Plant The Trees
In this podcast, we'll talk about all things agroforestry and what you need to know to plant, grow, and monetize your trees.
Plant The Trees
Mechanizing Agroforestry — with Bob Walker
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
How do you further mechanize tree planting? Where are the leverage points? How do you get the trees on a perfect grid or a Keyline grid, at inch-accurate, GPS-guided intervals? Can you mow, subsoil, rototill, seed, and mark all in the same tractor pass?
Bob Walker is a core member of the Propagate Team. He has decades of experience farming, and I’m really thrilled to finally get him on the podcast, because he’s the guy that makes all of our work truly efficient and effective.
Here we’ll dive into soil prep, tree planting, and a whole lot more.
Planting trees in a way that benefits people without breaking backs. How do you further mechanize tree planting? And where are the leverage points there? How do you get the trees on a perfect grid or a keyline grid at inch accurate GPS guided intervals? Can you mow subsoil, rototill, seed, and mark all in the same tractor pass? Bob Walker is a core member of the Propagate team. He has decades of experience farming, and I'm really thrilled to finally get him on the podcast. Because he's the guy that makes all of our work truly efficient and effective. Here we'll dive into soil prep, tree planting, and a whole lot more. Without further ado, please welcome Bob Walker. Bob, welcome to the Plant the Trees podcast. It's really solid to have you here and as a team member. I want to take it back to when you first started veg farming. How did you get into that? What was that like?
SPEAKER_01I was a, in that case, yoga maniac health food junkie in Southern California, Newport Beach. And uh I was drinking so much carrot juice that one day I was in the back of the health food store and a truck delivered carrots, and I saw these 50-pound bags of carrots going in, and I thought, where the hell do those carrots come from? And uh it didn't make any sense that I was uh juicing carrots and making almond cheese and you know all the healthy stuff, and I didn't have a clue. So I left. I went and learned how to grow carrots.
SPEAKER_00How many decades did you farm vegetables for?
SPEAKER_01Twenty years, plus, almost 30, maybe. I don't know. I'm kind of old.
SPEAKER_00You're uh you're the senior member of our team. Thankfully, you can talk some sense into us. Vegetable farming is notoriously not easy. Uh, you have the folks that just farm salad, you have root crops, you have all these different things. There's a lot of hand labor involved. And I feel like a through line that you and I have talked about before is that you saw people slogging repetitive work that was hard on the body. When did you first really say, hey, we can mechanize this, make it more efficient, get rid of like hand labor that no one wants to do?
SPEAKER_01Uh I I don't know. And what was the first thing? Probably planters. You know, when the when the water wheel planter hit the market, everybody was going crazy. And that was a real big achievement. Increasing the efficiency and figuring how to use that thing to do other things. You use the the platform itself without the water wheel to do other things. That might have been the the first one.
SPEAKER_00And did you have welding and machinery experience before farming?
SPEAKER_01Uh no welding or manufacturing. Designing, yes. And I used to before the carrot adventure, I was in the theat in the in the entertainment industry in Southern California and made design things to help make life easier backstage. Ways to move things or carry things or support things or store things on you know, that just made it easier. They always just farm those out to shops to build, I never built anything. Not until farming was there actually uh shops and tools to build stuff. You can just do all that stuff in the winter, you know. So that's where that all started.
SPEAKER_00So there was this quest for efficiency backstage. There's a need for efficiency in the fields. Did you go to trade school or anything, or was just this all of this really just intuitive and you wanted to make things easier on people?
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's intuitive. It's just uh ask a lot of people a lot of questions and watch what they do, and then go try and do it, make mistakes, and hopefully to you know get it together.
SPEAKER_00The carryover from vegetable farming to tree planting, you're dealing with a s ideally a smooth soil surface and no plow pan. You want carrots to grow long down into the soil, you want a tree's tap root to be able to grow down without uh any impediments. How has it been going from mostly annuals vegetables to prepping ground for trees?
SPEAKER_01I think of it as very similar. I think this whole thing is just how do you take the tools and techniques that are used in different types of agriculture and utilize them in each other? How do you take the vegetable toys and use them in agroforestry? Or how do you take the tools from a grain production and use them in agroforestry? What you're asking about is subsoiling and doing deep tillage, and that's a key thing in the vegetable growing. It's good, you know, got hard ground.
SPEAKER_00So And sometimes you're just planting a strip of trees. You you get to say whether it's corn stubble or pasture, and we can either prep the entire field or we can just put in a line of trees. Say we want to maintain pasture for cattle or hay or what have you, and there's already good perennial ground cover. Can you walk us through the different goals of that planting in a line, the different implements and and what we're trying to do there?
SPEAKER_01Well, if the silver pasture thing is just what we've been doing is a subsoiler, either the almond plough or we've now got a zone builder or the umpfer zone builder shank, do that kind of deep ribbage ripping with 20 inches deep and not disturb the surface as as much as you would if you're gonna try and do carrots, let's say.
SPEAKER_00So you have a part of it, I'm thinking about the bar on the back of the tractor, one of those early iterations, you have a subsoiler and a coulter in front of that, and then a roller. You're you're trying to get to a ground state that's really easy to either plant with a tree planter or just walk up and plant a tree. What are those facets? What's what's on that kind of first iteration of the single row gizmo, like the small, the small gizmo?
SPEAKER_01The first one was the coulter and the yeoman plow, but that was it. Just to break up the subsoil, but you can't use the tree planter in because there's all the sod in the ground's just not friable enough. But you can't come along and hand plant in or use an auger or a shovel. This makes the ground a lot softer to plant. It gives the roots a chance to go down, you know, aerate, let water in.
SPEAKER_00So a minimum just a subsoil rip works if you're going to come up with a shovel or an auger, dig a hole, plant a tree, just that pass, in addition to creating space for the tree roots to go down into the soil, it just one tractor pass makes the physical hand planting a whole lot easier.
SPEAKER_01I think so. The people that have been putting the shovels in the ground seem to think so. We have yet to see what the trees think. My guess is that they'll like it too.
SPEAKER_00I think at Cold Spring we did some of that with a subsoilar shank and some just with an augered hole into the ground. And as you said, definitely it was way easier with the subsoil rip. And no, I think we could go back and use a caliper to get DBH on all their younger trees, but we could still look at how they've grown with and without a subsoil rip beforehand. So you mentioned subsoil rip and the culture, that's just to break open the sod. You can't just throw a tree planter into pasture, a tree transplanter, because it'll it'll all that will gunk up the tree planter and it just it won't go through the soil. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it depends on what you're trying to plant. I mean, you you can watch the YouTube's the guys putting the Christmas trees into pasture, but they're just opening up a tiny little slot and putting in a tiny little tree. They're not trying to put in the bare root tree or a larger bare root tree. It depends on what you want, what the plant stock is, and what the end result wants to be, which really helps, you know, that all all together determines how to approach it. I mean, every site we've done has been different. Some have turned out better than others. Yeah, it depends on what the conditions are, what you're what what you're trying to achieve, you know. So if you give me some specifics, I'll I'll give you this scenario.
SPEAKER_00So you walk up to a field of golden rod and you want to plant chestnuts. Oh yeah, just drive away. Yeah, drive away.
SPEAKER_01Drive away. Yeah, and you're not gonna and you're not gonna use roundup. So that's a whole nother scenario, right? We have never used any herbicides on any of the plantings. Best case scenario, mow with a flail mower, get somebody with uh uh either the mole board plow it and do the whole field prep thing or vertical tillage, something to incorporate all that, wait a while, let it all digest, do it again, make it nice and smooth. Either subsoil the entire field or subsoil the tree rows. Depends on how much money you want to spend and how much time you have.
SPEAKER_00So, in a perfect scenario, flail mower gets rid of the trash, that decomposes, you probably mow it again to make it super smooth. And that then you might go in and and disc it and and rototill it?
SPEAKER_01You could, and we've tried that, depending on how thick this golden rod is and how many years it's been growing. The thing that we we never see is the root system. These fields that we've done that have these perennial, let's say, uh just gone wild. The root systems have gone wild too, and they're just an incredible mat of stuff that's really hard to deal with. The smaller tools don't do a great job. You know, the rotor till the subsoil rotor till will do it, it's gonna take multiple passes, uh destroy all the structure, or you gotta get the bigger tools out there and just flip the whole field. Treat it more like a big grain field. Depends on how big those field these fields are, you know, if they're one acre or they're 40 acres, it's a whole different it's a different game. But you know, if you're if you're trying to put in an orchard, then you gotta, you know, uh and you've got the cash, then flip the whole thing. Treat it like you're prepping well yeah, like a grain field, which is gonna like you're gonna put in a real commercial orchard, but get rid of all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00And you'd say it's probably easier to get rid of at the start as opposed to planting the trees and then trying to get rid of it later.
SPEAKER_01Oh, nightmare. You know, if you want to plant by hand with an auger, it's not you can mow it and just go out there and do it. That's you know, like it's that's an acre. You're trying to put it in a full-scale orchard, I would put it like that.
SPEAKER_00And you're gonna come back through, you're gonna mow between the trees. If you don't smooth it all out, the mowing and it being a bumpy field is it's annoying, it's difficult for the operator. Can you talk a little bit about how you want the ground to be smooth in perpetuity, whether that's for a mower or a chestnut harvester? Why do you want it to be easy mechanically?
SPEAKER_01Uh it's like mowing your yard. If you're gonna go mow your yard every every weekend, and it's a just a bumpy, miserable thing to do, you have no incentive to go mow that yard. And when you do do it, it's just gonna look like, you know, it's gonna look like crap. So and you're gonna do it for 40 years, that doesn't sound like a good time. So might as well get it ready, make it like a like a uh football field or a baseball field nice and smooth, and enjoy the being out there a couple times a year mowing it and not beat the crap out of yourself or the equipment and the whole chestnut thing, harvesting chestnuts and in and rutted fields mechanically. Forget that. I don't see that happening.
SPEAKER_00And at the beginning, even if you're mowing it and making it smooth or tilling it and making it smooth, like you said, a football field, you could still have a diverse perennial ground cover.
SPEAKER_01Sure. Put whatever you want in.
SPEAKER_00I I prefer a nice smooth surface.
SPEAKER_01Makes everything after that so much nicer.
SPEAKER_00That makes a lot of sense. Talked a little bit about full field prep, and we touched on in-row prep. And if you're just going for reforestation, as we've done numerous times, do you think you look more at in-row prep because mowing and just long-term maintenance of a non-closed tree canopy is just a much bigger feature of the system?
SPEAKER_01I think a lot of times it comes down to time and money. If you have the money to do a whole field and really do a whole field, it's gonna be a commercial orchard and do you want to make money on it? That's one approach. The other approach is just to just do the tree rows and not do everything else, you know, not do the whether it's 20 feet in between or 30 feet in between or 10 feet in between the rows. What what's the end result? What's the goal we want to have for the next 30, 40 years, 50 years, 100 years?
SPEAKER_00So if it's just reforestation, you don't need the full field prep. You don't need it to be a football field. Oh no.
SPEAKER_01No, you never see a warehouser go out and and uh bulboard plow uh a hill, you know, 400 acres, they go replant pine trees. It doesn't happen. What do they do? They put the tree in and they come back however any years, 20 or 30 years later, and uh drag the trees out. That's a different story than creating an orchard.
SPEAKER_00And conceptually, I'm just thinking about a wide in-row prep pass, say with uh three shank subsoiler, seven foot wide cedar on the back of a rototiller, then it comes along, sprays a dot where you plant the tree. It's all in GPS. This is this is what we call the gizmo on the team. That compared to a much smaller version of that, where maybe you have one shank followed by a harrow, follow followed by a roller, and then you're coming up and planting by hand. That's kind of it's it's a similar concept, but uh a little bit less high-tech.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we we've done that, just a single shank, and then drop a plug into that. The gizmo thing, just so because I don't know that anybody's ever described what the gizmo is. The gizmo is uh toolbar with yeoman shanks on it, and then the back of that toolbar has another three-point hitch on it that attaches to a rotor tiller, and then behind that rotor tiller there's another three-point hitch. These are all custom-made things that attaches to a grain drill, and on the back of that grain drill, there's a mechanism with a paint can and a c and a compressed air that puts a dot down on the ground, and all these all this is controlled by GPS, and that those dots are whatever in-row distances the GPS system is set for. So this is a single pass ground preparation tool that does three things at once to eliminate one tractor time and just labor time. When we've talked we say the gizmo, that's what the gizmo is. And each of those tools could be used individually, or in in that combination or different combinations, like the the grain drill could go right behind the yeoman plow if you wanted to. But uh rudder chiller could go right on the tractor with the grain drill right behind it, or you could stack them all so people know what the hell we're talking about without the gizmo.
SPEAKER_00And do you think you could have enough power to run the flail mower on the front PTO with all of that on the back?
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. That's all yeah, we can because the tr the tractor that we the Propagate has has a front PTO and a front three-point, a front three-point hitch and a front PTO. So it can run whatever, but most of the time it's a flail mower that is made to run either on the front or the back. Now you're doing four things at once.
SPEAKER_00In one tractor pass. Yeah. And that just that saves dozens of hours depending on how big your field is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, bigger the field, the more you save. Less labor time, less fuel, less tractor hours. And a very satisfying result when everything works right.
SPEAKER_00And so just just to recap the gizmo, uh, you have as as you said, those subsolar shanks. So it subsoils, deep rips, and then tills and seeds and spray paints a dot. So you basically walk up to a perfectly prepped surface where the trees can send their roots down, you know exactly where to plant, and you can dig a hole and put it in the ground.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And if we're not using the paint dot thing, then that ground is well prepared to run a tree planter through.
SPEAKER_00And the tree transplanter, could you just walk everyone through kind of what what that looks like? Uh, because for those that haven't seen it before and they're just listening, it could it really could be anything, but what does that implement?
SPEAKER_01So it's attached to the tract three-point on the tractor. There's different configurations of this, but let's just say that there is a coulter in the front, flat disc, steel disc that's cutting through sod. If there is solder, if there is residue, if there's no residue, then it's not so important. Then following behind that is a furrow opener steel V that uh moves dirt to the side and opens a furrow. Person sitting on a seat up right on top of that open furrow has a basket of trees to the side of them. And uh at specified intervals, either a beeper or a physical marker grabs a tree and drops it into that furrow. Behind that furrow is our furrow closers, either uh blades of steel or discs that then bring that dirt back in, cover the roots, fill up the furrow, and uh then behind that are some packer wheels that are basically the gauge wheels on the ass end of this implement that press the dirt around the plug or the root system. Typically, somebody walks behind this whole thing to just make sure that the stems are straight up and gives a few thumps with their feet to make sure that the dirt's packed in firmly. So it's a way of not having to carry a bunch of trees, walk along, take a ball or something, and open up a hole, drop a tree in, and then close it. It's it's as a single pass. Don't bend over tree planting methods.
SPEAKER_00To me, it almost feels like you're sitting in a really small sailboat, if anyone's ever done that. And the where the keel is, right in the middle, or the the center, the centerboard, that keel, that centerboard would open up the soil right where you're sitting at the back of the sailboat, you drop the tree in, and then the rudder almost seals the hole. That's just one analog that I always think about. But the yeah, the way you described it of this implement, it it doesn't really move. It's just a big piece of metal. Uh, the coulter moves, the thing that cuts the soil open, opens this crack, this uh crevice in in the soil, drop the tree in, and then the wheels on the back just fill the hole in. So it's almost like it digs the hole for you and makes planting a tree 90% easier.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think I think and I think faster, it's definitely more efficient. The other thing that you can do with this rig is you could drop fertilizer at the same time, you can water at the same time, we could lay down drip line or uh flat tube if you want to punch in the knitters. We could do all of that at the same time we're planting the trees. So, and steak. We could be putting in stakes while we're making this pass across the field. So when you think about accomplishing all, and we're distributing the trees, you don't have to go around, drop them at locations, or have somebody carry a pouch of trees. They're all being carried on this this platform that is sailing across the field or being towed across the field by the tractors. Like the tractor's the tugboat pulling the sailboat across the wide, vast ocean of dirt.
SPEAKER_00Love it. And then you have a bilge pump that you're watering the tree with.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there's a tank of water somewhere on the front of the tractor that uh is piped back to the planter that spits out water every time that it tells you to plant a tree, it spits water.
SPEAKER_00And I think that was that was automated. No, we had an IBC toad. Just on the front forks, hose hooked up to that. So the tractor beeps. You then you put the tree in, and then it squirts a quart or a half gallon of water on the tree.
SPEAKER_01Whatever you set it for. Yeah. Whatever, you know, set the volume or the duration of time that it's on. And it's all triggered by the GPS system sits the signal and triggers all this stuff.
SPEAKER_00And that's that's the automated version. We also have a video of CJ just sitting on the tree planter. He drops the tree in, the wheels close the furrow, and then he just waters it, sprays it with a hose.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that was that was in the the early early days with that that that little planter did not come for the manufacturer with a watering system on it. And we, before we ever got the piping to deliver the water directly into the furrow, we just ran a hose to the back and had a standard uh what do you call it, the nozzle on it that you would have on your garden hose. And uh it was a way to uh yeah water these things as as we were planting and test the system.
SPEAKER_00That was with the Daria tree planter.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And the with so there are two tree planters that we have. The first one is super basic, uh, kind of as we just described, and then the the other one, uh, is it is that one Dutch?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Dutch. Yeah, let's say Damcon, it's uh big company out of Holland. I think they're in Holland to look around.
SPEAKER_00And that opens a bigger furrow and it drives a stake at the same time. So if you need to stake all these trees, you can have two people riding on the tree planter, one's dropping the tree in, the other one's just positioning the stake, and it drives the stake in with hydraulics. So you're planting, staking, watering all in one pass. It almost seems too good to be true if you've done all this by hand forever.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I guess it's scale. Right? If you're just doing an acre and you want to plant by hand, it's it's great. There's no problem. But if you're trying to do hundreds of acres, you don't want to bend over, you want things in straight lines, you want them in perfect intervals, and want to do multiple things at once, cut down your labor costs, then that's where all these uh fancy implements come in and uh makes life easy.
SPEAKER_00Or easier, yeah, for sure. Well, you and it shifts it from uh hand labor to someone like Bob, like yourself, figuring it all out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean the Damcon came. Somebody figured it out and built it and you know, put it up for sale. But yeah, all of these tools can be you get them and then you play with them, and then you find ways to improve them. Hopefully the improvements work and makes everybody's life a little easier.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned fertilizing as well. With the Damcon tree planter, that's a that's a big implement. It weighs a lot. Would you have someone with a bucket sitting on the other side of the tree planter throwing, say, a pound, half pound of fertilizer down? Or would or would that be more of a mechanized process? How do you how do you think about the tree? So fertilizing at the same time as planting the trees and then mechanized fertilization after that?
SPEAKER_01It could be either way. If you don't have a the mechanized system on the on the planter, you can somebody can sit on it and ride it and do you know do that. Or I mean we have a uh electric driven or ground-driven fertilizer shredder that could just it hasn't been yet, but it could be mounted on either of these planters to do this uh by itself. Like the watering thing happens by itself. I don't think it's a big deal to pull that off. It's uh a day in the shop, make some brackets and bolt it all together. There are tree planters out there that have auto-fertilizing as an option that you can buy on the planter to put out either liquid or granular at a specified amount, either banded the doing the whole row or just turn on at each interval at each tree. So yeah, anything's possible.
SPEAKER_00And I feel like what one of the takeaways from mechanized fertilization versus doing it by hand, the larger the field, obviously the more it makes sense to mechanize. But also if you have zero access to labor for a medium-sized field and you're just doing this all yourself and you want to mechanize everything, then it it would probably make more sense to use either the ground-driven or the PTO fertilizer.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. The more things I can get done at the same time while sitting in a comfortable seat, the happier I am.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'd rather listen to a podcast and do something easy without my back hurting than listen to a podcast and do something difficult with my back hurting.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I I want to talk a little bit about mowing as well. Lots of folks understand what a brush hog is. There's a sicklebar mower, there's a flail mower, there's an in-row mower. As you've seen, are there some are there top two, top three ways to mow that you're thinking about in an ideal scenario?
SPEAKER_01I like the flail mower because it chops everything up and leaves it evenly distributed across the width of the mower versus the bush hog that tends to cut things, the long stems, and leave them in a windrow or a you know a row of debris. The in-row thing people may have seen fence mowers that mow underneath electric fence. They're gaining popularity. And so that same idea is used for orchards, where it's a rotary blade like a bush hog on a what do you use the right terminology? Articul is it articulating or is that right?
SPEAKER_00Reticulating, articulating, articulating. I think articulating is when you when you speak, unless that's it has two meanings.
SPEAKER_01That could be what is it when something moves back like that? What's it retract?
SPEAKER_00I feel it must be reticulating. There's a good one.
SPEAKER_01Uh so anyway, that little head is uh rises on the ground in the tree row, and when it gets to a tree, either bounces back from the pressure of the tree and it pushes itself back, or it has a sensor on it that activates a hydraulic ram that moves it back. Either way it works. The hydraulic one is uh I think more reliable. Uh you don't have to worry about it still getting stuck. They work great. It's a great way to not have to go around a tree on this on a zero turn, or to bow, you know, in each direction in an orchard.
SPEAKER_00Or to scythe it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, or to scythe it, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Only Harry would scythe an orchard. That was early days. I still I mean I still use the scythe for small stuff because I I really hate rodent habitat at the bottom of trees, but I haven't scythed all of the trees at Rambleon. That would be a bit much. Yeah. Yeah, and I I I looked it up. It's definitely articulating. So the these mowers uh are good at good at explaining themselves and retracting around each tree. Is it articulating? Yeah. Retticulating was something totally different.
SPEAKER_01Oh, okay. All right. Good good. I'm glad we got that cleared up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, probably the most important thing. We also have this elderberry sled. Oh, yeah. And the video of that, I think it has four people on it, three people. I don't know if you'd need four people, but it's in an elderberry assembly line. Could you tell us about that one?
SPEAKER_01That thing came from planting garlic, uh, which is a bend over, put a clove in, you know, every every eight inches, every foot, which is really not a lot of fun. So it's a platform that that has skis, it's like 12 feet long. Attaches with some chains to the back of the tractor, and on either side is a long ski, and then the platform is uh about 10 inches above the ground. The center of this thing is open, so the platform is really the length of the ski on either side of the bed. Weed mat's already been put down, and there's been a paint mark put on the weed mat at specific intervals that are where the places where the plants need to go in. So say every 30 inches, there's a dot of paint. And so the sled is being dragged down the bed. One person's got a torch and they're burning a hole in the weed mat. Next person's just taking a little trowel and making a hole, and then it takes two people to plant to keep up with this process to put the plugs in the holes. And the trays, there's enough room on here to carry, I think they had six trays. Six trays, maybe. I don't know how many cells in each tray. But it's enough to get you down the a complete row. It was so much faster than sending people around with trays. Even if they followed somebody who was walking and burning the holes, it was just so much faster. And every at the end of the day, everybody was happy. They weren't burnt out. That was the we use that thing t the two different properties to plant elderberries. And the elderberries are doing great.
SPEAKER_00You could go play basketball after a day of tree planting or ultimate frisbee or yoga and not feel like you just wanted to lay in a nice bath.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, or you can come back the next day and do it some more, which happened on you know one of these things took three days to plant, even with the sled. But everybody was still walking after the three days. So and we put a water tank on the front. So we we watered these things as we planted them. So that that was that was a real plus.
SPEAKER_00So we can mechanize everything from large-scale chestnut planting to reforestation to elderberries to food forests. There are use cases for mechanization that absolutely make everything easier. I think one thing that we briefly touched on, but I just I have it in my notes here. Three subsoilers on a bar. I think there are it's like a 40-foot bar, or maybe there was a 20 foot, I don't know if a 40-foot bar is too too wide, but it was a 20-foot bar. I think Keven did this and then drove in one direction and then drove perpendicular. Can you talk just a tiny bit about just subsoiling both directions and making a hole?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I mean I haven't done that. I I and I didn't see that this happened down there, but I I'll b I believe you that they did this. Uh I don't know, I don't know what I want to say about subsoiling in two directions. I don't know if I would do that, but there must have been a reason for it. Cool.
SPEAKER_00So even marking, if you want a inch accurate GPS designed orchard, GPS layout, you have the lat lawn points, you can keep track of everything. You can do that with a handheld GPS, which I've done a few times, and that's um it's not necessarily difficult, it's just kind of tedious because it's hard to multitask while you're doing it and you have to think, and it's really slow and it's just not that fun. But it seems like even mechanizing marking is a huge value add.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think so. The GPS system has just made agriculture raised to a whole nother level. The first tractor I drove with GPS, it just blew my mind. It's just nuts. How accurate a straight line or how how one line next to the next one pass next to the next pass to the next pass is so accurate that you just can't get it. Let's say you can you can be accurate for the first few hours, but by the end of the day, you're so stressed and tired that you just it's just hard to keep up. Where you start using GPS, but by the end of the day, there's no you're not stressed from trying to follow a straight line. So it'll drive you the straight line or a s or a consistent curve, whatever you ask it to do, and then set the intervals in the row for orchard style tree planting. It's the most incredible thing. If for people have never seen one of these systems work, you won't believe it.
SPEAKER_00So it sounds like you could designate a key line guideline and then drive an offset until it was awkward, and then do it again if you wanted to plant on a more elaborate layout.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you could load these things with instead of a straight line, you could drive a contour, and it would you could drive a little bit to the left, drive a little bit to the right, drive a little bit to the left, create a squiggly line, and then tell it to drive that exact same line 20 feet over, and it would drive that exact same line 20 feet over. It would do that all the way across the field. And when you took a drone shot, you would wonder how the heck did they get all of those lines to be so exact all the way across that field? And that's how that that's how they did it.
SPEAKER_00We're moving towards fully automated luxury agroforestry, even if we never actually get there.
SPEAKER_01No. Make it easier.
SPEAKER_00Bob, do you think there's something that's super important that we haven't touched on yet that listeners should absolutely know about mechanized tree planting in say the first two years?
SPEAKER_01Uh well, I don't know about mechanized, but I I think any of this stuff is get it right the first time because there's no going back. It's not an annual crop. You know, vegetables or grain, you you can put it in and next year you can try again. Put these these trees in the ground, you don't get to go back and try again. It'll be it'll be pretty expensive. So you gotta you gotta get it right the first time. So it's worth it's worth spending the time and doing the research looking for a way to do it that you won't regret. That's my take on perennial crops.
SPEAKER_00It's like building a house as opposed to cooking dinner. You don't get to do it the next day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. That sounds good.
SPEAKER_00If the food doesn't turn out well, you can have peanut butter and jelly, but if your house is moldy and uh your pipes burst, then that sounds pretty expensive.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, go with that.
SPEAKER_00Good stuff. Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, and hopefully we can do it again sometime. All right, Harry. See you later. Thanks so much for taking a listen to the Plant the Trees podcast. Whether you're cooking, driving, or otherwise multitasking, I hope you got something good out of this episode. Something that we didn't mention was that Bob and Darren Doherty of Regrarians have collaborated on tree planting implements, and we'll have Darren back on the podcast in the next few episodes to talk about mechanization and agroforestry as well. And if you'd like to learn more about working with us to plant trees on non-forested land that you own or manage, just head to the Contact Us page on our website and set up a time to talk, whether that's about chestnuts, black locust, biodiverse reforestation, fruit trees, or really any other woody perennial. And with that, I'll see you next time. Plant the trees and make it count.