Ag Alert Mar. 23, 2022

Recycling Continued from Page 7

farmers began calling Holtz, wanting to try whole-orchard recycling. “That’s when (it) took off,” he said. In 2020, conclusions from a UC Davis research team, including Holtz’s, were published in a scientific journal. The re- sults showed that tilling biomass from recycled trees into the soil, instead of using ashes of burned trees, increased yields of new orchards by 15% over their first five years. The whole-orchard recy- cling method also increased soil water retention by 30% and soil nitrogen lev- els by 17%. One grower who phoned Holtz after learning about his research in 2015 was Louie Tallerico, owner of a 38-acre al- mond orchard inManteca. At more than 20 years old, his trees had produced their last nut crop, he said. Fol lowing Hol t z ’s ins t ruc t ions , Tallerico said, a contractor removed the aging trees in 2016, “ground themup and spread the chip on the soil.” In March 2017, he planted 3,800 newalmond trees atop that earth. “Farming is a slow process,” Tallerico said. “When you plant an orchard, you don’t start getting an appreciable yield until three or four years later. So, it’s too early to tell.” But said he believes whole-orchard re- cycling will produce positive results over time. He saidHoltz continues to visit and provide recommendations. While Holtz still may not be getting much attention frommotorists passing by his modest farm, he is now drawing notice on YouTube. He is featured in a new six-min- ute documentar y featuret te t i t led “Res i l i ence : The Who l e Orcha rd Recycling Origin Story.” It was pro- du c e d b y t h e A lmond Bo a r d o f California, which continues to support his research. “My grandf ather would be ver y proud of the solution that came from his farm and his grandson,” Holtz said in the film. “I owe the growers who believed in me and recycled their or- chards a great debt.” (Edgar Sanchez is a reporter based in Sacramento. He may be contacted at edgar.chez@yahoo.com.)

His grandfather, Leonard James, bought the Modesto property in the 1940s and converted it into a peach, walnut and almond orchard. Like oth- er farmers, James routinely burned his almond prunings and brush at the farm. Air quality regulations did not exist then. But Modesto’s rapid expansion—by the 1970s, the city abutted the farm and soon grewbeyond it—sparked concerns, recalledHoltz, who as a teen became his grandfather’s helper. “If we were burning and the wind direction shifted, the smoke would go into surrounding homes,” Holtz said. “People would think there was a fire. Fire trucks would respond. The fire- fighters would say we couldn’t burn within the city limits.” The once-isolated farm needed a smokeless detritus-disposal system. In 1980, Holtz’s father, Stan Holtz, bought a small wood chipper for his personal garden in Escalon. He began depositing the chips around his plants as mulch. Delighted with the results, Stan and Brent’s mother, Diana, pur- chased in 1989 a larger wood chipper powerful enough to chip the prunings from the north Modesto farm. Soon, mulches formed over the almond trees’ root zones.

University of California Cooperative Extension farm advisor Brent Holtz perfected the science of grinding up old trees and incorporating them into the soil to help newly planted almond trees thrive.

“This mulch that was developing around the trees, you could see it and smell it and feel it, and you just knew it was becoming this good, healthy soil,” Brent Holtz said. In 2000, he began “a small-scale scien- tific study” involving 3 1/2-foot tall plastic drums at the farm to determine whether an entire almond orchard could be re- cycled. For six years, he watched as the young trees he planted in the drums grew into healthy specimens. In 2008, Holtz expanded his research to a 5-acre experimental orchard at the

Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Fresno County. There, he recycled almond trees into the soil before replanting a new al- mond orchard. “In this ongoing trial, instead of using a wood chipper, I used a 100,000-pound rock crusher called the IronWolf,” Holtz said. “It ground the trees up and incor- porated them into the soil. Then we planted new trees where the old ones had been, and we’ve been watching them” since. By 2015, it was clear that the new trees were growing larger, had greater trunk circumferences and yielded “significant- ly more almonds,” Holtz said. As it happened, 2015 was a tough year for Cal i fornia’s co-generation plants, which had bought biomass from almond growers. Many were clos- ing due to new clean-energy laws and declining profits. “In the past, orchard-removal com- panies would remove the (old) orchards for free for the growers, then sell the woodchips to the co-generation plants to burn them and generate electricity,” Holtz said. “What were the growers going to do with their orchard biomass if they couldn’t burn it, or sell it to a co-genera- tion plant?” In October 2015 , Hol t z ’s ini t ia l whole-orchard recycling findings were reported in a grower publication. Soon,

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8 Ag Alert March 23, 2022