Biosolutions in 2024 (Part Two) ft. Koppert’s Jeremy Webber

[Bill Caulkins]
Greetings, Greenhouse People. We're back at it with another episode of Tech on Demand, brought to you by the fine folks at GrowerTalks Magazine. If you don't receive GrowerTalks and Green Profit every month, it's time to head over to growertalks.com and subscribe. The magazine's been a pillar of the industry for more than 75 years, and it's about time you join the club. Speaking of subscribing, be sure to subscribe to the Tech on Demand podcast on your favorite podcast app. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Odyssey, and more.

If you have an extra minute to leave us a positive review, that would be awesome. Every little bit helps our algorithms and allows us to reach more greenhouse professionals. I'm your host Bill Caulkins, and this is going to be a two-part episode focused on biocontrols, bios, biologicals, beneficials, or however you want to refer to biosolutions for the horticulture industry.

And it's the first in a series of podcasts spinning off from the 2024 GrowerTalks Biosolutions Guide, which is a special supplement. You'll find a link to the guide in the show notes. My guest for the next two episodes is Jeremy Webber, Crop Team Manager at Koppert, a Dutch company that's been innovating in the biosolutions space for more than 50 years.

Koppert is a global market leader specializing in biological crop protection, and Jeremy has been with the company for almost 15 years and is well-versed in all things biosolutions and an excellent speaker, so I assure you, this'll be a fun, dynamic dialogue discussing why growers are seeking biocontrol strategies more and more, the best gateway pests and bios to start with, how to approach the conventional vs. bio cost discussion, SOPs for a few different common biocontrol scenarios and pests, what every grower should do on Fridays before leaving the greenhouse, why nematodes always work on fungus gnats, eyeless, dumb, predatory mites, and much much more.

But before we get started, let me run through Jeremy's bio because it'll give you some insight into why I was so excited to hear what he had to say about such a wide range of topics. Jeremy entered the northeastern nursery industry in 2003, ultimately leading production efforts as a director at Sunny Border Nurseries in Berlin, CT. He's unsure how many plants he's grown or sold, however he estimates he's killed at least a million, and he's good at learning from his mistakes.

For the last 13 years, Jeremy has been hyper-focused on the intersection of growers and plant pests and diseases, working for Koppert US. He manages the cannabis and ornamental crop team, with 12 consultants located throughout the country. Well, that's enough out of me.

We're on to part two in this two-part episode with Jeremy Webber from Koppert. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I suggest you hit stop and jump back in the archive and check out the first part before coming back to this one. And you mentioned it a minute ago, trials and demonstrations.

And when we were discussing this, that really clicked with me because, you know, obviously I've worked in the flower side of the business for a long time, and we talk a lot about trials. Even though we've done years of our own trialing on those crops, and we know very well that that new Calibrachoa is a vast improvement over the previous, you know, generations of Calibrachoa, and exactly, you know, quantifiably how it's going to benefit a greenhouse. And you actually caused me to think about it that way, that we are discussing more about demonstrations than trials.

And that is why you work with a trusted partner. Can you share, just talk the listeners through that so that it, I'm sure my description didn't make as much sense. And then why...

[Jeremy Webber]
You're paraphrasing a previous conversation to an extent.

[Bill Caulkins]
Right. And then where the fun comes in when you get past the demonstration into something that's new that you haven't seen before.

[Jeremy Webber]
Well, there's always new stuff, thankfully, or this would be too boring. You know, anytime I get to a point where I've got something completely locked up, it's like I better find something new. But the basic idea is, you know, we'll get a...

Researchers are great. You know, you'll get a phone call, but, you know, I really want to trial the response of this mite versus this pest and this crop. And it's like, you can trial it all you want.

We trialed it 20 years ago. I can just tell you what happened, you know, or whatever, you know, and that happens a good bit where it's like, yeah, I'd really like to trial the sachets and it's like, well, we already trialed the sachets. So just so we're on the same page, you know, we spent millions of dollars on R&D last year.

Not millions, tens of millions of dollars on R&D last year and the year before that and the 15, 20 years before that as well. So we did all the trialing. What you really want to know is whether or not you can trust what we're telling you.

So we want to demonstrate to you that we have a solution that works in a manner that's as low risk as possible. What we have learned is you never want to give the bios away 100% for free for one of these because then there's zero consequence for throwing them in the dumpster.

[Bill Caulkins]
True.

[Jeremy Webber]
Learn the hard way more than once, you know. So to me, the demo trial is ideally a code buys a week, you buy a week. And let's say, let's pick something.

Let's just say, you know, Fungus gnats control and propagation. That's pretty easy where you go. All right, we're going to put in sticky cards today.

Our horrible cards are great for Fungus gnats. They're really annoying. They're super sticky, but they're very attractive.

So you put them in today, you come back in 24 hours later, tomorrow morning after you put these in, you've got 27 Fungus gnats on average on every card in this prop house. In four weeks, what do you want it to be at? If you want to say zero on that one, that's fine, but let's say two on average.

All right. In four weeks, here's what you got to do to get that down to two. I need you to do nematodes every week at this rate, I need you to fog Isarid in here every week at this rate, and then put up a bunch of cards, you know, and do this every week exactly like that for four weeks, and we'll be at two or less, you know, and if it works, what are the next steps?

Let's go ahead and commit to that now. Okay, we're going to do this every week at that point. Okay, cool.

We'll pay for half the nematodes and I'll give you that first two pounds of Vescerad for free. And that's the point that, you know, it's a relatively low risk for someone to get in there and start to develop some trust that we're not just talking out of our butts, you know. You met us at a trade show or your buddy said we're good, but you're not a hundred percent sure he's not a little crazy.

No one in a new relationship is fully trusting they shouldn't be, you know. So what are the ways that we can get to that point and really strengthen that relationship so that you know that we're really here for your success? Because that's the only way we're going to have any ourselves.

[Bill Caulkins]
So you had mentioned that Koppert spends tens of millions of dollars in R&D, millions of dollars, you know, every year in looking at and developing products so that you have the knowledge and expertise to go into a greenhouse and do a demonstration of what you know will work. But there've got to be some weird and wild things that have come up. You're bringing a living thing into a field of living things.

So is there anything that you've learned over the past couple of years or just give me one example of something that's caught you off guard or opened you and your team's eyes to another potential application of your product or something like that?

[Jeremy Webber]
Yeah, that's a great one. I wasn't really fully prepared for that, which is good. I like being suppressed.

You know, I think we sort of think of ourselves in a lot of cases as an R&D company, first and foremost, and going, you know, we think up solutions. We're known as the company that invents most of the processes and most of the things. Swirskii is a great example of that.

We brought that to market a little over 15 years ago, patented the production process, the food source that you reared on. And that patent runs out probably this week, I think. So there's a bunch more Swirskii around right now, I think.

But regardless, you know, when I first got to know it, it quickly became my favorite predator because it's very reliable. When you use it in the environment that it wants to be in and, you know, there's no pesticide in the crop that's harmful for it. It kind of always works.

Not kind of. It always works. It's how I pay for my house.

People have thrips. Swirskii always eats thrips. You know, and literally, I take that to the bank every day and a huge fan of it.

So I don't know how many years ago it was when, you know, Henry and Paul and Peter said we could finally walk into and work directly with cannabis growers. But, you know, allegedly, I have a relationship with that plant from my teenage years way back in the day. And I'm like, heck, yeah, man, let's get back in.

And I'd love to actually get paid to walk into a cannabis grower. So I did. And, you know, we put a bunch of these Swirskii sachets in there, their mother plants and a bunch of thrips in there.

Very sensitive plant to thrips damage. They don't do a whole lot to it, but they show damage really, really well from only a handful in the room. It's pretty weird.

So I'm like, yeah, we'll put like a, you know, one of our paper sachets on a mom and, man, put a bunch of sticky cards in here and a couple of weeks later, trust me, this is going to be awesome. And it wasn't awesome. Nothing happened.

There were like three thrips on the card. You know, normally our horrible cards are they're designed to be the most attractive color in the greenhouse to a female Western flower thrips when it reflects light from the sun. We didn't invent these things 15 years ago, thinking of LEDs and grow lights.

Yeah, we did. But there's, there's supplemental on the greenhouse at most, you know, so, all right, we put them in a, in a grow room under a bunch of LEDs. And what do you know that thrips could care less about them?

You know, if we caught a few by accident, instead of vacuuming them off the plant, like, like we would with a Gerber. So, yeah, I'm sitting here scratching my head and we just had this product come out, which is Swirskii wrapped in compostable Mylar foil. We call it an ultimate sachet.

But instead of the standard paper sachet that you see all over the industry, you know, which we still have and use frequently, but we needed a system that worked better in dry environments, specifically for field peppers. Well, it just happened to come out the week that I walked into my first cannabis grow in New England or on the East coast period for Koppert. So I'm like, give me some of those for R and D.

Let's try it. Let's, let's hang some paper once in here too. It is, you know, some God awful low relative humidity and worried about powdery.

So sure enough, the sachet goes for three and a half weeks. And I started looking in the paper sachet I was putting in was dead on arrival. So that to me was this huge thing.

I thought them, I had no idea how sachets worked until I started working with cannabis. I didn't need to know. Right.

Put them in a hanging basket and might walk out for like two months. It's just super easy. And then you get into cannabis and everything's hard.

And it, it taught us so much just because, man, you know, I got hanging baskets dialed. All right, sweet. That means absolutely nothing now.

Right. And we went, Oh God. Okay.

So is this what happens when Swirskii can't reproduce on the canopy? Swirskii reproduces all over ornamental plants. I've only ran into one significant group of ornamentals where it doesn't.

And I didn't know it at the time, but because of cannabis, I know now it's asclepias.

[Bill Caulkins]
Okay.

[Jeremy Webber]
They don't like the foliage. You might find some eggs here and there, but you can put in a hundred per meter. And next week you'll have zero.

[Bill Caulkins]
Gone.

[Jeremy Webber]
I don't care how much food they have. It's just, they don't navigate well. Same as cannabis.

They don't navigate well. They don't reproduce hardly really at all. So, you know, we, it was this huge eye opener where we went, Oh God, that's the rate of Swirskii you have to apply when they can't make babies.

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah.

[Jeremy Webber]
That's the kill rate. That's the, everybody in here dies this week rate. So that's what we have to do in cannabis from a loose introduction every single week, because you cannot, what I was talking about earlier, where you like, you have these little micro pockets of reproduction.

You don't have thrips and they blow up in that little spot. There's no blowing up in that little spot.

[Bill Caulkins]
Right.

[Jeremy Webber]
They can't blow themselves up. You have to put them in at the bowl up rate everywhere, every week, all the time.

[Bill Caulkins]
So it is, so there is still a lot to learn and fun to be had, even with millions of dollars in R&D, which keeps it exciting.

[Jeremy Webber]
The R&D is a blast because, you know, we get to go in there and steer that ship, you know, and say, Hey, I need to know exactly what the temperature response is between these two different aphid parasitoids on this species of aphid. You know, now we're really, we're going from which parasitoids works for which aphid to which month am I using that parasitoid? You know, and we're really turning those dials a lot.

And, and that's a lot, that's, you know, just being more specific. It's a lot of fun.

[Bill Caulkins]
You mentioned before about isarid and nematodes being, you know, a go-to for fungus gnats in propagation. And that kind of being something that, that you guys demonstrate, you don't need to trial, you know, that it works. What are a couple other common greenhouse pests that you would consider kind of gateways into bio approaches for growers that are, you know, they need a couple of wins to convince their owner that biocontrols is the way to go or, or that you need to show them, you know, there are, there is potential to solve problems in your greenhouse pretty quickly with tried and true approaches.

Talk about the, what, what you're looking to control, whether it's fungus gnats or other pests and, and what, what you use that, that, you know, will have a pretty quick impact, positive impact.

[Jeremy Webber]
I think the, you know, the fun part to that question is going, okay, let me flip that back around to the grower. What's your biggest concern? What's your most expensive concern?

What's the one costing you the most crop loss? We're going to go after that one. Because probably, unless we're talking some weird scale that nobody's ever heard of, we probably got a solid solution for it.

[Bill Caulkins]
Okay.

[Jeremy Webber]
At this point where, you know, and even if it's not only from us, right. You know, that's the thing we're, we're selling an integrated solution. It's we, we sell, I recommend, I don't know, I need to talk to C bro.

I saw a lot of, you know, so like it, it's not necessarily that, Hey, we've got a bug for that. It's, Hey, we've got a solution for that problem. And, you know, maybe 60 or 70% of it comes from us, but the rest of it comes from.

Maybe the suppliers are already working with fungus gnats or the gateway drug. I, you're not going to go into a grow that doesn't have fungus gnats anywhere on the planet, my opinion, you know, like we're going to find them 99% of the time. So that's the, that's the easy one.

Nematodes always work a hundred percent of the time. If they don't, it's because you applied them and thought you were applying living nematodes and you weren't simple as that. You know, so when they don't work, go to said, trusted advisor, have them go through the checklist and figure out what went wrong.

[Bill Caulkins]
Okay.

[Jeremy Webber]
Did UPS kill him?

[Bill Caulkins]
Did you say what's, what's the most common issue that you run into when, when you find out that nematodes are just dead on arrival?

[Jeremy Webber]
Uh, DOA is, you know, like we're, we're doing QC checks on every single batch of every single thing that comes into the United States every single week from every single point.

[Bill Caulkins]
Okay.

[Jeremy Webber]
Three points into Michigan, three planes into Oxnard, California. And we're, we're, uh, we're checking all that. And then we go give it to UPS.

[Bill Caulkins]
Right.

[Jeremy Webber]
Heck of a business model, right? You know, let's just cross our fingers and hope they do exactly what we're telling them to do. And 99% of the time they do, um, you know, but you know, this end up that's upside down for sure.

So like stuff happens, this is about as perishable as it gets, you know? So you always want to open that box and shoot it with an IR thermometer and make sure that the actual packaging, the, the, the box of nematodes, the bottle of mites is whatever the temperature is listed on the side of the box or the bottle. And it's the biggest QC recommendation I can give for anyone.

We do not ship you dead product.

[Bill Caulkins]
Right. UPS. It's like receiving, it's like, it's like receiving your cuttings.

I mean, you're picking your cuttings in the middle of July or whatever. You should be checking, you should have an IR thermometer and check temperature of that box.

[Jeremy Webber]
To me, it's like that, that is the single, like it's one of the biggest tools that you can have for a bio program.

[Bill Caulkins]
Okay.

[Jeremy Webber]
24 box on Amazon, you know, open the thing, shoot the bottle. Is it 75 degrees? Call me, it's free.

I'm not charging you for that bottle. Now I got a good deal with UPS, but you thought you were putting out 50,000 mites and you put out 10.

[Bill Caulkins]
Okay.

[Jeremy Webber]
Yeah. Well, that's it. Well, they're moving.

Yeah.

[Bill Caulkins]
Nematodes. So as long, as long as the, the product you're applying is alive, you think nematodes and Isarid on fungus gnats is.

[Jeremy Webber]
I mean, think about it. You're, you know, the, the standard rate for nematode application is, is somewhere around 50,000 living nematodes per square foot of media. And if you do that correctly and don't saturate a three gallon pot all the way to the bottom and dilute them and you keep that 50,000 per square foot and the top inch of media profile, how many fungus net larvae are in a given prop flat?

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah, I don't know.

[Jeremy Webber]
That you just put 90,000 nematodes into. Right. That are going to swim in that soil solution, you know, so you, uh, you fill up half of the volume of a one 28 tray or less, even with 80 or 90,000 nematodes to go after seven or eight fungal fungus net larvae.

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah.

[Jeremy Webber]
They're having a terrible night. Everybody's dead tonight. You come in in the morning and whatever was there did not make it, you know, they might not know it yet, but they're, they're certainly not feeding anymore.

So to me, that's, that's a, I mean, it's disgusting, but it's kind of a beautiful thing to be able to say that with such certainty. Sure. Okay.

It didn't work. Well, okay. There's a flow chart in my brain of 20 different things to ask you if they arrived in the right thing.

All right. Show me the fridge where you stored them. We didn't store them.

They arrived at 42 degrees and I walked straight to the sprayer. I let them warm up first and I applied them properly. Did you check the gun after you apply it?

Yeah. Yeah. We actually pulled samples.

Everybody was happy. Okay. How much volume do you use?

Well, we saturate the runoff. Huh?

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah. There's a problem.

[Jeremy Webber]
Nematodes are interesting. We come back to that a pretty good bit where, you know, with we're, we're getting out of the phase of, yeah, I left them on my desk all week. Oh yeah.

You can't do like the mistakes people make are way more educated. They're a lot smaller. So what we get into now is, yeah, we run them through the boom and it's just like a regular irrigation cycle.

Oh, you're using four times the volume that you should be using. And instead of putting 50,000 per square foot in the top quarter to half inch of the media where the target is, you filled up a four inch pot.

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah.

[Jeremy Webber]
There's the fungus nuts on the bottom of that pot, you know, so you took that 50 K and that little half inch and turned it into, I don't know, 10 K. That's what's crazy to me is that even 10 K doesn't always work, you know? So we went down the rabbit hole there, but like, no, that's good.

CSI is part of the, part of the job. And to me, that's the other part that's really fun because there's always new and creative ways that these things break and, and then we get to go in there and figure out how'd you do that, you know, and, and put it back together. So that's a good one.

As long as you follow all of those things, nematodes kill everybody in the room tonight. I said, it gets the adults. We've got pictures of, you know, fungus net adults laying on the media surface with cordyceps exploding out of their bodies.

And it's a, it's pretty creepy, but it's pretty satisfying. Yeah. I'm a big fan of, I said, just in general, it, it kills most small body things, soft things, you know?

And, and that's a, that's a big piece of the equation. Um, but yeah, after fungus gnats personally thrips, like I said, decent chunk of my life devoted to, uh, to learning how to just take that life cycle and pull it apart piece by piece. Um, it's kind of maniacal when I say it that way, but yeah.

[Bill Caulkins]
I'm not surprised, but that's a past every grower struggles with.

[Jeremy Webber]
Yeah. And I mean, for me personally, that's a, that's a really rewarding one because there's so many people that have pulled their hair out because of this thing or have tons of white hair like me now. And you know, what, what, or no hair at all because of that past.

And as long as you've got the budget, you give me the timeframe and we'll hit that target every time.

[Bill Caulkins]
That's cool.

[Jeremy Webber]
And it's, and it's like, it's a much harder puzzle to put together though. There's way more moving pieces than some larvae in the soil. Like there are with fungus gnats and some adults flying around, you know, between the the different larval stages and what goes after what being able to put that, that picture together for the grower.

And then just go in there and say, all right, if you execute this properly in three weeks, this is what your car counts look like. You come in there and they're, they're three below that, you know? And it's like, yes, yeah.

Success predicting the future. It's fun. Yeah.

Oh, for sure. For sure. But that's the spider mites are just numbers.

So if you've got spider mites and you don't live in a super dry desert, um, yeah, what get at this point, I just like saying, look, give me, give me a date that you want them all dead.

[Bill Caulkins]
Really? It's so bad.

[Jeremy Webber]
This is what the invoice is going to be. But yeah, like if, if the shorter the date ranges, the bigger the invoices are going to be and the more deliveries you're going to get, but it's just numbers, you know, so they don't fly.

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah, it's true.

[Jeremy Webber]
You know, yeah. They do the webbing thing and they blow off or they climb up the wires or, you know, they're obviously annoying little crawlers, but at the end of the day, it's, it's just, uh, two predatory mites that really do a good job of eating them. And if you know how and when they do that, then it's just making sure that there's an air, right?

And there's enough to do the job. You know, it's a, it's a pretty straightforward equation in my opinion.

[Bill Caulkins]
Okay. Well, that, that's good. I mean, those are common pests.

There are very clear protocols to get rid of them using bio controls, um, to the listeners. This is, this is where you start, get some proven results and, uh, and then move forward. I got a couple more questions for you.

Um, I know we're, we've been, we've been at this a long time. We might make this into a two part podcast, but I can't let you go without digging into your past as a grower. In fact, you were one of the grower talks, young grower award finalists back in the day.

But, um, I know that I know from talking to you, how important that foundation is, um, to, to what you bring and what, what a lot of the Koppert team brings to the table in terms of being trusted advisors. So now you've been in the bio controls game for 15 years. What advice would you give to an IPM manager, or I suppose in a smaller operation, uh, uh, an owner about like no brainer bio-based approaches to dealing with pests or optimizing plant growth?

Um, what are a couple of things that you just implement immediately? If, if tomorrow someone said, all right, Jeremy, you're in charge of my greenhouse.

[Jeremy Webber]
Yeah. And I think that's the way I phrase it, you know, is, is, is not going back to that basis. Uh, God, especially God, I was a kid.

Uh, I mean, it was, it was a young grower award. So I guess I kind of was, but you know, I was really, really, uh, my, my ego was head grower ego. It was strong.

Uh, it was, it was bigger than the greenhouse I was in at any given point for sure. You know? And if somebody came in there and told me what to do, I'd have bounced them.

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah.

[Jeremy Webber]
No way it would have taken that well. And, and I always keep that at the front of my mind, you know, is, and granted, a lot of people are like, no, man, you're here because I want you to tell me what to do.

[Bill Caulkins]
Right.

[Jeremy Webber]
Sweet. All right. You know, that, that's, that makes this a lot easier, but you know, in most cases, that's not the case.

And it's, you know, I, I, I always phrase things in a way that, that wouldn't have offended my younger self, you know, and, and for better or worse, you know, so for me, it's, I don't know if for some reason, this, uh, this Koppert thing doesn't work out and I find myself in a greenhouse again, you know, what, what would I start doing? I would get as many DRAM autofoggers as, as you would possibly let me buy for, for all of the enclosed spaces that I have. Every Friday, I'd plug that thing in.

I'd take mix Isarid and Bacillarid, our, uh, fungal insecticide, the, the Cordyceps Isarid product, as well as, uh, Bacillarid is a new amylolyl liquefactions, Bacillus product that we've got. It's a, it's a novel species. It's not been available on the market yet.

And it's got a, you know, a really wide range of diseases that, that it controls. You know, I'd put both of those in the, in the same fogger and I'd, I'd hit this greenhouse every Friday and I'm pretty sure that'd be about 95% of my IPM program. And I just go home.

I watch my kids grow up instead of putting on Tyvek and strapping on a Raspberry, like I used to, um, you know, to, to me, that's been the single biggest revelation is that man, rotation's old school as heck. You've got all these different bio insecticides and bio fungicides. They don't have resistance mechanisms.

Most of them don't spray them every week. Okay. That one time when you're worried about spider mites or aphids, throw in some Ricard, throw in some formite, throw in some shuttle.

There's all these things that don't mess with your bio program if you're running one, but 90% of the time, 95% of the time, just do the same thing every week and go home, you know, and, and find something that you can run through an automated fogger call it a day, you know, and instead of going, Oh God, what am I going to spray this week? Or I'm going to spend, you know, a week coming up with this rotation of everything that I spray every single week. And why, you know, and then the flip side of that too, is bacillus in general are growth promotion organisms.

They colonize root zones. They feed the plant chelated nutrients. They solubilize phosphorus.

They make your nutrition system more, more efficient. They promote root growth. They produce phytohormones that make the plant grow better.

If I have an eight methyl doesn't do that.

[Bill Caulkins]
Right.

[Jeremy Webber]
You know, um, it's true. You know, like there's, are they an absolute cure all for downy or phytophthora or, you know, something with, you know, some crazy amount of pressure or established presence in your greenhouse. No, there, there's always going to be some, some weird scenario where, where you might have to do something different.

But for the vast majority of greenhouses in the vast majority of situations, you can literally do the same thing every day, weekly.

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah.

[Jeremy Webber]
And it's most of what you used to be worried about.

[Bill Caulkins]
Love it.

[Jeremy Webber]
Well, and to me that's like a whole, my God, that's a, that's a whole new thing.

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah, for sure. Huh? Well, I know that, um, assuming you don't, uh, the Koppert thing doesn't work out and you end up back in a greenhouse tomorrow.

I'm hoping that doesn't happen because I think that, that one of the, you know, knowing a little bit about your company and the company's history, you're, you're not sitting still Koppert isn't, uh, resting on its laurels as they say. So what is, what is the future of biocontrols look like? I don't need a predictive timeline, but I guess I'm interested in, in the bigger picture, you know, and we've got more people becoming interested in it.

There are great solutions out there, but what, you know, look, look into.

[Jeremy Webber]
With, you know, some crazy amount of pressure or established presence in your greenhouse. No, there, there's always going to be some some weird scenario where where you might have to do something different. But for the vast majority of greenhouses and the vast majority of situations, you can literally do the same thing every day. Weekly. Yeah, in its most of what you used to be worried about. Hmm. Love it.

[Bill Caulkins]
Well, and recently it's like a, Oh my God, that's a yeah, that that's a whole new thing. Yeah, for sure. Sure, huh. Well, I know that assuming you don't, the Koppert thing doesn't work out and you end up back in a greenhouse tomorrow. I'm hoping that doesn't happen because I think that that one of the, you know, knowing a little bit about your company and the company. History. You're not sitting still. Koppert isn't resting on its laurels, as they say. So what is what is the future of bio controls look like? And I don't need a predictive timeline, but I guess I'm interested in, in the bigger picture. You know, we've got more people becoming interested in it. There are great solutions. Out there, but what you know, look, look into your crystal ball and what's the future look like for bio controls?

[Jeremy Webber]
I think it's amazing, you know, and, and, and I can't. Yeah, I can give you our our 5/10/15 and 30 year strategic plan, but I'm trying to get yelled at after that, but it's aggressive. You know, it's, it's, it's very aggressive and I, I don't, I don't see how it doesn't happen. OK. I don't see how the industry doesn't double every five years for the foreseeable future. We have, that's been our growth trajectory through our inception is Koppert USS. We've doubled every five years. Wow. We're gonna keep doing that. You know, so that means new crops, that means row crops, that means, you know, touching way more of the food that we eat, not just greenhouse tomatoes and greenhouse lettuce. Alright, yeah, that's major food crops, CEA stuff. But you know, field strawberries are another big. One, but there's a lot more food produced in this country that you know, gets a a ton of chemistry applied to it, right? That's that's where it's going. And ornamentals, you know, I can really always speak for what I know about, and that's, for lack of a better term, cannabis and ornamentals. Yeah, you know, I who knows what's going to happen to the cannabis industry. That's that's always, you know, just roll the dice and see what happens depending who's elected. But you know, the based on what we see with ornamentals from the last 15 years, it's it's it's about to explode, right? You know, and, and I think that's where. Where we're really going to see that go is is with the bio pesticides. The best great heavy country. Yeah, when you have a global perspective, you go, well, the US really likes the spray stuff and all right, well, sweet, let's just spray things that are living. Yeah, it's great. Things that don't care about resistance mechanisms. Let's spray things that, you know, don't make me have to go get checked for freckles, right. Hey, I, like that. I like that. Future sounds good to me.

[Bill Caulkins]
Yeah, one more question and part of the reason I will make a pitch for the 2024 Bio Solutions guide from Grower Talks. Thank you for Koppert sponsorship and for helping and contributing to that. I think we, we see, we similarly see the future in ornamentals going heavily toward bio controls in that net explosion coming as well. And you wrote an article for that, for that guide discussing release systems. Umm, that was something I'd, I'd asked you to do because I think the growers have a lot of questions about what is the best way to release bio controls into their greenhouse. Can you pick one or two of of the tips that you had in that article and share them with the listeners? And I will put a link to the full article and the bio guide in the show notes because I know that. Listeners are going to want to dive deeper, but give me a couple tips out of that that article before we before I let you go.

[Jeremy Webber]
I you know, I think one of the fun ones for me is kind of. Doing things a little differently than what people expect, you know, and when you talk to a bug nerd, you expect to get a bug nerd sort of pitch and and. If I'm a bug nerd, it's way down on the list of descriptors for me. I'm not good bug nerd nerd, but not bug nerd and I love to make fun of them. I don't even like bugs really that much honestly. But you know, at the end of the day I I love saying this and my team makes fun of me for it at this point. But I always tell people that mites are just blind and stupid. You know, and it's like, look, but yeah, they're cool, they pay for my house, but they're morons. Don't the purpose to make their ability to do what you want them to do. Like they don't have eyes, you know, So like you put all of them on this one plant and then you're like, well, this other plant sucks and it's like, well, they don't know it's there, right so. As long as you go into it, you know, with that expectation that these are, these are blind morons, you're gonna be a lot better off with mites and, and most well, a lot of predators can't see. They don't have walls. So it's not that they're blind. They don't have. It's a different thing, but you know what with with mites. They always work if they're there, you know, and you say, look, let's work at it from this foundation. If every leaf on this plant has four things that wanna eat whatever hatches out of that leaf that that egg, you know, and. We're never gonna have a problem, right? We're gonna have a problem when this plant gets nothing and that plant gets twice what it's supposed to and the next plant gets 20 and then that next plant gets nothing and it's super variable. So you, you always. As I am an irrigation nerd and that's where this really started to collect. You go, alright, this is the same way that you apply fertilizer in a lawn. It's the same way that you apply irrigation. It's all about distribution uniformity. Sure, if you evenly apply the correct rate over the top of a crop. We're never uniform, predictable results. We're never gonna have a conversation about and what happened, you know, so that's that's huge. And literally, you know, I think the thing that, you know, really started to hammer that home was like, you go into a greenhouse and there's this big spider mite hotspot right on the row. And they're like, what the heck happened? You know, like, well, what happened 3 weeks ago? And you and you see him start faking and it's like, oh man, I had the flu. Who did the app? John did the app John's like. I actually the battery died right here on the blower and I had to change the blower out. Oh. Right, that's all it is ust this bench or this half a bench or this one plant and they weren't touching, you know, and and it's that easy, but it's also that easy to screw it up. So, you know, it's it's always our goal to to try to make that a little easier, but you know, distribution uniformity, make it as. Even as you can, if you're shotgunning these things out through a leaf blower, please do it slowly or use way more than you need to. They don't like landing. Like a bug into a windshield. Yeah. You know, go as slowly as possible. So, you know, we, we make these blowers ourselves and give them to our clients free of charge. And we do that for a reason. We spend a lot of money every year buying those from Koppert Netherlands and then giving them away. Right. Why in the heck would we do that if we could tell you to go to Lowe's and buy a leaf blower instead? Yeah, that's true, $52,000 last year. Straight, yeah, straight out the window, but yeah, but I mean, but you are right, but you are ensuring uniform coverage more, more chance for uniform coverage, safer application. Predictability, right. Well, like you said, it's like, I mean, I've, I've heard it said that most irrigation issues happen on the weekends, right, Because there is just someone different watering or different. Someone setting up the booms and all of a sudden, you know, I don't know what happened. Well, I think we do know what happened. Yeah, but back when I wasn't as good at onboarding people and I had to work a lot of weekends, just had a very scary flashback. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. On Saturdays and Sundays, I'm always in the greenhouse. I don't know why, but yeah, you know, so. So for mites, you know, to to be able to predict the future. It's it it involves applying them evenly. Sure. You know, that's huge nematodes. It's almost the same thing, you know, if you drop a A. 150 million unit the bottom of a one gallon bucket and stick a a dose of trim injector hose in that. They're gonna settle. You're gonna apply a lot of them in one pump and then hardly any in the next. And and you're gonna see some variabilities. So. So having an air stone in there to keep that solution moving around is key. OK, We're just putting them in a sprayer. I, you know, honestly, I grew up in with BIOS using Dosatron for nematodes and at this point I'd probably just run them through a, through the DRAM hydrant. OK, I, you know, keep the PSI below 300, pull all the filters, have the recirculation really cranked. In that way, everything that weaves the end of that gun is the exact same solution. And then give it to your guy that's really good at doing sue magic. OK, Don't give it to me. I'm, I'm, I'm OK with coverage, but I'm not OK with even coverage. Give it to you. Give it to your PGR guy. Have him apply that solution is evenly as he can. And you put that 250 million down over 5000 square feet the same way every week. Yeah. And we'll never have that conversation about fungus gnats again. You'll just be like, yeah, that's over.

[Bill Caulkins]
No, those are those are good tips and I think really good, good takeaways for the listeners. And again, I encourage you to look at their bio solutions guide. Check out the link. I'm gonna put in the show notes, dig out your June issue of grower talks and and pull that guide out of the middle because there's not only Jeremy's article, but. A lot of excellent content within those pages, and Jeremy, I think we're done. That was a good one. That was a good long discussion. I knew it would be. Thank you so much for all your time. I, I, I really appreciate it. And I'm sure the listeners do too. I, you know, I was gonna have this conversation with somebody today. So excellent. I'm glad it's recorded. And maybe you can just send people the link and you don't have to have this conversation as much.

[Bill Caulkins]
But before we close, can you? Let the listeners know how to reach out to you. To the team at Koppert. Learn more about your products. I know you guys have amazing educational resources online. Where? Where can folks find out more? Reach out to to your team.

[Jeremy Webber]
The best thing to do is just go to Koppertus.com. Or go to Koppert.com, but hat's our global site. Really our Dutch website you'll get an option to go to the US one like 'Hey, don't you want to be in the US and they'll kindly ask to redirect you, but Koppertus.com will be the one you want. That's our main website that has all the contact menu options that you get from every other website. But what I think is really cool is whenever you go to that website, you'll get this little chat window that pops up at the bottom. I get it every time. And if the real people, right? So like sometimes it's our customer service director galas, sometimes it's Roxanne Herzler, sometimes it's, we just hired a few new CS agents. So there there's, there's a handful of people, but like you'll, you'll get a living person that's direct the same person that I call when I get the office. So you call the 1800 number and they'll answer, but. If you just go to Koppert US, you'll get a chat window that pops up at the bottom and in any of our customer service agents are right there. And we'd be like, hey, I got thrips in New England. I heard this guy on a podcast help me and they're gonna, they're gonna send you to our New England guy Phil, and they'll give you his contact info. We also have a map on there and, and I, I don't know the exact. Address or link to that, But we have a map that shows where every single consultant is based and it allows you to filter by crop, by specialty, by by region, and it shows you where all our three different offices are, where our people are and and how to reach each one of them individually.

[Bill Caulkins]
Excellent. I put all those links in the show notes. I did not know that that was a real chat person. That's really cool there. I guess I wouldn't have thought it would be. I don't know why. Maybe I'm just jaded these days, but that's awesome. You know, we'll we'll have an AI person at some point doing something, but as long as we can put that off and have direct. You know, almost face to face interactions. That's going to be my vote. Love it. And again, Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing so much information.

[Jeremy Webber]

I would love to anytime.