, we have a neighbor right next to us that we're using as a control that is conventional. So he's part of the study. He's just the one that is the most—you know, they as we asked around, they found the one with the most similar soil to us and similar environment—well, not practices. So we don't have his organic matter from 2020, but we have ours. So we were at 0.72% organic matter in 2020. Very low. That's why the ground was hard as concrete. But you can see over the last three years we've actually gained about 0.6% organic matter, up to 1.3%. And we're actually now matching our neighbor, who—the orchard that our neighbor has is about four years old and it was not in almond before that. It was in a different crop. And so the ground has not been abused as bad. But it was kind of fun this year because we're actually now at the same level of organic matter as our neighbor. Well, it's sad though because we're seeing his trend going down as all of the nitrogen that you use for almonds—as they push these trees really hard, it burns up all of that organic matter in the soil. And we're seeing his trend go down to reach where ours used to be. Right. And as we watch ours climb up, it's exciting. It's really exciting.

19:24 So that gives you a little background for this next graph. So this next graph shows in the study they broke everyone—they broke the farms into three groups. One was conventional, just regular farming. Neighbor, yep. The second was regenerative, which meant that they had defined nine practices, and these farms had to have implemented five of the practices for more than four years. And then transitional, which meant that they were implementing five more of the practices but less than four years. And then on the far right, they gave us the results of our farm compared to them. And so you can see in the graph we would fit in the transitional group. Yeah, we would be in the transitional group. Thank you. And on the graph, you can see that our organic matter levels are lower than all other groups in the graph. But keep in mind that we basically doubled from the last three years. And so it's the positive trend. But this kind of sets us up for where we're going next, and that is our water infiltration rate.

20:15 So for those of you who aren't familiar with this, basically what we do is we pound a six-inch ring into the ground and we pour the equivalent of one inch of rain water into the ring and see how long it takes to infiltrate into the soil. And soil that has good organic matter, that has higher fungal properties, that has the pores that are open, roots—it will infiltrate much faster than collapsed and hard soil. And so they can time that and they can rank that. So this graph right here, same groups. In 2020, you can see ours was almost nothing—almost wouldn't go in at all. Again, it was hard as concrete. In fact, I want to share one other thing real quick. When we were doing the sheep fence in our farm the first year, I literally had to go—not the perimeter fence, but like the rotational grazing, the paddock fences—I literally had to go out with a hammer and pound a nail into the ground and then pull the nail out and then pound the post into the ground with a hammer to get it to go. That's how hard the ground was, guys. It was so terrible. It was enough to be like, this is not a good idea. And it was my idea to have sheep. I was like, I don't think this is a good idea after so many times of—I mean, we're just out there walking around with these big old spikes and using dead blow hammers, like, you know, pounding into the ground and trying to get those things in there. And then you saw to put up the fence. But we literally—it was bad. It was really bad. So very compacted soil. And so this was 2020. Okay. And then I'm going to show you now 2023. So this is 2023. You can see we went from—you

21:50 You know very very low infiltration right now. We're at 2.2 as of last year. Now this isn't us doing the test either. We've had actually two third-party groups do this test, which is really interesting to me because our organic matter levels are still lower than all of these other groups.

22:11 When I first got these graphs back I was kind of shocked because of such a massive difference in the infiltration rate. I thought why in the world is our so much better than everybody else when our organic matter levels are lower, our health scores are lower? What's driving this?

22:31 As we looked at the graphs and really contemplated what we're looking at, this is what we came to realize: we have living ground cover almost 100%. Living ground cover the regenerative orchards on average have about just a little under 50%. Conventional you know maybe 8%. Transitional 26% or something. And that's for what percentage of the year. They do this test in February right after the winter rains have come through, and so that's the best time to capture that data. But during the summer if you looked at this graph and did it again you would see that all these three groups have basically zero% living ground cover during the summer months. And so not only do we have a greater percentage but we have a greater percentage for more of the year, for all year.

23:18 That was what we feel like is driving this graph right here: the ability to infiltrate water, which was one of our biggest issues when we started out. We really feel like honestly, following that advice to let the Earth put forth what it wanted to, and those early succession plants, you know those big old roots that they wanted to put out, they were all part of that soil changing and fixing this problem. This was a problem that was going to tear an orchard out and that made the ground less valuable around here and everything else. And it was a problem that the Earth really did fix. It solved the problem. By just letting the Earth do what it's good at and staying covered and following these principles, it solved this problem without the acid, without the holes drilled, without the ripping. And this has been one of those things that is a joy to remind us that this is working and that it's doing what it needs to do.

24:17 We've seen the trees as we've gone through this journey react very strongly. Whereas they were very stunted, extremely low growth each year the years before, and some areas our trees actually were always yellow when we first bought it. They would never turn green. They literally all turned green now, and that was I think by the second year they were all green. We're not adding nitrates yet, and the growth was just phenomenal. A lot of the trees had three feet of growth the first year, three feet of growth the second year. Some of the trees have literally tripled in size in the last three years because they were just little bushes when we first got them. But all of a sudden they just took off.

24:56 It's been really neat to see the growth. So Davis, that's kind of our presentation so we're going to pass it back to you to give you context of where we've come from and what we're doing here a little bit.

25:08 Outstanding. Well thanks for sharing. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you've obviously changed the soil quite a bit, and I would say that's over a short amount of time. So these continued practices it's going to be amazing. I think the change that you'll see over a 10-year span, for instance, I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about what you've observed with the trees, cover cropping being what I usually define as what you grow in between cash crops, which could be either in between in the calendar year or literally in between the rows of the cash crop. So thinking of what the bread and butter of the operation is, although I don't think there's quite a this is an almond orchard, how are the almonds doing?

25:58 So the almonds, when you first bought the orchard, were producing about a quarter of what they should have been at that age. We bought it when it should have been just in the prime of production. It was really low, and they held on for a few years knowing that it had been struggling. They finally were like done, like this has got to go. We saw the first year of good increase in production just right off the gate. We saw a really good increase in production actually doubled with less of the fertilizer inputs. All that changed. That was really fun to watch, that the orchard respond so much. It really did.

26:39 As we mentioned before, the trees you can see it in the trees where there's much much larger growth, way way more growth. And then the leaves are greener, they're deeper green than they were. Some of them literally were just yellow when we first started and they would stay that way all year long. In fact, one of the guys used to work here came back and helped us last summer and he was just super surprised, came up to me and said 'holy smokes, this tree, I've never seen it green,' and it's green now. It's pretty cool. And so you see the change in the trees. The last two years have been really low production almost back to

27:14 There are some reasons for that. One is we had the sheep eat up a lot of the trees the first year, and the harvester that we bought we had to trim up a lot of the trees, and so we actually removed a lot of the actual bearing fruitwood on the trees. And then this last year we had, and that was a sacrifice that we were aware of and were okay with. It's been an interesting trade though. See, on those trees a lot of guys grow them with just maybe a two-foot trunk and then it's just all branching out from there, and you get a lot of low-hanging branches and stuff like that. And the harvester, though, because of the catch aprons, it has to have it up a little higher. So we did a bunch of trimming, and then the sheep, you know, they love the leaves and they love the almonds when they can reach them.

28:10 You know, it's we laugh because here's our orchard with all of this undergrowth, right? And everybody else's is neat and trim and perfect, you know, there's nothing growing. But then during blossom, especially, you've got this hard white line underneath our trees where the sheep have eaten everything off that they can reach. And it's just like the super duper, like we've trimmed or hedged the whole thing about four or five feet tall. It's right there just perfect line. But on some of these little short trees, it was literally half of our tree, and it was, we accepted it. Our trees are growing. This is part of the sacrifice to do it the way we feel like it needs to be done. And we've seen the trees really respond. I mean, they have really grown. But it has taken its toll on the yield. But on the tree health, they have improved every year.

29:02 This is an example. Every year before that and the years before that, if you look at the records, even before we owned it, they had to apply zinc every year. We applied zinc our very first year, but after that we tested and there was no need to. And it wasn't just zinc. It was about other things too that we realized we didn't need to apply anymore. But it's opening up in the soil and the trees can get it.

29:29 And then last year, I mean, most of you know, but we had a really rough winter season. Bloom happens in February and that was right during all those really heavy rain events. And so we had very few hours of pollination, and so we didn't get a good pollination last year, so we didn't have a very good crop this year either. So we're hoping for a great crop next year. There's always another year, right? That's what farmers say. And we're excited to see what happens. We absolutely without a doubt feel like our trees are healthier. They are better. They are doing well. It's just been hard farm years.

30:04 But I think one of the greatest challenges in that, though, is that because we're not farming the way that is set up for the system, we went, we looked at getting insurance when we first started, but no insurance is offered to those who don't follow certain practices. And we're like, well, that's not us, and we're not going to follow those practices. So that's part of our challenge that way. But I absolutely without a doubt, the health of our orchard has increased. Our trees are healthy and happy. They're thriving.

30:37 I've got one question that I think will take a bit of time, but I want to get to our Q&A here before too long that's already starting to fill up. The question is, as you started to look at what does almond production normally look like, and then you were inspired by the Gabe Brown video and learning of this new way, how did you come up with what is the system that we can create? How do we apply those principles to our orchard? But there's a lot of factors that go into it of growing season and what you can take on as a couple. I mean, the time that goes into adding more livestock species or building more fence or all of these things as you tried to figure out what is the system that we can build that not only produces the best trees but fits your family and what you're interested in? Talk us through that a little bit.

31:36 Well, it's kind of funny because we feel like we've actually grown together as a couple as we've made a lot of these decisions and had to talk through a lot of those challenges, right? I mean, because there's a lot of options, a lot of things we could do, things we disagreed on, things we agreed on. And so it was actually a great strengthening of our marriage because of that. And it's the best way to raise kids. They're solving real world problems, and it's good. I think if I'm understanding your question right, Davis, the how did we come up with the system, like what was our process of coming up with the system that works for our farm? You know, identifying the things that were holding us back, he was good at that, and his engineering he applied it, and he figured out how we could get, you know, we did that harvester, we both worked on it, and we continue to work on it.

32:24 The first year, year and a half, as we talked about all these practices, we just kept coming back to the same thing over and over and over again. And that was, we really can't make good progress on this unless we figure out how to harvest without shaking the almonds onto the ground because we, it ruins our sheep program, it ruins our cover crop program, it ruins the movement forward of the carbon, the soil, the whole nine yards. And so we just, we guys were stuck on that, and we kept coming back to it over and over and over again.

32:53 And so when we finally figured that piece out, well, like that was a huge milestone in our journey. It was an enabler. It was honestly the sheep weren't—I mean I didn't feel like we had a lot of extra time that was probably the biggest challenge, but the sheep weren't nearly as challenging to us because we both grew up ranching around animals. As the harvester was, but it's true, but and one other thing though, I mean Davis, we—I even saw on your Instagram the other day that you were talking about, you know, you guys are experimenting to see what fits you guys, and it just brought back all these thoughts that in 2020 we labeled our experimental year Y, and the goal was to try everything that was nuts.

33:40 We literally tried, I think, 35 different breeds of chickens and we tried chicken tractors, we tried fences for chickens, we did turkeys, we tried 12 different breeds of turkeys, we tried—we got pigs to try in the orchard, we got geese, we had ducks, cows, we tried cows, we got smaller cows, we tried the Dexter cows in the orchard. We were like what's going to work, what's going to fit? We had gotten the sheep in the fall of 2020 and that was still part of the experiment. We tried different types of fence. We were just like all in. Like we are all in, but it was like the all-in year of like okay, give it a blast, see what happens, and then be like don't ever do that again.

34:22 And we knew up front that a lot of wouldn't—we didn't know that they wouldn't work, but we knew that by percentage a lot of them probably weren't going to work, and we were okay with that. We were fine with the fact that hey, we're going to fail at these 80%, but the 20% that we do have left are going to work, and that's what we need to figure out, right? And a lot of it was also networking. We talked to a lot of people, watched a lot of YouTube videos. I feel like I took several university classes worth of the equivalent of YouTube videos, podcasts, webinars, books, you know, a lot of research.

34:55 You even went through the like there was educational one that you even paid for that was like—I mean we did all kinds of things that were helpful to learn that year, but I think it was just fun. I mean honestly, like you can ask my kids, they can tell you what chickens thrive best in our orchard. They can tell you what breed does it and what color of egg they lay to. I mean it's been fun. It's been an adventure. We've pulled back, we've looked at it and said okay, now for our energy what can we manage? What really fits the orchard well? What is helpful?

35:30 We've cut back on some chickens. They did well—were they worth it for our time? We are really short on time. He works a very full-time job that's very demanding. We've got kids, we homeschool. We are—it sounds like you just went all in on the system and here are the principles and we're going to try as many of these principles as we can incorporate.

36:00 Yeah, yeah, exactly. It was and find out what we like. I mean my kids have an opinion on chicken breeds and geese breeds and turkeys, and it's been good, and there's things that we will go back and do again, but then we recognize they're like oh, we need a different infrastructure for this to make that thrive with this. The pigs have been hilarious part of the adventure. We actually very much like them, and you know in searching for a market for them because they're unique. We're either we're looking at expanding or retracting, but they're helpful in the orchard system.

36:33 I think some of the things too that we had to think through was scale, right? Our almond orchard is not a small almond orchard. It's not a massive commercial almond—I mean it's not thousands of acres, but it's also not 10 or 20 acres. You know it's 64 acres, big enough to get in trouble on exactly. It's big enough to get in trouble on. So we had to think of okay, what can we actually manage and how can we make this more efficient?

36:58 You know, my one of the challenges we had was putting up sheep fence and taking it down as we move sheep each day. And our oldest son is 12 and we have made it a game to see how fast we can time ourselves in putting up and taking down the sheep fence. And so we time ourselves each time and our record for taking down a quarter mile sheep fence and putting up a quarter mile, which is what we do each time, is 23 minutes and 32 seconds, right? And so it's just you know, it's a challenge of trying to make things efficient enough that we can manage them.

37:31 Sure, so and reaching the scale, but yeah, that's excellent. Well I think we'll get into a Q&A. We've got 15 questions in here already. I think one of the ones that will be important to cover right away—do you have a picture Zack of the harvesting equipment?

37:45 I do, and I could actually share that. I don't have it on this presentation, but I could share that with you and Jonathan so you could post it after the video. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, and just to take a stab at describing it, and you've done that a little bit already, but normally you've got something that comes in through these rows behind me, grabs the tree, shakes it, then that's all swept into the middle and something comes and picks up all of that swath of almonds. This instead is almost like an upside down umbrella, like an umbrella that wraps around the tree. Then the tree is shaken and those nuts all fall into that funnel and are collected right there, all above ground. Am I describing that right? Yeah, exactly. And I would say that you know half the machine, the machine that wraps—

44:22 Much what we've learned is if you got too much dead vegetation above the ground and the seed can't germinate and get to sunlight very easy then it's not going to grow very well. So yeah you kind of got to get it knocked down. I think going back if we had the ability to do a roller crimper or something like that where we just laid it down instead of grounded up more we would have done that. But yeah I think you need to do something in order to get seed to soil contact and then also sunlight readily available to seed sprouts.

44:54 Yeah but that was the last time that we mowed, haven't mowed for a couple years. But yes so the sheep will go through and graze and then we will put in the so that was the initial. We had to do that, after that we've no till drilled into just regular field and into the regular orness then fine.

45:14 Okay, can you talk a little bit about pollination? That's a big deal in almond production and how pollination might be a little bit different in your system versus the typical system? Yeah that's a great question. So part of our 2021 experimenting we got our own bees and that was cool. We tried it and we thought that was a great plan and it was more than we could keep up with. The ones that have survived us though those are stocked to be mired with. But we know we scaled it back. We're like okay we'll provide bees for this part of the orchard. We still have to get bees for the other part of the orchard. But we have seen there's a lot of natural pollinators that come in the orchard, you know lace wings and ladybugs and I don't know what else but there's a lot, there's a lot more bugs I guess.

46:06 Here's one other example at the AISA study in a conventional orchard, they calculate that there's 40,000 bugs per acre. And when they did ours and this was two years ago when they told us this but they calculated five million bugs per acre. So you know a lot more bugs per acre we definitely, and we see them. And so we did plant cover crops intentionally with a lot of flowers to attract the beneficial insects and the pollinators.

46:38 Yeah and one thing with that, there's a couple of factors especially for almonds. Almonds bloom, they're the first thing to bloom really, there's only a few other plants that will bloom ahead of them here. And so a lot of our pollinators that are native or whatever you want to call it to our orchard they're not active yet and so that is still an issue for us. We can't count on them being a huge part of it. A lot of people told us rule of thumb organic orchards, they said can sometimes get away with half as many bees because of all the natural pollinators that are there. That's I think there's some truth to it. I think that you're taking a bigger risk though just like with the bad year that we had last year where your bees just couldn't get to enough places fast enough because of the weather. Yeah so I don't know if that answers the question well or not.

47:30 Yeah yeah I think so. So you are bringing in bees from outside sources. I was curious if you had tried honey in your own bees? Yeah no we have tried our own bees and the goal is to eventually be there where we have all of our own bees, but you know in the meantime we're raising up the stock that will survive us as handlers or our system best, the ones that really thrive here with the least amount of intervention because we really don't want another huge project.

48:04 Yeah yeah just like in the orchard there's an awful lot of sprays. I mean not our wormer I know but what I'm saying is in the bee industry there's an awful lot of antibiotics and sprays and things you can get into in hives and we don't want any of that either right. So we're trying to raise seed stock of bees if you will that don't require those things and so don't need the treatments and stuff. And we've definitely selected very hard natural selection has been in play.

48:33 So speaking of selection, question a little bit further down here, Mike Rice was asking what cover crop mixes you've used and I'm curious. We talked about the benefit that some of those early succession weeds were providing for you then we talked a little bit about pollination. So as we think about selecting for plants that you want to be there instead of just what might have appeared initially, what are you selecting for? What plants do you want out there? What factors are you evaluating for? That's a good question, a great question. I think the number one thing you want is high diversity just to help the system to grow together. We actually went through the Green Cover Seed online portal and you spent days, literally days going over all the seeds, read up all the seats made our own Excel spreadsheets of like this one will do this and trying to keep track of it in our heads. And you know at the end we're like holy smokes this is so much information we should call somebody and talk to them because it's a lot to digest right. We like oh yeah we want that but we also want this but we also want this. But the fun thing is when you work with Green Cover Seed is that you don't have to pick and choose, they just give it all to you. They're like oh more diversity go for it. Yeah but which ones thrive at the right season that you're planting it as, where we kind of got ourselves into over our heads. But I think for sure diversity was high on our list. We wanted again we wanted plants that would produce flowers for bees.

50:09 To the last question, the thing about pollinators that's been really fascinating is that a lot of places you can order beneficial insects that will eat your bad bugs, right. But the problem is you'll get this huge population of that you buy that will knock down this bad population, but then of course your good population dies off because there's no food for it, right.

50:31 The key though of what we've been trying to kind of get to is that if I don't want a big bad population to keep my good bugs alive because I don't really want to keep growing, I want those guys gone. But beneficial insects will eat pollen, and so if they have a diet of pollen they will be living here, and then when the opportunity to be a predator bug is there they will eat that. So if we have a lot of flowers in our orchard we will maintain our beneficial insect population without happening to have a lot of nasty bugs for them to eat.

51:05 Yeah, okay, so we plant things that will flower. We want flowers growing in the orchard all the time, and on my Instagram I'll often times take pictures of everything that's blooming at any one given point of time and be like, oh look, we've got this, this, this, this, and this. And even when everybody else is saying it's a dire situation in our area, we've got 10 different species that are still blooming in the orchard, which is awesome, right.

51:34 I think one other thing to add to that is that we first talked about doing a lot of legumes for the nitrogen fixation and you know all that, and I guess what I really come back to is try to kind of mimic what nature does. And in nature, nature doesn't have a high percentage of legumes in the mixes. You know, there's a lot of grasses, a lot of flowering plants, there's broad leaves, and there's some legumes, but having that diversity is what really felt like at the end of the day was most important. And then warm season versus cool season, annuals versus perennials, right, those are all discussions that we had to have. But the overarching thing I think was keeping it very diverse each season, right, so there's times where it feels like a flower garden out there. And I hate seeing the sheep eat it but it's okay.

52:25 Well, I think you're keeping some happy sheep. They are very happy. By the way, are you having to move them out of the orchard during harvest, or are you able to just set up a paddock in a corner while you're harvesting the rest and just keep them within the orchard?

52:41 That's a great question. That was another big question that we had to figure out. Yeah, that's been a long time coming. I was going to say just to answer it briefly because I know we're getting short on time, we actually decided that during harvest we will graze them through part that we're not harvesting because they're a real pain to have around. They're not a problem because we've got organic certification, all of that. Even with it, it's all approved, but because of that we never touch the ground with our product. So we have them in the part we haven't got to yet. And then once we're done grazing that, the goal is to have a certain portion of our orchard harvested to the point that we take the sheep off, we put them because we're part of NSP, which is the National Sheep Improvement Program where we're breeding for selected qualities like parasite resistance and good mothering and all that kind of fun stuff. We breed them up in groups so we have them in pens, which is the only time we feed hay. We breed them up in pens, and then when we're done with harvest, they're done with breeding and we put them back out on the orchard. So we've tried to make our system work with multiple systems stacking up here, and we're trying to get them where they marry, that makes sense. And that was another thing about the Katahdin sheep is it's super flexible with its fertility, so it will breed up throughout the year.

54:02 Yeah, I think so. And I think we've got about, if you're okay with going over just a little bit, maybe we'll take another five or ten minutes for questions. You can say no, that's totally fine. I'm curious, maybe to hopefully summarize some of these questions, and maybe there will be something to glean from however you answer this that will address a lot of different things. What do you think? Recognizing that we have listeners from all sorts of different systems and all sorts of different locations, what do you want people to learn from your system and how might it apply to them?

54:44 That's a great question. I feel like you mentioned lots of different listeners from different areas, different systems, and again I go back to context, which is one of the principles, right? What's your context? And I guess I think that if none of these practices apply to you, all of these principles do apply to you. So you just got to figure out what practices will fulfill the principles that you need to follow in your area and in your system. And kind of what you talked about earlier with the harvester, that was in our system that was a deal breaker. We had to figure that out, right? And that would allow us then to implement all these other practices, all these other principles that we wanted to. So I think that's one thing, and then I think the other thing that I would

55:31 Just say is that sometimes for us at least we try to go too fast, too much too fast. And so which is great in some things but not so great in other things. And so I guess sometimes pulling your ideas back and saying okay I'm going to try this but I'm only going to try 50% of these ideas instead of 100% of the ideas and managing it closer I think sometimes is better than doing it all at once. So I'm his idea tank, I'm the one that comes up with the crazy ideas. So he's saying manage—his wife is what he's saying. I'm just kidding. But no, I think I mean Zach said it really really well. I one thing I'd add to that is honestly like and I, these principles I mean we came to them like we told you from a personal space they came to us as like a gift all of a sudden on top of something that we were already being led to and that we had already discovered to a certain point we felt. And I guess that you know if you're willing to put your time in and your work in and you are seeking truth it works out and we keep holding on to that because there's still things that were working out. But I really believe as we gave thanks for each of those weeds that were willing to grow in our poor soil as scary as those weeds were to the system that was already established it was part of our journey of knowing that you know and helping us discover that point that we had to change like the Harvester. And I guess that you know if we give thanks for those and instead of trying to fight nature we learned to make it our friend I guess a little bit. That sounds kind of cliche but really those the Earth knew what it needed to fix the problem and we spur that along with adding the diversity in and directing it to fit our system the way we want it to by adding the different seeds and the different flowering plants that we want to establish in the orchard over time but I think that accepting it and just maybe embracing the fact that the Earth does wonderful things and trust it a little bit you know that it's going to, that it can fix these problems right. And I guess the point I made earlier and I want to make it one more time is that to me going back to this last graph I shared, living ground cover. I mean living ground cover is the difference between us and all these other orchards that are being studied and having it as much time as possible throughout the entire year is really critical. I mean the sheep, the reason that we graze is because we're trying to stimulate that living ground cover. That's how the soil is healed, that's how the carbon is created, that's how the organic matters levels are increased, that's how the infiltration happens. All those things happen because of that. And so however you can make that happen that's critical. The living ground cover is really critical in the operation and everything else kind of feeds that. And I guess ultimately that feeds the biology under the soil right which is what really makes the system healthy. But the part that we I think can influence the most is that living ground cover piece.

58:39 So right by the way those sheep are certainly providing great utility for you and are doing great things for the orchard and the soil, how's the marketing aspect of that been? When you add more enterprises you have to wear your marketing hat a lot more often. Care to share anything about marketing sheep, chickens, pigs, turkeys?

59:05 Oh man, we're working on that. We have been a little bit imbalanced in the marketing area. We are way more on the ground in our farm than we are online or in the marketing world and it's been a weakness of our farm. Like that is if I could give us a weakness that's it. Like we're not very good at the marketing end. We just have too much time doing the farming end and you people that are really good at marketing but they're not really marketing anything great but we've got something great to market we just don't have time to market it very good. So we got to figure out how to balance that. This year though, honestly our sheep are what if we're going to survive this year with all of the bad things, with all the flooding and everything else it'll be our sheep that carried us through. So stacking your industries is a real thing like it really is. And doing a good job of it. I mean like when I say we do a thorough job of it we know our sheep, we know our genetics, we know what we want. We get rid of the things that don't work. We know we cull hard. We are able with knowing our sheep to sell to people the things that they need better for their system and direct them that way. So that's been a really great thing to help us with that market. And we've been blessed. We've been blessed. We totally sold out on sheep and that's been good. And I guess stat of that we've run about 150 to 200 sheep. So it's quite a few lambs we had. 300, I know 300 and some lambs last year. And so it's quite a few to move at least from our perspective. It's quite a few to move. And so we could have sold a lot more honestly. This year I feel like we actually finally have started getting into the marketing. This year we found more of our markets like it's been a lot of work but we're finding more of our markets and we're finding people that want animals that are raised this way. And you know people that are interested in hitting the markets of people that would like to try our sheep in their market. And so there's some of those things that are going out as far as you know people that reach out to us and us that we reach out to other people and say hey we've got something that would fit with you.

1:01:03 Know here's what we do, here's who we are. That's been that, like I said, that's what it's going to keep us afloat this year is the fact that we had sheep to market where we don't have the almond crop this year to market because of all the flooding and problems that way.

1:01:21 Yeah, well that's excellent. I just want to one more time offer if there's anything else that you want to share, anything that you think is really important. Otherwise I'd like to hear what's next, where are things headed in the future for you.

1:01:38 Okay. I don't know that there is anything else I need to share or want to share. We could go on forever about the farm, but that's what we need to talk about right now. I think the future looks really bright. We're really excited about the future. I mentioned earlier, but next year—and we say that in a cliche way, but we're really excited about next year. The trees look really good. There's a lot of blossoms and buds, not blossoms but buds that will turn into blossoms. You can tell the difference between leaves and blossoms on the trees. So that's—we're very excited about it. And as the last three years have gone by, our costs have been reduced. So that's helped a lot. And we feel like each year it's gotten better. The trees look better. The opportunity, the potential for a high crop or higher crop is better every year. So we're very excited actually. And I think this year we're working on marketing a lot. That's probably the piece that we need to work on the most. But I think we're making good progress there, making really good progress. So we're excited for what next year brings. There's a lot of opportunities that are starting to manifest themselves.

1:02:49 So I think—what Zach said—one thing that I would say more, and this is: I think that we started with this idea of regenerative, like we said, and then we found out that it was regenerative, there was a name, and there were principles that we were still just touching the tip of the iceberg on. But I feel like as we progress further into it, I feel like the horizon just keeps getting bigger. Like the idea that we could hold enough water to produce almonds on less water, that we can infiltrate the water that comes down from the sky instead of fighting it like we used to have to, I feel like all of a sudden the potential for our orchard is beyond what we had even started out hoping for. And that to me is so exciting. That is just exciting to think about because here in California they're cutting back our water. They implemented SGMA this year and they're threatening 12 inches of water, and it takes like 40 to 50 to grow almonds. And people are going 'okay, they're going to fallow land,' and we're going 'I wonder how much water we could hold in our soil? Like, how much could we do this?' I mean, almonds are naturally a desert plant. Like, the potential though is there, and the hope is there. As we change our soil and it becomes better, we will become more resilient for whatever comes through the years. As our system becomes better, we're healing it. It's still in a healing process. We absolutely feel like it's in a healing process. Our organic matter has to improve, and it is improving, but it's not where we want it yet. And so as all that improves, everything just keeps getting better. Instead of that graph where you see the other farmer burning up his resource, we're increasing ours. And to me, that is the exciting part about regenerative farming—that we're increasing, we're not decreasing, we're not burning up the soil. That everybody says 'oh, you petered out your farmland.' We're saying 'my farmland gets better and better every crop I grow on it. Every year I'm improving it, it's becoming more resilient. We've got more bugs that are going to help fight bad bugs. It's just exciting. I mean, it really is exciting to feel that. And I think that to me is—I guess we talk to a lot of farmers that have inherited farms. We didn't inherit our farm. We're working our tails off to make these payments, and they're still losing them. And I understand because with agronomy, our first year we collapsed retirement to do everything that they recommended. And we were going 'well, not even everything, just a part of it,' and you go 'this could happen so easily.' I mean, you could go under so fast if you do everything that they're telling you to do just in case something might happen. And you go 'let's cut back on the cost and let's start doing the things that make the ground amazing.' And that to me is they doctor forever, but if we have real health inside of us, it's where it's at. So that's my thought on it. And I'm also really excited to take even a bigger step back. For our family, it's been a very, very great experience. I'm not going to say it hasn't been challenging—a lot of work, hard, sometimes up late at night. But my relationship with my son and with my daughters has improved. Our relationship has improved. And so as a family, the future is very bright. So we're very grateful for the opportunity that we've had to farm this way and to learn these principles.

1:05:58 That's beautiful. Well, you guys, I think your story will just inspire so many people within regenerative ag. I would ask you to go back to your first slide where you share your handle for social media. Just want to thank you again for taking this time, spending with us. I know this is part of your work day, and for you to spend this time with us is greatly appreciated. And we're excited that people got to join live, but we'll also have this on our YouTube page as well. And I had you go back to this just so that people can follow along with your regenerative journey. You have some great social media. I follow you on Instagram, and if anybody wants to follow along, there it is. But thanks again.

1:06:41 Well, thank you, thank you, thank you, Davis. Thanks everybody for joining us.