Brought to you by:
"We have to restore the health of the soil of what we have now, yesterday. We have to unite and pursue these technologies that can help us and management practices that can help us create a sustainable future for the next of kin. We have a finite window of opportunity to fix these problems that are affecting the globe. And let's do it together. We're all on the same team. We can unite behind that. So let's go."
— Parker Cohn, CEO, Performance Resources Management
Parker Cohn is in the business of rehabbing soil. He’s the CEO of California-based Performance Resources Management (PRM), a company that offers customized fertility and soil health recommendations for land of all types — from farm fields to golf courses to the San Francisco Giants’ ballpark.
In today’s episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, editor Brian O’Connor talks with Parker about how PRM designs biological management programs for growers, new technologies he’s putting to use to improve soil health and much more.
The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Dawn Equipment.
Dawn Equipment, a family-owned company in Sycamore, Illinois, has a reputation for responsive customer service and American-made quality products that goes back to its origin nearly 3 decades. The company has grown to more than 40 employees and numerous products, earned awards for innovative design plus a growing number of patents, but it has not lost its commitment to U.S. made products. And customers and dealers can still call to speak directly with sales and engineering staff. Dawn has redefined several market segments like strip-till and active hydraulic control of planter and attachments. Dawn was the first company to make a remotely controllable planting product. Dawn continues its commitment to innovation, to customer service, and to active response to the changing needs of America’s farmers. Visit them at www.dawnequipment.com.
Full Transcript
Michaela:
Welcome to this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast series. I'm Michaela [inaudible 00:00:09] Strip-Till Farmer's technology editor. Today's episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by the Pluribus light from Dawn Equipment. Dawn is bringing today's innovative farmers, a new strip-till product from the regenerative ag focused underground agriculture brand. The pluribus light is priced like a strip freshener, but it offers the features and performance to be used in the fall or spring as a primary strip-tiller or strip freshener. It's the perfect compliment to a cover crop system that just needs a little blacker strip. Check out the Pluribus light at dawnequipment.com. Parker Cohen is in the business of rehabbing soil. He's the CEO of California based performance resources management, a company that offers customized fertility and soil health recommendations for land of all types, from farm fields to golf courses, to the San Francisco Giants ballpark. In today's episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast editor, Brian O'Connor talks with Parker about how PRM designs biological management programs for growers, new technologies he's putting to use to improve soil health, and much more.
Brian O'Connor:
The first question, tell me about yourself and what's your academic background? How'd your company get started?
Parker Cohen:
My academic background, I grew up in Boise, Idaho, went to public school and then I visited California when I was 11 years old. I visited my uncle here and fell in love with it. He took me around to Santa Clara and Stanford, and I saw palm trees and ocean and wonderful weather and professional ballparks, San Francisco Giants, this culture that coming from a small town in the Northwest Boise, Idaho was very alluring to me. I set my intention to go to college, university in California. Applied to a bunch of schools, ended up landing at university of San Diego just above Sea World in San Diego and studied mechanical engineering there. I got a pretty strong academic scholarship and that's really what was the determining factor of why I attended USC.
Parker Cohen:
I actually went blind. I didn't visit the campus before move in day. It was an awesome experience. USD was a great place for me. I studied mechanical engineering there and studied in emphasis in water and design engineering. My senior design project was a water purification technology that I worked on and honed.
Parker Cohen:
Then I think attending USD really set me up for success. There's a great community, great career center, connected me with internships working for a solar design company. I got some tremendous experience there where that helped to form the business model of what I do today. Then USD gave me an opportunity to participate in the social innovation challenge in 2015, where I pitched the water purification project that I worked on for my senior design project in engineering, pitched that in that competition and ended up winning and getting some attention from that, which landed me an incredible job right out of school working as a strategy analyst for a startup company in downtown San Diego.
Parker Cohen:
San Diego has been very sticky for me and it keeps pulling me back. It's where I live now and it's very central to the regions that I cover right now. I worked at that job for a couple years, got a ton of experience, and really felt a little disconnected from what my core calling was, which I've really felt tied to the water problems in the Southwest and around the world. One of the leading causes of death in the world is waterborne illness, primarily affects women and children. Young children are the most predisposed to E-coli and infection picked up through water. I think the 2014 statistic was 1.4, 1.5 million people per year, which is substantial. It's the leading cause of death in the world and we really don't talk about it.
Parker Cohen:
I shifted from working for a startup company to pursuing career and performance resource management where I'm going out and helping farmers, golf courses, cities, municipalities, improve the health of their soil, reduce their water substantially, reduce chemical inputs, reduce labor, streamline and optimize their business model to produce healthier, more nutritious food and use less water and chemicals in order to grow healthier crop, which translates to healthier soil, healthier plants, healthier people, healthier livestock. So really aligned with the water passion that I have and I think is a great launching point for what's what's to come.
Brian O'Connor:
I had the privilege to review your website shortly before we began our interview and it seems like a lot of the results category focus is on golf courses. Do you see PRM as primarily an agriculture company or as a golf course company?
Parker Cohen:
Golf courses are a market for us, golf courses, professional sports fields. We work with the San Francisco Giants at Oracle park. We're solving the same problems on golf courses and professional sports fields as we're solving for farmers. We're affecting soil health, which affects everything else, from irrigation management, fertility management, sports fields. Renovation budgets are... it costs a lot of money to maintain a professional sports field. What we're able to do with our soil science and what our technology brings is the ability to extend the life of one of these ballparks, because we're solving the core problems in the soil, which are the reason that they need to renovate.
Parker Cohen:
So we come in, extend the life of a field a few years. Every year, we extend that field, that's about $400,000, $500,000, $600,000 of savings to go into that capital improvement budget. Totally transforms the operation.
Parker Cohen:
Further there's environmental impacts to that, too. If we're not tearing out a whole field, taking all that material, we're using, you know, dump trucks, heavy equipment machinery that are very fuel inefficient. The carbon footprint of replacing these fields is high. If we can reduce the carbon footprint of the field, make the stand last longer with using less resources, water, labor chemicals, it's a win-win-win for everybody.
Parker Cohen:
Back to your point, is this an ag business, is this a landscape, professional sports turfs? It's we really cover all the markets with performance resource management, and golf and professional sports turf is really where we've gained a lot of traction where the value proposition is just understood immediately. We go out there and we eliminate a black layer problem at Oracle park in six weeks. That's one of the main reasons they have to renovate, is this problem that forms in the soil.
Parker Cohen:
We are growing in ag and then and in golf and sports turf. The ag side of the business, the biggest value proposition for the planet is in agriculture, absolutely. But the market is a little bit slower to develop on the ag side to new technology. It's more ingrained in their management practices. There's a lot of convention in farming and agriculture. There's a lot more light being shined on sports turf and golf courses during this drought to make change that improves water efficiency, that reduces the cost of operation, that substantially affects the capital improvement budget, where farms haven't had the pressure that these other industries have had. I think that's why you see there's more present there in golf and sports.
Brian O'Connor:
Well, and it certainly seems like in your neck of the woods, particularly San Diego, California, the likelihood of increased pressure forward is certainly something that's probably on everybody's minds with the recent decision, I think to hold or not as release much water into the Colorado River, I believe. There's been a lot of agricultural response to that. It seems like if nothing else, this is something... I guess the question would be, have you seen an increased interest in this kind of thing as a result of changing environmental conditions that we're seeing across the United States?
Parker Cohen:
Absolutely. The changing environmental conditions here, here in the Southwest we have less water available because we're in this mega drought. We're in the worst drought that we've ever recorded. Much of the population is insulated from it. We as a population don't really see it, but on the farms and on the golf courses, we're starting to see it more so. It's kind of a repeat of 2015. We had a pretty big drought down here, but we're seeing legislation come through where in LA there's 35% water cut for municipal users and there's watering restrictions. You can only water on certain days of the week. Those are lifestyle changes. They're starting to affect people because you have to go and update your irrigation clock or you're at risk for getting a fine for irrigating on the wrong day or using too much water. Our water bills are going up as well.
Parker Cohen:
You look at the decline and what's affecting farmers as well is, you don't just have less water available. The quality of the water has deteriorated. We have more salt, more bicarbonates, more chemicals in the water, minerals, called minerals in the water that the water's picking up because there's not as much water flowing so it's more concentrated rather than more dilute. We see things like salt stress showing up in avocado orchards right around me here in San Diego and Fallbrook. We see a lot of salt stress. As we pump our wells and pump the water out of them, the more concentrated the salt gets, the worse quality there is. The lower the quality of the water, the harder it is to grow healthy plants.
Parker Cohen:
We need to start, farmers start looking for solutions for buffering salts in the profile. How do we improve the health of this soil, because we're headed in a direction that is not sustainable for crop production here. How do we go about buffering these salts, maintaining our plant health, buffering these salts through the soil so we can still grow avocados here?
Brian O'Connor:
All right. Give me your elevator pitch for the services that you offer. If I'm a farmer, how do you make the case this is something I need?
Parker Cohen:
If you're a farmer, I'm going to identify what your biggest need is. If you're a produce farmer, you till your soil three, four times a year. You go through and you have a massive, massive budget for ripping, plowing, disking your land. My pitch to you is, by working with me, we're going to restore the health of your soil. We're going to come out, establish a baseline, design a biological management program specifically for your tillage, for your compaction issues that you have on your land. What we're going to do is, we're going to come out, we're going to take some samples. We're going to take some measurements, design a program, implement it, and we're going to guarantee you a reduction in your fuel costs and your fuel burn and your tillage costs.
Parker Cohen:
In addition, we're going to track how much yield improvements we see, our nitrogen balance, how much more efficiently we're using our nutrients from the profile of the soil to the plant. We're going to capture that in yield and in quality.
Parker Cohen:
For instance, I had this conversation last year, started working with a big produce farm. The deal was, I will show you a 10% reduction in your fuel cost and your cost for tillage, guaranteed, [inaudible 00:13:16]. They're like, "Are you kidding?" Yeah, sign up. In four months, we saved 30% on fuel burn, and this is a split field and this is John Deere operations center data. This is very big tractor, lots of sensors. Multimillion dollar tractor, lots of sensors all connected documenting this in a data logger for John Deere. I got that data from John Deere.
Parker Cohen:
You look at what the fuel cost back then, it was $2.50 a gallon, maybe 3 bucks for road diesel. Now we're up at... I filled my truck up the other day, not with road diesel, but it was 7 bucks a gallon. You look at those savings and you translate it. I try to make an economic argument for my customer that hits their top one or two problems and solves it for them in a way that you can't say no. It's guaranteed. I've done this so long and I know what we're going to be able to do and what we're going to be able to affect, especially if I look at your prior management practices, your annual production history, what were we growing and what were our yields and what was our quality. We can look back at that and model out what our improvements are going to be and ultimately make an economic case for our customer to use our services.
Brian O'Connor:
That's interesting because a lot of the no-till farmers that I talk to on a daily basis talk about the reductions that they see in diesel for shaping and plowing is the primary reason why they decide to adapt no-till in the first place. Beyond the savings that are inherent to the no-till model, which has been in operation in Kentucky continuously since '62, and we see as conservation tillage anyway. It's the majority practice in agriculture today. Is there an additional ingredient or X factor that you can bring, or is this reflective of the mindset in California regarding no-till that it's just these tilling practices are so deeply entrenched?
Parker Cohen:
When we get in, I know the context is no-till and I knew this was going to come up and be part of our conversation is, I'm very supportive of no-till. I'm very supportive of regenerative agriculture and permaculture. I love it. How do we go from hundreds of thousands of acres of row crops to no-till? That's where I provide a solution and a bridge. What I'm able to do at scale with my systems is, think of it as probiotics for the soil at scale. We go out and we design this like a doctor, we go out and we design a biological management program that goes over the course of the year, that goes over the course of the season. This isn't a pump and dump type of program where you mix it, go out, spray it once to get a big pump.
Parker Cohen:
This is restoring the soil and it takes time to restore the soil. We design these programs in a way that can create a bridge. Now when we're burning 30% less diesel fuel across thousands of acres, now do we really need to do that? Why are we tilling? We're tilling because of where we're thinking farmers, conventional farmers, are thinking they're adding air to the profile, reducing compaction. That's what we've been programmed to do. We, being the conventional agriculture industry.
Parker Cohen:
I think there's a number of sustainable technologies out there that coincide with what I'm doing that can help bridge this gap from where we currently are to where we need to go, because what we're doing conventionally across the Southwest is not sustainable. Our soil is dying. It more resembles concrete than soil. You see increased disease because infiltration rates are down. Water standing on the surface causes more insect pressure. It's a great place for insects to lay larvae.
Parker Cohen:
You just see these problems begin to exacerbate. When we can roll out a solution that scales across thousands of acres and show, hey, we're solving these problems that these practices have just been layering on more and more problems, making them worse. That's really my angle is, we need to be able to implement technologies that make agronomic sense and economic sense to bridge the gap between where we are conventionally doing four foot rips with 900 horsepower tractors. Tractors don't even have wheels anymore. They're more like tanks. They got four tracks on them, or eight tracks. They're just massive and the conventional solution is just bigger equipment, more nitrogen, more chemicals, specialty products, wetting agents to get water to go down. All these things where if we can create soil house solutions that scale for these folks, integrate into that model, it can be a bridge to a more regenerative and sustainable future.
Brian O'Connor:
You mentioned the biological component. There's a lot of interest among no-till farmers because they're by nature early adapters. I guess they're too stubborn not to change is the way that I think about it. But how do you integrate the biological component of this into your fixes? Is that a case by case basis? Is there an example you can point to of, this is what we did for one farm and how we integrated a biological plan? Because one of the things that I've heard again and again is that there's a high degree of variability with a lot of proposed biological solutions and it can come down to the water temperature that you apply it as, or the ambient air temperature can affect whether or not you've seen improvement. You said soil testing is one component. How do you approach that particular biology in particular?
Parker Cohen:
I'll start with the baseline. We'll just walk through the process and I'll give you a couple examples from farms and we'll stick to farms. We go out and establish a baseline. We'll go out and we'll take physical measurements. We'll take chemical measurements. We'll take biological measurements of the soil. Indicators that we can diagnose, where is the soil at, what can we do to improve it? Where are the deficiencies? We design a program based on our findings of the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of the soil. Then we design a program based off of that.
Parker Cohen:
One example is, let's say we're working with a potato farm. Potato's a root crop. We find one of the things that's unique about our programs for potatoes is, we find that improving the health of the soil, we can specifically affect potatoes with different biology than we can affect, say alfalfa or corn or wheat. By having a different ratio of the microbes to fungi, we can improve root crop. Let's just say it instead of potatoes. Let's just say root crops. We can improve root crop production by 10, 15%, as opposed to if we took that potato program and ran it on corn or alfalfa, we wouldn't see the same improvement.
Parker Cohen:
With potatoes, there's yield and production. There's also processing when they go out and they harvest and they run them through tumblers. Every time you run produce through or run through tumblers to get the dirt off, you run the potatoes or the sugar beets or the onions, you run them through tumblers to get all this dirt off, to shake all the dirt off. If the soil's healthier, it's easier to shake that dirt off. You don't have to run them through the tumbler so many times, and every time you run them through the tumbler you lose a percentage of the yield, because it just gets damaged or shredded.
Parker Cohen:
That's an instance for root crops or potatoes. Now, if we go out and we look at an alfalfa stand, the alfalfa stand is going to... how you make money with alfalfa is going to be your quality. So what's your protein value of the hay? What's the feed value or relative feed value of that hay, determines how much a bale goes for or how much a ton goes for. As a farmer, your quality matters and your yield matters, so tons breaker.
Parker Cohen:
When we go out and run a program on alfalfa, we're looking for specific nutrient uptake to the alfalfa plant to optimize the protein value and the feed content of that plant, and while improving that yield in a sustainable way. Meaning, when I say sustain sustainable way, I mean we don't get a pump and then a decline. We don't overwork the soil to create artificial gains. We create a steady increase that is sustainable and improvement over time. When you compare to the former 5, 10, 15 years of production.
Parker Cohen:
Potatoes and root crops generally benefit from more fungi than we could add more of a fungi to the alfalfA [inaudible 00:23:01] and really not make any sort of difference. that's measurable for the farmer. Where we're spending that money for the farmer, we got to make sure that they're seeing ROI at the end of the day. As you're saying, it's a very complicated network of microbes and fungi and biological soil management is extremely overwhelming as a farmer when you got schedules, you got equipment to maintain. You got planning, harvest, water, you have a pivot go down, a pump go down. Layer this on to everything is really where we come in as a specialist in biological soil management to partner with you and make sure that you have the best success possible.
Brian O'Connor:
One of the things that your website mentions is the use of drones. How do you employ drones as part of this space?
Parker Cohen:
Drones and multi-spectral imagery is a phenomenal resource for us. We've used it for one off projects, like doing an irrigation audit for say, say olive trees or almond trees. You can see clogged emitters very quickly when you're working with drones and you can cover a phenomenal amount of acreage with an incredible amount of detail in just a short 30 minute flight that you practically couldn't even drive around a farm that quickly.
Parker Cohen:
The way we use the drones is, we've got a setup where we can go out and we can fly and we can quantify what the yield, what the biomass is, what the yields are going to be. We can go out and we can actually see affected change in the soil through the plants. The plants can communicate these soil health improvements by showing... we measure using... throw some acronyms out there, NDVI, NDRE, so normalized differential vegetative index, normalized differential red edge index, infrared, which is just a heat sensor. If you think of it that way, it measures the heat being reflected. We can look at and track these improvements over time using objective forms of data. We go out and we fly the drone and we have plant health improvements that we're quantifying based off of the chlorophyll content or the health of the plant, how green it is.
Brian O'Connor:
The Bricks rating, right?
Parker Cohen:
Or Bricks. Bricks is more related to the sugar content, but Bricks and chlorophyll are going to have a relation to each other. Now I can go out and I can fly this drone over a couple hundred acres and show the impact, show the changes that we're making from week to week, month to month. We can show this continuous improvement to our customers and streamline, optimize our programs to make sure that we have feedback and data in between harvests or in between cuts. It allows us to collect more data and incorporate that into our business model and help the farmers with that as well.
Brian O'Connor:
You're definitely speaking my language. I spent a lot of time talking about, or at least learning about these different types of indicators and what they mean. But I guess the other thing too, you're the head of a company and ultimately you have a product that you're bringing to the market. If I was to look at this from a practical perspective, what does it cost? Can you give me an estimate if I have a... oh, let's say 40 acres is the number that we use, 40 acre corn operation in Wisconsin. What would it cost to have you perform your analysis and recommendations for me?
Parker Cohen:
We'd come out and we'd do a baseline assessment based on the crop, the region. Is Wisconsin, is this irrigated corn or is this dry land corn?
Brian O'Connor:
It's a big distinction among our readership as well.
Parker Cohen:
We want to share the process, so let's nail the process down. Let's treat this like it's a conversation, like you're the customer and I'm me.
Brian O'Connor:
Well, let's say for the sake of argument I'm going to go with, in Wisconsin it would probably be mostly irrigated. Water is relatively cheap and so we can move it around cheaply, so let's say irrigated corn.
Parker Cohen:
Awesome. We'd come out and say, we had say I were closer to you. Right now we'd have to put together, we'd have to factor in travel costs and stuff because I'm in San Diego, but I could come out there for a flat rate and do a baseline assessment for you. Depending on, I don't know what airfare is to Wisconsin, but say airfare was a thousand bucks to get me round trip. I'll come out there for $2,500, $3,000. We'll come out, we'll do the baseline soil assessment for you, propose a recommended solution, and we would then forecast looking at your annual production history and your inputs and your soil, what's in the soil? How much of that nitrogen's available? How much is plant available versus what's totally there? Then we design a program for that corn to maximize your yield and return on investment with our program.
Michaela:
Before we continue this conversation, I'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, the Pluribus light from Dawn Equipment. Dawn is bringing today's innovative farmers a new strip-till product from the regenerative ag focused underground agriculture brand. The Pluribus light is priced like a strip freshener, but it offers the features and performance to be used in the fall or spring as a primary strip tiller or strip freshener. It's the perfect compliment to a cover crop system that just needs a little blacker strip check out Pluribus light at dawnequipment.com. Now let's get back to the conversation.
Brian O'Connor:
Now, what type of soil testing do you employ? Are we talking about hanging or mineral?
Parker Cohen:
We go out and we'll do a complete, if you have... the mineral tests, soil minerals don't change that fast. They don't change that much. If you have something that's within two years, I'm going to just look at that and we'll save the money at the lab. The Haney test, I have not seen very consistent Haney numbers from my experience working with labs, sending a sample to multiple labs and getting the data back. So that said, I know there's a lot of people working with Haney and they're having good experience with it, but where we will run a similar test to Haney that does soil respiration, the [inaudible 00:29:55], which there's not a lot of variables there. It's a very simple test. We understand it very well. We've worked with it for over 10 years. We go out, we incorporate that. That's the biological side of how we can key in, what is the health of the biology?
Parker Cohen:
We relate that to your chemical and also physical. We've got a toolkit that we carry around with us when we go out to the fields and we measure. We'll measure the compaction. We'll dig some holes and take some physical measurements of the soil and look at if it's a tillage type of operation, which may or may not. We'll quantify, we'll look at [inaudible 00:30:39] density. Is [inaudible 00:30:40] density, is that a measure that we can record and track improvement over the course of the season? How do we measure it? We measure it multitude of ways. We measure it with probes, measure it with penetrometer, measure it with tractors and sensors on them.
Brian O'Connor:
Say I'm a no-till operation in our hypothetical example. What then can you recommend that could help me improve?
Parker Cohen:
You're a no-till operation, so you're going to have higher organic matter in your soil and more food essentially for the microbes to process, cycle, and digest, and those plants to uptake. Think of us as like a supercharge for digesting and cycling your organic matter. We essentially turn your soil profile into a composting program, essentially. We're just accelerating the breakdown of organic matter and the production of plant available nutrients. We would be looking more at your organic matter numbers. We be looking more at your bricks, your tissue test numbers, in order to show... we could show more fertility reductions in that type of scenario
Brian O'Connor:
A hard one, because inputs are really high right now, and it looks like herbicides are also going to be really high this year in terms of cost. What kind of return on investment can I expect for my $2,000-$3,000?
Parker Cohen:
That would be for us to come out and do the baseline and put together program for you, right?
Brian O'Connor:
Yeah.
Parker Cohen:
If you're out there, and we'll look at your management practices and what you're using, we'll look at the nitrogen balance and we'll see, hey, well, are you putting down too much nitrogen? Or are we not putting enough out? Do we have a bunch of nitrogen that's locked up and we really don't need to fertilize for a year or two? When we talk about weeds and herbicides, we need to kill weeds. We can't have a bunch of weeds in our crop. It's mainly going to be, we're going to help the primary crop, so the corn, shade out and outgrow those weeds faster. We're going to out compete those weeds for the nutrients and for the sunlight. That's how we're going to be able to show those herbicide reductions.
Parker Cohen:
I think this question might have been stimulated. There's a picture in my head of a alfalfa field. We got a two year stand and a four year stand, and the four year stand is running PRM and the two year stand is not. The two year stand sprayed 30 bucks an acre of herbicides and had prevalent weeds. It looks like 50% weeds in that photo. Then the PRM field had no weeds and four year stands. So older genetics, you would expect that field to look worse. That's just what I describe to you, is the plants out competing and shading out those weeds and competing for the sunlight and competing for the nutrients better. The healthier soil, and this is where no-till sees a lot of reduction and special chemicals and herbicides and fungicides, because we're improving soil health in one way. This is just another tool to use.
Brian O'Connor:
I'm going to ask you to critique yourself a little bit. Why would I go with PRM as opposed to some of the open source? Because when I talk to farmers I generally find a very encouraging and eager to share audience to talk about right down to things of like what fertilizer they use, what rate, how many. Why would I go with the proprietary, I guess, service rather than some of the open source information that's out there? Do you rely primarily on peer reviewed sources or how does that work?
Parker Cohen:
The reason that you would want to go with us versus something that was open sourced is there's a phenomenal amount of information out there, and what is going to help you the most and what is accurate. What's going to provide you with a return on your time and your money? Because there are a lot of programs out there that are extremely time intensive and the amount of time that I've and my teams put into developing this system over the last 10 years or so is, all of that time is a learning curve. We've been able to hone and optimize this program over the course of that time and cut that 10 year learning curve for you.
Parker Cohen:
When it comes to maintaining a live culture, it's kind of like a micro brewery or a or wine making is, there's a bit of an art to it. There's also science to it that we can go out and we can measure. Really what you're getting by working with us is the experience and execution. I'm not sure if anybody else is out there that'll do performance based contracts. Here's what we're going to do for you. We're going to do this. We make sure the program is run properly, because we're maintaining the health of a live culture. This culture is alive and we need to maintain it and apply it and manage it over the course of the season. That's where we come in and do that for you and integrate with your team so you don't have to be overwhelmed with a stack of books on your table or trying to figure out how to integrate all of this into your operation is, you sign up with us, we guarantee results.
Brian O'Connor:
Okay. Do your recommendations include cover crops?
Parker Cohen:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It blows my mind.
Brian O'Connor:
You had mentioned shade and out competing and that reminds me of cover crops, because that's a lot of [inaudible 00:36:44].
Parker Cohen:
Yes, I love cover crops. More cover crops, please. I recently discovered at a conference that 5% of fallow ground in the state of California has cover crops on it.
Brian O'Connor:
Wow. 5%?
Parker Cohen:
Why do it at all? We learned this in elementary school. This was one of the first things that we learned when we started talking about agriculture food production, where do bananas come from? I don't understand how we don't have public policy that incentivizes or incentivize cover crops or dis incentivize not having cover crops, because in this drought as more water is getting cut... I've got a big tomato operation that I'm working with and we're growing in the spring and I'm asking what's going in next, because I want to make sure that we have the best establishment that you've ever seen on this land, in the 80 years that your family's been farming it.
Parker Cohen:
"Nothing's going in." "Well, are you going to put a cover crop in?" "Nope, we don't have water." That's concerning. If one thing resonates with the audience and one thing to talk about is how can we create policy that incentivizes positive soil health initiatives? The most basic, let's start with cover crops. If water districts are incentivizing farmers to fallow land or not grow and they're paying a couple thousand bucks an acre to not farm that land, let's talk about having requirements for covering that soil so we don't lose it.
Brian O'Connor:
Okay. Do you include cover crop recommendations as part of your suite of other recommendations as well, or do you primarily focus on microbial communities and that kind of thing?
Parker Cohen:
We primarily focus on soil health via micro biological solutions. Our soil management programs is really what we specialize in and we really just live in that space. Outside of that, I'm very supportive of cover cropping. Absolutely.
Brian O'Connor:
Okay. Then the question I have is this, what distinguishes you guys from... we have a popular slogan and you probably maybe heard it yourself: bugs in a jug. What distinguishes your operation from a bugs in a jug outfit?
Parker Cohen:
We're still around and we haven't changed our name. I get that a lot, especially at conferences. This is why I don't really do trade show booths or anything, because there's such a negative connotation with soil biology and biological soil health throughout agriculture. There's snake oil, bugs in a jug, snake oil salesman. Those are pretty offensive and they get old fast. Now I generally avoid... if those words are coming up, I'm not talking to the right people. I need to be talking to people that are saying, "Hey, our cost for UN 32 went from 250 bucks a ton to a thousand bucks a ton. What can you do to help us? And how are you making decisions with your programming that's going to affect both my bottom line and my top line?"
Brian O'Connor:
Yeah. If I sound skeptical, I don't mean to be offensive, but if I sound skeptical it's because my readers are skeptical. Although I will say there has been sort of a change in attitude that I've observed, or at least that farmers have told me about because I've been in ag since November of last year. What they say is basically 10, 20 years ago, I could safely label all of this as snake oil. Now some percentage of it is snake oil and I don't know how to tell the valid part from the other part.
Brian O'Connor:
I didn't mean to paint you with a broad brush in that question, but even though there's a lot of excitement and this area holds a lot of promise, especially I think with the advent of CRISPR and a couple other biological technologies, there's still a lot of, well, what are you trying to sell me, kind of stuff. That was the point of asking that question more than anything.
Parker Cohen:
First off, absolutely no offense taken. I think that's a beautiful question is, what makes you different from this whole category that we've treated it before? I'd say work with people that are going to... how to differentiate snake oil salesman from a beneficial biological management program that's going to affect your business, potentially even save your crop, save your farm is, work with people who make decisions based off science. They're going out and they're measuring data and they're designing these programs for you.
Parker Cohen:
There's not a silver bullet. There's not a silver bullet out there. If you can get somebody that'll come out and sign a performance based contract where they will put their skin on the line for your farm and your operation to partner with you, you should probably look at opening that door. If there isn't that kind of confidence, buyer beware.
Brian O'Connor:
That's what I've seen is, especially when it comes to cover crops, if they don't ask what your soil type is or they don't ask what you're growing right away, don't buy their seeds because they have no interest in actually matching you with an effective cover crop.
Brian O'Connor:
I guess I just have two more questions to go. The next question is, what do you see as the future of the agricultural biological industry in the United States? Where do we go from here? I've seen some academic journals pointing towards things like nanotechnology sensors as a means of looking at bacterial colonies and populations and fungi and that, but I'm really interested here in what you see as the next big steps. What problems need to be solved what's over the next horizon?
Parker Cohen:
I think our next big steps are really adoption. You can have, what was it, was it Fuji? Fuji made the first digital camera in what was it, 1970? Yet the usable digital camera that actually reached consumers didn't reach them for almost 30 more years. We have this adoption hurdle and this acknowledgement of, as you said before, what is bugs in a jug and what is actually an effective management program for my soil, for my plant, for my region, for my climate? What's actually moving the needle? What's actually making my land more productive while using less chemicals, growing more healthy and more resilient plants that are not nutrient deficient? We see our nutrition absorption go up, we see our disease go down, and we see water use go down and our inputs and chemicals.
Parker Cohen:
I think adoption is really a big one. I live in this world, but my side of agriculture is the big ag, it's get a bigger tractor. You got tillage problems, get a bigger tractor. We really need a cultural shift from that and to start looking more at technology, data, bottom line, top line, tracking these things all the way through, tracking these programs. If I'm spending X here, how's it translating to Y at the end of the year? There's so much technology available.
Parker Cohen:
My hat's off to John Deere for their operations center and all the data that they collect on that tractor when it's going through the fields, but training, training the folks that are using those tractors how to set it up because if you don't set it up right, the data is trash. How do we use all this technology that's at our fingertips? How do we use drones? How do we use soil sensors? How do we integrate all... this is where, this is the second part of the answer to your question is, where I see this going is where you're going to be using a suite of tools and technologies that demonstrate the value and the effects of the biological management practices, programs, products, what have you, in the field.
Brian O'Connor:
In other words, it sounds like what you're saying is not that we have the practical solutions to all of our problems nailed down, but we have a good stab at some of them and we should get that out to as many people as possible. Is that a fair assessment?
Parker Cohen:
Yeah, and we should look at adoption and integration.
Brian O'Connor:
Okay. The last question that I'll ask is the same question I ask at the end of every interview ever. Is there anything else that you want to talk about or anything else that you feel like we didn't touch on that you want to mention?
Parker Cohen:
Looking at the future with agriculture, with your front yard, with growing plants, I think it's really important to look at what does this look like 20 years from now? What does this look like for my kids? What does this look like for my grandkids? When we see these water cuts starting to hit, starting to hit in California... California's on the knife's edge. The Southwest is on the knife's edge that we're at the bottom of the Colorado River. If we don't take action, what does this look like where I live? We don't get 50 inches of rain. We can't, but with increasing the number of catastrophic environmental events that are happening, with the decrease in water availability, with the decline of water quality, how does the future look like?
Parker Cohen:
There is no plan B. There isn't. We have to restore the health of the soil of what we have now, yesterday. We have to unite and pursue these technologies that can help us, and management practices that can help us create a sustainable future for the next of kin. If I could tell the one thing that I don't know if we clearly covered is there is no plan B. This is what we have, and this is our chance. We have a finite window of opportunity to fix these problems that are affecting the globe and let's do it together. We're all on the same team. We can unite behind that, so let's go.
Michaela:
Thanks to Parker Cohen and Brian O'Connor for today's conversation. To hear more podcasts about resource management and strip-till, visit striptillfarmer.com/podcasts, or check out our episode library wherever you get your podcasts. Many thanks to the Pluribus light from Dawn Equipment for helping to make this strip-till podcast series possible. From all of us here at Strip-Till Farmer, I'm Michaela [inaudible 00:48:38]. Thanks for listening.
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