Fruit and vegetable producers across the U.S. share their perspectives on how biological products fit in their operations. Carol Miller | Editor, American Vegetable Grower David Eddy | Editor, American Fruit Grower & Western Fruit Grower Frank Giles | Editor, Florida Grower
Across agriculture, biologicals have arguably made the biggest impact in high-value specialty crops. Yet within the broad spectrum of U.S. crops, regions, and farms, it seems every grower has a different perspective on how biological tools are a fit in their production systems.
We discussed biologicals with a cross section of specialty crop growers — large and small — in the fruit, vegetable, and nut markets. We even talked with a Pest Control Adviser who makes crop protection recommendations to his grower clients. They shared their perceptions of these tools, strategies for best using them, success stories, and areas they’re looking for more help.
Take a look at how Gayle Thorpe, Thorpe’s Organic Family Farm, East Aurora, NY is incorporating biological products in her operation. Then turn the page for more thoughts from other growers around the U.S.
Specialty crop growers face four main problems, says Alan Boyce, who refers to them as “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”: water, labor, soil, and resistance.
Boyce is Executive Chairman of Materra Farming Co., which grows 3,000 acres of pistachios, as well as lemons and dates, at the southeastern tip of California, in Imperial County.
“Everybody in my company is supposed to be on the lookout for new ideas and technologies that will help solve any one of those problems, and if we can get more than one that would be great,” he says. “So the trick here is, we’ve got to try them because we're a pretty big grower. We're diversified into a lot of areas and a lot of different crops.”
Books have been written about the intricacies of Western U.S. water, and as for labor, Boyce says “in every conversation I have with farmers, labor’s in there somewhere. It comes down to ‘Do you have enough guys? And nobody does.’”
But with the final two, soil and resistance, Boyce believes they can make real improvements, and that’s what interests him about biologicals. He believes biologicals can help with both, but especially resistance, which he sees looming as a large, immediate problem.
For example, by far the top threat to pistachios is navel orangeworm (NOW), but Boyce says he has few problems with the pest. First, he’s isolated, well away from nearly all other pistachio farms in the state, which is a blessing because it reduces the threat of NOW making its way to his orchards. It’s also a boon to his lemon groves, as he doesn’t worry about the arrival of Asian citrus psyllid (ACP), a notorious hitchhiker, “because in Imperial Country there are only five growers and no people,” he says with a chuckle.
Actually, there’s another notorious traveler on the nation’s highways, he says. Boyce points out resistance is a problem in many areas, and may even continue to worsen, particularly in the West, because of the way specialty agriculture has traditionally been conducted.
“Unfortunately, we have a contractor model here on the West Coast, so we have many machines that move from microclimate to microclimate and all it takes is one guy to not properly wash down his pickup truck in Salinas before he drives down to El Centro to infect the Imperial Valley,” he says.
As for taking care of NOW, pheromone puffers might be, if anything, more important than his location. Boyce is convinced they wouldn’t be achieving the outstanding NOW control they get without them.
“The navel orangeworm puffers are pretty magical,” he says. “We have eliminated that pest in our pistachio orchards, and that's worth a bunch of money to us in quality premiums from the processor we send our nuts to, the Wonderful Corporation. In the in the long run, that's as close to a silver bullet we could ever expect. I'm not holding other biological controls up to that standard, if they can get there, that's great.”
Pheromones are a great solution that’s beautiful in their simplicity, Boyce says, who adds that he is so enamored with the technology, he has joined the Board of Directors of a California pheromone company, Provivi.
“They keep the male moth from finding the female moth and having a happy ending, so you don't have 1,000 times as many bugs in a couple of weeks,” he says. “I also think we have a healthier ranch because we don't have to use insecticides so we're not killing all the beneficials.”
Boyce says he’s glad that there are so many companies involved in pheromones, and solid companies at that, and that bodes well for the industry’s future.
“There are several competitors in the space,” he notes. “We use Suterra, which has been around the longest, but Semios has an excellent product, as does Pacific Biocontrol. Trécé doesn’t do puffers, they have emitter strips. But I’d say that the most important thing is that there's some competition. So as long as there's competition out there, it makes sure that the suppliers keep pretty sharp pencils.”
What’s becoming a big issue these days, Boyce says, is many growers are wondering what happened to getting a premium for ensuring people’s fruits and vegetables are not only pretty darn perfect, but farmed so carefully, because it can be costly for the grower.
He says that not too long ago, Whole Foods was the only retailer to feature a lot of organic produce. But now all the major chains have separate sections for organic produce. The biggest organic retailer has become Walmart, which is great in that organic has truly gone mainstream, but mainstream doesn’t often mean premium pricing.
Boyce says the organic premium that used to be quite high for some fruits and vegetables has really come down. He’s run the numbers, and it simply doesn’t pay for Materra Farming to go through the three-year conversion process to get their ground certified organic and change their growing practices for the crops they currently grow. Especially when he’s not convinced it may not be in the earth’s best interest.
“The second thing about organic farming is organic isn't necessarily sustainable,” he says. “In many cases, organic production uses more inputs and ends up with less production, and we’ve got seven-plus billion people on this planet and only a certain amount of farmland, so it might be certified organic but it's probably not as sustainable.”
However, Boyce is excited about a new movement, “they picked a really good name, calling it regenerative agriculture, which is getting a lot of press and a lot of support, especially from retailers and some packaged food companies, though we've been doing it for years. We call it no-till.”
Boyce says it would be fantastic if farmers actually get a direct benefit for building up soil carbon in the form of carbon credits, because many growers in the U.S. and Western Canada are already no-till, and would profit handsomely.
“That will be a great long-term thing for agriculture and then farmers might actually make a positive margin,” he says. “And maybe they don't have to worry so much about the phone call from their farm lender.”
Hector Mariscal was intent on becoming a doctor when he got his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences, but managed care was becoming an issue at that time, and in thinking more about it, he realized he wanted to work outside with plants. He shifted gears, and instead became a plant doctor — a Pest Control Adviser (PCA).
Mariscal, who is based in Gilroy, CA, founded Devan Inc. in 2010. He manages the farms of 20-plus growers, working in many tree and vine crops, though 60% of his business is berries — strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries — and 40% of the acreage he handles is organic.
Because he studied biology, Mariscal was immediately taken by the use of biologicals. He thinks it’s just good common sense to take such a holistic approach to crop management.
However, understanding how biologicals fit in a given situation can be difficult, so Mariscal is meticulous when it comes to sourcing products.
“We must understand the origin of the biological. Who's behind the product? Who's behind the box? We must understand,” he says. “You need to know the enterprise itself, who's making it, how are they making it. Is what they are doing sustainable? Does it have benefits to the soil and the plant in the long term?”
Mariscal says he wants to know the “team” that is supplying products. He needs to know if they have a laboratory behind them to analyze the origins of their product. If they have scientists working on new strains, old strains, or different types of strains, Mariscal says he wants to know.
“How they make up the product is important, so I think I think being able to understand the supplier, and to make sure that they have a science team behind the product, is important – it really helps,” he says.
Getting the right products from the right supplier is critical, but then comes the hard part: Winning over skeptical growers. Because more than half of Mariscal’s growers farm conventionally, he has to adjust his approach, but not as much as one might think.
“I have conventional farming, and I have growers in organic farming, but farming really is taking care of the soil, so that whatever you plant, you have can produce the fruit, the nut, whatever it is that we're trying to accomplish,” he says. “So we must find synergistic effects, whether conventional or organic, to help the plan be more efficient. I'm trying to understand how to make the soil more lively, more productive, balance the physics, the chemistry, and biology.”
Mariscal says in the future he will certainly be using more biologicals, in part to further his goal of getting rid of fumigation. Strawberries, a key crop on California’s Central Coast, have long been fumigated because the plants are so sensitive to soil-borne diseases.
Restricted fumigants are slowly being phased out, as the township caps are being reduced, and growers are balking at the high prices for those fumigants they can get, Mariscal says.
“So we have to get along with doing what we do and using biologicals and then using synergistic elements to help us accomplish our goals without reducing production,” he says. “That's really my goal, to help growers understand that ‘Yeah, there's a value in not fumigating and being a trendsetter and doing it right.’”
Lipman Family Farms, based in Naples, FL, is the largest outdoor tomato producer in the U.S. The farm also grows a variety of other produce items. The business has deployed technology throughout its operations as part of its sustainability initiative.
Jamie Williams, Director of Operations, says agricultural technology and data management has allowed the farm to be operated very precisely when it comes to the application and timing of ag inputs. And it has opened windows for the use of certain biological inputs on the farm.
Data can provide insights down to the row level as layer-on-layer of information is collected year after year.
“One of the things we keyed in on a decade ago is the idea technology would launch us into the future by gathering information in large quantities and using it to predictively model fertility rates, yield outcomes, labor needs, etc.,” Williams says. “Anything we could do to stay on the cutting edge through technology.”
Wes Roan, Crop Protection and Food Safety Manager, directs the application of inputs on the farm. He says while overall operations have relied on more conventional chemicals and fertilizers, biologicals have found slots where they are useful as well.
“We have been working biologicals into our program over the past few years,” Roan notes. “We like to use them around harvest time because of the typically lower pre-harvest intervals and re-entry intervals for worker safety.”
The farm also has deployed products aimed at soil health. “The last few years there’s been a lot of attention paid to soil sustainability, and how we can improve the ability of our soils to make more nutrients that might be tied in the soil available to crops,” Roan adds. “That’s one of the areas we’ve been evaluating lately with biologicals.”
With the biological industry on a growth boom and new products being launched seemingly every week, there’s a lot of noise in the marketplace. That can present a challenge to growers when they’re trying to work the materials into their standard production programs. There is more to choose from than time and money to evaluate.
“We are not a research company; we are a production company,” Roan notes.
The biological products Lipman has used or currently is using started out in small plot evaluations without putting a lot of money at risk. The goal is to avoid a large-scale situation where a product doesn’t live up to expectation and endangers yields. They also target biologicals toward specific needs on the farm, which is not always an “on-every-acre” proposition.
“We are looking for consistency and repeatability in a measured way before we put too much confidence in any products,” Williams says. “We like to call our testing of products firing rifle balls before firing cannon balls.
“Serenade fungicide (Bacillus subtilis, Bayer), for example, is a biological product we started out using on a very small scale but has transitioned into a much larger use product that is important in our operation.”
Lipman Family Farms will continue to evaluate biological products as the market continues to develop with sustainability in mind. That’s sustainability of the environment but, more importantly, sustainability of profitability.
