Episode #70: Steven Bierlink

Regenerative Agriculture Podcast

AEA Marketing

Earth Sciences, Science, Natural Sciences

4.7 • 546 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2021

⏱️ 97 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Steven Bierlink is an apple grower located in Quincy, WA. When Steven returned to work on his family operation after graduating with a business degree, he was driven to meet the many challenges their orchard faced. Looking for solutions to bitter pit, cork spot, and lenticel rot, Steven sought out the management practices that could renew the health of their orchard.

Today, Steven abides by meticulous observation in his management practices that have brought many exciting successes, notably on his Honeycrisp blocks which have packed out at a stunning 160 bins per acre.

On this episode, Steven and John discuss:

Overcoming bitter pit in Honeycrisp apples by altering the interplay among excessive potassium applications, calcium timing, and manganese availability.
Steven's focus on observation resulted in a shift away from his previous conventional operational methods.
How Steven balances data collected from fruit analysis and sap analysis to maximize marketable fruit production.
Managerial philosophies for happy, engaged employees, healthy work-life balance, and why he chooses to maintain a smaller-scale farm.
Virtually elimination of alternate-year bearing, through a combination of pruning, bud and spur management, PGR's, nutrition, and lime-sulfur sprays.
The importance of growers owning the decision-making process, working alongside consultants.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi friends, this is John and this is the regenerative agriculture podcast where we talk about agronomic science and cultural management practices that regenerate plant health and soil health, and of course, ultimately animal and human health and the entire ecosystem.
0:14.0	My guest for this episode is Stephen Beerlink, who I've been privileged to know for several years as an AEA customer and apple grower in Washington.
0:22.0	Stephen spends lots of time thinking about the things all of us should spend more time thinking about,
0:27.1	and I always enjoy my conversations with him.
0:29.0	So, Stephen, welcome to the show.
0:30.4	I'm really glad to have you here.
0:31.5	Thanks for being here.
0:33.0	Thanks for having me.
0:34.3	Stephen, can you tell us a little bit about your story in the context of your
0:39.0	farming operation and the types of the things that you're working on? Sure. I guess first off,
0:44.3	I've lived on a farm my whole life. Grew up doing it. It was all row crops when I was young. My
0:49.9	dad decided to plant some orchard in 1991 and slowly grew from there.
0:57.0	When I graduated from high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do.
1:00.0	So I went to college and got a generic business degree.
1:04.0	That ended up being a really great asset for me after I came back.
1:09.0	But I wasn't planning on coming back. I went through
1:12.2	college and the only reason I came back to the farm is because it was in 2008 at the market
1:18.6	crash. I couldn't find a job. So I moved home to work for my dad for the summer. And from what
1:25.0	I had learned in business education, Orchard became a lot more attractive to me
1:30.6	because there was a way to apply a calculated math to how you might make a certain type of profit
1:38.7	or an amount. And that made a lot of sense. So I started running some numbers and doing some things and it started to take off from there.
1:49.0	But I wasn't seeing the results that I wanted.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from AEA Marketing, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of AEA Marketing and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.