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Growing Pecan Orchards in Southeastern Arizona

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Here's good news from our West Coast Distributor John Miller of Spec International. 

He sent me this report with photos yesterday, September 14, 2015. 
The farm is located near the New Mexico Arizona State line South of Interstate 10 in the Chihuahuan Desert.  The trees are irrigated with above ground spray heads with water coming from deep irrigation wells.  Soils are typical Southwestern desert dirt with high pH, high salinity and poor structure after its been disturbed.  As a result crops including  tree crops often show signs of salt burn, iron uptake problems (chlorosis) and zinc uptake  problems on pecan trees.  This particular grower is putting in over a thousand acres of new trees each year with some of the acreage treated with our TerraPro and Protein Crumblies products.  I'm glad he's left some acreage untreated as it gives us the opportunity to compare.  They are also being supplemented nutritionally with a foliar feed using an AgGrand 4-3-3 product which Soil Secrets collaborates with as both company's are very complementary to each other.  Here are some photos showing treated versus non treated, so you can draw your own conclusion.
Leaves from non treated trees

  

Leaves off of trees treated with Soil Secrets and AgGrand



Trees on the left have been treated while those on the right have not.





Looking into the treated field, showing vigorous growth on trees treated May of 2015 with TerraPro, Soil Secrets Bio-Identical Supramolecular Humic Molecule product.


Looking into the field of non treated Pecan trees



Typical new growth with vigorous foliage of a TerraPro treated Pecan.  Trees were treated 4 months earlier at the beginning of the growing season. 

The changes seen on this pecan orchard are consistent with our results seen in California Almond and Pistachio tree orchards where TerraPro's aromatic chemistry corrected the health of the soil, opened up the structure making the soil more porous to oxygen and water, which improves the availability of water and nutrients, while decreasing the damage caused by salinity.   We've done compaction measurements that quantifies these changes showing the compaction of the soil droping form a psi of 300 down to 50 - 75 psi down to a depth of 3 feet. If our penetrometer can probe the soil to a depth of 3 feet with only 50 to 75 pounds of pressure than water and oxygen can easily get into the soil, which changes everything and puts that soil on the journey to better soil health.    Getting the irrigation water to penetrate deeper will help to reduce your irrigation frequency needs and improve the crops ability to get mineral nutrition up into the plant.  In addition to needing less irrigation water, healthy soils also need less fertilizer inputs and in this case the farmer can skip the typical sulfuric acid treatment that's commonly used in Arizona and New Mexico's pecan industry in the attempt to open up the soil and remediate the harmful effects of salt.  TerraPro can do this much more effectively while also improving the health of the soils terrestrial biosphere.  


Michael Meléndrez
Managing Member of Soil Secrets LLC
 
www.soilsecrets.com

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