What’s the No. 1 lesson you’ve learned from an agronomic standpoint in the past three decades?
The most important thing relates to nutrition. Contrary to what I’d learned in school and what we practiced in the lawn care business, synthetic fertilizer is not the only choice and can often be the wrong choice. Soil is the most valuable input that we can manage, and making the soil work for you is the hardest thing we do. I’m not a hippie, but you have to be cognizant of what happened before us. Synthetic fertilizers have only been around for 75 years or so, and good agriculture has been around for thousands of years. They relied on organic amendments to the soil. The soil web, microbial activity, whatever you want to call it… you can enhance it so much by increasing organic matter. We use compost at about 100 tons per acre. We make our compost ourselves and our plan is to use zero synthetics in 2009. It took a long time to figure out the right recipe, but we finally got it right. We use deep tillage to mix the organics in. The result is we’ve increased growth and productivity up to
