And Sam's argument was that focusing on yield is important, but profitability is even more important.

Yield, I think is a bit of a false metric sometimes, and I think what's a better way to look at things is, like, profitability because you could have a very high yield with tremendous labor costs and not be profitable.

And, you know, what's better, to have high yields of very poor quality coffee or lower yields of very high quality coffee that, that's gonna be compensated much higher?

They are the three core nutrients that plants need to grow, and they are the building blocks of most fertilizers.

There's one farm I can think of where they were, they were basically for decades applying these rates of NPK and essentially saw, like, huge drop-off in production, huge increase in disease and pest incidence, and, you know, were basically at a point where they weren't sure if they could continue to farm economically.

So we, we took a soil analysis and did a, a whole kind of farm diagnostic and assessment and saw that really the bottlenecks in the system were not due to a lack of nitrogen, for example.

So what we did is we, we did a more holistic, integrated amending approach where we balanced out all of the minerals in the soil that we were able to test for.

So calcium, magnesium, we're looking at all the trace minerals as well, and got them more balanced out in, in the right ratios to each other so we're not creating antagonisms where an excess of one blocks the uptake of another.

They are the three core nutrients that plants need to grow, and they are the building blocks of most fertilizers.

There's one farm I can think of where they were, they were basically for decades applying these rates of NPK and essentially saw like huge drop off in production, huge increase in disease and pest incidents, and, you know, were basically at a point where they weren't sure if they could continue to farm economically.

So we, we took a soil analysis and did a, a whole kind of farm diagnostic and assessment and saw that really the bottlenecks in the system were not due to a lack of nitrogen, for example.

So what we did is we, we did a more holistic, integrated amending approach where we balanced out all of the minerals in the soil that we were able to test for.

So calcium, magnesium, we're looking at all the trace minerals as well, and got them more balanced out in, in the right ratios to each other, so we're not creating antagonisms where an excess of one blocks the uptake of another.

And, um, we did this over time, and we, we pulled back eventually one hundred percent on the nitrogen applications.

So we, we stopped applying the synthetic nitrogen that had been recommended for decades, and we did another type of analysis where we're looking at the nutrients in the plant sap and the tissue.

To explore that more, we spoke with a second agronomist, my friend Sam Knowlton.

My name is Sam Knowlton, and I'm with, uh, Soil Symbiotics.

Um, so I'm a- an agronomy consultant and regenerative agriculture specialist.

I've been doing this about going on 17 years, and I've had the chance to work all over the world and with over 300 farms.

And Sam's argument was that focusing on yield is important, but profitability is even more important.

Yield, I think, is a bit of a false metric sometimes, and I think what's a better way to look at things is, like, profitability because you could have a very high yield with tremendous labor costs and not be profitable.

And, you know, what's better, to have high yields of very poor quality coffee or lower yields of very high quality coffee that, that's gonna be compensated much higher?