Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1432253
You mentioned your previous experience with compost. Is there anything that might surprise people based on your personal learnings? If you're on a steady compost program, one thing that's really great, but is not really recognized, is that compost is great on the minerals – zinc, boron, iron and manganese. Compost has available, steady levels of these and almonds are big users of those elements. I'm not a soil pathologist, but I think it promotes healthier soils by getting the microbes and everything going, so that maybe some of the soil-borne diseases that affect almonds could be suppressed. I can't make any claim that it's going to reduce diseases, but I tend to think if you have a healthier soil that's in better balance, the roots in the soil are going have a better chance against some of those pathogens. You're using almond hulls as a soil amendment on 10% of your farmland today, with the hopes of doubling it later this year. What's the biggest challenge related to expanding their use as a compost? It's a logistics game. It takes a lot of volume but it's not really heavy by weight. We watch dairies apply it and they use very little commercial fertilizers, but most dairies have the farm ground really close to the dairy. So once we can get over the logistics hump here – either becoming vertically integrated or having our own trucking fleet or whatever makes the most sense – the composting system becomes a lot easier to fully deploy. A compost pile made up of green waste and tree grindings will be incorporated into the orchard to improve water-holding capacity and add organic matter to the soil. Almond Board of California 14